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Back in February, Gerber chose their first ever baby with Down Syndrome – Lucas Warren – as the face of their ad campaign. Whether the company intended to take a stand on the abortion issue or not, their baby of the year choice has caused an uproar over Down Syndrome abortions. Five states have since introduced laws forbidding pregnant women from aborting because of a positive diagnosis of the disorder.
A So-Called Cure
Last year, Liberty Nation’s Gabriella Fiorino explained Iceland’s “cure” for Down Syndrome: eradicate the disorder from the population through abortion. But as she pointed out, Down Syndrome, a form of aneuploidy, is not heritable. It’s a random genetic mutation, and no matter how many babies you kill, it’s still going to be just as likely to occur.
Even if killing affected children would eventually cull Down Syndrome from the population, don’t those children have just as much of a right to life as anyone else? Of course they do. That’s why Ohio passed their own Down Syndrome abortion ban back in December. And thanks in part to the publicity generated by Gerber’s decision, Oklahoma, Missouri, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Utah are now following suit.
The Tolerant Left Fights for the Right to Discriminate
Naturally, the oh-so-tolerant left is fighting these new laws tooth and nail. It’s wrong, they say, to hate people based on such differences as gender, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, or even disabilities, but they don’t practice what the preach on this topic. We all know that it’s perfectly fine to hate heterosexual white men in good health. Apparently, they’re all for the right to discriminate when it comes to killing off babies too. To leftists, unborn children with disabilities aren’t people – they’re inconvenient burdens. They don’t have potential; they have expenses and additional requirements.
Of course, all of the anti-abortion laws are being challenged; the argument that women expecting babies with Down Syndrome should have the right to opt out of the extra burden is just an excuse. The same people routinely argue for the right of all women to opt out of parenthood after failing to take the necessary precautions to avoid pregnancy in the first place. Who needs personal accountability and the acceptance of consequences? Life to them seems like a video game – if you don’t like how it’s going, just hit reset and start fresh.
But those lives lost in the reset are real people who had the right to make a go of it. Life begins at conception; this should be a fact simply accepted by anyone who managed to pass even an introductory biology class, as it is made explicitly clear by the time you reach the chapter on reproduction. Even the least developed of unborn children is a person – no matter what the Supreme Court of 1973 has to say on the matter.
During the announcement that Lucas Warren was Gerber’s 2018 choice, the company’s president, Bill Partyka said that “every year, we choose the baby who best exemplifies Gerber’s longstanding heritage of recognizing that every baby is a Gerber baby.” The boy’s father, Jason Warren, said that he hopes his son’s story can impact everyone, “that it will shed a little bit of light on the special needs community and help more individuals with special needs be accepted and not limited.” Perhaps someday that will be the case. Preventing the practice of eugenics is just the start.
Ed ¬ Join Liberty Nation‘s Leesa K. Donner and James Fite as they discuss the Downs Syndrome Gerber Baby ad campaign on LNTV!
