About Abortions

September 13, 2008

ABOUT ABORTIONS:

I always believed that when someone died, especially children that they returned to God, as he was the one who made the miracle of life. Most of us have been taught that and in his own time he would judge each and everyone of us. But that all children would be returned to him, as they had committed no sins.

Children die in the womb and children are aborted for various reasons. They are safe from the trials and tribulations of this earth, and back in God’s hands.

I have seen children born into this world who have not been wanted and many have led a terrible life. I read a doctors report on a girl who was in a mental hospital. She had stated, “I am nobody’s nothing, it’s bad not to be loved, but the worst thing is not to be wanted”. Many unwanted children are put in orphanages and if they are lucky some nice couple will adopt them, I and members of my family and many friends have adopted. I adopted a handicapped child. Deaf, blind, mute and non-ambulatory. I have
Had him 41 years and keep him healthy. He will 44 in December.

Many live their lives in an orphanage until they are of legal age, then ousted. Many have been mistreated, but were lucky enough to survive and learned to live in the in the outside world and made a success of their lives. God helped them find their place in his world. Many survived the orphanages, but did not find a place and lived very sad lives. Some of these became parents, many were great parents, but many who had children were not good parents and treated their children, just like they had been treated in the orphanage, it was the only way they knew. I have heard many people say, “I wish I had died when I was born.”

I think the many that survived and found their place, were the children that were born and their Mothers wanted to keep them, but didn’t get to, as their grandparents wouldn’t let their Mothers keep them, as it supposedly would bring shame to them. Their memory of the feeling of their Mother, while they were in her womb that they were wanted by her, they retained this feeling, that someplace , somewhere in time, there was a place for them in someone’s heart and soul.

Many parents insisted that their daughters have an abortion, rather than bring shame on the family. At least the child was safe, back in God’s hands. These were some of our good Christian people who were more worried about what people would think of them, than worry about taking care of their child and the grandchild and doing the right thing. Many abortions are done, due to rape and incest, at least the babies were safe back with God, even though their Mothers had not been safe from harm.

Many people have children, and when they come into this world they are handicapped, caused by many different things, and considered imperfect. Many are kept, taken care of and loved.
Many are sent to institutions and some of their parents never go back to see them. They live to be old, and they are treated terrible in institutions. Of course most did not know their children would be handicapped, and wanted children, but when they came into this world less than what they wanted, most would not keep them. This kind of person would not be the type of parent I would want. And frankly had they had the knowledge to know if they would be less than perfect and would not accept an imperfect child, they would have been better off aborted. At least they were in God’s hand again.

Many people in every land have handicapped children. Most are locked away in the back room someplace. I read this article the other day by the Associated Press about children locked away for decades in Palestine. A man age 38 and his sister age 42, locked away since childhood in two concrete rooms adjoining the family’s home. They did this in fear that it would ruin the marriage prospects of a healthy child if they were discovered. The case highlights the shame felt by Palestinian families that have children with disabilities, a situation made worse because of poor services and the practice of marriage between cousins. Arab communities often favor marriage between first cousins to keep inheritances within the family. The couple had eight children, five with disabilities who died in childhood, the two who they locked away like animals and another son, who has married. Those children would have been better off returned to God. But they lived all these years, so I guess God kept an eye on them. Maybe for the reason to expose the cruel hearts of their parents.

This is the reason that I believe in abortion for people who make that choice. As they know whether they are capable of handling the responsibility. There are not many people around who would assume their responsibility. I once heard a man say about adoption,
“I don’t want to raise somebody else’s mistakes.

I don’t see or hear about all these people who are against abortion down at the institutions adopting or helping take care of the children that did not get to return to God’s loving hands. All I hear from the majority is griping about the government having to maintain these institutions and orphanages and helping poor people less fortunate than they are take care of their children. Christians, not in my book, but my book doesn’t matter. I’m just glad that God made me different than they are.

I ordered this from 60 minutes after I saw it. The last two paragraphs are my own, as I adopted a handicapped child 40 years ago, he is now 42. He is deaf, blind, mute and non-ambulatory and I keep him at home and he is well.

