Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on aborting children with Down syndrome:
On March 14, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black issued a preliminary injunction blocking an Ohio law that would have banned abortions performed solely due to a diagnosis of Down syndrome.
It made the ACLU and Planned Parenthood happy: they both support killing babies who are 80 percent born (partial-birth abortion), so it’s easy to see why they were delighted with this outcome.
Judge Black explained his reasoning by saying, “The State’s attempt to carve out exceptions to a categorical right where none exist fails as a matter of law.” He’s wrong. In some states it is illegal to abort a child on the basis of sex. Pennsylvania is one of those states.
Pennsylvania is currently considering legislation similar to the one struck down in Ohio (North Dakota has a law, which has not been challenged in the courts, that bans aborting children with Down syndrome).
On March 12, Karen Gaffney spoke at the Capitol Rotunda in Harrisburg in favor of the ban in Pennsylvania. She has Down syndrome. She is also a champion swimmer who has traversed the Boston Harbor, the San Francisco Bay, and Lake Tahoe; she also participated in a relay that crossed the English Channel. Perhaps the ACLU and Planned Parenthood could explain to her why she has no right to live.
In Iceland, as George Will wrote in his March 15 column for the Washington Post, “upward of 85 percent of pregnant women opt for prenatal testing, which has produced a Down syndrome-elimination rate approaching 100 percent.” He calls that genocide. “It is simply the deliberate, systematic attempt to erase a category of people.”
Will quotes an Icelandic counselor who consoles mothers about to abort their Down syndrome baby. She says, “We don’t look at abortion as a murder.” Then what is it? “We look at it as a thing that we ended.” (My italic.)
A “thing.” This kind of sanitization of the language is not merely troublesome, it is demonic. It is precisely the kind of language used by the Nazis: the Final Solution began by killing the disabled. Though we are not about to repeat that horror in the U.S., the road to killing the unwanted and the infirm is inexorably greased by this mind-set.
