Posted on 07/23/2007 5:58:02 AM PDT by John Galt 72
Abortion Politics and Barack Obama’s Slaughterhouse Jive
By Matt Carrothers
July 23, 2007
The leading Democratic presidential contenders stumped last week before the Planned Parenthood poobahs, sounding the usual refrains that protection of abortion on demand ensures a woman’s health, that the Supreme Court erred in upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, get your rosary beads off my uterus and all the rest of it.
The New York Times even titled its report of the event “Democrats Attack Bush on Women’s Health Issues.” Funny enough, there was no mention in the Times’s story of breast cancer, uterine cancer or any other health topic of unique interest to women. Just abortion, the lodestar issue of today’s political left.
The candidates were particularly incensed that the Supreme Court’s Gonzales v. Carhart decision upheld the ban on intact dilation and extraction of a baby’s head. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) stated, “For the first time the courts endorsed an abortion restriction without an exception for women’s health.”
Elizabeth Edwards, speaking on behalf of her husband John, promised Planned Parenthood that the Edwards universal health coverage scheme would include “all reproductive health services,” including taxpayer-funded abortions.
The left’s “women’s health” and “reproductive health” language is a rhetorical straw man devised to obscure the fact that abortion terminates a fetus’s life. It is even debatable whether “health” is a legitimate justification for abortion. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Gonzales majority opinion, “There is documented medical disagreement whether the Act’s prohibition would ever impose significant health risks on women.”
In fact, a 2005 study published in “Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health” titled “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions” found that just 4 percent of women had an abortion for reasons concerning the mother’s health. Sixty-seven percent of pregnant women sought abortions because they did not feel ready for the responsibility of motherhood, could not afford the baby or already had all the children they wanted.
Liberals maintain an odd predilection for adamantly insisting on zero restrictions on abortion at any point in a pregnancy, while simultaneously demanding federal protection of animal life, plant life and our planet’s supposed threatened health.
For example, in 2006 Obama co-sponsored legislation to prohibit funding of food safety inspections at what were then three U.S. horse slaughterhouses. The legislation passed, effectively barring the slaughter and export of horse meat. Obama wrote in a letter to a constituent, “This is a legitimate concern that deserves the attention of the nation’s lawmakers.”
Though horse slaughterhouses operated at the time in the U.S., horse meat can not be legally sold in this country. The meat is exported to Europe and Asia, where many consider it a delicacy. In January 2007, an Appeals Court shut down two horse slaughterhouses in Texas, and in June a U.S. District Court judge closed the remaining U.S. facility in Illinois.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, there are 1,819 abortion facilities in the U.S. That’s an average of 36 facilities per state, yet abortion advocates like the Guttmacher Institute bemoan statistics such as “Eighty-seven percent of all U.S. counties lacked an abortion provider in 2000.”
USDA statistics show that since 1980, approximately 4,190,639 horses have been slaughtered for export. In that same time, abortion has claimed the lives of approximately 40,108,300 babies. That works out to about 410 horses slaughtered and 4,000 babies aborted each day. And there aren’t enough providers.
Interestingly, the horse slaughtering procedure that Obama and others in Congress sought to permanently ban is remarkably similar to the procedure for performing a partial-birth abortion.
To perform a partial-birth abortion, the abortion provider grabs the baby’s legs with forceps and pulls the baby’s leg into the birth canal. The provider then delivers the baby’s entire body, except for the head. The provider then jams scissors into the baby’s skull, and spreads the tips of the scissors to enlarge the skull. The scissors are then removed, and a suction catheter is inserted into the skull opening. The abortion provider uses the catheter to suck the brains out. The collapsed head is then removed from the uterus.
Though babies are not given anesthesia prior to the scissor jamming or suction procedures, federal law mandates that horses be rendered unconscious prior to slaughter. Slaughterhouse workers first shoot a metal rod into the horse’s brain. When the horse is deemed unconscious, workers hoist by a rear leg and cut its throat. Once the horse is “bled out” its body is ready for processing. Many opponents of horse slaughter feel that the slaughterhouse environment is stressful for the horse.
The fact that liberals place a higher value on a horse’s life than human life is not surprising. Margaret Sanger, a racist pioneer of eugenics, founded Planned Parenthood to promote “race hygiene” and rid society of “dysgenic” groups.
A telling measure of liberals’ moral fiber, though, is that they promote abortion as a medical procedure beneficial to a woman’s health. In truth, many of them harbor a belief that pregnancy is an anchor on a woman’s ability to achieve success in the workplace. They view abortion as the hammer to break the proverbial glass ceiling separating her from the male-dominated corridors of corporate power.
America’s horse slaughterhouses sit silent for now. The horses should be thankful that mares can not vote.
© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Nice going Elizabeth.
BTW... who's running for President? Elizabeth or the Breck Girl?
Ping
Oops.
Sounds like a stereotype.
Did Obama also reiterate his support for infanticide?
This guy loves horses, hates babies, and thinks murder by the numbers is not anything for Americans to care about.
Two things this does ~ destroys his chances for election, except by the most jaded ~, and destroys his chances to run with Hillary Clinton.
She's also got all these issues tied up and she's better known.
Amazingly Osamabama has made Giuliani look much better to everyone.
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I didn’t think it could get worse than Hilary, but I believe that Obama is Satan’s hand-picked candidate; a pro-abortion monster with a soothing, paternal, smile.
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