A DARK CHAPTER IN MEDICAL HISTORY/SONOMA STATE HOSPITAL

Karen Alves was just 10 when she lost her baby brother, Mark Dal Molin, in 1961.

As the oldest of four, she says her fondest childhood memories are of doting on her little brother. “One of the things we looked forward to, when we came home from school, was to play with Mark”, she says. But life would be a struggle for the Dal Molins because Mark was born with cerebral palsy, a condition that cripples the body, but not necessarily the mind.

“In the ‘50s, cerebral palsied children were considered to be developmentally disabled, mentally retarded,” says Alves to correspondent Vicki Mabrey. “I never believed he was mentally retarded. When you looked into his eyes, he communicated through his eyes. …He’d laugh and giggle and kick, and just screech when he saw us.” But by 3, Mark could neither walk nor talk, which meant that his mother, Rosemarie, had to care for him. “We know he recognized everybody,” says Rosemarie. “He would laugh or he would cry if he was unhappy.”

The children’s father, Bill Dal Molin, felt that Rosemarie was neglecting their three daughters, because of Mark. “His mother was very, very much attentive to him, and the girls, I felt, were like troops to her,” says Bill. “She was very hard on them, the girls.”

Doctors advised the Dal Molins to commit their son, so Bill told Rosemarie they had to send Mark to an institution. It was November 1958. “I just remember one day coming home from school and the house was very quiet,” says Karen, who never got to say goodbye to her brother. “I don’t remember much after that. It profoundly affected me.”

Rosemarie had committed 3-year-old Mark to Sonoma State Hospital, the largest Institution for children in California. At the time, the hospital housed 3,500 children with diverse needs, from babies born with minor defects, like a cleft palate or a clubfoot, to children with epilepsy and Down Syndrome. While the severely disabled languished in overcrowded rooms, the able-bodied were put to work in the institution’s dairies and orchards.

Rosemarie did something more that other parents who committed their children to Sonoma State did not; she visited her son every Wednesday. “It was just a small thing that I can still do is to go see him,” says Rosemarie. “Because most of these children, they never see parents again.” But those visits came to an abrupt end on Memorial Day, 1961, when Mark was 6.

“I picked up the phone and I heard a voice say, ‘Is Mrs. Dal Molin in?’ and I just knew,” says Karen. “They didn’t even say where they were calling from. But I just, this dread came into my heart, and I got my mom and I left. I ran. I hid. Nobody told me. I knew he was dead. From that day on, Karen and her sisters, Chris and Gail, say they never spoke Mark’s name again. They buried their grief, grew up and had families of their own. But after 40 years, they still struggle with the decision to institutionalize their brother. “It pretty much blew the family apart,” says Gail. “I believe that Dad did what he felt was best for the family. In my heart, I know that is true. But the impact of it on each one of us and the family was devastating.

In 1994, haunted by thoughts of her baby brother, Karen Alves secretly decided to devote all her spare time to answering the question that had burdened her for decades: how exactly did Mark die?

“I just needed to know. And no matter what it was, I had to know. So I went to the recorder’s office,” says Karen.

There was no death certificate. One of the clerks came over to the front desk, leaned over, and said, ‘When did he die?’ And I said, “1961”. ‘Well, when did he go into Sonoma State? I said, ‘1958.’ She said, “You better look into it, because strange things happened there.’

Things got stranger still when Karen noticed an article in the local paper saying 16,000 people, including children, had been used in radiation experiments. Just out of curiosity, I started to read it, and I just—I go, ‘Oh, my God. This could be it.’

Then-President Clinton had just ordered thousands of secret documents on government-sponsored human radiation experiments declassified and made available on the Internet.

I just put in “Sonoma State” and 25 documents came up. She found a study, funded by the federal government, involving 1100 Sonoma State cerebral palsy patients from l955 to 1960. One document showed that her brother, Mark, had been part of the study, assigned specimen number 8732. Karen wasn’t able to find out what tests, if any, Mark was subjected to, but some of the patients in the Sonoma State study were put through painful procedures like the pneumoencephalogram, in which air is injected into the brain before a series of x-rays.

Imagine puncturing someone’s spinal cord, drawing fluid out, and then putting a foreign substance in there: gas. When they trap air in your body, you’re in pain, excruciating pain, for days.

