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Notes
posted 5 / 9 / 2013
Now, from the perspective of the journalists defending a consistent use of the term “fetus,” even when the term is inaccurate (see Gosnell coverage), here is the hard-news question of the moment. If the prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty for [Ariel] Castro in this case, who did he kill? What human persons with full dignity and legal rights, under this nation’s current legal regime, died during these alleged crimes?— Terry Mattingly
Kermit Gosnell has been the equivalent of the American slave-dealerâsomeone who has done work rendered absolutely necessary by the twisted laws of his regime, but who has nevertheless been ignored or regarded with unease, and even repulsion, by his fellow citizens.
Gosnell, whose clinic was shut down by the Philadelphia authorities who charged him with murder, is the ne plus ultra of the abortion trade. Not because of the filth, the squalor, the jars of amputated keepsake baby feet, the employment of unlicensed incompetents, the promiscuous use of narcotics on unwitting patients, or the poisonous racism of a physician who preyed upon women and babies of his own race—although all of these are no surprise at all in America’s most unregulated branch of medicine.
No, Gosnell is the “slave-dealer” par excellence because, even if he had run the cleanest, brightest, most professional clinic in the country, he was simply following out the remorseless logic of the abortion regime installed forty years ago by the Supreme Court.
Women came to him for the very latest of late-term abortions, and he made sure their children were dead. Whether he accomplished their deaths in utero or ex utero—before or after their births—didn’t really matter to Gosnell. And, as we have heard from Planned Parenthood officials, from then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama, and from “pro-choice” politicians like Senator Barbara Boxer, it doesn’t matter to them, either.
Their insouciance about infanticide, moreover, is given intellectual respectability when a leading academic publication like the Journal of Medical Ethics publishes a symposium on infanticide in which the majority of the contributing scholars cannot bring themselves to condemn it.
And there is something inexorably logical about this attitude. How can it really matter where an innocent human being’s life is deliberately snuffed out? If it’s a legally protected “baby” after birth at 24 weeks’ gestation, but only an unprotected “fetus” before birth at 25 weeks’ gestation, how does that make any sense? Yet this is the kind of gyration the law produces, just as it was shot through with contradictions and inanities under the regime that sanctioned slavery.
The Stork bus…is a bright, lovely blue on the outside, and the inside is clean and free of clutter, with a welcoming but no-nonsense clinical feel. There is a little couch for the mother to sit on and speak to a counselor, and a padded bench where she can lie comfortably.
The ultrasound machine pulls out from underneath the bench. It is operated only by a licensed sonographer whose work is frequently reviewed by an OB/Gyn. In the back there is a small private toilet for pregnancy testing. It isn’t the slightest bit cramped or unpleasant; these mothers get only the best. The completed bus with the ultrasound machine was paid for by private donations to the tune of about $140,000.
The Stork bus is by no means the first mobile ultrasound vehicle…but it may be the smallest, lightest, and most practical. It doesn’t require a permit or special permission to park. It will fit in a parking space or even at a meter.
It is an abortion clinic’s worst nightmare.
What a fantastic, encouraging article.
The church cannot expect governments or legal systems to get this right. From Dred Scott v. Sanford to Buck v. Bell to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has egregiously erred, asserting that the powerful have legal rights that cause permanent harm to the weak. God will hold those justices to account for this evil they affirmed.
The church cannot expect the educational systems to get this right. Eugenics was born in American and British universities long before it was expressed in the killing camps of Nazi Germany. Equally vile is the assertion being discussed in academic and medical journals that unborn children are not actually persons — an argument that is now being extended even to children already born.
The church cannot expect the medical establishment to get this right. Too often parents feel the pressure from doctors and nurses to end a pregnancy when a disability is discovered. Pray that God would raise up hundreds of medical professionals who default to caring for the mother and child, rather than pretending to care for the mother by destroying the child.
