Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Bishops' Statements Against the HHS Mandate

CV Blogger Thomas Peters is compiling a list of Bishops' statements against this HHS mandate at http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=25591. Is your bishop not on this list? Please check with your diocese to see if a statement has been made by your bishop, and if not, respectfully ask him to do so! If they have issued a statement, please email us at info@catholicvote.org.

[This past weekend millions of Catholics were read a letter from their Bishop in response to the HHS mandate (partial list below). CV Blogger John White published an excellent post on how we can help our shepherds. I thought you would enjoy it, and so we are featuring it today. -Brian

Pray for our Bishops.

Because they need it, they need lots of it.

And they need it now.

Many American bishops have publicly spoken out against the Obama administration’s recent declaration of war against the Catholic Church. So far, the response from the episcopate has been widespread, clear, and strong. We should all be encouraged by the readiness on the part of these bishops to lead the American Church in this fight for freedom.

But we ought not take this leadership for granted. So often it seems, when something Church-related gets us upset, we are all too ready and willing to focus our outrage on the local bishop. Granted, the last ten years have certainly reminded us that bishops can make poor, even seriously harmful, decisions. And the accounting for those transgressions is still underway.

But too often the bishops suffer our wrath over the fact that the state of the Church (in our parish, our diocese, or our country) isn’t just the way we want it to be. Expecting faithful leadership from the bishop is one thing. Calling up the chancery (which you have on speed dial) because Father Bob failed to mention Hell in his homily is something else.

It gets lonely at the top, or so they say.

The same thought has been echoed by high-ranking military officers, or their biographers, who speak of the “loneliness of command.” When you’re the top dog, or the top brass, or the top guy in the diocese, you get to call the shots. But that means that you also bear the responsibility, alone, for the shots you call.

In the case of bishops, it means that every day they are asked to make decisions, issue statements, and take actions with one thing in mind – the salvation of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of souls. That’s a sobering dose of responsibility. And as a bonus, these shepherds carry out their vocation with the certain knowledge that no matter what they do, a good percentage of the souls they are charged with will be left disappointed, upset, or outraged. At them. That’s not a job anyone should envy. Certainly not one that we should take for granted.

A Chesterton quote, on St. Thomas Aquinas, whose feast we just celebrated:

His experiences included well-attested cases of levitation in ecstasy; and the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, comforting him with the welcome news that he would never be a Bishop.

Welcome news indeed. And now things just got really fun if you have “Most Rev.” in front of your name. At the end of the day (and that day, if we want to be precise, is August 1, 2013), the HHS mandate doesn’t force most of us (unless we own a small business) to do anything. The bishops aren’t so lucky. Yes, the laity have a responsibility to engage this threat wherever and however they can. The ways for doing this are numerous and varied, and have been ably put forth on CatholicVote's site.

But in most cases, the actual responsibility for the decisions that will need to be made regarding the cold hard consequences of the mandate lies squarely on the shoulders of the bishops. Thus has it been, from St. Ignatius of Antioch to St. Thomas Becket. These successors of the Apostles, these shepherds of souls, these men clothed in black cloth and human weakness have been called through the ages to stand on the ramparts of the Church under siege and take the first blow from the enemy’s sword.

Thus has it been, and thus shall it be. The bishops will be the ones who will have to stand tall, just as St. Polycarp and St. John Fisher did before them, and say, with dire consequence, ”We cannot, and we will not.” And they will be the first to suffer. One American prelate, Francis Cardinal George, the Archbishop of Chicago, made this stark and rather chilling observation of the current state of affairs:

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Hell, Health Insurance, and A Man's Soul

National Director Column

January 30, 2012

v.2 n.2

Arland K. Nichols

Dear Friends of Life and Family,

"The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, 'To Hell with you!' There is no other way to put it. To Hell with your religious beliefs. To Hell with your religious liberty. To Hell with your freedom of conscience." With unusually strong language, Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh alerted his flock to a new threat to the Church.

