I just read this article about a family who tried to abort a “weaker” twin who refused to die. Now I could go on about certain aspects of that, but what I want to focus on here is this stupid statement by the mother:
It really is a miracle. Doctors carried out an operation to let Gabriel die – yet he hung on.
Did you catch that? “Doctors carried out an operation to let Gabriel die“…to let him die????
I suppose if I ever kill someone I can stand before the judge and say, “Your honor, I simply pulled the trigger/cut the throat/poisoned the food of the victim to let the victim die. I didn’t actually do anything. It was all passive.”
This statement by Mrs. Jones is nothing but a rationalization of abortion by making it seem passive instead of admitting it is the active killing of the unborn. We see the same exact terminology used in euthenasia cases too. “We’ll pull the feeding tube and let the patient die. It’s what they would have wanted.”
All this begs the point that anyone who deprives another person of food will CAUSE that person die. Anyone who engages in activities that will cause the death of another human being is not “letting” death occur, it is causing death to occur.
Words have meaning. The fact that this woman felt pricked in her conscious enough for her to twist her words from an active killing to a passive allowing of a death demonstrates that she knows in her heart that what the doctors were doing was wrong. If the doctor’s decision is not morally suspect, there is no reason to pretend that what the doctors do is to permit a death instead of causing the death.
