Just the Three, er, Two, of Us.

I don't know that this WaPo editorial is quite as infuriating to me as it is to Katherine Jean Lopez, but I can see what has her goat. Among pro-lifers, the only thing as arguably monstrous than a partial-birth abortion is aborting a fetus because of Down Syndrome or other mental handicap. My sentiments swing the same way; it's a difference of degree from the destruction of "useless eaters" as advocated and practiced by you-know-who.

But I am far from thinking that such was what motivated Ms. Eftimiades. She'll even pay lip service to the notion that raising a mentally handicapped child:

While I have no doubt there can be joys and victories in raising a mentally handicapped child, for me and for Mike, it's a painful journey that we believe is better not taken.

Now who could be so unjust as to take issue with that? It's not that she's opposed to the raising of handicapped children, per se, it just wasn't her bag, baby. The "joys and victories" were, for her lifestyle, insufficient to set aside the pain of the "journey," or something.

Note that all the "joys and victories" of their child's life is talked of as belonging to herself and her man, not the child itself. On first glance, this is unsurprising; spend too much time thinking of the fetus, even a "profoundly retarded" fetus, as an entity all its own capable of its own joys and victories and it becomes harder to justify squelching it. But then she has the temerity to claim that she "made the right choice for the three of us."

How to square these statements? If the choice to abort a child is justifiable because the pain of raising it will be too much for yourselves to handle, then why the need to justify it in term of the needs of the fetus? Does this woman seriously believe that her Down Syndrome-afflicted child would not rather have lived, whatever the cost? If you made the call to spare yourself and your boyfriend difficulties better left untaken, then own it and live with it. Don't sit there and pretend that you made a choice for the three of you when there no longer is a three of you.

One thing further: you aren't denied "the right to grieve". How could you be? What you are denied is the right to use your grief as a shield against the troublesome march of "other people's morality". I'm going to get hate mail for this, but I don't give a hoot in hell about the grief of a woman who gets an abortion. All her agony, powerful though it may be, is entirely self-inflicted, and the suggestion that it trumps someone else's life is insulting to the memory of the dead and the intelligence of the living. The child you had ended no longer has feelings, no longer has pains, no longer has anything. It's dead. You killed it. If you think that's gonna wash away with a few bars of soap and a stale platitude, then maybe "someone else's morality" would do you more good than you think.

Well, I guess it was infuriating after all. I'll be nicer on the next one, I swear.