Runaway Planet

CONFUSION ABOUNDS

David Limbaugh assesses the weak theological and moral musings of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Whoopi Golberg in this good article.

THE PRO-ABORT MINDSET VI

I don't find the Sarah Silverman clip below funny (it is actually quite offensive, so be warned), but the fact that it is supposed to be confirms what I have been saying about the pro-abort mindset.

As far as I can tell, this is an attempt at satire. It is about making fun of a particular mindset and the people who hold to it. I'm not exactly sure who Silverman is mocking here, but there are only two possibilities. She is either taking a shot at the advice giving friends or the Silverman character herself.  Either way it supports the same point - that the pro-abortion movement is about nothing more high-minded than narcissistic sexual licentiousness.

If the moralistic friends are the brunt of the joke, it is because they don't realize what a handy and consequence free (indeed quite pleasing) birth-control device abortion really is. And if the Silverman character is being mocked, it is because she is convinced that a serious issue like abortion is equivalent to taking a 12 year old who has the measles to a friendly pediatrician. Either way the sketch only makes sense if such people like the Silverman character actually exist. They do. The fact is, the attitude displayed by the Silverman character is foundational to the pro-abortion movement. For this group, regardless of what they might say, abortion has nothing to do with saving women's lives or helping the downtrodden and abused. It is about being able to conveniently escape from responsibility by killing a child.

HOW PRO-ABORTION ARGUMENTS DEMEAN WOMEN

Anna Quindlen offers an interesting take on the abortion argument in a recent Newsweek article. She points out that most pro-lifers do not have a good answer when asked how much jail time they would like to see given to women who have abortions should that procedure ever be outlawed and then argues that "there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can't countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can't have it both ways." Quindlen rightly observes that to only punish the doctor is to ignore and infantilize women, "turning them into 'victims' of their own free will. State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time."

Now Anna Quindlen is one of the most heartily pro-abortion columnists in the country, and her piece is clearly intended to cause people to oppose establishing anti-abortion laws. For me it had the opposite effect. I heartily agree with Quindlen's assessment and think that we should starting treating women as more than just victims, including imposing penalties on them for having their baby killed.

What Quinlden does not seem to appreciate is that understanding women as helpless victims has been a foundation of the pro-abortion movement. They want us (and indeed need us) to see women as the victims of a patriarchal society intent on raping them and leaving them barefoot and in the kitchen. Only in that light does allowing women the "right" to have the baby that has been forced on them disposed of sound reasonable at all. And even this disposal is never spoken of as something actively done by the women. The woman is the victim all the way through, a helpless lass who is saved by a white coated vacuum wielding savior and bill-paying boyfriend.

This attitude is explicitly apparent in the Maryland story of Christy Freeman. According to AP,

Investigators trying to fill gaps in a case with daunting legal and forensic issues returned Wednesday to the home of a woman suspected of killing her newborn son and hiding the bodies of three other pre-term infants.

Investigators must determine whether all four bodies found at the home were the offspring of Christy Freeman. Freeman, who also has four living children, has been charged in the death of one newborn found last week wrapped in a bloodied towel under her bathroom sink.

That body was determined to have been at 26-weeks gestation. Investigators still need to figure out how old the others were when they died, when they died, and whether Freeman or someone else was responsible for the deaths.

The timing is critical. If the pre-term infants were too young to be considered viable outside the womb, Freeman can't be charged with murder. And if they were old enough to live outside the womb, but died before Maryland passed its 2005 fetal homicide law, it may not be a crime even if Freeman caused their deaths.

So even if it is proven that Christy Freeman killed her babies, it may not be possible to charge her with a crime. Here is the reason:

The 2005 fetal homicide was designed to penalize those who kill a pregnant woman or her viable fetus, but it includes a provision shielding pregnant women from prosecution for actions that result in their own fetus's death. . . .

