INFANTICIDE

Abortion is the killing of an unborn child.  Attorney John W. Whitehead provides this definition:  “Infanticide is the killing of a born child.  It is killing whether it is accomplished by a direct act, or whether the child is allowed to die by indirect action such as refusing to feed him or her.”

Infanticide (killing of newly born children), also called neonaticide,  follows abortion like night follows day.   C. Everett Koop and Francis A. Schaeffer warned of this in their book, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?

Just three months after Roe v. Wade,  Nobel Prize winner James Watson, who cracked the genetic code, wrote:

Because of the present limits of such detection methods, most birth defects are not discovered until birth.

If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice...the doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering.

To most people, hopefully this seems outrageous.  What’s even more outrageous is the opinion of some of Watson’s colleagues.  They disagree with him because they believe the time period to be too short!  They think it should be thirty days.

Infanticide has been practiced in the United States.  In 1982, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the decision of parents of a Down’s Syndrome baby to be starved to death.

In the spring of 1997, the nation was appalled at the news report of the young woman who gave birth to a child in the rest room, killed it and returned to the dance floor of her high school prom.  But is her logic all that far off?  Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton denied the rights of the unborn and permitted abortion in all nine months of pregnancy.  Abortion is legal past viability.  It is legal until the time of delivery.*  What is the difference of a couple of days?  Furthermore, the court in Indiana permitted infanticide in the Baby Doe case.  Given the legal, medical and ethical climate in the United States, are not her actions consistent with the prevailing environment?  And is not our outrage at her behavior inconsistent with the climate?   The reality is this:  One cannot devalue the life of one class of people, i.e., the unborn without devaluing all human life.  Prom Dancer is wrong.  But no more wrong that the courts and the nation that permits what the courts have declared legal.

*As a matter of fact, an incomplete breech delivery is induced and the brains removed from the skull with a suction device in the procedure known as Partial-Birth Abortion.