While reading CBS’s recent story on Iceland’s success at reducing the number of Down syndrome cases, I was reminded of the Amazon Prime series Man in the High Castle.
The show, based on the celebrated alternative history novel by Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982), explores a timeline wherein the Axis powers won World War II. The United States is divided between the Greater Nazi Reich and the Empire of Japan.
In one scene, one of the protagonists — a hero? a villain? — is stalled on a Midwest country roadside. He smells something in the air. Smoke. Ash.
The very American sheriff explains: it is a local hospital destroying defective humans. The weak, the sick, the disabled.
And we, the viewers, recoil: how evil. Nazis actually execute the weak, the sick, the disabled. Well, they did, in history, not just fiction.
But, as CBS explains, the reason Down syndrome cases are disappearing all over the place, and in Iceland most of all, is not a new cure. Chalk it up to the rise of prenatal screenings. We see fewer Down syndrome people because, before birth, they are executed. Aborted.
In our non-fictional timeline, many Americans are incensed that a few folks proclaiming to be Nazis have been “allowed” to demonstrate in public.
Nazism is evil. I agree.
But how do these morally horrified people react about the very “progressive” and culturally acceptable practice of killing the unwanted?
Think I’ve gone over the top, have abused a revered author to make a point alien to his own? Well, please read Dick’s “The Pre-Persons,” a story about abortion, way post-natal … until the age at which a person can understand algebra.*
Quite the moral calculation we make, eh?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* That could mean it’s open season for murder as states are moving to drop algebra requirements because so many fail to master the subject.
5 replies on “One Way to Do It”
“Oh what a tangled web we weave.…” History is going out of the window at a fast pace. Certainly, the 7 Supreme Court justices who came through with the kill-the-babies- on- demand vote in 1973, based on a lie through Roe v. Wade, should be held accountable for the aborticide of almost 60 million babies since then. Genocide, homicide, infanticide, so aborticide fits the deliberate murder aspect. 44 years, and people are complaining about the population decrease, closing of schools because of lack of students, the economy.…? I say that 2+2 still has the answer of =4. Imagine that! It was stated back in the 70’s that sympathizers would be there, because of someone knowing someone who had an abortion… and that it would become a non entity. God is still in control.
I was once having a lighthearted conversation about life wherein we were all coming up with weird public policy suggestions. Alcohol was involved. I won with the idea that parents should be allowed to retroactively abort their children up until the child reached the traditional “age of reason,” their seventh birthday. I thought I was being totally over the top, but now I discover that Phillip K. Dick was way past me in terms of outrageous ideas.
The slope is indeed slippery when principle is determined to have to yield to the pragmatic, especially when that pragmatism is driven by individual human will and desire.
Look at all the contradictions in policy as well.
It’s a woman’s right to abort the pregnancy, which means the fetus isn’t recognized as a person.
However if a stranger stabs the woman and it results in a miscarriage that person can be charged with pre-natal homicide? If you want to be consistent, the crime should pertain only to the woman — assault.
Roe vs Wade gave us a right ‘to privacy’, but the government has the right under the ACA to decide how we provide for our own health care and can penalize us for not complying. So much for privacy.
Are you actually chastising people who choose to abort Down Syndrome pregnancies? If I were a would-be parent who had made that choice, I’d offer you a direct, colorful response. As I have been lucky enough not to have had to make that choice, when I think about someone who has, all I can say is that the world is filled with busybodies and I try not to be one of them.