By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A British television pundit is causing shockwaves around the world after saying that any “good mother” would prefer to smother a disabled child with a pillow rather than see it suffer.
LifeNews is reporting that Virginia Ironside made the comments during a recent BBC interview in which even the host of the show was openly shocked by her remarks.
“If I were the mother of a suffering child — I mean a deeply suffering child — I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face,” Ironside said. “If it was a child I really loved, who was in agony, I think any good mother would.”
During the same interview, she advocated abortion for unborn babies with disabilities. “If a baby’s going to be born severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely an abortion is the act of a loving mother,” she said.
The host of the program was so shocked by her statements that she called them a “horrifying thing.”
Another guest on the show, Reverend Joanna Jepson, was openly stunned by the comments. Jepson, who was born with a severe birth defect that was corrected by surgery, advocates for the rights of disabled children who are targeted for abortions even for “defects” as minor as cleft palates.
“I have warned that our neurotic obsession with eliminating–as opposed to mitigating or alleviating–suffering leads directly to support for eliminating the sufferer,” said pro-life activist and attorney Wesley Smith on his popular Second Hand Smoke blog.
” Yes, some were outraged by the statement. But the UK has already taken a hard turn onto ‘Euthanasia Road,’ accepting killing as an acceptable answer to human suffering to the point that the public prosecutor has stated he won’t punish some assisted suicides. That leads directly, if farther down the road, to infanticide, as it has in the Netherlands and Belgium. In other words, with controversies like this the ground is being paved.”
That these callous attitudes are shared by others in the UK was evident in an op-ed published in the Guardian newspaper entitled “Abortion and Euthanasia: Was Virginia Ironside Right?” in which the author, Zoe Williams, determines that she was.
“This goes to show that no principle of civilization, no precept — no matter how holy, authentic, or certain — cannot be twisted into the service of evil. Murder as an act of love,” said Patrick Archbold in the National Catholic Register.
“You might think that all this is some wicked theoretical exercise on the part of Ironside, alas no. Ironside willingly recounts the tales of her two abortions. The second of which she professed to be for the good of her baby.”
He concludes: “The only good that comes out of this is the glimmer of hope that such things still have the ability to shock.”
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