In the Wake of Parkland

Here’s a post from my friend Mike:

Curious question, with no comment desired other than indicating your response. Debate is not welcome on this thread. What do you think is the primary reason for mass shootings in the US?   

A. Gun availability and proliferation 

B. Violence in entertainment 

C. The breakdown of the family 

D. Lack of mental health resources 

E. Other (please specify)

Mike got scores of answers, if not hundreds (I stopped counting after a while), and they ranged all over the place, including many who wrote in some version of “All the above.” So did I – here it is:

Abortion, euthanasia, mercy killing, capital punishment, targeted killing, drone warfare. We're immersed in the culture of death, and we've all grown accustomed to solving problems by killing people. So, yes, all of the above (A, C, and D especially), but also a zeitgeist that implicitly condones destroying human life as an acceptable means to reach a variety of ends.

That was on Friday. On Saturday morning, I snagged my Wall Street Journal from the curb and located Peggy Noonan’s column: “The Parkland Massacre and the Air We Breathe.” In it, Noonan articulated and expanded on the same point I was trying to make in response to Mike’s question – a point the column’s sub-title succinctly summarizes: “What’s gone wrong with our culture that produces such atrocities? It’s a very long list.”

Noonan answers her own question with another question: “What has happened the past 40 years or so to produce a society so ill at ease with itself, so prone to violence?” Her list overlaps my own, and she adds some more: “The family blew up—divorce, unwed childbearing. Fatherless sons. Fatherless daughters, too. Poor children with no one to love them. The internet flourished. Porn proliferated. Drugs, legal and illegal.” Noonan speculates that all this cultural upheaval is responsible for a pervasive moral illness in our body politic. “A nation has an atmosphere. It has air it breathes in each day,” she writes. “America’s air looks clean but there are toxins in it, and they’re making the least defended and protected of us sick.”

What caught my attention, however, was the 40 year figure – why forty? A quick scout around the internet finds other retrospectives since Ash Wednesday’s horrific events in Florida utilizing a similar reckoning, more or less. Some go back to just 1999; others go back to the mid-1980s; few go back further than 1978 – that 40 year mark mentioned by Noonan. In fact, according to CNN, only two of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history occurred before then: Austin in 1966 and Camden in 1949.

Why? What happened around 1978?

Consider: Abortion on demand was legalized in this country following the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Since then, abortion on demand has become part of the fabric of our cultural consensus – that is, a medicalized form of killing has become a normalized means of addressing challenging human dilemmas.

And it's not just an American phenomenon. A friend recently gave me an essay by actress Patricia Heaton about Iceland’s “success” in eliminating Down syndrome. Heaton astutely observes that Iceland “was not, in fact, eliminating Down syndrome. They were just killing everyone who has it.”

So, without excluding questions of easy access to guns, lack of mental health resources, and the breakdown of traditional mores, here’s my own curious and honest inquiry: Could it be that we’ve just gotten used to killing as a way of life, especially since Roe v. Wade? Could it be that we’re raising one generation after another with that mindset?

And, if that's the case, what can we do about it? What ought we to do?
_______________________

The Disappearance of Down Syndrome

Originally posted on Facebook, June 28, 2008.

If you can recognize the characteristic physical features associated with Down Syndrome (DS), try this experiment: Next time you're out in a crowd, take a look around and count how many folks with DS you can identify. How many? How old?

Chances are you wont see many, and the ones you see will be well into their 30s and 40s or beyond—an observation that would be consistent with documented demographic realities.

Why is this? What happened in the early '70s that so radically decreased the number of babies born with DS? Was there some kind of fantastic medical discovery back then that aided the treatment of this condition in the womb?

Guess again.

In a beautiful yet discomforting piece in the Wall Street Journal recently ("A Life Worth Living," 6/27/2008), Christine Rosen alludes to the real reason:

Between 80% and 90% of women who find out they are carrying a child with the chromosomal abnormality (which can be tested using amniocentesis) choose to abort. A Harvard medical student who surveyed 1,000 women who were pregnant with Down Syndrome babies reported that many were urged by their doctors to terminate their pregnancies; one woman's physician told her that her child would "never be able to read, write or count change." This at a time when new developments in medicine have nearly doubled the average life span of people who have the condition to 49 from 25 years.

So, it wasn't a medical advance that led to fewer babies born with DS, but rather the Supreme Court's decision in 1973 to make abortion legal in all 50 states. In other words, we're eliminating a disorder by eliminating the patient.

All abortions are abominable crimes, but killing preborn babies because they are viewed as "defective" is particularly revolting—especially when it becomes the norm. Again, Christine Rosen:

As a culture, we have made what Amy Laura Hall of Duke University Divinity School calls a "democratic calculus of worth" regarding Down Syndrome. And that calculus has resulted in a society hostile to people who refuse to make the culturally acceptable choice of ridding themselves of a disabled child before she is born.

Can we continue to call "civilized" a society that tolerates, protects, and even promotes this heinous practice? Or has our "teetering on the edge of collapse" finally shifted into a moral free fall?

Pray for an end to abortion. Work for its end. Protest accordingly. Vote accordingly.

And when you see a baby with DS say a prayer of thanks. That baby's very existence means that we haven't hit rock bottom just yet.