The Obama administration has directly and deliberately attacked our fundamental right to religious freedom, and in a most patronizing way. His Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that contraceptives and abortion inducing drugs be part of every health care plan, free of charge. With this decision, Catholics and Catholic institutions such as hospitals, universities and social agencies will be forced to pay for and provide contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs.

With a veritable pat on the head, the administration has given Catholics a year to comply with the ruling. Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote, "In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences."

As Catholic citizens, we cannot let this unjust mandate and unprecedented violation of our beliefs stand. It is, as Bishop Paul Loverde has described, "a truly radical break with the liberties that have underpinned our nation since its founding."

It might not be so radical if the conscience was mere social construct, superficial conviction, or personal wishes and tastes. But conscience is much more. Cardinal Newman understood conscience to be the "perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of the truth of God within the person." Conscience involves one's inner inclination to do good and avoid evil, and then recognize the good that must be done in a particular situation.

We must never act against a certain conscience that has been well-formed. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it this way, "Man has the right in conscience and freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters" (CCC 1782). Yet, this is precisely what the Obama administration is demanding.

To follow the dictates of one's conscience is essential to the dignity of man. Further, to act freely and knowingly against one's certain conscience is a mortal sin. Saint Thomas More understood this well, and is an exemplar of how Catholics should respond to this threat to our consciences and religious freedom.

Robert Bolt's famous play "A Man for All Seasons," tells the story of Saint Thomas as he faced the tyrannical acts of Henry VIII, who destroyed the Church in England so he could marry Ann Boleyn. Imprisoned, Thomas faced his accusers including his one-time friend, the Duke of Norfolk, who beseeched him "But damn it Thomas, look at these names. Why can't you do as I did and come with us for fellowship?" Thomas responded, "And when we die and you are sent to Heaven for doing your conscience and I am sent to Hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?"

The administration has placed Catholics in an equally precarious situation. Condemnation is the reward for acting against a certain conscience (CCC 1790). Yet the Obama administration says we have no choice.

How will we respond? How will you respond? Is there a "proper response"?

I confess that I do not yet know the answer to such questions. But I do know that we cannot buckle over as this administration asks us to lose our very souls so that we might gain health coverage for our families and employees.

Following the announcement, Bishop Loverde wrote, "I urge the faithful of Northern Virginia and all citizens of good will to understand what is at stake in this unavoidable confrontation, which has been thrust upon us, and to be prepared to engage in a strong defense in the civil arena of the basic human right of religious liberty."

This much is certain: It does not profit a man to gain health insurance, and to lose his soul. Recognizing what is at stake, we must be willing to defend our freedom of religion and conscience. So, let us unite with our Bishops for fellowship and for Truth.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Arland K. Nichols

National Director, HLI America

http://www.hliamerica.org/

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Child sacrifice in 21st-century America

Jan. 25, 2011 - The Hebrew Bible is not for the squeamish. And its harshest maledictions are called down upon those who practiced the abomination of child-sacrifice.

Thus the psalmist:

“They sacrificed their sons and daughters to the demons/they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood./Thus they became unclean by their acts, and played the harlot in their doings./Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, and he abhorred his heritage./… they were rebellious in their purposes, and were brought low because of their iniquity” (Psalm 106:38-40, 43).

And the prophet Ezekiel, delivering the word of the Lord:

“And you took your sons and your daughters, whom you had borne to me, and these you sacrificed to them to be devoured. Were your harlotries so small a matter that you slaughtered my children and delivered them up as an offering by fire to them?... Behold, therefore, I stretched out my hand against you, and diminished your allotted portion, and delivered you to the greed of your enemies…” (Ezekiel 16:20-21, 27).

Thirty-nine years after Roe v. Wade created an unrestricted abortion license in the United States, and during the week when hundreds of thousands of Americans pray and march for life, all Americans ought to ponder these words—and the kind of country to which Roe v. Wade led.

