Last week saw the largest demonstrations for women’s rights in human history. And yesterday saw the annual the March for Life in Washington, D.C., which describes itself as opposing “the greatest human rights violation of our time, legal abortion on demand.” The March for Life was attended by hundreds of thousands of people, and was accompanied this year as in years before by much hand-wringing about the lack of media attention it garners. Amid my own gleeful posts about equal rights for all people, I was asked by a pro-life colleague if I also consider “the rights of unborn children.”
I happen to be a pediatrician, so children’s rights concern me deeply. Indeed, what I see in my practice as a pediatric resident is that children enjoy few rights. In the emergency room, we sedate children or hold them down physically while we perform painful procedures that they are fighting with every mitochondrion in their body to refuse. We teach parents how to pry open the mouths of their autistic children for a nightly ritual meant to prevent their teeth from rotting out. On the oncology ward, we drip poison into the blood of children whom we physicians suspect may be beyond saving, but whose parents are desperately longing for just a few more weeks. In operating rooms, we make cyborgs of children who lack the capacity to assent or refuse—inserting breathing tubes, permanent feeding tubes, tubes to shunt fluid from their brains into their bellies. Because parents ask us to, we force children to live when their bodies are no longer capable of sustaining life
Continue to thedailybeast.com article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/28/pediatrician-it-s-not-about-being-pro-life-or-pro-choice-it-s-about-being-pro-parent.html
