I think this may be one...
Posted on 09/23/2003 2:19:56 AM PDT by sarcasm
ALL OF BRITAIN was buzzing last week after a tabloid published highly controversial photos — not of a topless supermodel or two female pop singers kissing or Prince William in a grass skirt, but of angelic babies smiling in the womb.
The ultrasound images, taken between 26 and 34 weeks after conception, were released by Professor Stuart Campbell and widely circulated on the Internet via the Drudge Report. Campbell’s an obstetrician at the privately run Create Health Centre in London. For the past two years, the medical facility has offered state-of-the-art 3-D/4-D scanning equipment services to expectant parents. Campbell performs an average of 30 scans a week. His outspoken enthusiasm for this blessed technology is refreshing. “Parents love them,” he told the Mirror. “I hear so many couples laughing when they see the pictures — it’s wonderful.”
Campbell’s high-tech window to the womb also shows the babies moving their limbs at 8 weeks, leaping and turning by 12 weeks, curling their toes and fingers at 15 weeks, and yawning at 20 weeks. The clients’ reactions are overwhelming, Campbell said, “especially with fathers, who rarely get involved. Before, they sat in the corner. Now, they really show emotion. I enjoy scanning and looking at babies. It is so informative about babies and behavior. Every scan is an adventure.”
How have pro-abortion activists abroad reacted after seeing the happy, grinning photos of these unborn babies? With reflexive scowls and dour grimaces, naturally.
Anne Karpf, a commentator for the British-based Guardian who bills herself as a “medical sociologist,” says the photos are “deeply disquieting” and ridicules the anti-abortion lobby for being “intoxicated with evidence of a fetus’ humanity.” (God forbid this cold woman ever be exposed to a pregnant mommy experiencing the undiluted joy of a baby kicking inside her for the first time.) Australian Birth Control Services medical director Geoff Brodie complained that the photos “will be picked up by those groups that use anything and everything to stop terminations but ignore the fact that women have a right to choice.”
Here in America, the pro-abortion lobby is having the same toxic reaction. It was bad enough when conventional, 2-D sonograms revealed unborn hearts beating and blurry hands waving, but the abortionists are absolutely aghast over rapidly spreading access to 3-D/4-D ultrasound technology. When General Electric began running incredibly moving ads last year celebrating the company’s new innovations in sonography, a writer for the liberal American Prospect complained the commercials were “a milieu of clever illusion” that “blur(red) the distinction between a fetus and a newborn infant.”
This from the masters of deception who gave us the infamous euphemisms “fetal matter” and “uterine tissue,” which have successfully blurred the distinction between human life and disposable Kleenex for more than three decades.
Similarly, pro-abortion advocates have attacked legislation in Congress, introduced by Florida Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns, which would guarantee free ultrasound screenings to any woman who visits a non-profit crisis pregnancy center that receives subsidies for sonogram equipment. Kathryn Allen, Planned Parenthood spokeswoman, griped, “With all the problems going on in our world, I can’t imagine that Congress would spend its time and energy on ultrasound for anyone.”
Allison Herwitt, director of government relations for NARAL Pro-Choice America in Washington, also attacked pro-life supporters of the bill. “They don’t want women to go to Planned Parenthood, where they’ll get their full range of options,” said Alison Herwitt. “They just want them to go to crisis pregnancy centers, where women will be exposed to this weapon at taxpayers’ expense.”
Liberals in America are all for the government giving away any health services for free — except if it’s a service that has the ability to persuade a wavering patient to preserve a life instead of end it.
These amazing advances in golden-hued ultrasound have illuminated an insurmountable truth: No amount of NARAL money or National Organization for Women screeching can overcome the persuasive power of an unborn child’s beaming face.
Michelle Malkin is author of “Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores” (Regnery).
Lie. The screening is not "free". It is paid for with money stolen from others.
First, I don't want to minimize the reality of abortion at all, but the facts is the facts, and spreading misinformation (or disinformation) just weakens the cause.
The actual number of abortions performed in 1999 - the last year for which I could find data - was just under 862,000. Ten percent of that would thus be a little over half (86,179) of your imputed number. This from the CDC:
Abortion Surveillance - US, 1999
Snidely
I think this may be one...
While those pictures of the babies are cool, they aren't really relevant to the overwhelming majority of the abortions done in the US.
Kinda relevant to the kid getting his limbs ripped off or his skin burned off or having his brains sucked out, don't you think?
