“House of Horrors?” Country of Horrors?

Maddi Gillel

By now you’ve read about Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his Philadelphia abortion clinic also known as the “house of horrors.” It is exactly that.  I’ve heard bits and pieces of the case and don’t want to hear anymore; it’s too heartbreaking and disturbing.

Gosnell has committed extraordinary atrocities and hopefully will never be allowed to harm another woman or child.  But the bulk of abortion doctors are performing a legal ‘medical’ procedure. They are doing what the ‘mother’ asks and pays them to do, and what our society allows them to do! Nevertheless, where are their hearts/did they ever have one?

So, we’ve talked about the doctors. Number two on the list are the women who request this procedure. I have no sympathy or tolerance for women who do this.  Do they not know what causes pregnancy? With all the birth control so available in our society, there isn’t any excuse for abortion!  Do these women have no moral code in their heart/mind/life that tells them that pre-marital/extra-marital sex are wrong and that ending their unborn child’s life is not the way out of their predicament?  Last but not least – where are these women’s hearts?  How can they allow a tiny helpless baby to be killed – inside their uterus, OR outside!?  Where is their tenderness, sympathy, their motherly intuition? Can they feel any emotion at all?

Now, third on the list is our society.  I would venture to say that if we think nothing of killing the smallest and most helpless in our society – the sky is the limit.  Then we have no sympathy or tenderness for old people, the maimed, physically or mentally impaired, how about minority groups?  By the way, Planned Parenthood’s founder stated that the program’s purpose was to get rid of and prevent the birth of the undesirables in our society.  Planned Parenthood performs the most abortions per capita on women of minority groups with African Americans at the top of the list. You do the math and draw your own conclusions.

Remember Nazi Germany. They started out exterminating the Jews, the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, and moved on to religious groups.  Evil usually begins small, and then, incrementally and insidiously, takes over: Nazi Germany and WWII.

The actress Ashley Judd and her batty views have been in the news lately. God is ambiguous to her and she believes it is abominable to “breed.”  She’s white and beautiful.  She would be the last in Nazi Germany to have been given any grief.

This is the state of many in our society today: heartless, Godless, narcissistic, unsympathetic, past feeling.

So, who should really be on trial in the above case?  The mother?  Probably. The Doctor? For sure.  Our society? Absolutely.

Shame on us.

 

Auschwitz, Abortion and Connecticut

Gordon Jones

This past summer my wife and I had the opportunity of traveling through much of Europe. We saw many cities, churches and museums. Of all that we saw, our visit to Auschwitz made the deepest impression. To walk on the grounds where millions of men, women and children were murdered and tortured was an overpowering experience. Their blood and suffering have consecrated those grounds and anyone who walks those paths can feel a small portion of the pain and anguish of those poor souls who were so unfairly hated and killed. There was not pretext that this was just punishment. This had nothing to do with what they did, it was simply who they were.

It was Dr. Mengele who watched the prisoners get off the train and to each he would signal the officers either a thumb up or a thumb down. The thumbs down meant they went immediately to the gas chamber. The others went to the camp where they were slowly starved and worked to death. It was here and at the nearby camp of Birkenau that Dr. Mengele conducted his horrific experiments involving the torture of twins among other atrocities. While listening to his cruel and perverse experiments I was deeply troubled to hear of one story in particular.   After visiting the children’s block Mengele drew an arbitrary line on the wall. He then instructed the guards to go through the camp and any infants and children who were shorter than the line were taken immediately to gas chamber. More than five hundred children were killed as a result.

The evil that took place at Auschwitz haunts me still because of the cruelty and the random torture and murder of the innocent children is such a painful thought. As I pondered these horrific images it began to dawn on me that I own a portion of guilt for the murder of innocent children. It became much more real to me that we, as a society, have drawn an arbitrary line on the wall and have killed millions of innocent children because they were less than 22 weeks old. We are killing more than one million babies a year. We are making the atrocities of Dr. Mengele look small by comparison.

I cannot escape the guilt that I am part of the society that not only tolerates these atrocities, but encourages it in many ways. I feel a great empathy with Lincoln’s words at his second inaugural address where he placed equal blame for the sin of slavery on the North who had been complicit in the slave trade until a few decades before the Civil war. He viewed the war was just punishment to both the North and the South for those sins. In reality, we find our country in wars and with atrocities on all sides. How is it possible that the massacre of 20 innocent children in Connecticut could bring the entire nation to their feet while the killing three thousand children every day with the surgeon’s blade goes completely unnoticed?

“Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man (or nation) by whom the offense cometh.” –“we shall suppose that American slavery (abortion) is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God,– He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war (atrocities) as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war (abortion) and senseless killings may speedily pass away.”  -Abraham Lincoln

 

Reader Poll: “If genetic engineering were to give parents the ability to screen out ‘personality flaws’ in their children, would you take advantage of it?”

Here’s the question we asked UFI readers:

“If genetic engineering were to give parents the ability to screen out ‘personality flaws’ in their children, would you take advantage of it?”

Here’s how readers responded:

0   Percent           Yes

97 Percent           No

3 Percent             Unsure

If given the opportunity, it’s pretty clear that  UFI readers would have no interest in tinkering with their children’s personalities via genetic engineering.  But an Oxford professor thinks that you have a “moral obligation” to do so.  After all, it is only responsible parenting to create “ethically better children,” Professor Julian Savulescu claims.