It was supposed to be a country in which women were liberated; it became a country in which women were ever more the victims of predatory and sexually irresponsible men, left alone with their “rights” to find a technological “fix” to the dilemma of unwanted pregnancy. It was supposed to become a more humane country; it became a country in which morally coarsened pundits can describe as “extreme” and “weird” the faith-filled response of the Santorum family to the loss of a newborn shortly after birth. It was supposed to be a country of greater equality; it became a country in which the fantasies of those who believed that America was for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants only, with emphasis on “white,” were realized beyond the wildest imaginings of the most crazed racists and eugenicists of the 1920s.

These hard truths have too often been hidden, especially where abortion is widely prevalent. Thus it is to the immense credit of the New York-based Chiaroscuro Foundation that it has compelled the New York City Department of Health to itemize separately abortion and pregnancy statistics in its annual reports.

The 2010 numbers, just released, would make both the Psalmist and Ezekiel blanch:

Of the 208,541 pregnancies in New York City in 2010, 83,750 were terminated by abortion: 4 in 10. Among non-Hispanic blacks, there were 38,574 abortions and 26,635 live births: thus for every 1,000 African-American babies born, 1,448 were aborted. Those numbers were even more chilling among non-Hispanic black teenagers: for every 1,000 African-American babies born to teenagers, 2,630 were aborted. The overall teenage abortion rate was 63 percent in a city where 16 percent of all pregnancies were teen pregnancies.

New York City is not America, of course. And there is encouragement on various fronts in the battle for life. The national abortion rate is down over the past several decades. Science has vindicated the pro-life position. The pro-life/pro-choice opinion balance has tilted, if slightly, in favor of the pro-life cause. Younger people are more likely to be pro-life than aging baby-boomers. Legislated regulation of the abortion industry has driven abortuaries out of business in many places.

Yet the fact remains that America is a country in which almost 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in the willful, violent death of the unborn child. And this slaughter of the innocents has been going on, often in higher percentages, for almost four decades.

As the Psalmist and Ezekiel might have told us, feeding the demons inevitably leads to a terrible hardening of sensibilities. The warnings from ancient Israel about where that hardening leads are worth pondering in this election year, and indeed in every year.

SOURCE: http://www.archden.org/index.cfm/ID/342

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Weigel’s column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver.

Click here to read his biography.

Phone: 303-715-3215.

To access the complete archive of his columns, please visit www.archden.org/weigel.

Template for a Letter to State Rep

A possible letter to send to your elected representatives regarding Obama's attack on the Catholic and all Christian Churches:

On Saturday, January 21st, 2012 President Obama called New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan. The President had disturbing news for the Archbishop.

Secretary of Health and Human Services and pro-abortion Catholic Kathleen Sebelius just announced that the proposed mandate requiring all insurance plans to pay for contraception, sterilization and some abortion drugs is official — and Catholics cannot escape. Exemption for religious groups will not be modified, apart from allowing some groups an additional year to comply. That’s just one year until Catholic doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, hospitals and any other health care provider must comply, regardless of their own conscience.

Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan responded immediately, saying: “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences. Beginning August 1, 2012 (less than eight months from today), the insurance premiums we pay, including the insurance premiums paid by Catholics for employees of churches and schools — will be used to cover drugs and procedures that are in direct conflict with the teachings of our Church.” Catholics will be paying for abortions, sterilizations and other immoral procedures whether we like it or not.

Cardinal-designate, Archbishop Timothy Dolan is now in direct opposition to President Obama on this issue. And so am I.

President Obama ignored the organized efforts of Catholics across the country, including bold statements from the Bishops, university presidents (including Notre Dame’s Rev. Jenkins), and even his Catholic allies like Sr. Carol Keehan. Instead, President Obama stood with his real friends — Planned Parenthood. Make no mistake; this decision is a direct attack on you, our Church, and the religious liberty of all Americans. This is just one part of the bigotry against religion, which pervades the so-called “elites” in our nation.

Just last week, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the bishops from the United States who were completing their “Ad Limina” visit in Rome. The Holy Father specifically cited the “grave threats” to the freedom of the Church in America, and urged the Catholic community to respond, especially with “an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity.” He’s talking to you and me. The Holy Father’s brief address is a must read and can be found on the Vatican Web site or on my Face Book Page or on our Parish Web Site.

