A Culture of Life

There’s a couple of articles I found this evening on the web. Both of which disturbed me.

The first clip concerns parents who were so absorbed by drug abuse they allowed their baby to die. The baby either starved to death, or something else horrible happened.

The second article indicates the Dutch have been euthanizing babies, and are now making the practice official.

It always strikes me as cosmically unjust that crack addicts and prostitutes can have babies almost without effort. Compare that to the scads of good, deserving couples out there who can’t get pregnant no matter what they do. These folks would love to have that baby the crackheads killed. I can guarantee the baby would not have died of neglect with one of these sad couples.

Anybody can create a child. It seems to take something really special to be a parent.

Add to that the babies that are killed by abortion every year. Every one of these babies could have found an adoptive home. Since the biological parents do not want to be bothered, the child is killed before it ever gets a chance to draw a real breath. The tragedy there is almost too unimaginable to bear.

It all goes back to the lack of responsibility our culture seems to be developing. For every action, certain consequences can result. Having sex could very well create a child. That’s the bottom line: a child is created. Not a fetus, not an embryo. A baby. One that will grow up, go to school, pay taxes, and do everything the rest of us do. If that doesn’t constitute life, I don’t know what does.

That child will have to be taken care of. It didn’t ask to be born, but it certainly has all the same rights the rest of us do. First and foremost, it has the right to live. If it’s created, the parents have that responsibility. And it’s a big responsibility, probably the biggest one any person can face.

I was proud to see President Bush stand up for what he termed, “…a Culture of Life” in the debates and on the campaign trail. I don’t think we grasp why this is so important.

The Dutch have taken it upon themselves to officially sanction termination of babies they determine have no chance. They are already euthanizing adults who want it.

What right have they to determine who has no chance? Where does that line get drawn? That’s a power I don’t think I want a hospital to have over me. They might quit trying a little too early. They might decide since I’m conservative, I don’t need to be saved. They can write me off as a hopeless case, when in fact I am not.

The possibilities for abuse are almost limitless. Hitler was big on the idea of killing mentally retarded people, too.

A government’s sole purpose should be to allow and encourage law-abiding citizens to live free. Abortion and euthanasia seem to trivialize existence, and that’s a dangerous thing. We need to encourage life, not sanction the death of innocents.

This is not even the same thing as the death penalty. I can hear the whining already. Notice I said “…the death of innocents?” The parents of the neglected baby have now put themselves right out of the “innocent” category. They need to be taken out of the gene pool before they do this again.

C.S. Lewis warned about naturalism, the tendency to think human existence is simply a naturally occurring phenomenon. It creates moral relativism, which takes out a higher power altogether. Read this article by Chuck Colson, and check out some of Lewis’ stuff for yourself.

At any rate, if we start to view death callously, we have started to thumb our noses at God himself. Not a practice I think we need to encourage.