By Judie Brown
Advocates of death are a curious lot. And those with a penchant for trailblazing are among the most aggressive, even though they remain in the shadows of the larger pro-death struggle to kill.
The one person who has recently caught my renewed interest is a Dutch doctor by the name of Rebecca Gomperts. Several years ago she became known as the Women on Waves doctor. Gomperts welcomed women who wanted to abort their children to a ship she had parked in international waters, just off the coast of countries where abortion was illegal or generally hard to get. Her mission was to give these women the opportunity to come aboard for an abortion at sea! Yes, it is true; ghoulish but accurate nonetheless.
Today Gomperts is still in the news, but now she is saying that according to her research, a misoprostol-only abortion has proven to be just as effective as the two-pill regimen that requires mifepristone plus misoprostol. The problem is, of course, that her research involved 1016 women, 568 of whom confirmed the use of the single drug. The self-managed abortion has existed for a few years, but it is surely not a tried-and-true method of killing babies. But as history makes clear, that has never stopped practitioners like Gomperts.
And then there are women like San Antonio, Texas, mother of five, Ashley Martinez, who will stop at nothing to get the result they want, no matter what the cost. In the Martinez case, though, the scenario is a bit different. Her fifth baby is on the way, but she has posted a video on TikTok letting her doctor know that if her life is endangered by the pregnancy she wants her life to take priority, not the life of her baby.
According to media reports, posting a “living will” on TikTok has become a trend, creating debates between those who want their baby’s life to take priority and those who want to save themselves first. I found this story, like the reports about chemical abortions, worthy of a large exclamation point on the subject of pregnancy. After so many years of decriminalized contraception and abortion, it is clear that the culture of death is at the center of megalomania on a level I for one could never have imagined.
Lest you think that aging and ill people have escaped the clutches of these death peddlers, allow us to introduce designer Julijonas Urbonas, who has drawn up plans for a hypothetical death machine he has called the Euthanasia Coaster! The mechanism would cause cerebral hypoxia in the rider, cutting off oxygen to the brain and thus causing death.
Between abortion at sea, the self-managed mom as killer, and the hypothetical roller coaster ride guaranteed to take your life, there seems to be no end to the insanity plaguing those who refuse to acknowledge the intrinsic value of the human being’s life.
Perhaps this international plague of narcissism will eventually boil over and folks will come to their senses, because if that does not happen, Yale professor Yusuke Narita’s recommendation that the elderly partake in mandatory suicide as a way of thinning the human herd will no longer seem farfetched. And though he now says his suggestion was an “abstract metaphor,” the idea is still incredibly chilling.
The clock is ticking! Mankind is in desperate need of the Lord, for as St. John Paul II reminded us in The Gospel of Life: “The glory of God shines on the face of man.”
