Life and Death: Aktion T4 and Gianna Molla
I don’t normally enter into the wild and wicked wars over abortion. That battlefield is well worn, and the march of science and technology is slowly pushing one camp into a morally and ethically indefensible corner. But Zombie’s recent photo expose at PJ Media gives you a good look at the two camps, and the contrast couldn’t be greater.
Then this weekend comes the story from Maryland that a woman died having a late-term abortion at 33 weeks into pregnancy. This horrific tragedy exposes Maryland’s absolute permissiveness for this gruesome procedure. We’re just over a month shy of full term in this horror.
Even an agnostic can conclude that aborting a baby at 33 weeks is morally and ethically unacceptable. One need not base opposition to late-term abortions on theology. Human life is valuable, period. Though if one accepts most western theology, then late-term abortion cannot be acceptable in law, especially at 33 weeks.
Health of the mother? The child’s health? Modern neonatal science has answers for that I won’t detail here. When people say that late-term abortions are usually for medical necessity, they aren’t telling the truth. The data show otherwise.
But I’m not here to enter the abortion wars, but rather talk about some history. You can do with it what you will.
Let’s start in Germany with the Aktion T4 program. If you never heard of it, then it is time you do.
Aktion T4 was a program to eradicate the imperfect and undesirable. Children and adults with defects were euthanized by doctors in hospitals dedicated to the medical eradication of those with birth defects or other imperfections. The German government even promoted and justified it publicly. Behold a poster. Does anything sound familiar??
The translation (courtesy of Wikipedia and my slight proficiency in German):
60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read “[A] New People,” the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP.
Bad stuff, those pesky hereditary defects.
Now consider Gianna Molla, an Italian doctor who was told that if she didn’t have an abortion, she would die. These days, we call that the “health of the mother.”
In September 1961 towards the end of the second month of pregnancy, she was touched by suffering and the mystery of pain; she had developed a fibroma in her uterus. Before the required surgical operation, and conscious of the risk that her continued pregnancy brought, she pleaded with the surgeon to save the life of the child she was carrying. . . . The life was saved. . . . She spent the seven months remaining until the birth of the child in incomparable strength of spirit and unrelenting dedication to her tasks as mother and doctor. She worried that the baby in her womb might be born in pain.
A few days before the child was due. . . . she was ready to give her life in order to save that of her child: “If you must decide between me and the child, do not hesitate: choose the child – I insist on it. Save him”. On the morning of April 21, 1962, Gianna Emanuela was born. Despite all efforts and treatments to save both of them, on the morning of April 28, amid unspeakable pain . . . . the mother died. She was 39 years old.
We’ve seen all this stuff before. The language and ideas in today’s debates about the dignity of human life from natural birth to natural death are all familiar terms and ideas. In the 20th century, individuals and nations have made choices about these matters. Some choices were beautiful and anchored in the deepest unselfish love. Only the hardest hearts can ignore these examples.
Baby Gianna Emanuela Molla
Other choices come from the blackest evil with all the trappings of practicality and common sense. Pay close attention to how evil was justified in the past. You’ll know what it looks like in the future.
One quibble, the normal gestation period is 40 weeks. Otherwise spot on.
Fixed, thanks.
Aw, that’s okay… born at 7 months (28 weeks) myself– abortion at 33 weeks seems just a mite excessive, if you ask me.
Agreed. My daughter was born at 31 weeks, and never needed a ventilator. Abortion at 33 weeks is incomprehensible!
My niece was delivered at 24 weeks. Weighed about a half pound. (My sister-in-law suffered from Preeclampsia). She’s now a very bouncy 6-year old.
We have often asked what separates man from the animals. One of those things is the ability to control our sexual urges…animals simply breed. Man makes love and enjoys the results…the joy of a child.
At the risk of sounding crude, modern women have a choice, the choice that is made before legs are spread.
(and dont bore me with the incestuous rape stuff… a red herring and distraction for sure)
ta
I agree.
On the issue of incest.I ask people about incest and they repy: “Against it. It causes hereditary defects”.
Then I ask: “What about homosexual incest (father-and-son, uncle-and-nephew, aunt-and-niece, brother-and-brother)”? I get blank stares.
I continued: “So heterosexual incest is bad and homosexual incest is good”? I get more blank stares. I did not think about homosexual incest until I read a passage of Aristotle who condemned homosexual incest and disagreed with Socrates who was fine with it.
The taboo against incest has little to do with blood relations per se and has a lot to do with the cohesiveness of family. Incest corrupts the various ties between the members of the family.
