Aborting Beethoven And the Reputations of Politicians?–Truth! & Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A couple of ethical questions about abortion and judging character.
One describes a pregnancy that many would argue would justify an abortion but the child turns out to be Beethoven.
The describes three world leaders and asks which you would vote for.
Their qualifications seem clear, but their identities are surprising.
The Truth:
The eRumor has some factual problems.
As far as we can tell from researching the life of Beethoven, it’s misleading to set up the question by saying he would have been his mother’s ninth birth.
Only three of the children born to Maria Magdalena Beethoven survived infancy, with the composer Ludvig Von Beethoven being the oldest of the three.
Beethoven himself suffered from deafness in adulthood, but we found no evidence of deaf, blind, or mentally retarded siblings as children.
We found no substantiation of Beethoven’s mother having had syphilis.
She is said to have died of what at that time was called consumption or tuberculosis.
Regarding candidate A, Franklin Roosevelt, there is talk among astrologers that he consulted with astrologer Evangeline Adams, but we have not been able to document that.
We don’t know how many mistresses Franklin Roosevelt had but he had an affair with his wife’s social secretary Lucy Page Mercer. She was with him when he died in 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia.
He did like his martinis and is credited with having been the first to mix a martini in the White House and was a smoker.
Regarding candidate B, Winston Churchill, according to WinstonChurchill.org, he was known for his drinking.
We could not find whether he used opium in college.
Regarding candidate C, Adolph Hitler, it is true that there is no evidence that he ever cheated on his wife but that’s primarily because he was married to her for a few hours before both of them committed suicide.
Hitler’s and his longtime mistress Eva Braun got married early in the morning on April 29, 1945.
At about 3:30 the next afternoon, both took cyanide although Hitler also shot himself in the head.
Hitler preferred a vegetarian diet, but was not a pure vegetarian.
It started when his doctor once put him on a vegetarian menu but Hitler is described by his biographers as liking a variety of meats including sausages.
There is no record of Hitler having smoked or been a user of alcohol and, in fact, he campaigned against the use of tobacco among his troops.