Thursday 17 February 2011

French pro-lifers are striving wonderfully to defend the most vulnerable human beings

Genethique, the online information website of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation, has reported on a range of distinct yet related initiatives to defend embryonic children, especially disabled ones, from lethal discrimination via a revision of France's bioethics laws, currently being debated in the National Assembly:
  • 35 deputies of the assembly launched an appeal, saying that the first duty of a bioethics law is to:
"protect the fundamental rights of people, above all the most vulnerable ... [H]uman procreation is not an industrial process that should aim for 'zero defect’ ... 96% of mothers whose test comes out as positive are led to abort today. This is eugenics ... The embryo cannot be a laboratory material serving economic and financial interests ... [Human procreation cannot be regarded as an] industrial process whose effectiveness is in the hands of a ‘qualified engineer’"
  • A group of organisations representing the disabled published an appeal against:
"the eugenic abuse of which people suffering from Down’s syndrome are victims ... The exclusion that victimises the people with Down’s syndrome is clearly expressed in the immense difficulties they have in gaining access to school and the labour market. But, long before then, it is manifested firstly in the refusal to welcome them, which starts before their birth".
  • The same group of organisations have placed full-page advertisements in Le Figaro, a leading French mainstream newspaper, and elsewhere, denouncing the arguments for prenatal screening as:
"arguments that kill ... [T]his massive screening amounts today to selecting the members of a group on the basis of their genome in order to eliminate them."
I congratulate the French deputies and organisations involved in this vigorous and clear-speaking pro-life campaign. Conducting such solid defences of the right to life is our duty towards most vulnerable human beings among us.

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