In thought

A month or two ago, my friends and I got quite a bit of shattering news from a friend on the Kingdom Hearts Francophone Wiki — he was paralysed waist down in a motor accident. At that point in time I did not know what to say to him. I knew one thing, though : he had a great amount of courage to live on even with disability looming over him.

His desire was to live, just like any person with a disability would.

And I absolutely hate mentioning this part, but let’s face it : had he been in the womb in present-day Britain or France in that condition, there’d be an increased possibility of him being exterminated — “aborted” in today’s terms — just because he wasn’t perfect, and his parents were either 1) not willing to bear the burden of raising a disabled child, or 2) they felt it’d be difficult for him to live, and they took the discretion of ending his life ; 3) and guess what ? It’s perfectly legitimate in Europe.

Oh, how my heart aches.

We are here to love every human being, even the littlest of them all, because that’s all we can procreate. I had a friend tell me, in a discussion, that even the offspring of turtles, elephants and chimps have more rights than the human offspring does. This should already ring alarm bells.

We are not here to do “cleansing” in any sort, no matter what the reason may be. Disability ? Welfare ? Saving of expenses on our part ? Bollocks. If we are going to be selective for the sake of ourselves, or allegedly for the sake of the child’s future, we are still being selective towards the people we are getting rid of — and that makes us no different from the selectiveness of exterminations of Hitler’s Third Reich, it makes us no different from the selectiveness of persecutions suffered by groups of people all around the world. Only that this time, the target here is the poorest of the poor — the child in the womb, who is born with nothing (just as we were), and can’t be anything else but something great — a child.

Let us not forget that in our own cases, we were born to live, and we were born for each other. It’s not for us to say what will happen to someone, or how someone’s life will turn out. So it was with my beloved friend, and so it is with the multitude of infants in the womb.

The recent argument that Britons of the next generation are going to be less well-off than we are is still no excuse. I , for one, was brought up in a recession in Malaysia, as we drew near the third millenium. Times were very hard, people were losing jobs and pulling their hair out over this, and children were the source of joy for the people around them. If Malaysia hits economic boom time anytime soon, the workforce would most probably come from our generation. And the exact same thing is going to happen in Britain, with mortgages stopped and people finding it extremely difficult to get a home for themselves. The logic for procreation in this instance is that we wrought the decadence upon ourselves — and we can’t leave it at just that. If we’re going to make a nation better, we need offspring. Children are described across cultures as the hope for generations ahead, and you can bet your bottom dollar that every child will have to go through the nine months of humility that today’s youth culture despises so much.