Ted Kennedy

This article compares and contrasts Eunice Kennedy Shriver with Ted Kennedy on abortion:

For abortion opponents, cruel ironies abounded in this sibling disagreement. Because of Eunice Shriver’s work with the developmentally disabled, a group of Americans who had once been marginalized and hidden away — or lobotomized, like her sister Rosemary — was ushered closer to full participation in ordinary human life. But because of laws that her brother unstintingly supported, that same group was ushered out again: the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, for instance, is estimated to be as high as 90 percent.

In 1992, Eunice participated in the last significant effort to push the Democratic Party away from abortion on demand, petitioning her party’s convention to consider “a new understanding” of the issue, “one that does not pit mother against child,” but instead seeks “policies that responsibly protect and advance the interest of mothers and their children, both before and after birth.” That same summer, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court upheld a near-absolute right to terminate a pregnancy — a decision made possible by her brother’s demagogic assault on Robert Bork five years earlier, which helped doom Bork’s nomination to the court.

Some will be surprised it was a Kennedy woman who supported life, a Kennedy man who supported death. I am not. In fact, I am currently preparing a talk on why abortion constitutes a significant injustice for all women, not just those who choose to have one.

This U.S. bill will prove controversial, no doubt. In the understatement of the century, abortion-related bills typically are.

I have to ask whether national registries work for anything. (Recall the gun registry debacle here in Canada.) Then there’s the fact that I recently learned that offers of adoption do not, apparently, help abortion-minded women change their mind.

So any praise for this bill would be quite limited without knowing more. But one good thing it does is this: It raises consciousness that we are practicing eugenics when we kill babies because they have Downs, or cystic fibrosis. And nobody likes eugenics–which our abortion-on-demand-culture allows us to so readily and easily practice.

When we privately seek the “perfect” family, it has implications for our country. Maybe a national registry of adoptive families might go some distance to showing people that. And maybe there might be a call to help families with children with special needs. Wishful thinking? Possibly, even probably. But when bills like this are raised, people remember that the issue of selective abortions goes on around them every day. And they might just be prompted to do something about it.

The Kennedys on abortion

The perfect family, the perfect country

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