Kill a Handicapped Child?

On the BBC-TV’s Sunday Morning Live, advice columnist Virginia Ironside surprised viewers by saying, “If a baby’s going to be born severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely an abortion is the act of a loving mother. . . . If I were the mother of a suffering child—I mean a deeply suffering child—I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face . . . if it was a child I really loved, who was in agony, I think any good mother would.”

"Sometimes the decision of a good mother is not to have the child.”

During the same TV program, Ironside said that “abortion can often be seen as something wicked and irresponsible, but in fact it can be a moral and unselfish act. Sometimes the decision of a good mother is not to have the child.”

Clair Lewis, an advocate for the disabled, said that “the problems that disabled people face will not be fixed by killing off unborn children” and complained that Ironside’s approval of the abortion of disabled children was merely an excuse for eugenics.

Some praised Ironside’s comments, but the majority of viewers agreed with the TV program’s host, Susanna Reid, who was visibly appalled by Ironside’s opinion and said, “That’s a pretty horrifying thing to say, that you would put a pillow over a suffering child.”

Ironside’s statements are consistent with a belief system that rejects God’s authority. In Genesis 9:6, God explains that human life is sacred because man is made in the image of God. Someone who rejects God’s commandments as authoritative is left to create his own morality. If there is no ultimate moral authority outside human reasoning, why can’t a mother put an end to a suffering child’s misery? Why can’t a woman kill an unborn baby that would interfere with her own lifestyle, causing her great expense and inconvenience? Why can’t unwanted or unproductive individuals of any age be done away with for the betterment of society at large? All these things—along with many other atrocities—have historically been justified through human reasoning. Without God’s moral boundaries as presented in the Bible, there is nothing to keep man from reasoning himself into a frightening world where the only authority is man himself.

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