State Delegate Susan K. McComas, a Republican who co-sponsored the 2005 bill, said the exemption was added by majority Democrats who feared the bill would restrict a woman's right to abortion. "We weren't contemplating a woman doing something to her own fetus," McComas said.

So abortion has nothing to do a woman doing something to her own fetus? That is what the pro-abortion side would have everyone accept.

Of course, as this story makes clear, that mindset is ridiculous. If someone other than the mother killing a "viable fetus" is murder, than it is murder when the mother does it to her own baby. And if it is proper to punish people for hiring someone to commit murder, than it is proper to punish mothers for hiring someone to kill their babies. To do any less is demeaning to women.

(Thanks to James Taranto at Opinion Journal for the Freeman story.)

THE PRO-ABORT MINDSET V

The L.A. Times front page, as it is prone to do, yesterday offered some pro-abortion propaganda that once again clearly exposes the position for what it is. The first three paragraphs are really all you need to read:

Fourth-year medical student Megan Lederer recently helped deliver a premature baby at barely six months gestation. The newborn was tiny, unimaginably fragile, but she survived.

Caught up in the moment, Lederer didn't think about the implication for her chosen career. Later, though, she wondered: Could I have aborted that pregnancy?

She could have, she decided. She would have felt an obligation.

Because most abortion supporters have not yet openly embraced infanticide, the supporting argument for their position, as it is popularly presented, can be boiled down to this: the being that inhabits a pregnant woman is not something that needs to be given the protection against destruction that we give the being that comes out of the woman at the end of her pregnancy, so abortion is OK. 

This is why abortion supporters always avoid the term "baby" to describe the being that is destroyed while growing inside its mother. They talk about the procedure as "ending a pregnancy" or "getting rid of tissue" or perhaps "ejecting the fetus." It is an attempt to make a value distinction between the being inside a woman and that being outside of a woman, which everyone refers to as a baby (and most people don't want to see killed.) "Abortion doesn't kill a baby," say advocates who use this argument, "so it is OK."

However, this is simply a lie, and everyone knows it. They know a baby is killed, and they simply don't care. That the word-play is just a smokescreen is apparent in the article.

In the first paragraph, after six months of pregnancy, a woman gave birth to a being the author described as a "newborn" and a "baby." It would be hard to argue with her choice of words as they accurately describe the facts. The woman who was pregnant is now a mother of a child that we all recognize to be deserving of protection against death.

The we read that the medical student who assisted with the delivery thought about whether she could have "aborted that pregnancy." She decided that she could have.Now, it is simply impossible in the context of this story to interpret the term "aborted that pregnancy" to mean other than "killed that baby." The medical student clearly knows that the being she is willing to abort is a baby that is viable outside of the womb. And she doesn't care.

It is no longer realistic to view the continued eradication of millions of pre-born human beings as a matter of scientific or philosophical debate. It is a moral issue. More to the point, it is simply evil.

TINY BUT PERFECT IN EVERY WAY

Some biting commentary from the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today:

Womb With a View

London's Daily Mail offers proof that human beings are not animals:

An unborn elephant, tiny but perfect in every way. A dolphin swimming in the womb, just as it will have to swim in the ocean the moment it is born. An unborn dog panting. Each one amazing and now, thanks to these remarkable pictures, they can be seen for the first time.

Using an array of technology, the images reveal what until now has been a secret--exactly how animals develop in the womb.

The unborn elephant, shown at the link, is quite something to see. By contrast, as we all know from reading the newspapers, there is no such thing as an unborn human being. We develop by a little-understood process in which a clump of cells, similar to a tumor or a fingernail, miraculously becomes a baby at the moment the entire clump is exposed to air.

That humans and animals come into the world in such radically different ways pretty much demolishes the notion that we are the product of Darwinian evolution, doesn't it?

THE PRO-ABORT MINDSET IV

Today's front page LA Times article on abortion offers a clear picture of the attitude and philosophy  behind this insidious practice. Between the sheer emotional callousness of the doctor (and many of the patients) to the outright idiocy of the "reasons" they present to support their actions, it is a wonder anyone can take this movement seriously at all.