Yes and no. The solution of the late-term abortion question is a helluva lot easier for a society to arrive at than the earlier-term stuff. This scanning technology seems to be geared more at saving late-term pregnancies.
But since the vast majority of abortions are done when the developing embryo (which is what a baby technically is before 12 weeks) is far less, well, "cute," it becomes more difficult to make the case to people that those beings - those 87% - are in fact People, with rights. That is the the very root of the issue being argued, and all the handwaving and shouting in the world isn't gonna change that. It may be easy for you and me to reach a conclusion on whether abortion should be allowed, but not everyone thinks the same way, and if you fail to recognize that and deal with it intelligently and honestly, you're just tilting at windmills.
You apologists for abortion are the main reason it still continues.
The main reason abortions continue is that there are women who want to have them. Period. The whole point of this article is that maybe some women will change their minds. I hope it does - if it changes their mind, good for them, good for the baby.
But even if Roe v. Wade were repealed (likely eventually), and all abortions became illegal (not so likely), there will still be women who have abortions. That's brutal and harsh too, but it's reality, something a lot of folks are a bit distanced from these days.
Snidely
Even though all fifty states and the Federal Government have laws against murder, murder continues to happen. But it is not protected by law, it is against the law of the society.
Currently, a very mistaken court, in 1973, made the killing of unborn individual human beings something legal in our society. From that beginning we see how far the society has degenerated into protecting the right to kill these unborn for any reason the woman has, as long as her hired killer writes some mish-mash about her health on the kill orders.
A more appropriate approach would have been to recognize that there is a precedent for allowing pregnancy termination, with two sub-set realities: self defense is a concept in our founding principles and is to be found throughout common and natural law. In the following two scenarios, a woman ought have the right to terminate a pregnancy, but this doesn't carry with it an automatic 'right to a dead second individual, a baby': 1) if a pregnancy actually endangers a woman's/girl's life, she ought have the right to end that pregnancy; 2) if a woman/girl is raped and thus impregnated via a criminal act, she ought have the right to terminate that pregnancy (she was forced into the increased risk to her life in sustaining a pregnancy).
The single principle of self-defense is at the heart of both the above sub-sets, but should not carry an automatic right to kill the innocent if it is possible to save the innocent unborn without violating the woman's right to choosing self-defense.
Will America ever reach the stage where the above is the norm? I cannot say, but I do know that technology is advancing so rapidly that even an early pregnancy which a woman chooses to end under the principle of self-defense will soon be sustainable (gestationally) outside her body, so the termination of a pregnancy need not have death of a second individual involved in the not so distant future.
Not exactly. What Roe did was strike down all state laws regarding abortion, whatever their approach - that's important. Abortion was in fact legal in many states, though there was the facade of medical necessity that was imposed - a requirement that was surely skirted on many an occasion. I dunno how many abortions were performed before Roe, though I have seen estimates as high as a million and a quarter annual.
Roe also gives the states the option of banning all abortions (w/ a life of the mother exception) after viability, a line which is blurry at best (depends how you define "viable"), but begins at around 24 weeks.
The single principle of self-defense is at the heart of both the above sub-sets, but should not carry an automatic right to kill the innocent if it is possible to save the innocent unborn without violating the woman's right to choosing self-defense.
Many folks in the pro-life movement would disagree with this approach WRT rape/incest, the rationale being that the unborn shouldn't be killed simply because they were conceived due to a criminal act - it isn't their fault, after all.
Snidely
Not exactly. Should we expect anything different from folks who will not give the slightest benefit of the doubt where human life is concerned?
Move along...
I once, many years ago, posted here a thought that, basically, the abortion lobby would want to legalize "post-term abortion" that would allow the mother to kill her baby for up to six months after birth.
The hate mail I got was amazing. Not long after we got story after story after story of women having kids and leaving them in trash cans, bathrooms, etc. and they weren't being prosecuted for murder. As usual, the left wanted to rationalize away those deaths.
Then you get that crazy lady in Houston that drowned her kids (that husband was a wacko and should have been held responsible also as well as the psycho-babble community) and all NOW can talk about is some kind of post-whocares syndrome.
The extremists in the abortion-for-any-reason-at-any-time crowd are scary. Why is it they aren't the ones aborted?
There is something deeply disturbing about the mindset that produced this phrase. Let me ask Christopher Hitchens' question in response: "If it isn't human, what is it? If it isn't alive, what is it?"
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