*** Important Update At The End ***
Imperfection has become the reason to abort. I am stridently pro-life. I am not ready to make all abortions illegal, but I think we can all make the case that treatable birth defects (also known as human imperfections) should NEVER be a reason to kill a human being.

The ethical storm over abortions has been renewed as it emerged that terminations are being carried out for minor, treatable birth defects.

Late terminations have been performed in recent years because the babies had club feet, official figures show. Other babies were destroyed because they had webbed fingers or extra digits.

Such defects can often be corrected with a simple operation or physiotherapy.

The revelation sparked fears that abortion is increasingly being used to satisfy couples’ desire for the ‘perfect’ baby.

There are no PERFECT babies! There are no perfect people. The human condition is one of surmounting imperfections and challenges, not skating on them lazily through life. I blame a lot of this on our culture, which was rotted out years ago by greed driven media and Hollywood stories that only promote fame and fortune and never the silent, ongoing human condition.

My favorite movie recently was Something The Lord Made because it exposes a true American hero: Vivien Thomas. Thomas was a blackman who grew up in the darkest days of segregation to help pioneer heart surgery – until then a forbidden discipline. The result of Thomas’ work under the Johns Hopkins University doctor Alfred Blalock has meant nearly 2 million people a year get their lives back because these two men tried to do the unthinkable.

Hollywood rarely produces movies like this. Instead they go for the car racing, womanizing, boozed up, no time for kids stories. And our culture follows behind in their waste products.

Somehow, if not Hollywood, we have decided that we need to be perfect little Stepford people. So that people who have challenges and overcome them are pitied, not admired.

I know from experience much of this is in the medical community as well. I could have gone MD, but decided to work on machines instead of people. But during my biology studies I learned a great respect for life. All life. To become an MD I had to kill that off in order to be able to probe, dissect, incise and suture the body and its parts. It makes you cold to life.

Two types of doctors worked with us with our twins who were premature and who might not had made it if the head doctor wasn’t well researched and an optimist. They came out two months premature and 3 pounds 13 ounces and 1 pound 7 ounces. The ‘little one’ had some challenges, but now is a normal six year old.

One set of doctors were optimistic. The other pessimistic. The pessimists kept warning of dire events and wanting tests that were risks. We declined. When they were delivered one doctor couldn’t help herself. Less than 45 minutes after giving birth she came to my wife’s bed and predicted a life of physical and mental challenges, one where we would need to care for her the rest of our lives.

The head doctor tore her a new one the next day. But I had seen this before. A good portion, maybe half, of doctors are pessimists. They can weave a tail of woe and concern that can rattle anyone. Since I know what they are talking about I can put the risks they hype in context. And I am not afraid to get as many opinions as I can. But these doctors can convince you to kill one child in the womb to give the other a ‘better’ chance. They have become cold and calculating. Willing to thin the herd to gain an increase of fractional odds.

Whatever the core reasons, and I suspect there are many, the taking of life because challenges are facing the babies is ludicrous. We might as well all commit suicide before we are born. I think it is time to propose legislation that outlaws abortion for cosmetic reasons. I think that would be much more worthwhile than opposing guest workers who are already here working anyway.

Addendum: Science and the law have reached a point where it is possible to stop abortions through the courts. The same DNA tests that send murderers to Death Row and innocent people back home can confirm two things about fetuses: (1) they are human beings and (2) they are unique individuals relative to the parents (and anyone else alive, with the exception of identical twins). Therefore a fetus is not an organ, tissue or mass of cells in the mother. If so they would have her DNA, not the child’s. And since we know humans are concience beings at some point, and we do not know when they become concience beings scientifically, we cannot assume they are not concience in the womb (in fact, my twins illustrate the fallacy of that logic by being top of the line viable 8 weeks premature). Finally, the unconcience state of someone in a coma (no matter how long) is not much different than a fetus’ mental state, and in some cases it could be considered worse (fetuses do respond to stimulus). All these facts make for a very strong legal case that would protect fetuses under our normal laws. A case which I had my doubts should come now. I have changed my mind.

BTW, Terry Chiavo’s case is important here.  As I mentioned people in coma’s can be less responsive to stimuli than a fetus.  But what happened in Chiavo’s case is there was no hope of her getting better and having a normal life again (so the theory goes).  Well, we all know the opposite is true of a fetus.