I hate painting beautiful pictures with words, because the beauty we conceive is not true, it ceases to be true when we alter life to make it so. I revel in the intricacies of life, the innate gestures we take for granted and the ones that spawn out of innocence. So to me, a child smiling at the prospect of getting a candy has more beauty than a well toned model with features that even god didn’t have a hand in making them.
Naturally so, I was a little perplexed on the issue of later stage abortions (for the naive few, its aborting the child after 20 weeks of conception; the foetus is almost formed and is declared alive by US law). It’s appalling, I know, killing a child because it’s not formed properly. Are the stereotypes of babies propagated by media the benchmark in deciding how yours should be? If everybody looked like that where would individualism figure in our list of priorities? Several disabled people live happy lives, sure, they may be ridiculed in society and be looked upon in pity all their lives, but does that give anybody the right to kill, who are we to decide? I am starting to sound like a fear monger selling a dystopia to the inexorable public.
Then I heard the plight of a couple, their story put a different perspective on the topic. They have been trying to conceive for years and when they finally did they were elated, painted the kids room, bought everything they could get their hands on, did everything prescribed in every pre-natal care book. Unfortunately, after 22 weeks, a scan revealed that the baby’s brain was filling up with fluids and he would be born without any brain function. They were distraught, they took as many second opinions as possible but they all concurred. So they had an abortion. Are they justified in doing so? Did they in doing so, reduce the agony that the child would have lived through and also the parents agony?
Like all debates, we can never conclude on anything, we just compromise between the two and hope that our conscience figures out what’s right.
