This article made me want to gag.
We don't feel guilty. We don't feel ashamed. We're not even really sad, because terminating these fetuses — at 15 weeks' gestation — was a medical imperative. This has been a white-knuckle pregnancy from Day 1, and had it gone on as it was going, Tina's health would have been in jeopardy, according to her doctor. The fact is, multiple pregnancies are high risk, and they can go bad very suddenly. I wasn't going to allow that, though the fires of hell might beckon.
They weren't even sad at seeing two of their own children killed?
They underwent IVF. You get the feeling these people see the unborn as some kind of "genetic ooze" to be manipulated.
Would it — as proposed by South Carolina's pending "ultrasound" legislation — require women to look at pictures of their fetuses in an attempt to impress on them the humanity of the fetus they are aborting? Believe me, they know.
Apparently not. Apparently, this couple couldn't manage to be sad about the death of their own offspring.
We got a sense of this kind of heavy-handed paternalism in Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion in Gonzales vs. Carhart, in which he asserted that the ban would ultimately be good for women, who would be spared the mental and moral trauma of the procedure.
As I quoted in this blogpost:
Let's be honest. If some other medical procedure was causing thousands of women to experience depression, suicidal thoughts and other mental health issues, there would be an uproar over the need for change, the need to address the problem. And rightfully so.
The court's ruling upholds the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which declares the intact D&E — in which the fetus is partially extracted from the uterus before being dispatched with an aspirating needle, scissors or forceps — to be "gruesome and inhumane." But the truth is, there is no such thing as a pretty abortion. The alternatives to intact D&E are no less grim. Is grasping and dismembering the fetus in utero with forceps (as opposed to after a partial extraction) or injecting it with heart-stopping chemicals and then delivering the stillbirth any less repellent?
Gruesomeness is no standard at all. Removing the organs from a brain-dead teenager is gruesome, yet we do it to preserve the life of an organ recipient. The point is, sometimes it's necessary.
The procedure is morally gruesome. But I guess that fact completely escapes this guy.
I guess the guy can't tell the difference between a baby who is half out of the womb and is killed on a technicality, and a baby killed entirely inside the womb. Do you get the feeling the guy has no clue about the debate?
Americans need to be careful what they wish for. I think antiabortion advocates imagine a world in which women — promiscuous, lazy or selfish singletons — roll into the doctor's office for midterm abortions and stick their feet in the stirrups while still chatting on the cellphone. Recreational abortions, you might say.
But in the real world, that's not how it happens. Virtually no one takes the matter lightly.
I have read enough abortion accounts to know that that's crap. There is a wide variety of approaches to abortion, including clueless teenagers who think it's like getting your tonsils removed.
Some wanted to know how we decided to keep the girls. Partly, it was a matter of how the fetuses were arranged. Partly, it had to do with other factors. Some studies show offspring of older fathers (I'm 47) run a higher risk of autism, and males are four times as likely to be autistic. Still, I had reservations about bringing girls into the world now, when forces seemed to be aligning to disenfranchise them (nine of 10 GOP presidential candidates favor reversing Roe vs. Wade). I hate to think my girls will have to fight the battles their mothers and grandmothers fought.
How liberal. Doesn't want to deal with an autistic child, but is afraid for his daughters.
When Roz and Viv grow up, I hope one day I can introduce them to her. I think she'd be proud
"Hey kids, meet the woman who killed your two unborn siblings. They died so you can live."
Yeah, that's a nice homey moment. Do they have a Hallmark card for that?
Once again, a whole long article about abortion by a liberal, but he doesn't address a single argument about the value of the fetus.
Really, pro-lifers should be requiring liberals to speak to that issue. The writer completely neglected to address the issue of killing babies half outside the womb.
_________________________
Visit Opinions Canada
a political blogs aggregator
_________________________