The church, those of us trusting in Jesus, we must get it right:
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! (Psalm 127:3–5)
Church, please, do not let the language of law or property guide how we think of the children God gives us. Children — all children in every circumstance from every part of the world of every color and ethnicity and physical or cognitive ability — are not chattel. Children are not chattel. They are rewards and blessings from our gracious heavenly Father, for his glory and for our eternal good.
Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations?
It’s not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell’s former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart.
NBC-10 Philadelphia reported that, Stephen Massof, a former Gosnell worker, “described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” One former worker, Adrienne Moton, testified that Gosnell taught her his “snipping” technique to use on infants born alive.
It doesn’t fit into the left-wing paradigm of pro-choice folks as bigoted, anti-women moralizers intent on suppressing reproductive freedom, so this story gets almost no coverage.
Let there be no mistake: the blood-guilt America has earned over the last 40 years (and is still earning) is orders of magnitude worse than slavery ever was.
There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: The onset of individual life is not a dogma of the church but a fact of science. How much more convenient if we lived in the 13th century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas Aquinas sounds like an American Civil Liberties Union member. Nowadays it is not some misguided ecclesiastics who are trying to suppress an embarrassing scientific fact. It is the secular juridical-journalistic establishment.—
Please indulge the novelist if he thinks in novelistic terms. Picture the scene. A Galileo trial in reverse. The Supreme Court is cross-examining a high school biology teacher and admonishing him that of course it is only his personal opinion that the fertilized human ovum is an individual human life. He is enjoined not to teach his private beliefs at a public school. Like Galileo he caves in, submits, but in turning away is heard to murmur, “But it’s still alive!”
To pro-abortionists: According to the opinion polls, it looks as if you may get your way. But you’re not going to have it both ways. You’re going to be told what you’re doing.
Novelist Walker Percy in a 1981 New York Times op-ed.
Those who deny the scientific fact of when human life begins do so to avoid having to engage the troubling moral and ethical considerations of abortion. This can be a genuine cognitive dissonance or straightforward, cowardly dishonesty.
You want to know what the real controversy should be about? Both candidates say they believe life begins at conception, yet one candidate is principled enough to advocate protecting that life and the other is not.
If you take the hard-line (some would say “principled”) approach that a mysterious faith-based miracle happens when a sperm meets an egg, doesn’t it logically follow that any and every pregnancy resulting from rape (or, indeed, incest) is a “gift” from the deity responsible for said miracle?
I find this development in Indiana unsurprising.
I also find this recent acknowledgment by the GOP revolting.
“God performs abortions all the time. We just call them miscarriages.” — my friend Rich Mullins
THE FIRST THING MOURDOCK’S STATEMENT WAS
It was politically damaging and unhelpful articulation—not because the intended meaning is wrong, but because it touches on an emotionally complex and politicized issue that the left is guaranteed to knee-jerk and froth at the mouth over. It was a stupid and insensitive way to engage the issue.
THE SECOND THING MOURDOCK’S STATEMENT (MOST LIKELY) WAS
I know little about Mourdock’s religions beliefs, but it sounds like was affirming a traditional, orthodox, and uncontroversial Christian doctrine: the idea that God is sovereign and in control over everything that happens, that nothing occurs without his permission, and that he works everything (both good and evil) into his eternal plan.
Does God “intend” for a rape to occur? Not in the sense that we use the word. Does God allow evil actions (free will) and yet weave them into his broader tapestry, his plan for the eventual moral redemption of the earth and mankind? Absolutely.
The reason Christians defend life in the womb is not because we think we know the details of God’s plans to weave the fruit (pregnancy) of a horrendous crime (rape) into his broader plan. After all, we can’t really know those details definitively, and it’s not our job to. The operating principle here is that when the right to be alive comes into conflict with the right over one’s body, the former is the more fundamental right. The unborn child is fully human, with all God-given rights intact, and the means of conception does not impart or remove those fundamental rights.
