Every Child A Wanted Child....Better Aborted Than Abused... Why Have Them If You Can't Care For Them?....Better Off If They'd Never Been Born
Have you heard these excuses for the infanticide that is abortion? Compassionate people look at news reports of abused children, hurt and broken at the hands of those who were supposed to love and protect them, and conclude that abortion would have been a kinder fate.
Why does no one ever ask these children? Where are the news people and why are they not talking to adult survivors of child abuse? Would these people who have run the gauntlet in their early lives say that they would prefer to have been simply discarded before birth than to have lived the horror of their childhoods?
I suspect not. This is the unseen truth of most child abuse. It is horrible and terrible and should never happen, and the adults that these children become...they adjust. Many if not most become productive members of society, loving parents, devoted spouses. They look at the example of their own parents and vow to never parent that way themselves. For the most part they are successful.
So whom does the abortion spare? Does it spare the children from pain and fear, sorrow and heartbreak? Or does it spare the news reading, news watching adult from feeling helplessness and guilt at having done nothing to prevent the pain and fear and sorrow and heartbreak? I suspect it is the latter. Human beings do not like guilt. It makes us uncomfortable and angry and sad. We would do just about anything to prevent feeling guilty. An "invisible" unborn child in a trash can is easier to deal with than a battered cherubic face on the news. But would that child agree?
Perhaps those now grown-up abused children of this world need to come out of the shadows and speak up for the tiniest among us. Tell the world that child abuse should be stopped, but not by killing its victims. We need to stand up and declare that a horrible childhood doesn't necessarily lead to a horrible adulthood. Because where would the world be without us? How much emptier would our spouses' lives be without us and our children? How bored would our readers be without the blogs like this one?
5 comments:
I'm not sure about whether the majority of abused children go on to parent with any amount of health despite their wanting not to repeat the same cycle they lived as a child. At least that is the way it was for me. No matter how much I wasn't going to become my mother I did repeat the abuse cycle. It was not all wretched but there is plenty of it that was. My memories of those times when I was most abusive haunts me. Without the mercy of God I would be still drunk about it all today. There is nothing I can do now but lift it up to God and pray that my children will look to Him to heal the wounds.
But I doubt my children regret being born. I know I don't. Despite what I lived through as a child and teenager I am grateful to be alive.
Hope,
I know many, many formerly abused children who are good parents. They are not perfect parents, or even as good as they want to be, but they are good nonetheless. But you are right, it is only with the help of God that the cycle can truly be broken.
I just find the "better off dead" argument to be a strange one as there is never a single abused child who comes forward to affirm this point of view and say "I wish that I had never been."
I do agree with you that the better off dead argument is strange. And it comes from people who are very much alive....life is such a gift.
Mom and Hope,
I worked in a mental health facility for children who had been abused and neglected throughout the early years of their lives. Some of whom were literally abandoned by their mothers and fathers to be taken care of by the state. Many of them, if not most, often told me they would rather be dead or to have never been born, but that is what children say when they get upset. I'll bet even your children have said that before only to recant the statement in an hour, a day, or even a week. So, perhaps asking these children when they are children wouldn't be the best idea because they are in the situation. Anybody who sees little hope will want to die or to have never gone through it, I think that is human nature. The problem is that so many people who argue for us to listen to these children's pleas take that statement to be 100% fact and fail to recognize human emotion and human potential. Just end the problem quickly and we don't have to hear about it anymore.
CH,
That's why I suggest finding the adult survivors of child abuse. Children are dramatic, and incapable of fully understanding the seriousness of that kind of a statement. God bless you for working with these little ones.
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