A study was done on children born and raised in the kibbutzes in Israel. There were very few marriages between children raised in the same kibbutz even when they knew there was no blood relation between them.
Steve Jobs was adopted and he has met his biological father, an Arab-American but Jobs considers his adoptive father his true father. Shaquille O’Neal was raised by his stepfather and he has met his biological faher but Shaquille considers his stepfather his true father. There is no doubt that adopted children consider the biological children of their adoptive parents as their true siblings.
The Progressives/Socialist want to destroy the concept of a nuclear family. Look at Woody Allen (married his step-daughter). Look at Morgan Freeman (married his step-granddaugher).
There is in fact a basic difference between the Roman and Jewish concepts of incest. Roman is based on degree-of-relation, while the Bible’s is based on social matter. (So you can marry your niece, but not your aunt.)
In Judaism, adoption does not change your relatives for the serious stuff. You cannot marry biological relatives, but (under certain circumstances) you can marry adopted ones, and this is in fact the law for Jews in Israel. (And, sorry, adoption does not change your tribe, or affect the hereditary priesthood, or the David’s male line of succession.)
I recall reading years ago in the Catholic Encyclopedia that eventually the Church chose the Romans rules over the Bibles’. Of course, the latter only applied to Jews anyway.
Actually, the Church went with both: adopted relatives and in-laws are treated the same as blood relations. One is absolutely forbidden to marry any relative in the vertical line and first and second-degree relatives in the co-lateral lines. Marriage between co-lateral relatives of the third through seventh degree requires the permission of the Church.
That makes no sense. If you can’t marry your aunt, you can’t marry your niece, because then your aunt would be marrying her nephew, which is the same relation, except male. Unless of course there are different rules for males than for females.
Just for the record: you wrote, “I did not think about homosexual incest until I read a passage of Aristotle who condemned homosexual incest and disagreed with Socrates who was fine with it.”
Personally, I’d say we do not actually know what Socrates was fine with because Socrates wrote nothing, and all we have “from” him is hearsay written by Plato, right? And, apparently you’ve cared this one heresay level deeper by offering that Aristotle said Socrates said? This is not, however, intended to condone incest in any form whatsoever; nor is it to be construed as any type of homosexual defense.
“The taboo against incest has little to do with blood relations per se and has a lot to do with the cohesiveness of family” Not entirely true. Inbreeding can be a very serious problem, especially in those societies that have little intermarriage with outsiders. See the Hapsburgs and Romanovs for good examples.
The Hapsburgs inbred extensively – especially the Spanish Hapsburgs, which is why they went extinct in 150 years.
However the Romanovs did not, AFAIK. The hemophilia which afflicted the Tsesarevitch Alexei was inherited in the female line, from his great-grandmother Queen Victoria. It’s nearly certain that Victoria had the mutation which causes it (it happens fairly often); none of her maternal relatives ever had it.
And let’s not forget the example of Tim Tebow and his mother. If I remember correctly, she was told that unless she had an abortion, both she and the baby would die.
Looks like the doctors were wrong on both counts on that one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QfKCGTfn3o There’s this guy too.
And I am certain that not far away from this atrocity, there were several children born younger than 33 weeks gestation, being cared for by their parents, nurses, doctors and techs of all kinds.
There was absolutely NO excuse for this abortion, that late in the pregnancy.
Mr. Adams, I deeply thank you for your heart-felt article. Alas, it is not fully logic-felt. I will explain my seeming oxymorn below. But first, I find it rhetorically wise on your part to have quoted the Nazis. Not a bad translation. You see, I speak perfect German and am horrified by the felt-logic of the nazis, for afterall some of my relatives might well have been in the post partem abortion machine set up by the nazis. “Post parten abortion” and “felt-logic”? What is the good old (and he is, alas, old) prof. saying?
Logic is cold, very cold–and it should be. If one says “a” and if “a” implies “b”, one must say “b”, whatever one’s feeling maybe. And this logical necessity goes on and on until someone finally says “z”, including, perhaps, “I conclude logically that you are to die”! At that point logic becomes “felt”. In other words, no matter how cold a logically ordered argument maybe, its contents can be deadly and thereby “felt” deeply. In this way I come to my felt-logic. If group “a” of humans cause unacceptable problems for a society, then one must say (as did the nazis in economic terms) “b”, i.e., get rid of “a”. (Golly gee, Obama says that too.) The “getting rid of” here is, of course, abortion. What is abortion? All depends upon an evaluation here. I “evaluate” that abortion (in a clinic like Planned Parenthood) is the intentional taking of an innocent human’s life. I deduce logically from this (by me) “felt” fact that intentional abortion is homicide. It makes no difference if the logic is that of the nazis or of Planned Parenthood. Logic is cold, ice-cold and “group a” must go. This makes Planned Parenthood abortions to be “murder”. Whether abortion at 33 weeks or 10 seconds before a natural birth, it remains by (my) definition morally murder, irregardless of the safety factor for the woman. If late term abortions can be made “abolutely” safe, an argument against them cannot be due to any danger for the mother since, by hypothesis, the danger no longer is (for the unborn child there is no health problem since, of course, the child is destined for death). You might be scratching your head at my remark about an abortion 10 seconds before a natural birth. You should be because I only said “y” and not “z”. And what would be, with cold logic, “z”?
