It was impossible to picture what Mark had been only a year earlier. The photograph clutched tightly in his mother’s trembling hand showed her ten-year-old boy, his face beaming with happiness, proudly wearing his school’s new red and white football strip. Mark had been the leading goalscorer during the previous season, a fine striker who modelled himself on his hero, Michael Owen.
Yet, Mark had achieved all this despite his troubled medical history. He had been diagnosed at birth with an atrioventricular septal defect, a rare form of congenital heart disease. Surgeons had refused to operate at the time, because of what they called ‘medical complications’. Mark suffered from Down’s Syndrome.
At the age of seven, Mark eventually got the surgery he so desperately needed. However, it came too late, as damage to other organ systems had already been done. Now the consequences of the delay were taking their toll as he succumbed to end-stage renal failure; Mark was slowly dying before our eyes.
Some would say that Mark had been one of the lucky ones; antenatal scanning had failed to pick up any abnormalities. He had been allowed to live; for ten short years he had filled his home with laughter and smiles. Yet despite surviving the perils of pregnancy, he still became the object of unfair discrimination, even at the hands of those whose job it was to care for him.
Mark is just one example of someone whose life was not valued as it should have been, yet he is by no means alone in this. In this newly re-designed edition of Nucleus, we look at two other examples. Joanna Thompson and Rachel Moody examine the secret pain of many women following abortion whilst Jason O’Neale Roach looks at why, in a country that fails to value each human life equally, our government is proposing a bill of animal rights.
In addition to this, Nick Land begins a Christian framework for viewing psychiatry whilst John Wenham starts our new series, ‘Ethical Enigmas’, designed to help you decide where you stand on difficult issues.