Finally, we are just one year from Inauguration Day. In twelve months, America will welcome a new president, or usher in four more years of Barack Obama and his assault on our liberties. This irony is not lost on us. At a time like this we realize that elections indeed have consequences. The Catholic vote must rise up like never before. If the President is re-elected we will certainly see more radical moves against our Church and all Christian people, as well as Jews and people of other faiths.

But the Church has faced this kind of thing before. And the very people who criticized the Catholic Church for not doing enough to stop evil in the 20th Century in Europe before and during World War II are the very people who we must respond to now with a very loud, very clear “No!”

I hope you will stand with people of faith in the United States and oppose this direct violation of Religious Freedom. I trust you understand the seriousness of failure to keep the oath of office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”

Sincerely yours,

Monday, January 23, 2012

March for Life 2012

Pro-Choice to Pro-Life Catholic

A Sexual Revolution

One woman's journey from pro-choice atheist to pro-life Catholic

Back in my pro-choice days, I read that in certain ancient societies it was common for parents to abandon unwanted newborns, leaving them to die of exposure. I found these stories to be as perplexing as they were horrifying. How could this happen? I could never understand how entire cultures could buy into something so obviously terrible, how something that modern society understands to be an unthinkable evil could be widely accepted among large groups of people.

Because of my deep distress at hearing of such crimes against humanity, I found it irritating when pro-lifers would refer to abortion as “killing babies.” Obviously, nobody was in favor of killing babies, and to imply that those of us who were pro-choice would advocate as much was an insult to the babies throughout history who actually were killed by their “insane” societies. We were not in favor of killing anything. We simply felt that a woman had a right to stop the growth process of a fetus if she faced a crisis pregnancy. It was unfortunate, but that was the sacrifice that had to be made to prevent women from becoming victims of unwanted pregnancies.

At that time I was an atheist and had little exposure to religious social circles. As I began to search for God and open my mind to Christianity, however, I could not help but be exposed to pro-life thought more often, and I was put on the defensive about my views. One night I was discussing the topic with my husband, who was re-examining his own pro-choice stance. He made a passing remark that startled me into reconsidering this issue: “It just occurred to me that being pro-life is being pro-other-people’s-life,” he quipped. “Everyone is pro-their-own-life.”

Growing Discomfort

His remark made me realize that my pro-choice viewpoints had put me in the position of deciding whose lives were worth living, and even who was human. Along with doctors, the government and other abortion advocates, I decided where to draw this crucial line. When I would come across Catholic Web sites or books that asserted “Life begins at conception,” I would scoff, as was my habit, yet I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with my defense. I realized that my criteria for determining when human life begins were distressingly vague. I was putting the burden of proof on the fetuses to demonstrate to me that they were human, and I was a tough judge. I found myself looking the other way when I heard about things like the 3-D ultrasounds that showed fetuses touching their faces, smiling and opening their eyes at ages at which I still considered abortion acceptable. As modern technology revealed more and more evidence that fetuses were humans too, I would simply move the bar for what I considered human.

At some point I started to feel I was more determined to remain pro-choice than to analyze honestly who was and was not human. I started to see this phenomenon in others in the pro-choice community as well. As I researched issues like partial-birth abortion, I frequently became stunned to the point of feeling physically ill upon witnessing the level of evil that normal people can support. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read of reasonable, educated professionals calmly justifying infanticide by calling the victims fetuses instead of babies. It was then that I took a mental step back from the entire pro-choice movement. If this is what it meant to be pro-choice, I was not pro-choice.
Yet I still could not quite label myself pro-life.

I recognized that I too had probably told myself lies in order to maintain my support for abortion. Yet there was some tremendous pressure that kept me from objectively looking at the issue. Something deep within me screamed that not to allow women to have abortions, at least in the first trimester, would be unfair in the direst sense of the word. Even as I became religious, I mentally pushed aside thoughts that all humans might have God-given eternal souls worthy of dignity and respect. It became too tricky to figure out when we receive those souls, the most obvious answer being “at conception,” as opposed to some arbitrary point during gestation. It was not until I re-evaluated the societal views of sex that had permeated the consciousness of my peer group that I was able to release that internal pressure I felt and take an unflinching look at abortion.