Some medical moralists have validly raised the quesiton, namely: What is the difference between an unborn child (one that could live outside the womb) and a newly born child? Pray tell, what is the difference? Such moralists can see no difference and this is “z”. On its own, a post partem child (say 10 seconds after birth or much longer) can no more survive than a child at 0 – 10 seconds before birth, not to mention back to 33 weeks of gestation? So, if the just born child is deemed to belong to “group ‘a’”, then the system must say with cold logic “b”, i.e., get rid of the problem, kill it. Since the problem “a” has been born and since it apparently implies validly “b”, then cold logic demands the conclusion that “a” should be done away with. And this “doing away with” is what I (imitating some abortion moralists) am designating as “post partem abortion” (something practiced fully by the Nazis). So you see, Mr. Adams, an atheist or agnostic or a liberal theologian can, indeed, conclude that a 33 week gestation, given a safety guarantee, is quite acceptable. Indeed, said people can, if their feelings to not ge in the way of their logic, well accept the abortion of a late term child at any point in time or the killing of an already born child. The principle is that a member of “group ‘a’” can be (and, indeed, should be) done away with, i.e., killed (= “b”).
Space precludes developping the argument further. Mr. Adams, I fault your marvelous article for a certain lack of “felt-logic”. Once life begins (and the moment of fertilization seems to be the most logical point), neither 10 nor 30 weeks nor even minus 10 seconds before birth is of importance, logically speaking. Here is a point of logic deeply “felt” by me. I do not like confronting murderous logic, be it under Hitler or Obama.
You write,
“Indeed, said people can, if their feelings to not ge in the way of their logic, well accept the abortion of a late term child at any point in time or the killing of an already born child. The principle is that a member of “group ‘a’” can be (and, indeed, should be) done away with, i.e., killed (= “b”).”
Your sophistry is showing! According to what you offer as “logic,” which is nothing more than the old “If it feels good, do it” substitute for reasoning, a person may be “aborted,” ergo murdered, at any time it’s socially expedient to someone, or otherwise when agreed upon by some undetermined group of someones. When is a child no longer a child? At some arbitrary age, decreed by whom? I seriously doubt that if anyone decreed that you were a child because you think like one, and decreed your murder, you’d think it logical.
With all due respect, JR, I am fairly certain the the Professor who wrote that lengthy post considers abortion abhorrent under any circumstance, and he used the “logic” against the perpetrators of this travesty. In his last paragraph, he wraps it up pretty well, in my opinion.
You know, it is a gorgeous Sunday morning, I have just gotten off the phone talking to my daughter and my incredible 10 month old grandson, and I really don’t wish to descend into the pit that is Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood and the “Freedom to choose”, coupled with the siting of the majority of their “clinics” in inner city minority neighborhoods, is an automatic and unavoidable invocation of Godwin’s Law.
Progressives ever wish to purify society, by enforced sterilization, by targeted abortion, and by herding the remains of the offending groups into tightly controlled urban enclaves where they can be maintained as reliable voters, so that they (Progressives) can continue their predations on the very sheeple that vote them the power that they abuse.
There is always a group that does not have the right to exist for these people. Always, somewhere, eggs must be broken to make their crappy omlette.
I just want to make the slight emendation that an exception for the life of the mother will still be necessary for emegrgency situations. Please note that I said “life”, and I mean that specifically.
One can be an atheist and be pro-life; the point is that is is not at all clear where life begins from a scientific viewpoint; in fact the question may be meaningless from that persepctive. We may indeed be appraching the point where the only logical choices are to ban abortion or permit infanticide, as in that recent paper. I fear that the latter may occur. After all, it was just those crazy Jews, as the great Roman historian Tacitus pointed out, who thought it was actually a crime to kill a child.
“…the point is that is is not at all clear where life begins from a scientific viewpoint.”
