The Works of God

The quote above comes from Jeff McNair, professor at California Baptist University and writer of the blog, disabled Christianity. That provocative quote by Dr. McNair is in response to an opinion piece from the August 2009 edition of the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities journal.  That journal is not available online, but Dr. McNair offers this quotation from the opinion piece:

“Current research in genomics, as well as many other areas, is intended to improve understanding of the fundamental causes of disability to reduce risk, thereby lowering incidence of impairments and minimizing their severity. Should these goals be realized, the decrease, perhaps dramatically, and in some distant future significant impairments might even be eliminated altogether. As unachievable as that ultimate goal might appear to be, an assumption supporting many of the programs and much of the research agenda in the field of developmental disabilities is that we, as a society and as individuals, would be better off if physical, mental and cognitive impairments ceased to exist” (emphasis McNair’s) (p. 320) (Silverman, W. (2009), Prevention of intellectual and developmental disabilities. Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 47, 4, 320-322)

Dr. McNair agrees that it is good to seek to alleviate suffering caused by disease and disability.  But he rightly points out that ‘dealing with’ downs syndrome today means aborting the pre-born child – and not really dealing with downs syndrome at all:

We are killing people and calling that prevention. If we can prevent disability without killing people or doing other evil in the process, I am with you. However, the fact that there are decreasing rates of down’s syndrome is the result of killing. That is the world I do not want to live in. People with disabilities do not have their disabilities prevented, they have their lives taken.

The clarity of that statement makes me wonder: how did we get this far away from actually believing people with disabilities are people?  How did we come to conclude that destroying human life that will experience disability is dealing with the problem of suffering?

Further, how could a journal that deals entirely with people with disabilities not see how dangerous this opinion piece is to all the people they serve, both born and not yet born?  The darkness of the human heart is really that dark.

And Christ really is the light that deals with the darkness (John 1:5)! Someday we will have a world that is without disease and disability – the new earth, ruled by our King Jesus Revelation 21:1-7).  Until that time, we must remember that God creates some to live with disability (Exodus 4:11), and did so with full knowledge, knitting together from the womb (Psalm 139:13) and before any are born, writing their days (Psalm 139:16).   We should be very careful in how we deal with God’s creation.

You can read all of Dr. McNair’s post here.