They were the raw material of medical research, “says Susan Lederer, who teaches medical history at Yale University, was a member of the 1994 presidential panel that investigated the radiation experiments. She says she was shocked by what Karen discovered, because researchers have been using disabled children in experiments for over a century.

Children in orphanages, children in homes for the mentally retarded. These are all “good populations” from the sense of medical research because you have an easily accessible group of people living in controlled circumstances, and you can monitor them, says Lederer. Lederer read the study that was conducted at Sonoma State Hospital, and says the children underwent painful experimentation, for which they received no direct benefit, no direct benefit whatsoever. So this research was not to try to cure them? It seems clear that these experiments were intended to enlarge knowledge about cerebral palsy. It did not produce a breakthrough, although Susan Lederer says studies using mentally retarded children were critical in the creation of vaccines for polio and hepatitis. Using captive populations meant big money for medical researchers. It would even be an advantage in applying for grant money, because, again, you don’t have to go to the problem of recruiting subjects.

In the case of Sonoma State, records show that when the study began, cerebral palsy admissions there jumped by 300 percent. Susan Lederer states that one of ways that medical directors of such institutions sort of connected themselves to the world of medical research was simply to provide their patients as commodities. I mean, the—you know, We can provide this many guinea pigs for you…..

Sonoma State is now known as Sonoma Developmental Center. During her 12-year- search, Karen Alves repeatedly wrote to the current administrator looking for information about Mark. She was told there were, “no records on radiation studies at Sonoma,” and that there was “no record that you brother was involved in radiation research.” And I’d say, “just go to the human radiation Web site and put in Sonoma State Hospital in your search and documents come up,” You’ve got to have something there. No. They deny it, DENY IT. If I called her right now, she’d deny it.

Administrator Theresa Murphy has worked at Sonoma State for 30 years. She said she didn’t have any information about the medical experimentation that was taking place at the institution. When asked if patients at state hospitals were used in medical research, Murphy says, “I’ve read that there has been things like using rattlesnake venom for epilepsy. But you know, there’s just nothing in our archives about the research you are talking about.” When asked if these studies were being done, if there are patients from here being sent for radiation studies, is that a stain on the hospital record? I think that in the history of people with developmental disabilities, and there have been some dark times. I truly believe that, “says Murphy. “And it wouldn’t surprise me that there were things we would—consider questionable today.”

It took two years and a court order for Karen to get Sonoma State to turn over Mark’s medical records. Though not complete, records did show that Mark Dal Molin suffered unusually high fevers the last six months of his life before dying of a seizure. He ran extremely high fevers that none of us here right now would live through, says Karen. “Swollen eyes, seizures, those things can fit in with radiation poisoning.” Mark’s records contained another shock. Karen found not one, but two autopsy reports, one for his body and another for his brain. Karen says that Mark’s brain was removed after he died. They took my brother’s brain without consent, and the doctor, in his obituary it said that he had one of the largest brain collections. If there was any way for me to find that, I would like to put him back together.

60 Minutes learned that between 1955 and 1960, the brain of every cerebral palsy child who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied. Rosemarie Dal Molin, Mark’s mother said she never gave them permission to take Mark’s brain for research purposes. “I came from Europe after the war, where all these horrendous things happened,” says Rosemarie,” I never dreamed that in this country they would do experimenting on children, Handicapped children.”

Unless their family claimed them, the children ended up in a community grave with the ashes of 500 other people, or buried in an empty field without a headstone to mark their passing. Theresa Murphy showed 60 Minutes the final resting place of 1400 Sonoma State patients. “The folks that remain here are undisturbed and available for family visitation.”

But Mark Dal Molin’s family was able, at least, to spare him that fate. They had
him cremated and placed his ashes in a private mausoleum.
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This breaks my heart. And this is one reason I would never send a child to an institution. I lived not to far from this place and had friends that lived within a mile of it and never knew that things like this was going on. I keep my son at home.

And we talk about what Hitler did to the handicapped people of Germany. Our government is no different. When the people of this country eventually find out all the things hidden from us by our government we will be appalled. And our leaders have the audacity to set themselves up as Christians and a beacon of light for the rest of the world to live by. Good God Almighty, do something soon.