Why a Premature Baby Feels Like an Accusation

A video of a baby born at 24 weeks can be a surprisingly divisive post. Instead of the collective urge to protect the vulnerable, a large cross-section of the populace calls for such videos to be taken down, or seeks justification for killing the child. Just the sight of such a living child is interpreted as a condemnation of abortion, because it provides witness to the reality of the child’s humanity.

Hundreds of exchanges below such videos mirror this one:

“Your ethics are different than my ethics,” is often stated as if it ends the conversation. But if taken seriously, it dissolves the very concepts being discussed. If ethics are purely personal, then words like “murder,” “care,” and even “suffering” lose any stable meaning. If he is right, then there is no truth at all. There are multiple implicit assertions in his proclamation of relativistic morality.

For example, within such a statement, it is asserted that the definition of murder and the essence of suffering are merely opinions in which a person might take any, equally valid side. This manner of thought is common to our age, and it means that not only are we almost guaranteed to talk past each other, but that we are supposed to applaud our having done so. After all, it represents a victory for individualism if each person can invent and live by his own moral code and assert it as best for him. How we could sustain a society on this concept remains unexplored.

By deciding that suffering gives us license to kill, he reduced Man into a mere product that we can terminate when it fails to perform as we desire. It is villainous to look at vulnerable people not as persons to care for but as problems to be solved. All of this is encompassed under the supposed umbrella of “ethics.”

The poster implicitly asserted that there is no reason to live apart from pleasure and the pursuit thereof—that there is no value in suffering or inherent dignity in being human. It’s an attitude that provides little counterweight to the nature of life—each of which is marked by pain and toil. We all experience loss, sickness, and suffering. Thus, it seems unsubstantiated for a person to profess the belief in a purely hedonistic meaning to life, based upon the reality that he continues to live in a world that has and will bring him pain. If our lives are not disposable, then neither are the lives of the vulnerable.

If you look at a video of a struggling infant and your first impulse is to kill him, something is awry. For too many people, what is happening is not as clear as is declared. The suffering of a child being helped in his weakness is not the real cause of alarm. The issue is that the sight of such a child plagues the consciences of those who can no longer deny the humanity of a child born 24 weeks into development.

As medical advances grow, it is inevitable that we will be able to save struggling babies at earlier and earlier ages. We will, as a society, have to come face-to-face with the reality of the children who were previously dehumanized and denied. We will have to look into their eyes. It has been said that it is easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled, but how much easier is it to convince a man to dehumanize as “clumps of cells” than to later convince him that he has applauded murder?

There’s an irony in the fact that the technological advancement that is alleged to lead us away from the ‘darkness’ of religion and the rigidity of absolute morality is eventually going to show the reality of the evil of abortion. The question is no longer whether we will see. It is whether we will admit what we see, and what that says about us.