The latest handwringing over all of those yucky disabled babies that might not get aborted if a post-20-week abortion ban goes into effect has my thoughts turning again to the need for a word to describe the mindset of the people who champion such abortions. Their "celebrate diversity" signs vanish when the diversity means somebody whose mind or body or senses work differently than those of the majority of people. Something must be suddenly kicking in to shut down the tolerance have them reaching for the medical equivalent of torches and pitchforks.
Let's
go to the Phobia List and see what we
find:
Here we have a possibility: Atelophobia- Fear of imperfection. Granted,
these folks act out their own bigotry in terms of trying to eliminate others
that they view as "imperfect", but might not there be an underlying fear of
their own imperfection that they're projecting onto kids who are
different?
Maybe this is closely
related to Cenophobia or Centophobia- Fear of new things or ideas. (or
Metathesiophobia- Fear of changes.) How
horrible it might be for these people to entertain the idea that just because
other people are different doesn't mean they're wretched or deserve to die?
Maybe we're
dealing with Optophobia- Fear of opening
one's eyes. Not literally, of course, but fear of opening one's eyes to the
humanity of those who are different.
There's definitely an aspect of
Panthophobia- Fear of suffering and
disease. The eugenicists perceive the child as suffering, and as being afflicted
with some disease, and thus fear the child.
Maybe we have a lot of
different people with different fears all converging against their common enemy:
children whose existence makes them uncomfortable, for whatever
reason.
We need to stop acting as if what they propose -- identifying
"defective" children through prenatal testing so that they can be weeded out in
the womb -- is in any way a decent, humane thing to do. It's acting on one's own
fear, making somebody else die because of your own personal issues.
It's bigotry and intolerance maxed out and on steroids and needs to be treated like the social pathology it is.
2 comments:
A couple of medical non-names come to mind: dysfunctional cardiac syndrome,egocentricness, bipolar ethic disorder. Certainly tunnel vision-hearing disease.
People who defend infanticide are called pathetic.
If they defend it in some sort of a philosophical / political way it is called patheticism.
If they defend it for irrational reasons it is likely due to the individual acting out the anxiety of pathophobia by proxy (fear of personal suffering in others). This drama is similar to Münchausen syndrome by proxy. Perpetrators seek to deny their own abortion induced emotional experience and garner attention for themselves by validating others in killing their children in a more exaggerated way. It is a kind of cry for help and simultaneous denial.
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