Looks mighty suspicious here. I speak as a disabled person!
IOTM also to ask who’s more “disabled”: a person with special needs who maybe drives his family and neighbors and teachers and acquaintances crazy … or a world that would rather do without us?
“Suffering”? I know a little about that subject, though definitely not as much as many of us disabled. But killing us in the wombs of our mothers denies us even the chance that we’ll struggle and overcome it, or others will cure it or at least lessen our suffering. Who ever said life was supposed to be free of suffering?
I also speak as an Eastern Orthodox Christian. In original Christianity suffering has an honored place: it can make us more like our Founder, who suffered a bit Himself. I don’t mean ‘Suffer like Jesus suffered’ — that’s just masochism. But Orthodoxy teaches that suffering* may help cure us of our own will and inadequate understanding … and Orthodoxy itself directs us to the Will and Understanding of One Whose Will and Understanding are infinitely perfect. In fact, many ancient Christians envied the original Holy Martyrs, and found the real and difficult Struggle was ordained for those who lived in the Faith to a ripe old age. Furthermore, Orthodoxy says that even though we Orthodox with long-term illness/disability might not or ought not, for instance, participate in the Church’s fasting rules and Traditions (i.e., abstaining from certain foods at certain times), God Himself has as it were fitted us with this special ascesis to purify us of sinfulness,** He has allowed this to happen to us. Some admired, sick Orthodox have taken this teaching so to heart that they have ceased desiring to be cured — again, understanding that it may be easier than the “normal” Orthodox ascetic spiritual path, and blessed by God. If I may paraphrase St. Raphael of Brooklyn, ‘Man — or demons — may have meant this to me for bad, but God means it for the good.’ Orthodoxy also still teaches that miracles do happen, by the Graciousness of God.
(I don’t say this as someone who has reached such wisdom or dispassion himself yet. But it does seem most reasonable.)
I also have some expertise in Western Christian ethics or moral theology.
As for calling aborting someone saving his or her life, that reminds me of “destroying the village to save it,” or “killing the Indian to save the man” — real Orwellian, and I don’t say this lightly to a rabbi who survived the Holocaust, even as an infant. More than 40 million Americans have been electively aborted under color of law, few without the dubious benefit of genetic testing of them or their parents. Now it’s being sold to us as a large-scale, historic, positive good?
(*–This is ‘redemptive suffering.’ In Peace Studies they talk about some “myth of redemptive violence,” which however I never heard of till then. Violence does not redeem! [And real “martyrs” don’t die killing others intentionally, even vengefully!])
(**–Orthodoxy also remembers and teaches that all creatures suffer sinfulness from the first moments of their lives, thanks to the choice of our first parents — what one Western wag once called “Christianity’s only self-evident doctrine.”)
American Red Tory 