A horrifying story of murder was reported
in the Chinese province of Hubei, where family planning officials drowned
a newborn baby in a rice paddy-in front of its parents. The baby's crime?
He was the fourth child of his parents, born in a country that has tried to
enforce a one-child policy for 20 years. Various methods of enforcement have
been used, including forced abortion and abortion that targets girls. The
officials initially tried to kill the infant by forcibly injecting the mother
with a saline solution to cause her to abort. Miraculously, the baby survived
and was born naturally.
His father was ordered to murder the baby
when he was born, but the father refused. A doctor cared for the infant
and gave it to his parents to take home. The government officials were
waiting for them when they arrived.
In the U.S., Texas Governor George W. Bush
raised the highly controversial subject of partial birth abortions
in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. The
governor promised to sign into law a federal bill that would ban the
unspeakably cruel procedure, should he be elected president.
The current U.S. administration, well known
for its support of all types of abortion, recently issued guidelines
that would permit federally financed scientists to conduct research
on human embryo cells. Scientists are supposedly justified in working
on embryos to obtain stem cells, "because retrieval is conducted when
the embryo is still a one-week-old microscopic ball of undifferentiated
cells, long before any organs or limbs have developed." As if that
means the embryo is not a human being. Representative Henry Hyde is
credited with the astute observation that, "the human embryo will not
develop into a German shepherd."