A few examples, first of the callousness:

[Dr.] Harrison opened an obstetrics and gynecology practice, but after the Supreme Court established abortion as a constitutional right in 1973, he decided to take on an additional specialty. Now 70, Harrison estimates he's terminated at least 20,000 pregnancies....

He calls himself an "abortionist" and says, "I am destroying life."...

An 18-year-old with braces on her teeth is on the operating table, her head on a plaid pillow, her feet up in stirrups, her arms strapped down at her sides. A pink blanket is draped over her stomach. She's 13 weeks pregnant, at the very end of the first trimester. She hasn't told her parents.

A nurse has already given her a local anesthetic, Valium and a drug to dilate her cervix; Harrison prepares to inject Versed, a sedative, in her intravenous line. The drug will wipe out her memory of everything that happens during the 20 minutes she's in the operating room. It's so effective that patients who return for a follow-up exam often don't recognize Harrison.

The doctor is wearing a black turtleneck, brown slacks and tennis shoes. He snaps his gum as he checks the monitors displaying the patient's pulse rate and oxygen count.

"This is not going to be nearly as hard as you anticipate," he tells her.

She smiles wanly. Keeping up a constant patter — he asks about her brothers, her future birth control plans, whether she's good at tongue twisters — Harrison pulls on sterile gloves.

"How're you doing up there?" he asks.

"Doing OK."

"Good girl."

Harrison glances at an ultrasound screen frozen with an image of the fetus taken moments before. Against the fuzzy black-and-white screen, he sees the curve of a head, the bend of an elbow, the ball of a fist.

"You may feel some cramping while we suction everything out," Harrison tells the patient.

A moment later, he says: "You're going to hear a sucking sound."

The abortion takes two minutes. The patient lies still and quiet, her eyes closed, a few tears rolling down her cheeks. The friend who has accompanied her stands at her side, mutely stroking her arm.

When he's done, Harrison performs another ultrasound. The screen this time is blank but for the contours of the uterus. "We've gotten everything out of there," he says.

Just in case it isn't clear, let's emphasize that the "everything" means not just the hands, head and elbows that were mentioned in the story, but legs, feet, heart, lungs and every other piece of human anatomy that you and I have and "gotten it out of there" means "I've ripped your baby apart with forceps and sucked out the pieces of his body with a vacuum cleaner."

As for the ridiculous arguments offered up in support of this barbarism, they include such classics as the "I don't want to get fat" defense:

a) "A high school volleyball player says she doesn't want to give up her body for nine months. "I realize just from the first three months how it changes everything," she says."

b) "His first patient of the day, Sarah, 23, says it never occurred to her to use birth control, though she has been sexually active for six years. When she became pregnant this fall, Sarah, who works in real estate, was in the midst of planning her wedding. "I don't think my dress would have fit with a baby in there," she says"

And the ever popular "everyone does it":

Amanda, a 20-year-old administrative assistant, says it's not the obstacles that surprise her — it's how normal and unashamed she feels as she prepares to end her first pregnancy.

"It's an everyday occurrence," she says as she waits for her 2:30 p.m. abortion. "It's not like this is a rare thing."...

She regrets having to pay $750 for the abortion, but Amanda says she does not doubt her decision. "It's not like it's illegal. It's not like I'm doing anything wrong," she says.

In a similar vein, the abortionist's helper has given that argument a creative theological twist:

For the few women who arrive ambivalent or beset by guilt, Harrison's nurse has posted statistics on the exam-room mirror: One out of every four pregnant women in the U.S. chooses abortion. A third of all women in this country will have at least one abortion by the time they're 45.

"You think there's room in hell for all those women?" the nurse will ask.

