Posted on 01/25/2017 7:30:14 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
Forget the war on babies. The abortion industry has a new enemy: ultrasounds. In a bizarre and rambling 2,600-word feature piece published on Tuesday, The Atlantic writer Moira Weigel took a sledgehammer to basic science and then did her best to vacuum its brains out before anyone could figure out what just happened.
The article’s headline is bad enough—”How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person”—but its subhed is the real work of art: “The technology has been used to create an ‘imaginary’ heartbeat and sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus.”
There are numerous other gems throughout the piece, such as her implication that only male doctors are allowed to use ultrasounds.
“Ultrasound made it possible for the male doctor to evaluate the fetus without female interference,” Weigel declares. Are female doctors banned from or incapable of doing an ultrasound on a pregnant mother? What about X-rays, MRIs, or CT scans? Are those marvels of modern technology that have helped to diagnose and cure countless diseases and physical maladies since their inception? Or are they evil technologies that merely enable peeping mandoctors to cast their eyes into the inner recesses of a woman’s body?
Before ultrasounds, a woman had to wait until delivery to find out if she was getting a puppy, a goat, or a human. https://t.co/PNrbRoMjKa— Denise Russell (@DRussell76) January 24, 2017
Weigel’s war on science, common sense, and life-saving medical technology is not aimless, though. Her real enemy is legislation that would criminalize abortion once an unborn baby’s heartbeat can be detected. Her logic is straightforward. If it’s illegal to kill a healthy, unborn baby after her heartbeat is detected, simply deny that she has a heartbeat:
Opponents of the heartbeat bills have pointed out that they would eliminate abortion rights almost entirely—making the procedure illegal around four weeks after fertilization, before many women realize that they are pregnant. These measures raise even more elementary questions: What is a fetal heartbeat? And why does it matter?“What is a fetal heartbeat?” is a simple question with an even simpler answer for those who are not desperately trying to rationalize the killing of a healthy unborn baby. But for abortion activists desperate to rationalize killing, it becomes a tortured exercise in metaphysics. Which is of course why the author then scare-quotes “life” after struggling mightily to understand what a heartbeat is and then—I’m not joking—asking why the presence of a heartbeat should even matter. Why does the existence of a heartbeat matter? It’s a real puzzle, I tell you.The idea would have been unthinkable before the advent of a technology developed in 1976: real-time ultrasound. At six weeks, the “heartbeat” is not audible; it is visible, a flickering that takes place between 120 and 160 times per minute on a black-and-white playback screen. As cardiac cells develop, they begin to send electrical pulses that cause their neighbors to contract. Scientists can observe the same effect if they culture cells in a petri dish.
Doctors do not even call this rapidly dividing cell mass a “fetus” until nine weeks into pregnancy. Yet, the current debate shows how effectively politicians have used visual technology to redefine what counts as “life.”
The fact of the matter is that abortion activists know what they’re doing: they are voluntarily choosing to end a precious and distinct human life. After all, if that unborn baby girl weren’t alive, the abortionist wouldn’t be so hell-bent on killing her. And if her heart weren’t beating, the abortionist wouldn’t have to try so hard to make it stop.
“The origins of fetal ultrasound lie in stealth warfare,” Weigel subtly declares, hoping her dear reader will be able to draw a straight line from the military’s war on enemy ships to the patriarchy’s war on women via life-saving medical technology. “Before ultrasound, medical care received by pregnant women had depended on their testimony, or how they described their own sensations.”
And before modern medicine existed, patients depended on leeches to rid their bodies of toxins and holes drilled through their heads to allow the evil spirits making them ill to escape. Medical technology is great and all, but can you believe doctors are using it to take care of unborn babies, too? How gauche.
Weigel’s anger is not limited just to medical imaging technology, though. She’s also extremely upset at the way social media allows newly pregnant moms to share their joy over the Internet.
“In many ways, social media have heightened the social reality of the unborn,” Weigel writes before sneering at the women who happily post pictures of their unborn babies on Instagram or Facebook, thereby promulgating the horrific notion that the babies growing inside them are actually babies growing inside them.
“Yet it remains unclear what the popular enthusiasm for fetal images actually means,” Weigel concludes.
Is it really unclear? The popular enthusiasm for pictures of unborn babies is popular enthusiasm for the eventual entry into the world of those babies and the unlimited potential they represent. How jaded and bitter a person do you have to be to feign shock at people who express joy over the creation of human life?
