GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: Pope Francis slams eugenic mentality behind down-syndrome abortions

Pope Francis slams eugenic mentality behind down-syndrome abortions

Pope Francis slams eugenic mentality behind down-syndrome abortions

by Xavier Symons | 28 Oct 2017 |

Pope Francis has condemned the “eugenicist” mindset behind increased rates of abortion of children with down-syndrome, saying that people with disabilities face an “attitude of rejection” in contemporary society.

The Pope’s remarks were made at a conference on the inclusion of people with disabilities in parish life, held at the Vatican last weekend.

Addressing an audience of hundreds in the Clementine Hall, the Roman Pontiff said that the desire to “suppress the unborn who have some form of imperfection” was proof of a “eugenic tendency” within society, and he warned of the danger of trying to deny the inherent vulnerability of human beings:

“we all know so many people who, even with their fragility, have found...a good life that is rich in meaning...vulnerability is part of the essence of man”.

Among the keynote speakers at the conference was down-syndrome American actress Bridget Brown, who warned attendees that she may be part of “the last generation of people with Down syndrome.”

The conference comes in the wake of the release of data indicating that nearly 100% of babies with down syndrome were aborted in 2015 in countries such as Iceland and Denmark.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Stories like this have surfaced in BioEdge before, but I have always found them quite touching. We report below that researchers have found that a Neanderthal who lived in a large cave in Iraq about 50,000 years ago was terribly handicapped. Not only was he blind in one eye, missing a forearm, and crippled, but he was also profoundly deaf. With Pleistocene lions and tigers prowling in the neighbourhood, this was a big handicap for a forager.

How did he survive? His clan cared for him, tended to his needs, healed his wounds and protected him. He died at the ripe old age of 40 or 50 (equivalent to about 80 nowadays). Obviously Thomas Hobbes' infamous maxim -- that the life of man outside society is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" -- needs to be revised. Primitive as they were, these Neanderthals had their own family-based version of Obamacare.