What’s really going to fry your noodle, mzk1, is that from a scientific viewpoint life is a cycle; reproduction is not the “beginning” of life, but the “continuance” of life. Thus every stage of gestation from conception forward is “life”.
From the scientific viewpoint, reproduction is not where “life” begins, it is merely where the “STUDY of a life cycle” begins.
I probably should have said “human life”. OK, a sperm is human. Or have you just made my point for me? I think you are aware of the paper I referred to. After stating that there is no difference between pre- and post-natal, it then decided to go with the Romans and declare that since abortion is OK, so is infanticide. They could have gone with the Jews and declared the reverse, but they wanted the paper to get published.
Stating that one cannot show that life begins at birth is a secular argument. Where religion comes in is where we ask for a prejudice towards life.
(Similarly, I don’t know if we can scientifically define sexual behavior of any sort as “abnormal”. I would be interesting in hearing an argument in defense of homosexuality that does not equally apply to incest.)
Abortion is a medical procedure, and a pregnancy, whether it is wanted or not, is not a life-threatening medical illness to be “cured” by a doctor. Rather than argue whether secular or religious argument should inform “the law”, we should instead acknowledge that the Hippocratic Oath should be the controlling authority governing the medical necessity of an abortion. Under the Hippocratic Oath, performing an “elective abortion” on a healthy fetus -at ANY stage of development- is just as medically unethical as performing an “elective amputation” on a healthy limb; either one should be considered medically appropriate only when it will prevent the death of the PATIENT.
To clarify: Catholic Church teaching allows for mothers to be medically treated even if it means risking death for the unborn child so St Gianna was not obligated to die; her willingness to do so is considered heroic so she was canonized. Thanks.
No need for clarification given the post intentionally left out doctrine as it relates to her, or even that she is sainted. The decisions of the living woman were what I wanted to present, and nothing more.
I just meant “for the readers” because there are some odd, wrong ideas about Catholics and pregnancy out there. Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that your article lacked anything crucial.
Jeannette, it is necessary to add some precision to Catholic doctrine. There is the absolute principle that the ends to not justify the means, if the means entail the use of an intrinsic evil. Let us look at the choice if the mother is out of question. In the film “The Cardinal” (I believe based on a true story), the sister of the Cardinal gets pregnant out of wedlock and entails delievery problems. She slips into a coma. It thereby becomes the legal duty of the Cardinal to decide what is to be done. The doctors tell the Cardinal that EITHER they can save the child’s life OR that of the mother, one life must be sacrificed for the other. The procedure, one way or another, demands the direct taking of life of one of two innocent people for the sake of the other. In other words, the saving of one life entails the intentional taking of the life of the other. The Cardinal, following the principle that the ends to not justify the means and that the taking of one innocent life for another innocent life entails using the principle of the ends justify the means formulates his decision. What decision did the Cardinal make?
The Cardinal informed the doctors that he could not sanction the intentional killing of one being for another. Consequently, the Cardinal informed the doctors to do their best to save both. What happened? You will have to see the film. A mother can, indeed, freely risk her life, even a probable death, to save her child. But let us say that a “devil” (or some perverse doctor from the HHH crowd) gave her the following choice: “If you kill yourself, I will save the child”. Following the Catholic rejection of the use of an intrinsically evil means to realize a good end, the mother could not morally commit suicide anymore than the Cardinal could order the intentional killing of the mother to save the child.
Should any reader think that the Catholic position here (as I understand it) is harsh, if not false, please reflect: If the use of an intrinsic evil is permitted to achieve a good or just desireable end, there is NO limit as to the uses that such thinking can conclude to. I recently asked my German urologist why it is so difficult to get a PSA test here in Germany as the test is a means for cancer detection. (I was found to have cancer and had treatment and PSA was used.) The doctor said to me (and I translate as literally as possible: “The German government does not want to use of PSA testing much because it does not want to have too many old people. The money is not there”. Keep in mind that Germans have 1.34 childern per woman and that 2.1 per woman is necessary for reproduction Between 2000 and the end of 2011 the number of Germans 18 and under dropped from 15.2 million to 13 million. That means that fewer workers are faced by an ever increasing population of old people. No wonder the German government wants the “good” end of having less old people–>>limiting PSA tests. I have read an article in which it is stated that the British government has “put to sleep” about 60,000 really old people, all in need of intensive care. Cost effective, no? But the end is realized by the use of such means, no?