Rape is a horrible crime; the answer to it is not to allow a worse one.
-“A lot of people like to sweep it under the carpet,” Jenni told me Wednesday. But, if commonly cited statistics are correct, hundreds of thousands of Americans walking around today were conceived in an act of rape. Jenni, and legions like her, raise a tough question for pro-lifers who don’t want to talk about rape cases. Her smiling face and growing family — she has three kids of her own — is also damning to pro-choice people who argue that abortion is a necessity for a woman impregnated by rape…— When A Horrific Rape Leads to an Innocent Life
“When someone like me … says, ‘I actually love this child. I actually see her as an extension of me,’ people view me suspiciously. They don’t see me as a legitimate rape victim…”
Prewitt quotes another congresswoman describing the child merely as the “product of such violent, vicious and terrible act.”
But those “products” have names and faces. And lives.
Mandating sonograms creates for “pro-choicers” an impossible intellectual, not to mention moral, dilemma. If they oppose women receiving information, they are censors. Pro-lifers are aligning themselves with truth in labeling and truth in lending laws requiring that information be provided to women (and men) in order to help make decisions presumed to be in their best interests.— To live or die ‘on the floor’ | WORLD Magazine
When abortion proponents stand in the way of women receiving information about such a critical decision, they place themselves where they say conservatives reside, in the land of intolerance and ignorance.
The response to this proposed legislation goes something like this: “You are insulting the intelligence of women who are smart enough to figure out these things on their own.”
“Fine,” I say, “then let’s remove labels from cans, bottles, and packages and do away with paperwork at the bank when a woman applies for a loan. Let’s also rip Monroney stickers off vehicles at car dealerships because women should be smart enough to figure out the price, options, and miles per gallon on their own.”
The reason abortion proponents don’t want women to see what their babies look like in the womb is because, for too many of them, abortion has become a sacrament. They embrace a right to kill while simultaneously denying the right to life. Showing a pregnant woman a picture of her baby in the womb, heart beating, can only enhance the possibility that the child will be given the opportunity to live.
Mark Steyn, quoted at the link:
So a [Canadian] superior court judge in a relatively civilized jurisdiction is happy to extend the principles underlying legalized abortion in order to mitigate the killing of a legal person — that’s to say, someone who has managed to make it to the post-fetus stage. How long do those mitigating factors apply? I mean, “onerous demands”-wise, the first month of a newborn’s life is no picnic for the mother. How about six months in? The terrible twos?
She objected arguing that the unborn babies are not persons (are not “ensouled”) until they take their first breath and are no longer connected to their mother. This caught my attention. She argued that as long as a baby is physically connected and thus dependent upon his mother for life, the baby can be aborted. So I asked her to play that principle out in some hypothetical scenarios.
I asked, “What if the entire baby has been delivered except for its head? Should a woman have a right to kill the baby then?”
She replied, “Yes” (indicating her support for partial birth abortion).
I pressed further, “What if the baby has been delivered completely but is stillconnected to the mother by the umbilical cord. Should a woman have a right to kill the baby then?”
She replied, “Yes.”
I pressed still further, “What if the baby has been delivered completely, is stillconnected to the mother by the umbilical cord, and remains outside the womb for an hour while still connected? Should a woman have a right to kill the baby then?”
She replied, “Yes. If it’s still connected to the mother, it’s still a part of her body, and she has a right to abort it.”
I was astonished and informed her, “That’s infanticide, and that’s illegal.”
It was at that point that I realized that this conversation wasn’t about logic. It wasn’t about what was reasonable or right. This was just blind passion, and this woman had no ears to hear the cold inhumanity of her own position.
The encounter brought home again how indefensible the pro-choice position is. There is no morally significant difference between a person inside the birth canal and one outside. One is here, and one is there. But there’s no basis for arguing that one is human outside but not human while only inches away inside the birth canal (or for that matter in the womb). The pro-choice position is indeed ethically bankrupt.
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