Sex and Creating Life

Growing up in secular middle-class America, I understood sex as something disconnected from the idea of creating life. During my entire childhood I did not know anyone who had a baby sibling; and to the extent that neighborhood parents ever talked about pregnancy, it was to say they were glad they were “done.” In high school sex education class, we learned not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. Even recently, before our marriage was blessed in the Catholic Church, my husband and I took a course about building good marriages. It was a video series by a nondenominational Christian group, and the segment called “Good Sex” did not mention children once. In all the talk about bonding and back rubs and intimacy and staying in shape, the closest the videos came to connecting sex to the creation of life was a brief note that couples should discuss the topic of contraception.

All my life, the message I had heard loud and clear was that sex was for pleasure and bonding, that its potential for creating life was purely tangential, almost to the point of being forgotten. This mind-set became the foundation of my views on abortion. Because I saw sex as being by default closed to the possibility of life, I thought of unplanned pregnancies as akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street—something totally unpredictable and undeserved that happened to people living normal lives.

My pro-choice views (and I imagine those of many others) were motivated by loving concern: I just did not want women to have to suffer, to have to devalue themselves by dealing with unwanted pregnancies. Since it was an inherent part of my worldview that everyone except people with “hang-ups” eventually has sex, and that sex is, under normal circumstances, only about the relationship between the two people involved, I was lured into one of the oldest, biggest, most tempting lies in human history: the enemy is not human. Babies had become the enemy because of their tendency to pop up and ruin everything; and just as societies are tempted to dehumanize their fellow human beings on the other side of the line in wartime, so had I, and we as a society, dehumanized what we saw as the enemy of sex.

As I was reading up on the Catholic Church’s understanding of sex, marriage and contraception, everything changed. I had always assumed that Catholic teachings against birth control were outdated notions, even a thinly disguised attempt to oppress the faithful. What I found, however, was that these teachings expressed a fundamentally different understanding of sex. And once I discovered this, I never saw the world the same way again.

Burdens or Blessings?

The way I had always seen it, the generally accepted view was that babies were burdens, except for a few times in life when everything might be perfect enough for a couple to see new life as a good thing. The Catholic view, I discovered, is that babies are blessings and that while it is fine to attempt to avoid pregnancy for serious reasons, if we go so far as to adopt a “contraceptive mentality”—feeling entitled to the pleasure of sex while loathing (and perhaps trying to forget all about) its life-giving properties—we not only fail to respect this most sacred of acts, but we begin to see new life as the enemy.

I came to see that our culture’s widespread use and acceptance of contraception meant that the “contraceptive mentality” toward sex was now the default attitude. As a society, we had come to take it for granted that we are entitled to the pleasurable and bonding aspects of sex even when we are opposed to the new life it might produce. The option of abstaining from the act that creates babies if we see children as a burden had been removed from our cultural lexicon. Even if it would be a huge crisis to become pregnant, we had a right to have sex anyway. If this were true—if it were morally acceptable for people to have sex even when they believed that a new baby could ruin their lives—then abortion, as I saw things, had to be O.K.

Ideally I would have taken an objective look at when human life begins and based my views on that alone, but the lie was just too tempting. I did not want to hear too much about heartbeats or souls or brain activity. Terminating pregnancies simply had to be acceptable, because carrying a baby to term and becoming a parent is a huge deal, and society had made it very clear that sex was not a huge deal. As long as I accepted the premise that engaging in sex with a contraceptive mentality was morally acceptable, I could not bring myself to consider that abortion might not be acceptable. It seemed inhumane to make women deal with life-altering consequences for an act that was not supposed to have life-altering consequences.

Given my background, the Catholic idea that we are always to treat the sexual act with awe and respect, so much so that we should simply abstain if we are opposed to its life-giving potential, was a revolutionary message. Being able to consider honestly when life begins, to open my heart and mind to the wonder and dignity of even the tiniest of my fellow human beings, was not fully possible for me until I understood the nature of the act that creates these little lives in the first place.

