With Roe v. Wade officially overturned, pro-abortion activists have been pulling out all the stops to misinform and to justify the killing of children in the womb by any means possible. One of those activists was CNN contributor Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, who exploited her own relatives with disabilities in an attempt to justify abortion.
In an interview with Navarro-Cárdenas, she and host Alisyn Camerota complained about the number of children in foster care, some of whom have disabilities, claiming that these children aren’t being taken care of as it is. Navarro then invoked her supposed Catholic faith as a defense for eugenic abortions.
“I am not anybody who needs to tell you what to do with your life or with your uterus. And because I have a family with a lot of special needs kids,” she began. “I have a brother who’s 57, and has the mental and motor skills of a one-year-old. And I know what that means financially, emotionally, physically for a family. And I know not all families can do it. And I have a step-granddaughter who was born with Down syndrome,” she said, questionably claiming that “it is very difficult in Florida to get services” for children with disabilities. She added, “It is not as easy as it sounds on paper, and I’ve got another step-grandson who is very autistic, who has autism.”
Navarro-Cárdenas then moved on to tell the world how having a child with a disability, like autism or Down syndrome, is something that will ruin their lives.
CNN commentator uses her disabled brother & step granddaughter who has Down syndrome as examples of why we need abortion.
The ugly cruelty. The utterly bald ageism and ableism. The unfettered call for violence against the unborn disabled. pic.twitter.com/qo3jdfkK8b
— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) June 24, 2022
READ: Allowing babies with disabilities to live is not ‘grotesque’ or ‘cruel’
“There are mothers and there are people who are in that society or in that community who will tell you that they’ve considered suicide, because that’s how difficult it is to get help, because that’s how lonely they feel, because they can’t get other jobs because they have financial issues, because the care that they’re able to give their other children suffers,” she said. “And so why can I be Catholic and still think this is a wrong decision? Because I’m American. I’m Catholic inside the church. I’m Catholic when it comes to me. But there’s a lot of Americans who are not Catholic, and are not Christian, and are not Baptist. And you have no damn right to tell them what they should do with their bodies. Nobody does.”
Abortion, however, is controversial precisely because it violates, suctions, and dismembers the body of a unique and genetically distinct human being growing the womb of his or her mother. If this were not the case, there would be no right-to-life movement.
Live Action founder and president Lila Rose responded to the exchange on Twitter, noting, “The ugly cruelty. The utterly bald ageism and ableism. The unfettered call for violence against the unborn disabled.”
The public perception of people with disabilities is staggeringly poor. People with disabilities are seen as leading lives that are not worth living, that are empty and meaningless, and devoid of any joy or happiness. As Navarro-Cárdenas makes clear with her own feelings, people with disabilities are treated as if they are burdens on their family members, and on society.
Navarro-Cárdenas has helped to further this argument by using her own family members to claim discriminatory abortions should be legal, and are morally justifiable. But the problem is, it isn’t acceptable to kill someone because their caretaker doesn’t feel like caring for them anymore. That’s the position Navarro is taking, and it’s a large part of the reason that people with disabilities face a three times higher chance of becoming victims of violent crimes. People like Navarro perpetuate the notion of the disabled as meaningless burdens — and what’s worse, she’s using her supposed loved ones to do it.
While Navarro, as a pro-abortion grandparent, may embrace the potential of aborting autistic preborn children, it’s something the autism community has long feared. As researchers get closer to being able to identify autism in the womb, many fear that preborn children diagnosed with autism will be treated like preborn children with Down syndrome: screened out, erased, killed before they even have a chance to live life outside the womb.
“If you want to improve the lives of any group of people… the best way of going about that is asking them what would improve their quality of life, not asking for their DNA and not explaining what’s going to happen to it,” autistic author and journalist Laura James said earlier this year. “If somebody develops antenatal screening [for autism], for example, as they have with Down’s syndrome, then we could be in a situation like in Iceland, where barely anybody’s been born with Down’s [syndrome] for a number of years. Do we really want to write autistic people out of the world?”
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