LONDON, December 22, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Anglican rector Joanna Jepson made international headlines in recent months by having the UK courts approve her lawsuit against British police for failing to prosecute a late term abortion for a cleft lip. Writing in the Telegraph, Rev. Jepson compares the helplessness of the disabled unborn child to that of the Christ Child in the stable.
“It is as though such a child – though the cleft palate condition is trivial and easily corrected by surgery – somehow represents a threat to our society, increasingly obsessed as it is by a harsh, unattainable notion of cosmetic perfection. I think back to the threat that Jesus, though a helpless baby, represented to the powerful in his own time – to the point that King Herod, in his madness, ordered mass infanticide to remove the risk that Jesus might one day supplant him as King,” writes Jepson. “There is a tragic paradox here: that sometimes we seem to be most threatened by those who are most vulnerable. Herod, for all his might and authority, could not abide the possibility that he might one day be supplanted by a child. The deplorable exercise of his power revealed only his pathetic insecurity. So, too, in our own age, I wonder whether our readiness to refuse life to those who are less than physically perfect lays bare our own darkest fears and sense of inadequacy . . . As a result, we turn away from people and things that remind us of our flaws. We ostracize them, scorn them and even abort them.” Read Jepson’s full article online at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/12/21/do2105.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/12/21/ixop.html