All of these thoughts had been percolating in my brain for a while, and I found myself increasingly in agreement with pro-life positions. Then one night I became officially, unapologetically pro-life. I was reading yet another account of the Greek societies in which newborn babies were abandoned to die, wondering how normal people could do something like that, and I felt a chill rush through me as I thought: I know how they did it.

I realized in that moment that perfectly good, well-meaning people—people like me—can support gravely evil things because of the power of lies. From my own experience, I knew how the Greeks, the Romans and people in every other society could put themselves into a mental state where they could leave a newborn child to die. The very real pressures of life—“we can’t afford another baby,” “we can’t have any more girls,” “he wouldn’t have had a good life”—left them susceptible to the temptation to dehumanize other human beings. Though the circumstances were different, the same process had happened with me, with the pro-choice movement and with anyone else who has ever been tempted to dehumanize inconvenient people.

I suspect that as those Greek parents handed over their infants for someone to take away, they remarked on how very unlike their other children these little creatures were: they couldn’t talk, the couldn’t sit up, and surely those little yawns and smiles were just involuntary reactions. I bet they referred to these babies with different words than they used to refer to the children they kept. Maybe they called them something like “fetuses.”

SOURCE: http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=10904
Jennifer Fulwiler is a Web developer who lives in Austin, Tex., with her husband and three children. She converted to Catholicism from atheism in 2007 and writes about her conversion at http://www.conversiondiary.com/.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

EUGENICS UNDER THE GUISE OF NON-INVASIVE PRENATAL DIAGNOSIS

Eugenics–the idea that the human race can be improved through selective breeding–was widely accepted in the first three decades of the last century. Mental health patients were forcibly sterilized in the USA because of it. Eugenics gained special credibility in Germany, where it laid the foundation for the Nazi holocaust. Now … something very much like it has returned under the guise of non-invasive prenatal diagnosis.

Non-invasive prenatal diagnosis allows mothers to learn whether their unborn child has Down syndrome with a high degree of certainty at an early stage in pregnancy. As a result: ”By 2030, Denmark will become Down Syndrome-free. . . . The number of DS [Down Syndrome] births halved in 2005 and has dropped by 13 percent every year since then. . . . In recent years, abortions of DS pregnancies have outnumbered live births worldwide. In France and Switzerland, over 85 percent of all DS pregnancies are terminated.”

Those tempted to see this as a good thing might want to ask themselves where it should stop. Suppose for example that a gene were identified which accurately predicts a propensity for alcoholism, and suppose this gene could be further identified during pregnancy. Should all babies who are likely to become alcoholics be aborted? Imagine a world without drinking problems, and it’s tempting indeed.
But what about children with learning disabilities? Attention deficit disorder? Dyslexia? Or how about homosexuality? After all, most of the arguments for normalizing society’s view of homosexuality depend on the assumption that gay people are born that way.

Then there’s skin color. Many people believe darker skinned people have more social challenges in America, even among African Americans. Should unborn children with darker skin be aborted for their own good?

Clearly, a line must be drawn somewhere, but by whom? Assuming the medical technology will soon exist to test for all of these and countless more genetic possibilities, should we allow a mother to continue to become pregnant and abort until she finally has a fetus she believes is worthy of a life outside her womb?
It is not a hypothetical question in Asia, where hundreds of millions of unborn girls have been selectively aborted in the last few years because boys are considered more valuable. In some Chinese cities, the ratio of newborn boys to girls is not 1.5 to 1.

The answer to these questions is that human beings are not capable of answering these questions. We are not gods. Again and again we will think such selective breeding is wrong for others, but acceptable in our particular case. We, after all, are experts as assuming we are exceptions to the rule. So given the ability to breed selectively, and given our fundamental selfishness, we will follow in the footsteps of the Nazis.

Indeed, with 1.3 million abortions in America every year, we already have.

Article source: http://dailycristo.com/religion/abortions-of-down-syndrome-babies-nearly-universal/

Image by Conny Wenk: http://kidswithalittleextra.blogspot.com/