On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and media pundits took to the airwaves to lament the decision in all their haughty glory.
One such pundit was Ana Navarro, who I am told plays a conservative on TV although such a performance appears to be rather shoddy as she tends to say all the same things a progressive Democrat might say.
This Navarro, in an attempt to inspire outrage over the high court returning the authority to regulate abortion back to the people and their elected representatives, decided to use her own brother and step-grandchildren as an example as to why abortion access should be protected.
Yes, the woman referenced her own living family members as examples of why women should be allowed to dismember and kill their own babies in the womb.
So it was sort of hard not to pick up on the not-so-subtle implication that Navarro believes that her family would have been better off had these children and her brother been murdered as babies.
“I have a family with a lot of special needs kids,” Navarro told host Alisyn Camerota and GOP pundit Alice Stewart. “I have a brother who’s 57 and has the mental and motor skills of a 1-year-old. And I know what that means financially, emotionally, physically for a family. And I know not all families can do it.”
Stewart had challenged Navarro on how she can claim to “support life” but also be “fine” with “a woman’s decision to choose abortion,” especially as a professing Catholic.
The way Navarro sees it, apparently, life no longer needs supporting if life might be difficult or challenging in any way, as she has seen evidenced in her own brother and step-grandchildren.
“I have a step-grandaughter, who was born with Down syndrome, and you know what, it is very difficult, in Florida, to get services. It is not as easy as it sounds on paper,” she continued.
Do disabled people have the same right to life as anyone else?
Yes: 0% (0 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
Apparently, Navarro believes that Down syndrome sounds easy “on paper.”
In reality, no one says it’s easy. The point of treating a person with Down syndrome with the same respect and dignity as every single other image-bearer of God is not that it’s easy, but that it’s worth it.
The same is true for every child, no matter how they are conceived, what their genetic makeup is, or who their parents are — their lives are worthy, and it is worth it to bring them into the world.
“And I’ve got another — another step-grandson who is very autistic, who has autism,” she continued.
“There are mothers and there are people who are in that society or in that community will tell you that they’ve considered suicide because that’s how difficult it is to get help, because that’s how lonely they feel, because they can’t get other jobs because they have financial issues, because the care that they’re able to give their other children suffers,” she declared, astonishingly.
“And so why can I be Catholic and still think this is a wrong decision? Because I’m American,” she then declared. “I’m Catholic inside the church. I’m Catholic when it comes to me. But there’s a lot of Americans who are not Catholic and are not Christian and are not Baptist. And you have no damn right to tell them what they should do with their bodies. Nobody does,” she concluded, peppering this glorious display of anti-human apologetics with a touch of profanity for good measure.
The pro-abortion camp’s reasoning so often displays a staggering array of tone-deafness, but it largely hinges on the fact that they don’t have the same conversation that we staunch anti-abortion advocates do.
That is, as we argue that abortion is wrong because human beings are made in the image of God, who endowed them with the right to life when He hand-crafted them in their mother’s womb, they argue that abortion should be accessible because having a baby is hard.
We are not having the same argument — but they so frequently, and unwittingly, make the argument that certain human beings simply aren’t worthy of sharing in God-given right.
In this case, Navarro, by implying that severely autistic or disabled babies or those diagnosed with Down syndrome should be put out of their misery before they can inflict misery on their overburdened parents, is indirectly answering the question “is abortion moral?” with “disabled people’s lives are not worth living.”
This callous step-grandmother, thus, is ultimately making the argument that “Down syndrome and autistic people do not deserve to have their God-given right to life protected.”
What’s worse, as a woman who claims to be a Catholic for herself alone, she condemns herself further by claiming to know the God of the Bible who endows each individual with their sacred worth, and yet seems to think its perfectly acceptable for those who do not follow Him to do whatever they like with their own bodies and the bodies of their unborn children, as though His Word doesn’t matter and His image reflected within us means nothing.
I am a step-grandchild myself, actually, and growing up without a big biological family, my step-grandparents’ choice to treat me exactly the same as the rest of their descendants gave me a tremendous sense of worth and belonging that I might not have otherwise had.
I might not have been born to their own children, but they always looked upon me as one of their own nonetheless and, being sensible, moral, caring adults, knew what young people need from adults and gave it out accordingly.
They were also Catholic, by the way, and I have no doubt at all that their love for God greatly impacted their perception of me as a child as just as worthy as the offspring of their own biological children.
Meanwhile, Ana “I’m-Catholic-when-it-comes-to-me” Navarro looks at her step-grandchildren and brother as people who ought never to have been born and whose difficulties in life and the challenge this poses for their family make them far less worthy of living.
What a sick contrast.
But this is the abortion argument in a nutshell, isn’t it? One person can look at a child and see, reflected in its humanity, their own responsibility to love and tend to the needs of the far more helpless creature that has been placed in his or her care.
Another person can look at a child and, failing to consider its immutable humanity, see nothing more than an undue burden on the adults who have been stuck with caring for it and in their subsequent suffering, a need to simply eliminate the child and thus, presumably, the burden.
The most worthwhile things in life are not easy. A person’s humanity is not defined by the ease with which they will go through life, or how difficult it might be for their parents or others to care for them.
It is defined by the One Who made them, and Who made all of us in His image.
It is Him that we betray when we try to assume His role and decide for ourselves who is not worthy of being treated as such — and it is before Him that we will be held accountable for this wicked folly one day.
