Infanticide, Eugenics, Euthanasia, and the Lord's Work: There is "outrageous" and there is "sickening"--what is happening on the abortion front is both.

• Author: Singleton, Marilyn M.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

NEW YORK'S Catholic Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, had the World Trade Center and other area edifices bathed in celebratory pink lights to congratulate the state legislature (which gave itself a standing ovation) for passing its abortion-on-demand-until-the-day-of-birth law.

The New York Reproductive Health Act was framed as empowering women through guaranteeing "reproductive health." Women in New York must be really powerful since the state abortion rate is twice the national average. This and eight other similar state laws largely were ignored as merely codifying Roe v. Wade, but the state of Virginia's Democratic pediatrician governor's ghoulish advocacy for abortion until delivery of the infant was jaw-dropping, as Ralph Northam explained that killing the infant after birth was allowed.

How can we tolerate this moral regression? Infanticide was the norm throughout ancient Athens and Sparta, where the elders inspected the newborns to ensure that only the strong survived, and the weak were left to die. Early Roman law decreed that deformed children would be put to death. By the fourth century, however, European law, religion, and medicine rejected the intentional killing of an infant.

Americans have been sucked in before by pretty words that mask the brutal reality of "evolved" policies. There was a time when the U.S.'s best and brightest were teaching Nazi Josef Mengele a thing or two about eugenics, the "science" of improving the human gene pool for the preservation of society.

At the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912, a Carnegie Institute-supported paper, "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders' Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population" ("Breeder's Report"), analyzed the problem of the "unfit" and the need to find a solution to "cut off the supply of defectives."

Even black intellectuals jumped onboard. Harvard-educated professor and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois believed only fit blacks should procreate to "eradicate the race's heritage of moral iniquity." The NAACP promoted eugenics theory by hosting "Better Baby" contests.

The Model Eugenical Sterilization Law (1914) was the blueprint for the sterilization of the "socially inadequate," including the feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed, dependent, orphans, ne'er-do-wells...