Last Wednesday we had the first of our Laudato Si meetings. Earlier that week and repeated on Thursday was a programme on BBC2 A World Without Down’s Syndrome? which highlighted the stark reality of where the world is trending. The programme offered a timely reminder of the dangers of embarking on a determinist view of society and the risk that selective breeding will come to be viewed as acceptable. There is a lot of pressure to avoid a potential “burden” as an outcome of the wrong sort of foetus.
Currently 92% of babies diagnosed with Down’s syndrome before birth are aborted, and the 1967 Abortion Act allows for abortion up to birth in the case of disability in England, Scotland and Wales.
Laudato Si is about how we should live our lives with a care for the whole world and the whole of humanity. Specifically on abortion Pope Francis says: Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties? “If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away”
We have a Pro-Life Group in the Parish. We need to rally together and raise our voices.