It is argued: "Every child should be a wanted child. We should not bring an unwanted child into the world. It is not fair to him; he is better off if he is not born. He will have a miserable life, rejected by his parents, unloved.
For his own sake, he should be spared such a life. Abortion, in such cases, is the merciful termination of a pregnancy that, if continued, will result in an unloved, miserably unhappy child. Abortion is the only humane thing to do in such a case."
We must certainly have the greatest sympathy for a child who is unloved and rejected. We should do all in our power to alleviate her suffering. We should love her in a special way, and try, as far as possible, to make up for the love she has not received. These are the things we should do - not kill her by an abortion.
"We should not bring an unwanted child into the world." But the child in the womb is already in the world! The womb is part of the world. It is a part of the woman's body, and she is surely in the world. What is in the womb is just as much already in the world as the womb itself. Thus, the child in the womb is as much here as her mother. She is merely not visible to us, and we cannot interact with her. And so we overlook her. But she is as real, and as present, as the rest of us.
As noted in the previous chapter, one cannot kill innocent person B for the sake of benefiting person A. The same is true when B is the supposed beneficiary. We cannot kill B for the sake of B. The obligation to not kill a person clearly overrides the obligation to benefit a person.
A child unwanted in his preborn phase may become wanted later. How many times have we heard of women with unplanned pregnancies, on the one hand considering abortions, on the other hand rejecting the idea of keeping the baby now and then giving him up for adoption after birth? The same child, unwanted as a baby in the womb, will then be very much wanted when he has emerged from the womb, when he can be seen and touched, when it is psychologically easier to identify with him. This is especially true when it is the pregnancy that is unwanted, and when the child is called "unwanted" because of this. There is evidence to suggest that "most women who are refused abortion will be glad that they carried the pregnancy to term."2
A child unwanted by his natural mother even after his birth may be wanted by others eager to adopt him. Thousands of couples would like to adopt babies. So few are available, and usually only after a very long waiting period. How tragic that at the same time a million and a half or more are slaughtered each year by abortion!
Can a disabled child be given up for adoption? There is a program called IMPACT, Innovative Matching of Parents And Children Together, which "places 'hard to place' children, many with multiple handicaps such as mobility impairments, hearing or vision loss, or mental retardation in adoptive or foster families."3 These are parents who have "chosen to raise disabled children." Marsha Saxton, meeting with these parents says, "What struck me was that the usual feeling of 'burden' seemed consistently to be replaced with a sense of challenge to find solutions.... To the IMPACT parents, their disabled children served as a source of enrichment, growth, challenge, joy."
Suppose, despite this, that the child remains unwanted and unhappy. Even then the argument for abortion does not hold. For it says we should kill preborn children who will be unwanted or unhappy. Should we then not also kill other children who are unwanted? If, as the pro-abortion reasoning assumes, killing the preborn child who will be unwanted is doing him a favor by sparing him a life of misery, why not grant this favor also to other children? If preborn persons should be killed to save them from a life of misery, the same logic should apply also to post-born persons.
If there seems to be a difference between killing an unwanted born person and abortion, it is, I think, largely because of the assumption that we should not bring an unwanted child into the world. To regain our perspective we have only to remember that the child in the womb is already in the world.
Perhaps an unwanted child would not want to continue living. Perhaps he would decide that life in his particular condition is not worth living. It is one thing if he decides this for himself, it is quite another if we decide this for him, if we impose this awesome life and death decision on him. How dare we force such a decision on the child, the irreversible decision that a life in an unhappy state is a life not worth living!
The person recommending abortion in such cases should ask himself how he would feel if someone else forced such a decision on him. He would want his autonomy respected. He would claim the right to make such a decision himself. The child's autonomy should also be respected, as well as his right to decide. Why is he not allowed to live until he is capable of making his own decision?
Many persons who suffered through an unhappy childhood find happiness, meaning, and fulfillment later in life, through creativity, love, and many other things. The present argument for abortion assumes that an unwanted child will be an unhappy person. This is an unwarranted assumption, and when it is removed, the pro-abortion argument collapses.
The term unwanted seems to be an adjective modifying child. It is not. The child does not change her characteristics if she is first unwanted then wanted, or the reverse. We change. We should change from unwanting to wanting people.
So the whole problem of the unwanted child is our problem. There is nothing wrong with an unwanted child, no reason why she should be destroyed. There is very much of a problem with unwanting parents and an unwanting society. The changes that are called for to solve this problem are changes in us, not changes in the so-called unwanted child, from being alive to being destroyed.
There is no such thing as an unwanted child - there are only unwanting people among those who are born.
Every Child a Wanted Child