Never has it been made so glaringly obvious that it no longer matters that abortion kills a living baby.
Several headlines in the media said it all on 24 November, 2011.
“Medical bungle at Royal Women’s Hospital kills healthy fetus,” read one in the Herald Sun. “Healthy foetus accidentally terminated,”’, said another on the ABC website. “Royal Women’s Hospital investigates accidental termination of wrong twin in surgery error,” reported The Australian. “Victorian mother’s twin baby agony after hospital botch,” said Brisbane’s The Courier Mail.
The story dropped off the breaking news lists and various newspaper websites quickly, overshadowed by the shenanigans in federal parliament over the election of Peter Slipper as the new speaker of the House of Representatives.
The story makes grisly reading. In Victoria, a woman 32 weeks pregnant with twin boys is told that one of them has a serious heart defect. She decides to terminate him while keeping the other child. A child is injected and dies; so far a routine procedure. However, the medical staff have injected the wrong child. When the mistake is discovered, the other baby is terminated also. The family is devastated.
The hideous irony of the story is that healthy fetuses are terminated every day, hundreds of them. The single thing that makes this story newsworthy is that one of the two brothers was still wanted. Would we have heard about the termination of the unwanted twin at 32 weeks if his brother had not died with him? I seriously doubt it. These stories are studiously kept quiet.
No-one bothers claiming that these twins were not babies; otherwise there is no story. The one difference is the relative predicted health of each boy.
Thirty-two weeks’ gestation. This is unspeakable, almost impossible to imagine, when at 37 weeks a child is considered full term. Everyone knows that children born as young as 24 weeks survive regularly with the right care. Children have survived on rare occasions from 22 weeks. A child at 32 weeks’ gestation would almost certainly survive if born prematurely.
Never has it been made so glaringly obvious that in many minds it is no longer material that the innocent victim of abortion is undeniably a living baby. The only justification that is made for the procedure is that one child was wanted because he appeared to be healthy and one baby no longer wanted because he appeared not as healthy.
It is unutterably sad. None of the headlines or stories acknowledged the equal right to life of the unwanted baby. None of them described the unwanted baby’s death as tragic, only the ‘healthy’ child’s death.
Thirty-two weeks is when a woman is longing beyond anything for the birth of the child she is carrying; the discomfort of the pregnancy is peaking, the babe is positioning him or herself for birth, and everything is pretty well ready at home.
This is truly an awful story on so many levels. How far we have come down the path of inhumanity and craven selfishness when such blatant acceptance of the terrible injustice and cruel double-standard inherent in the culture of death is so callously evident in our everyday newspapers? The one spark of light was that a few of the comments attached to the web stories reflected my own revulsion.
My heart breaks for the lost children, the confusion, the sorrow, the regret, the suffering, the tragedy this family has brought upon themselves. What a world we are making for ourselves.