Certain circumstances have me thinking a lot lately about the unborn. I think of a married couple who are dear friends of mine. Chris and Rachel have five beautiful children—the oldest daughter, when out and about, is often mistaken for Dakota Fanning. Rachel, as it turns out, is again having a baby. I still recall the day only months ago when Chris proudly announced at a faculty meeting that “number six” was on the way. But my friends received some hard news a couple of weeks ago. In the course of a routine sonogram, the doctor told them that their baby—Malcolm—had some grave health issues.

Malcolm suffers from hydranencephaly—a rare condition in which the brain's cerebral hemispheres fail to form and are replaced by sacs filled with cerebrospinal fluid. At just over five months of gestation, Malcolm has a brain stem, but little more. He also suffers other complications.

The hard news, however, was not all that Chris and Rachel received at the hospital. They were also pressured to “terminate” the pregnancy—no less than three times in the very short interval between concluding the examination and leaving the hospital. My friends are staunchly pro-life; they responded—three times—that abortion was simply not an option. Chris—a professor of philosophy and an astute diagnostician of contemporary culture—described the whole ordeal to me over the phone a few days ago. I am still pondering his closing words: “It’s very clear to me that we are not ‘on our way’ to the age of a new eugenics; we are already immersed in it!”

Yes. We are now a eugenics culture. Most readers of this column have heard—or directly experienced—any number of stories similar to Chris and Rachel’s. In the face of severe pre-natal defects, the current default option in the minds of most healthcare professionals it would seem—and tragically in the minds of more and more parents—is to abort. This was vividly evidenced recently when doctors at a Milan hospital mistakenly aborted a healthy twin fetus instead of her sibling with Down syndrome; the latter was eventually aborted as well after they and the parents realized the mistake.

As I was pondering this incident, someone else brought to my attention a story that stands as a living metaphor of the kind of maternal love that was so appallingly absent in the case of the Italian twins. It was a story about the recent fires in Greece. In the tiny village of Artemida, most of the villagers were caught by surprise. Many of them attempted a final, desperate sprint up the surrounding hills where rescue workers later found at least 23 bodies. Among the dead were four children—ages 15 to 5—and their 35-year-old mother, Athanasia, her charred arms still wrapped around them—a heartrending testimony to her love, and to her final, heroic attempts to shield her children from a fiery death.

Maybe we can think of Athanasia as a kind of symbol of that genuine love of parents who embrace the gift of human life—no matter what the stage of development and no matter how negative the judgments others might make about “quality of life.” Some might say it is compassion that moves parents to “terminate” a pregnancy when severe pre-natal defects are diagnosed, putatively to spare that child, themselves and their other children untold suffering. But this, we know, is a terribly misguided sense of compassion.

Parents confronting the painful reality of bearing a child prenatally diagnosed with a trisomy disorder like Down Syndrome or other defects could be directed to a new resource I recently discovered. Mary Kellett is founder of Prenatal Partners for Life, a non profit, non-denominational, pro-life support group for just such parents. She formed the support group after her own son Peter was born with trisomy 18. Expected to live only a few hours after birth, Peter is today—as Mary describes him—“a giggling, smiling 2 1/2 -year-old who, though physically limited, brings joy to his family every day.” She is currently co-sponsoring a nation-wide billboard campaign with Prolife Across America to spread the good news about the gift each of these children is meant to be. These are examples of the billboards that will appear in the campaign:

I encourage you to support Mary Kellett and her work. The age of the new eugenics is certainly upon us, so we can’t stand by idly. First and foremost, we need to support parents who are struggling to cope with the crisis of bearing children with severe developmental defects. A culture that opts more and more to purge itself of unattractive, imperfect, defective, or simply burdensome human beings, in the name of a misguided compassion, must be shown the power, depths, and possibilities of human love.

So Chris and Rachel—thank you for the beauty and strength of your commitment to Malcolm! And Malcolm, you hang in there, buddy. We love you very much, and we welcome the gift of your life for as long as God will allow us to enjoy your presence among us!

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