Like most treatises from abortion activists about how babies aren’t real people, Weigel’s comes across more as a sad attempt to convince herself than a credible attempt to convince her readers. No amount of euphemisms can obscure the truth that unborn babies are alive, that their hearts beat just as ours do, and that the abortion industry is dead set on killing as many of them as possible.
That explains some of the freaks out marching over the weekend.
As you are doubtless aware, the alive unborn CHILD can learn by age 22 weeks of gestation. This has been proven via the startle reflex, where a loud noise startles the child but if this is repeated the child eventually is no longer startled by the familiar sound. Typical of dead soul satanic servants, they seek to dehumanize the fellow humans they want to murder.
The real tragedy is that morons who call themselves liberal will go along with anything the satanists say because that's the "party line."
The Hirschfeld cartoons in the New Yorker plus all the dry cartoons
The best part
I think Hitschfield put the words Nina in all his painting for his daughter Nina
I used to read NYT foreign news too when I lived there in 80s
So much detail about stories few paid attention to
Folks here argue with me but I think the media is as bad as ever in my 59 years
I still receive & peruse the New Yorker just to watch 'em bleed.
I wonder if the author ever saw her own unborn child on ultrasound.
At eight weeks from conception (ten weeks as obstetrics measure it) I saw my unborn daughter leap her length in my womb, in response to a push from an ultrasound probe.
Four days later she was entirely still. We learned that she had trisomy 21, Downs syndrome, and had died in utero when development failed, as it does naturally for eighty percent of affected unborn babies.
But for eight weeks, she was fully human, and oh, so alive. And still loved.
I agree on the sinking of the Atlantic to some level just above the Weekly World News.
However, I’m sure that this scientific article was peer reviewed for accuracy. [sarcasm/]
This author is denying women’s competence and professional achievement to try to prove an odd, incomprehensible point.
yes, this author seems quite the dunce, doesn’t she...but what can we expect from a female nourished by the milk of misandry...?
I was a “choicer” years ago. It was ultrasound that changed my heart.
but what can we expect from a female nourished by the milk of misandry...?
perhaps if she nourished herself with milk of magnesia, she could expel all the vitriol from the milk of misandry...
This Weigel beast is the “pinnacle” of leftist ideology I guess. If it wasn’t so horrific I’d feel sorry for it. As it is, it is barely human itself. And so cannot be expected to recognize the value of a human life, even in a baby. This blasphemous crap, along with the women’s freak march last weekend, capped by Ashley Judd’s word vomit, just exposes the entire ugly left for all to see.
They are really not that far removed from the kind of people who support or join ISIS. If these women could make abortion snuff videos like ISIS does thier murders, and get away with it, they would do it. I have no doubt.
bkmk
Once upon a time, the Time-Life publishing company put out a wonderful video—I can’t remember exact title. Something like “How Life Begins.”
Anyway, it was considered standard sex education material, used in many schools. I saw it in “Biology/Hygiene” class in, IIRC, eighth grade.
Due to the potential for hysterical giggle fits, boys and girls were separated.
The video with a VoiceOver showed everything, clearly—some parts, like the male member becoming erect, were somewhat blurry. But ejaculation happened, we gasped, and then we saw live sperm swimming like little Olympians.
We saw one sperm penetrate the egg, and the cell immediately began to divide and multiply. Life had begun.
Then we watched the fetus develop into a baby, and roll around and laugh and suck its thumb—all while in its mother’s womb. The action was stopped several times while the narrator showed us what the baby looks like in the various stages of gestation.
We saw the woman having contractions and we saw the baby as it was being born, bloody and squalling.
My point here, is that videos like this can no longer be shown because the pro-abort lobby pitched a hissy fit-—and continues to do so now with the help of the LGBT lobby-—about these types of teaching aids.
They literally do not want anyone to see that it’s a baby.
Now wouldn’t it be wonderful if this video were shown on television, in prime time, with lots of advance publicity? Aren’t there some FReepers involved in the broadcast industry, with Hollywood connections, who might make this happen?
Wouldn’t it be great if the whole world could witness the howls of demonic rage of the feminists fighting to prevent the simple truth from being shown?
Liberalism Science: Brains Are Imaginary
Oft thought, but ne'er so well express'd!
Than you for telling this about your tiny daughter. Amen. Amen.
Yup. Cant really escape that one.
After reading this Satan threw a few more logs on the fire.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.