Adventists Reflect on the Value and Dignity of People with Disabilities
From ANN, April 27, 2016: The Seventh-day Adventist denomination designated Saturday, April 23, as Special Needs Day. It was an opportunity for the church’s 19.1 million members to remember that more than 1 billion people live with disabilities, coping daily with difficulties often created by a society that prioritizes perfection.
The General Conference, the administrative body of the Adventist world denomination, is placing a renewed emphasis in reaching out to people with special needs with the establishment of a new Special Needs Ministries department.
“At the heart of the Adventist initiative for Special Needs Ministries is the desire to assure those with special needs that all are gifted, needed, treasured, and loved,” said Larry Evans, director of Special Needs Ministries as an assistant to the General Conference president.
Special Needs Ministries looks to share the love of Jesus with those with physical and mental limitations as well as with orphans.
Evans said Special Needs Day seeks to remind the world church about the value and dignity of these people.
Corrado Cozzi, deaf liaison for the Adventist Church’s Inter-European Division, said people with special needs especially needed to be accepted, encouraged, and engaged in everyday life.
“We want them to enjoy the beauty of life,” he said.
Steps are being taken in that direction through the efforts of church-affiliated organizations such as Rise and Walk. Fifty-three disabled people, nearly half of them deaf and mute, showed up for a first meeting of a recently opened branch of Rise and Walk in Romania, said George Uba, the organization’s president.
“We had a great surprise,” Uba said.
Rise and Walk — whose motto is “To be the eyes of the blind, the ears of the deaf, and the legs of the lame” — had not expected such a high turnout. Uba said the large numbers provided an indication of the great desire of disabled people connect with others and to live better lives.
Church leaders expressed hope that Special Needs Day would encourage all Adventists to find new ways to reach out to those with special needs and to say to them every day in one voice, “We love you!”
Adventist News Network (ANN) is the official news service of the denomination’s world headquarters in Washington, DC. Featured image: People with special needs attending an Adventist-organized meeting in Europe. Featured photo credit: ANN/Inter-European Division.
I can’t help but reflect on the fact that while these people are certainly worthwhile and to be loved, and this is awkward, but a number of them were born in places where abortion was restricted and unavailable. The fact that the church takes a pro-choice stance should be applauded. It’s easy to be pro-choice when we’re talking about prospective choices but harder when it comes to those who were forced to bear these children.
Wow, Wilmer! Absolutely astonishing! A) The SDA Church has not taken a pro-choice stance- at least not as the pro-choice movement understands that term. It is very pro-life, with allowance for exceptional circumstances; B) Most disabilities are not the product of genetic or pre-natal abnormalities; C)It is not just awkward – it is incredibly inhumane and barbaric to suggest that the parents or loved ones of people with special needs disabilities would wish that those people had not been born; would, with the benefit of hindsight, have aborted them; or would wish that they had not have survived with disabilities.
Please think about the implications of your comment. I doubt that you will find others, even among hard core pro-choice advocates, who would subscribe to the uninformed, cruel sentiments you have expressed about people with special needs disabilities.
It’s a verrry hard decision for a parent to make. In the earlier histories of this world, those born with “impossible to treat” physical and mental bodies so warped with grotesque and physical deformities, conditions, that mitigate against survival, as well as saddle a family for unknown years of pain and suffering, were permitted at birth, not to survive. There are today, medical “miracles”. to permit many of these severe cases to survive, to a meaningless existence, mentally, as well as untold misery and
24/7 support, until these unfortunate creatures die. Should the state determine these
“impossible” lives should survive, the state should assume full responsibility for their decision. i’m not familiar with such a program in the USA, but in Canada, in the 1960’s onward, each province had such facilities. And the stench in them was unbearable to a visitor. That role, handled by the workers there, was a Godlike love response, that knows no boundaries. God love them>
The reality is that the Adventist position on abortion is neither the standard pro or con positions. It clearly would not be a moral choice that Christ would support to decide to abort simply because of the hardship that a child born with disabilities might cause for others in the family. The only exceptional situations that are moral are those in which the pain and suffering of the child cannot be mitigated in any way (the baby would live in constant torture) or there is no possibility of conscious existence (the baby would be born brain dead). Those are very, very limited possibilities. The other element in any discussion of the Adventist view of abortion is the often misunderstood doctrine of the Nature of Humanity (“the state of the dead,” traditionally) which understands that a human life does not exist until both mind and body are present. (The wholistic nature of the person.) This means that Adventist theology does not teach that human life begins “at the moment of conception” (the standard view of many Christians), but some time later in the process … although probably a much shorter time than typical pro-abortion opinion.
Monte,
When we were expecting my daughter, because of my wife’s age our doctor wanted to do a test to show if certain abnormalities existed that might make us want to abort. We decided to not have the test and deal with what God gave us. We could tell from the start that she was different but years would pass before we had a medical diagnosis the test would not have identified. No, dealing with her challenge has not been easy. But it forced us to our knees many times and we have learned to depend on God in ways we never imagined were possible. Today, our daughter still has challenges but she is doing better than any doctor predicted.
