At first glance, a new undertaking by British health crusaders may seem innocuous – or even a sign that the country is abandoning long-held anti-Life views. The British Transplantation Society has suggested that parents of babies diagnosed prenatally with a condition thought to be fatal should be asked to deliver the baby. Unfortunately, the reason for this is an attempt to convince the parents to let doctors harvest the baby’s organs to fill a shortage of transplant organs. The child, if declared “brain-dead,” would be kept alive by a ventilator so that vital organs would stay fresh until harvesting. UK Mirror reports:
Women whose babies develop fatal defects in the early stages of pregnancy will be given advice on going ahead with the birth so the NHS can harvest the baby’s organs, it was reported last night.
A serious shortage of donated organs means mothers will be “supported” to have the baby at nine months instead of aborting it so the child’s vital organs can be taken for transplant…
The move was revealed at the annual meeting of the British Transplantation Society in Glasgow.
Far from being a life-affirming option, however, the move further cements the pervasive notion that preborn children are commodities – in this case, medical commodities – to be used and discarded at will. Note that the plan is not to encourage parents to carry their babies to term because doing so is a life-affirming option that respects the child’s Right to Life. On the contrary, parents will purportedly not be presented with the organ-harvesting option until after they have chosen whether or not to terminate the child’s life via elective abortion.
Furthermore, the child whose parents reject abortion, rather than being cherished for his own sake, will instead be treated for the duration of his brief earthly existence as little more than a human incubator. This is exceedingly ironic, since many abortion activists hold that Pro-Life advocates treat women as the incubators of so-called unwanted children when we denounce abortion as a viable pregnancy outcome. However, the British proposal to use preborn children expressly for their organs is, in no uncertain terms, tantamount to reducing human beings to incubators. These tiny babies are being valued for no other reason than their ability to grow usable organs.
If this scenario is conjuring up memories of a certain investigative journalism project that made worldwide headlines in 2015, that’s because the parallel is chilling. Britain’s proposal comes on the heels of the Center for Medical Progress’ ghoulish revelations that American abortion mills routinely ravage the dead bodies of babies killed in abortion for salable organs for scientific research.
Salable… Transplantable… When will preborn children be respected for simply being human?