Through what he calls “rational design” he thinks we could have less violent, more intelligent, more pleasant people – in short, a better society.  Evidently the technology to accomplish this is close at hand.

Professor Savulescu argues that there is no reason why we shouldn’t be willing and indeed, motivated, to create people who are less likely to harm themselves and others.  You can read more about it here.  And then tell us what you think?

Good idea?  Bad idea?  and why.

 

 

Celebrating Jon

The number tells the story.  More than ninety percent of unborn children who are diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted.  There is no better indicator of the “better dead than have downs” attitude that exists in our culture.  But one man, columnist George Will, tells a different story.  His son, Jon, turns 40 years old this week and Mr. Will is a powerful witness to the goodness and contributions that those with Down Syndrome can -and do – make to the world.

Will’s tribute to his son, Jon, also touches on something that unfortunately too often goes unmentioned in the disability dialogue – parents and families that share the gift of an individual with Down Syndrome feel happy and feel blessed.  Dr. Brian Skotko, a geneticist at Children’s Hospital Boston, studied these families.  His work was published last fall in the American Journal of Medical Genetics.

Skotko found that among siblings ages 12 and older, 97 percent expressed feelings of pride about their brother or sister with Down syndrome and 88 percent were convinced they were better people because of their sibling with Down syndrome. A third study evaluating how adults with Down syndrome felt about themselves reports 99 percent responded they were happy with their lives, 97 percent liked who they are, and 96 percent liked how they looked.

Take a minute and read George Will’s article.  You’ll feel a little better about humanity.

Respect for Life and the Tucson Tragedy

We, at United Families International, have been greatly saddened by what occurred in Tucson, Arizona, where six people were killed and more than a dozen injured.  The tragedy in Tucson is a tragedy for us all.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families.  We add our condolences to those that have poured in from around the country and the world.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was gravely injured, but thankfully is recovering.  Rep. Giffords was engaged in a meeting with her constituents – important work for elected officials.  Acts of violence against political figures can destroy democracy itself.  Unfortunately, around the world, elected officials, candidates and other leaders are killed or injured while performing their duties and seeking to make the world a better place.  Although we may disagree with the politics of some, we thank all for their willingness to serve and pray for their safety.

As we reflect on what has occurred, many questions come to mind:

• Are all individuals who murder or harm innocent individuals emotionally and mentally compromised?
• As a society, what responsibility, if any, do we bear for the actions of others?
• What happens to a person that they could conclude that human life has so little value?
• What role, if any, does the violence depicted in TV, movies, video games, and other forms of media play?
• How numb and desensitized to violence has our culture and society become?
• Is this the least violent time in all human history, or have we reached a new low in civility and regard for human life?

We’re sure you could add many more questions to this list, but the question of basic respect and regard for human life looms large for us.

UFI has spent many years advocating for a universal respect for life.  Protecting life at all stages– from its very beginning to its end- is essential if societies are to survive.  There can be no exceptions to this understanding:  animals are not more important than human life; environmental ideals are not more important than human life; abortion is not simply a choice, and there are no expendable human beings, no matter their age or their “quality of life.”  As a society we must retain the understanding that each human life has intrinsic worth and value and is capable of a positive contribution to a community.

We at United Families International will continue to extend every effort possible to retain a respect for all human life in public policy around the world.  It’s time for each of us to examine our commitment to the sanctity of life and to determine what we can do to teach this principle to our children and to reflect it in our lives. We can never have a safe and peaceful world without it.

British Advice Columnist insists that “any good mother” would suffocate her suffering child

Popular British advice columnist, Virginia Ironside, shocked more than a few people with her comment:  “If I were the mother of a suffering child – I mean a deeply suffering child – I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face . . . If it was a child I really loved, who was in agony, I think any good mother would.“  Speaking on BBC program “Sunday Morning Lite,” Ironside continued to insist, even after the host of the program called her original comment “horrifying” and asked if she (Virginia) thought other mothers would agree with her.  “I think a lot of mothers would…maybe not ‘any,’ but a lot.”

The program’s theme “Can Abortion be a Kindness?” had already brought forth some astounding statements from Virginia Ironside such as referring to abortion as “getting rid of a couple of cells” and that aborting an unwanted or a profoundly disabled child is the act of a loving mother.   Here’s how Ironside justifies abortion and her high-brow version of Euthanasia and Eugenics.

“To go ahead and have a baby, knowing that you can’t give it some kind of stable upbringing, seems to me to be cruel.”
…
“If a baby’s going to be born severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely an abortion is the act of a loving mother.”

The frightening thing is that this woman, Virginia Ironside, is considered to be “wise” and has power to influence public opinion via her regular column in the UK’s “The Independent.”  She’s not alone in her twisted perspective either.  Her views are shared by many so called “academics” and “progressives” in the United States and are very commonplace in Europe.

One pundit attempted to defend Ironside by saying:

“Ironside is not waging a war against the disabled: she simply said “life isn’t a gift per se”. There are plenty of circumstances that make it more burdensome than joyful.”

It is impossible to circumscribe the depth and breadth of issues that are relevant to this story.  Eugenics is not new, eugenics is not well reasoned, eugenics is the cold blood thirsty confirmation of the moral rot of a society turned upon itself.   See it for yourself.