The experience has given us many opportunities to sympathize with the parents of other special needs children and share from what we have learned along the way, so God has taken a negative and turned it into a positive.
Monte, thank you for clarifying. Before the fetus draws it’s first natural breath there is nothing immoral with aborting the organic process according to the Adventist doctrine of the Nature of Humanity that you lay out so well. Most people live with the myth that the Adventist Church is “pro-life” but before the first breath is drawn the decision of what to do with the fetus is morally neutral.
I do have to differ with you where you simultaneously claim that abortion before birth may not be moral under certain circumstances. If the first breath has not been drawn or of you have drawn an earlier line at some amorphous stage and we are before that time it is not a child and therefore the abortion is of no moral consequence.
The church does not act as a conscience for its members and the continued fact of life for those with disabilities that would have been detectable within the fetus should not be a vehicle for guilt to be laid upon those who saw either disability or other negative consequences of birthing a child and decided to abort.
Again if the fetus is not yet a human according to Adventist doctrine, the interests of the parents supersede the interests of a potential life.
“…if the fetus is not yet a human according to Adventist doctrine, the interests of the parents supersede the interests of the fetus.” Please specify, Wilmer, your source of authority for this breathtaki9ng assertion.
The Adventists do not have a “doctrine” regarding abortion. The closest thing to Adventist doctrine is the 28 F.B.s, and you’ll find nothing about right to abortion or right to life in those beliefs. I have not read it recently, but as I recall, the Adventist statement on abortion is carefully nuanced and balanced. It does not purport to clarify when, on the continuum from zygote to live birth, a human happens.
Not until God breathed into man’s life did he become a living soul. This is still the Jewish belief, and why shouldn’t it? To speak of an “unborn person”–there is no such thing. Both morally and legally, personhood is when a human breathes through his own lungs and is given a SS no. which recognizes his personhood legally.
Individual members are free to have their own opinion but the church has never taken a position on abortion.
Monte says it well. Adventists have a proud history of abortion research. Kellogg was a pioneer in eugenics and Adventist philanthropist Ed Allred invented saline abortion and has been honored for it by the church and the church does so without hesitation. The pro-life agenda is based on thr Catholic doctrine of the immortality of the soul and is opposed to religious liberty. Ellen White was prophetically silent on the issue. Adventist hospitals perform abortions.
Even the Bible only imposed a penalty on terminating a fetus in Exodus 22 if it was done by another person and that was only a fine. Nothing is said if the woman did so.
A fetus has a value only insofar as it is wanted. No rights apply. Abortion as it is practiced both within and without the church is morally neutral. The church statement on abortion is clear in terms of how it is practiced.
No woman should ever feel that they sinned in aborting their fetus.
The church through its teachings
I’m not going to get sucked into hijacking an article about compassion for special needs people to debate abortion. How cruelly inappropriate! My only point, Wilmer, is to
Expose the reality that you cannot cite any denomination ally sanctioned document for you assertion that the SDA Church has a pro-choice doctrine, or even that it is more pro-choice than pro-life when it comes to post-conception reproductive decisions.
My, o’ my. If SDA Doctors perform late term abortions, up to the full 9 months, may God have mercy on their souls. If the fetus has no brain parts, or is dead in the womb, and or has physical deformities that would be invalided with extreme pain for life, and or seriously threatens the life of the mother, abortion is murder, regardless of the SDA religion, or any religion’s viewpoint, it is murder. Yes, the mothers. who abort as their method of controlling birth, through carelessness, are guilty of infanticide. Many fetus’s of 2-3 lbs birth weight have survived and led healthy lives. There is a thriving business in fetus parts that are sold on the open market. God forbid this practice.
“Murder” is a legal term and has many grades: involuntary manslaughter, premediated, etc. But no where in both the Old and New Testaments OR EGW’s writings is abortion called murder. So those who use that term are only giving their very personal opinion based on their own conscience and, it should be added in this instance, from someone who will never be pregnant. This is not a church controversy and only the woman and her physician have any right to choose for her. Women are no vassals or slaves but free moral agents who should make their own decisions and no one else’s.
Should read “UNLESS THE FETUS HAS…………..>>>>>>>>”.
You are correct that this shouldn’t be that thread. I would simply refer you to the writings of Kevin Paulson who addressed the issue with great compassion. http://adventistlaymen.com/Documents/SEVENTH-DAY%20ADVENTISTS%20AND%20THE%20ABORTION%20QUESTION.htm
Why are we being so foolish to talk about abortion here when the topic is respect for the disabled? It is hard to go through a single day without encountering someone who has a disability. Are we willing to see the person in a wheelchair who is approaching a door and delay a few seconds to hold it open for them, then leave them with a smile that affirms them as a person instead of a “poor you” remark? Are we willing to help adapt a bathroom so a disabled veteran can take a shower? The opportunities to help the disabled are many and growing. Will we respond to the opportunities God so obviously puts in our path to bless someone? Will we be the Samaritan who helps the man beaten and left to die on the road? Or, will we continue being like the devout Jews who walked around him and refused to help?