Let's not forget the standard argument against adoption, that it is better for your child to be dead than for you to have to wonder how they are doing:

Kim, a single mother of three, says she couldn't bear to give away a child and have to wonder every day if he were loved. Ending the pregnancy seemed easier, she says — as long as she doesn't let herself think about "what could have been."

And last, but certainly not least, we can rest easy knowing that, although abortion is a bit of a "bummer", it's a lot better than the alternatives, like having to remember to take birth control pills:

The last patient of the day, a 32-year-old college student named Stephanie, has had four abortions in the last 12 years. She keeps forgetting to take her birth control pills. Abortion "is a bummer," she says, "but no big stress."

WHEN IS A MOTHER NOT A MOTHER?

 A pointed observation from Best of the Web:

In an apparent effort to reduce the number of casualties from future hurricanes, a Little Rock, Ark., doctor "has offered to perform free abortions on hurricane evacuees," the Associated Press reports:

Despite protests from abortion opponents, Little Rock Family Planning clinic director Dr. Jerry Edwards said he has already performed six free abortions. The clinic usually charges between $525 and $600 for a first-trimester abortion.

"If we didn't provide it now, they would get it later--a late-term abortion that would give greater risk to the mother's health," Edwards told KTHV-TV in Little Rock.

OK, we're confused by that last quote. How would the timing of a woman's choice affect her mother's health?

BABY OR FETUS II

From OpinionJournal's "Best of the Web":

Life Begins at Conception--if You're a Panda

"A 13-year-old giant panda gave birth to a cub at San Diego Zoo, but a second baby died in the womb, officials said Wednesday."--Associated Press, Aug. 3

"A cancer-ravaged woman robbed of consciousness by a stroke has given birth after being kept on life support for three months to give her fetus extra time to develop."--Associated Press, Aug. 3

BETTER OFF DEAD

This week's winner (in a landslide) of our Jonathan Swift award for most ridiculous pro-abortion argument goes to Michel Read. He was born with a skin abnormality that caused some disfigurement. His looks have since been fixed by plastic surgery and he openly admits that he has a good life. However, he is haunted by the fact that some people made fun of his mother when he as a child and caused her emotional discomfort and pain and he claims that if she had an abortion, everything would have been much better.

Some years ago I was asked by a financial supporter of the Right to Life movement whether I would give to their cause. After all, out of adversity I had achieved more than many physically normal people. My answer was clear and unequivocal. My life in many ways has been a wonderful experience, but it has been achieved through the suffering of my mother. It would have been better for her had she aborted me. After all, my life then would never have been, and logically, I could not have regretted not living it, but my mother would almost certainly have had a better one.

Even if we leave our the fact that it is not at all certain that his mother would have had a better one, particularly since she would have had to live it knowing she had killed her child, the logic here is chilling. If causing pain to others is the criteria for forfeiting ones own existence, than should anyone be allowed to live? Certainly we have all caused some degree of pain to another human, whether intentionally or not. If that means we would be better off dead, let's nuke the planet, or at least sterilize everyone on it so that humans can no longer reproduce and cause any more pain.

This is clearly a ridiculous argument but it is to be expected from people who start out with the presupposition that this life is all there is. If we cease to exist after our bodies die, than the removal of pain from this meaningless existence naturally becomes a top priority, even to the point of abolishing bodily life itself.

NARCISSISM AND CHILD "THINGIFICATION"

In the context of a very good article discussing homosexuality and parenthood, Kathleen Parker has some astute observations about  how our culture views children:

Throughout our culture, children have become objectified, "thingified," created or acquired for the fulfillment of our selves - decor options, accessories, cute little bundles for our entertainment and amusement.

Unless, of course, we're not in the mood, in which case we hit the "abort" button, the ultimate expression of "thingification."

As long as children are viewed as mere extensions of our selves, put here to satisfy some narcissistic need for self-actualization, it is easy to suppose that our needs and their needs are complementary. If same-sex marriage is what "I" need, then two same-sex parents are what "my" child needs.