Midwife with a Knife (what an appropriate name) recounts on his blog:
I'm feeling a little melancholy today. I killed a baby, a very loved baby, on purpose. The baby in question had a lethal birth defect. His parents, although they loved him a great deal, decided that the best thing for their baby and for their family was to terminate the pregnancy.
Well, his forthrightness is very appreciated.
Abortion was supposed to be about a "woman's right" to do what she wants with her body.
That's obviously not true.
She wanted the baby. She didn't mind the pregnancy or motherhood per se.
It's about the convenience of killing a fetus. The mother's health was not improved or driminished. It had everything to do with avoiding the birth of a genetically defective baby.
That baby did not have to die from an injection of potassium chloridue to the umbilical vein. The midwife says the baby would have been born and suffocated. Truly a tragedy. But how does making a baby die of an extremely painful heart attack make it all better? Because it's done now instead of later? If no abortion had been done, at least the cause of death would have been natural and not inflicted. What is morally worse: naturally ocurring pain or inflicted pain?
The mother offered herself to be "used" to train obstetricians in cordocentesis. For that purpose, she and the baby were given morphine and valium.
Now if the baby why couldn't the baby have been given morphine and valium at birth? I've had morphine during a c-section, when you sometimes have the sensation of suffocating-- it's not that bad. You're suffocating in a pretty happy state. Sure, it's not ideal. But palliative care is far more ideal than killing a baby.
We don't treat newborns that way-- injecting potassium chloride in their veins-- by what right do we kill the baby in the womb? Again, this is not about the mother's rejection of pregnancy or motherhood. This is about the misguided belief that treating any human being that way is morally acceptable.
