A friend of mine on Facebook linked to an article called, “Why Rick Santorum would have killed my daughter?”
What an inflammatory title! The article chronicled, in heart-wrenching detail, the ordeal of an Rh positive baby in an Rh negative mother. The mother was properly grateful for the amniocentesis test that helped to diagnose the trouble during her pregnancy. But she was improperly and outrageously angry at Senator Santorum for statements he has made about amniocentesis. Santorum points out that while the test often has good results, it also leads to the abortion of the weakest and most vulnerable of us. Specifically, Santorum points to studies that show that 90% of Down Syndrome babies are aborted. Usually an amniocentesis reveals the Down Syndrome which leads to abortion. But explaining that doesn't make for a juicy headline.
When I pointed out that the article was demagoguery, my friend defended it by fanning the flames. “So we need to completely do away with pre-natal testing...?” she asked, as if Santorum, or anyone else would suggest such a thing. I requested that she stop making stuff up. But she claimed that she was merely warning about the result of going down this “slippery slope”. Slippery slope? Gimme a break!
If you want to know a result of the real slippery slope we're on, just peruse The Journal of Medical Ethics to an article called “After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?” (It appears the article has been removed from the internet.) The authors argue that since, “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus...” then parents should be able to do to their infants what many do to fetuses. They say, “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”. You got that? Since we regularly kill fetuses, some of which are disabled so we don't want to care for them, we should also allow the killing of babies, even if they are not disabled, if we don't want to care for them. That's medical ethics today. And the authors express their idea without the slightest recognition that their modest proposal is ghoulish. It is just perfectly logical.
Then I ran across this fascinating factoid about abortion in the U.S. A fact checking website, Politifact, asked Mark Evans,professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, about Santorum's statements. Were they accurate? Interestingly, Politifact thinks Santorum would have been correct if he had restricted his comments to liberal areas of the country. "In liberal areas such as New York, probably 80 to 90 percent of parents with severe abnormalities do choose to terminate when legal to do so. In conservative areas, the proportion of termination is much lower — perhaps as little as 10 percent," Evans said. There you have it. Liberals plunge down the slope using death as a solution. Conservatives, it seems, at least try to keep from sinking.