The moral thing for the Cardinal to do is to give his sister the Last Rites and make every effort to see to it that the child is born alive and baptized, even if the child dies within minutes of birth. If the situation has deteriorated to the point where one life can’t be saved without explicitly murdering the other, then you don’t bother trying to save their lives and focus on saving their souls.
Mr. Adams is a very skilled, and experienced attorney. He has repeatedly stressed that his writing is separate and apart from any religious treatment. He recognizes these arguments exist, but offers a comparison of the legal position of the late term abortion law in Maryland, as practiced, with the similar legal position of Nazi Germany.
Extraneous replies based on any specific religion do not contribute. It simply confuses.
According to the local news reports, the lady was rushed to the hospital, near death, after the abortion, where the doctors sought but did not get professional information about the patient from her abortionist. She died of internal bleeding. The abortionist travels to Maryland from a far away place, every week, as Maryland is one of the very few states that allows this horror. I am not a lawyer but wonder if butchery is a crime. We fought a war with Germany over this same issue.
Since Gianna Molla is a canonized Catholic saint specifically because of her heroic actions, Catholic Church teaching is somewhat relevant to the general discussion. If we were talking about Stacie Crimm, for example, http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/woman-dies-of-cancer-after-refusing-treatment-to-save-unborn-child/ or Chiara Corbella then it wouldn’t be quite as relevant.
The only way abortion could be moral is if it’s done if both the life of the mother and the baby is in danger. Because doing so would save one life instead of letting them both die. On the other hand, as the Tebow example above had shown, pro-abortion doctors had been known to abuse this.
Divine justice
She got what she deserved, the child not so much.
Abort at 33 weeks is murder…the penalty for murder is death.
Why is abortion at 33 weeks murder and not at 32 weeks or 28 weeks or earlier? My son was expelled from his mother’s body on the very last day of the 2nd term of gestation. Put differently, his mother had an unvoluntary natural abortion or an early birth–both come to the samething physically. However, if, say, abortion is allowed for the first two terms (and it is in some states) what a paradox faced me and my wife assuming that she had not had an early birth. We or, according to Obama, she could have decided to keep the child (which was viable) or abort it for whatever reason. Interesting situation, no? It is a situation that illustrates the paradox of at least some abortions. The child could live or could be aborted. Your choice! The principle, however,the that governs acts of killing unborn is that the ends to not justify the means if they are intrinsically evil. From that point of view, the weeks mean nothing logically, though emotionly yes.
“Undesirable-rein”: a country made free of people with defective beliefs, non- politically correct thinking, and other useless eaters. A hell of a system.
Dig into the history of the Nazi treatment of undesireables and you will come to the conclusion that it more than a hell of a system, rather a system that is or was a hell.
The Nazis modeled their practices and camps off the American eugenics movement. Interestingly, Margaret Sanger was heavily into that movement and a racist. She founded an organization that later became Planned Parenthood. Her goal? To eliminate the black race and other undesirables. Into the 1970s it was legal to sterilize undesirables in a few states.
That whole evil empire (PP) must be dismantled.
You don’t have to dig much, just look out your window.
Hey hey…. that’s now SAINT Gianna Molla. And the daughter grew up to follow in her mother’s doctoring footsteps.
That message doesn’t read, “Fellow citizen, this is your money, too.” It reads, “Fellow citizen, this is Danegeld,” as in, money that is extorted from us by parasites. This is beyond merely saying that the disabled are too expensive to support; it was outright calling for Germany to declare war on the disabled.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dein
G_d gives to woman the ability to create life, but He also gives her free will. She can choose to do good or ill, but the ultimate verdict is her decision, and like the election of the Jews, should be let to a Higher Court to adjudicate. Men and women are complementary and not the same, through each other we live to our respective destinies. I think that comparison is apt…..
http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ctsa/article/viewFile/2612/2248
Don’t you understand yet? You are already a criminal.
There are so many rules and regulations from the USSA Almighty State Federal Government that you have automatically ALREADY VIOLATED at least one of them. It is only through statistical randomization that the IRS or the Stasi brownshirts (State-directed) police haven’t yet broken down your door. But if you EVER come to their attention, believe me they will.
But you don’t want to believe this, do you? You want to stick your head in the sand, you want to continue to be the frog in the gradually-boiling pot, don’t you?
Here it is, folks… Either stand now, or submit forever. Resist NOW, or be a slave forever. Folks, that includes you, and your kids, and generations yet unborn.
What can I say, except it is way past time to wake up, it is way past time to admit there is an enemy, and that enemy is the leftist-facist State and all its useful idiots.
Fellow patriots, fellow citizens, please read the following and be ashamed…
1776, The Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence: “…we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor…”.