On one of my trips to Rochester, Minnesota, to do something in our Word on Fire studio, I had an opportunity for a brief visit with our CEO, Fr. Steve Grunow. We had a great conversation about the various opportunities I’ve had with my fellowship, and as he walked away, he turned to me and said, “Tell them to stop killing their babies!”
Well, whenever I have the opportunity, I do that anyway—like when I was invited to speak at the United Nations on World Down Syndrome Day on March 21 of this year—but his words from those several months ago have never stopped echoing in my memory. His comment was powerful. It was an imperative from an impressive and wise man, but I think more than that, his comment has remained with me because even in our culture that is so obsessed with death, telling people to stop killing their babies just isn’t one of those things that we should have to say. It is a mother’s instinct to protect her young—isn’t it?
So, as I puzzled over his comment I decided to do a search online, asking, “What female animals kill their young?” The AI-generated response at the top of the page gave the answer: “Various animals such as rabbits, hamsters, burying beetles, mice, and humans.”
Ah, yes—humans, too. Sadly, we know that, don’t we? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a conservative estimate is that 625,978 babies were killed by abortions in the U.S. in 2021. That number doesn’t account for the widespread availability of the “morning after pill” and the toll it has most certainly taken on embryonic life. Sadly, many are happy to be in the barbaric company of burying beetles and mice. Soulless creatures they are, but we? Even as Psalm 8 reminds us that we were made “a little lower than God, and crowned . . . with glory and honor,” our culture of death has forgotten who we are. We are like the crepuscular Israelites who—while Moses was on Mt. Sinai communing with God and receiving the Ten Commandments—were clamoring for the fleshpots of Egypt and exchanging “the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (Ps. 106:20). But our dismal and pathetic selves are far worse. We’re exchanging God’s glory for an image of Moloch who eats babies sacrificed to him in exchange for prosperity.
Wake up, people! We are not soulless creatures like burying beetles and mice. We are made a little lower than God with a soul upon which has been written a law of nature, and that law says that human mothers protect their young. They don’t offer them to the false gods of our convenience: the gods of prosperity, property, prestige, and perfection.
The child is treated as a product, to be discarded if he or she does not meet the standards of the manufacturer.
Every sacrifice of a child by abortion and infanticide is a horrific sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance (see Gen. 4:10). But, if we dare categorize abortions, there are those crimes done for convenience or to erase the consequences of our haphazard “mistakes,” and there are those done selectively—i.e., to eliminate a child because there is something about him or her we don’t want. Those abortions most often follow upon a prenatal diagnosis that identifies some genetic trait like Down syndrome.
I was reading some research recently on the prenatal use of chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA), and the first sentence in one of the articles was this: “Birth defect is the main cause of infant death and an important factor of child disability and affecting the quality of the population.” Read that quote again and sit with it for a moment. People with Down syndrome, spina bifida, cerebral palsy, fragile X syndrome, etc., are factors that affect the “quality of the population” and CMA can provide the solution: identify the enemy and destroy it.
Granted, this article discussed research conducted by investigators in China and not the U.S., so we know there is a difference in cultural values and probably no religion to restrain such things. But the research was published in a major, peer-reviewed, scientific journal, the International Journal of General Medicine. The peer reviewers clearly don’t have an issue with promoting eugenics to the international medical community.
This is called eugenics, right? It is the scientific process of improving the gene pool of a population by the selection and sterilization or elimination of undesirable traits. We were into this in a big way in the United States in the early twentieth century, and we even have a legendary Supreme Court case to prove it. That was the case Buck vs. Bell (1927) that supported the sterilization of Carrie Buck because “three generations of imbeciles is enough,” at least according to Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote the majority opinion supported by all but one of his associate justices. The lone dissenter was Pierce Butler, a devout Catholic.
The American eugenics program in the early twentieth century was so well known and respected that the Third Reich in Germany even looked to us to inform its own eugenic sterilization project. In the 1930s, it modeled its “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” on laws on the books in California and Indiana. The principal architect of those laws was the American Harry Laughlin, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his work on “race hygiene” in 1936.
As Dr. Felipe E. Vizcarrondo wrote in The Linacre Quarterly in 2014, “The new eugenics . . . continues to pursue the same goal as the old eugenics, the development of a superior individual.” Further, he writes:
The parent who uses reproductive genetic technologies [like IVF and CMA] does not intend to improve the undesirable trait but to prevent it. To prevent the manifestation of the undesirable trait, the ‘defective’ embryo or fetus is destroyed. . . . The child is treated as a product, to be discarded if he or she does not meet the standards of the manufacturer. The new eugenics shows no concern to preserve the life of the child who is considered inferior.
I wrote in Evangelization & Culture Online at the end of December 2023 about so-called “pronatalists” who are using these technologies to have lots of children they are fairly certain will be healthy and free of disability or disease. They are trying to solve our self-inflicted population crisis by being generous in having children, but not in the natural way. That is far too risky. Their quest for perfect children is eugenic. They use reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and polygenic risk screening to select a perfect embryo from their menu of options and produce a “perfect” child.
All of this is horrible and hard to think about, isn’t it? But this is our reality. Of course, we are far more sophisticated than the beetles, hamsters, and mice I mentioned above who also kill their young. Presumably, they do so for other reasons, or at least after some sort of much more primitive deliberation. We, however, are sophisticated. We use science to search out and justify our destruction of what we decide is undesirable and don’t want to parent. After all, it’s for society’s good, isn’t it? That’s what the new eugenicists would have us believe. But regardless of how hard we try, Moloch isn’t appeased. His hands are never empty, and yet his blood lust is insatiable.
So, for now, we have no other choice. Until Jesus comes again to resolve this mess in his mercy and justice, please join me in continuing to shout at every opportunity, “Stop killing your babies!”