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Tuesday, November 07, 2006

My house of cards theory

It's perfectly consistent in this modern age of quick fixes. There's a leak? Plug the hole. There are pests in the house? Just leave some poison for them. Back pain? Pain reliever! Muscle pain? Pain reliever! Why, there seems to be a quick fix for everything. We have long realized, however, that quick fixes bring in new problems. The problem is that we're so stubborn that we just design new quick fixes on top of the prior quick fixes. The result being a house of cards.

And here's the latest thread of quick fixes: newborn babies have serious disabilities? Just kill em: so say members of a British medical college. Yet doctors are supposed to be scientists, so I'm wondering why they're not digging deep enough. Why are babies becoming increasingly disabled? Surely it's not the unbelievable smoking (or second-hand smoke) that mothers are subjected to, thanks to evil advertising. Surely it's not the poorly thought-out decision by more women to postpone pregnancy until they are in their late 30s, all the while assured by society and doctors that everything will be alright. Surely it's not the poor diet.

But surely there's a better solution than covering up the mess by killing the babies. Families with disabled children are threatened with emotional and financial hardship, true. But is it then just to foist the burden -- by termination -- on the disabled child?

Truly, this is modernism's culture of death: solving society's ills, one murder at a time.

[Link found via Mark Shea's blog. The American Papist also blogged on this.]

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