This year I missed posting anything on the anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade because of a combination of busyness with the "same God" controversy, a bout of political discouragement, and a lack of inspiration.
Here, two days late, I'd like to do a small bit to rectify that omission.
Back in December, Newsweek published an article on abortion that was hardly a pro-life op-ed. But as it happened, the cover picture at Newsweek showed (I know this will horrify you) a pic of an unborn child, and that was just too much for the more-pro-abortion-than-thou Sady Doyle at Elle, who was shocked, shocked, to find that a fetus looks like a baby.
I won't take you through all of Doyle's tedious, anti-scientific gibberish. It's hard to decide which of her statements is the most absurd and/or creepy, but maybe it was her insistence that the unborn baby in the Newsweek picture was "relatively late-term." If you compare the Newsweek cover (as shown here) with fetal development images (here, here, or here, for example), you can see that the fetus in the Newsweek picture appears to be well within the first trimester--perhaps around the ten-week mark. Scarcely "late-term." Look at the development of the ears, for example. Those are little ear-nubbins, not the ears of a late-term unborn child. The scientific fact is that unborn human beings look baby-like really early. Deal with it, Elle.
But Doyle can't handle the truth, and she wants to be sure that her readers can't, either. She even makes some garbled argument based on various reasons for late-term abortions and contrasts the unborn child in those cases with the one in the Newsweek picture because "even in cases where a fetus was carried long enough to look very human, it probably wouldn't look like a healthy, happy baby." Well, that's fine. As long as it doesn't look healthy and happy, killing it is no problem, right?
Contrast Doyle's imitation of Miracle Max when hearing the word "Humperdinck" with Frederica Matthews-Green's story of her own change of heart. Green was impressed by Richard Selzer's historic 1976 piece "What I Saw At the Abortion," and changed her mind on the issue as a result. Selzer's article, much less graphic than the information we have now about abortions, describes the movement of a syringe injecting saline into the mother's abdomen--a movement representing the unborn child's reaction to the burning saline. Selzer is a master with words, and in a sense it is no wonder that Green was struck, reading him, by the violence of abortion. But given the contrast with Doyle, who is suppressing even more information than Green had at the time, Green's 1970's hippie honesty and consistency is refreshing.
Politically, we seem to be at a low point. Even after the Planned Parenthood videos were published, and even with a Republican-majority Congress, our representatives were unable to muster the votes to overturn a presidential veto and defund Planned Parenthood. And to my mind the prospects don't look good for taking even that small step after 2016, whatever the outcome of that election year. I hope I am wrong.
The Planned Parenthood videos were important. They woke some people up. They got pro-lifers willing to protest once more. But I fear (pessimist that I am) that they will have no effect on national policy. Many others (such as Doyle) just doubled down in response to the videos. Sin--including the sin of defending murder--makes you stupid.
At a time like this, there is one encouraging thought: Truth is on our side. The humanity of the unborn child is a patent fact, and technology has made that fact more evident than ever. Some will suppress the truth. Others will let the truth set them free. Therefore, whatever happens, whatever follows, whatever our discouragements, what we must never cease to do is to tell the truth and show the truth--the child and the violence against the child.
If that truth will never actually "win" until Jesus comes again, that makes no difference to what we must do. We shall not have failed of our task if we continue to proclaim the truth, to cry out against the slaughter, to try to save those being led away to death. And meanwhile, there will be the victories--the mothers who see ultrasounds and cannot kill their babies, the men and women who hear facts of fetal development and change their minds.
Let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.
Comments (7)
You can say that again. It was an entirely pro-abortion op-ed. I say that because, in spite of the author trying to pretend (maybe he even thinks it) that he holds some kind of "rational middle" (his word) ground between the two camps, (a) every argument he brings to bear is against the pro-life side, (b) every argument he gives - if this weren't an op-ed, and weren't promoting the liberal pro-death agenda - would have had the editor cutting and red-lining all the errors, mistakes, unsupported claims, etc. It is funny (in a grotesque sort of way) that the author thinks he is capable of pretending to occupy a middle ground, when he cannot even so much as accord the ORDINARY common courtesy of using the group term each side gives for themselves. He calls the pro-death people "pro-choice" (even though the facade on that name has been exposed countless times, many here at W4), but the other side he calls "anti-abortion" instead of "pro-life". Yeah, that's likely to represent a clear, unbiased middle position.
Nor is he capable of actually grasping the pro-life point of view, so it's not surprising that he cannot occupy a rational middle ground: look at this mis-attempt to align the positions for and against:
By that kind of "logic", I am glad he is not in charge of anything important.
You gotta love his list of "solutions":
And there you have it. The cause of abortion is lack of the far left liberal agenda, which is: destroy the family, eradicate chastity, demolish personal responsibility, hound employers, disincentivize adoption, and make sure the federal government is intimately in charge of daily "family" life. So to get rid of abortion, the solution is obvious.
Posted by Tony | January 24, 2016 5:04 PM
Posted at FB. Thanks, Lydia.
Posted by Beth Impson | January 24, 2016 5:09 PM
Tony, you're channeling Dave Andrusko of NRLC, who wrote a good fisking of the Newsweek nonsense.
http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2015/12/americas-abortion-wars-and-how-to-end-them-another-sledgehammer-attack-on-the-movement-in-the-guise-of-even-handedness/#.VoLxHLYrJko
Posted by Lydia | January 24, 2016 8:11 PM
And by the way, it's bad enough when a woman feminista is doing the bait-n-switch on every argument (and all the other fallacies), but you have a whole nother level of disorder when it's a man feminista (I assume Kurt is a man) doing it. Here's his comment about and definition of mansplaining:
How's that! According to this approach, there's no possible way way for a man to approach a woman on this issue. It's not that he MIGHT be accused of mansplaining, it's that according to this definition, anything he says (other than abject agreement to whatever SHE says) will be mansplaining. For, an argument consists in trying to show the other the right way to think about a matter. Kurt has not only drunk the poison in the kool-aid, he is not even aware that he swallowed the kool-aid, much less the poison.
For those readers who (lucky them) have not been tortured with hearing this word before, here is Merriam-Webster's account of it:
And here is urbandictionary recounting its morphing into a useless nonsense word:
(Notice the way urbandictionary captures the "angry woman" with the all caps?) In effect, this makes the root "man" in any word into an epithet of extreme disgust. It's not so surprising when women feminista professional man-haters use it that way, you know you can't use reason with them. But when a man uses it that way, you have a different level of problem talking to him.
Posted by Tony | January 25, 2016 8:57 AM
"Politically, we seem to be at a low point. Even after the Planned Parenthood videos were published, and even with a Republican-majority Congress, our representatives were unable to muster the votes to overturn a presidential veto and defund Planned Parenthood. And to my mind the prospects don't look good for taking even that small step after 2016, whatever the outcome of that election year. I hope I am wrong.
The Planned Parenthood videos were important. They woke some people up. They got pro-lifers willing to protest once more. But I fear (pessimist that I am) that they will have no effect on national policy. Many others (such as Doyle) just doubled down in response to the videos. Sin--including the sin of defending murder--makes you stupid."
I hope I am wrong, I hope my pessimism is unwarranted here, but I have the sense that when it's all said and done that the videos will have turned out to be a coup for Planned Parenthood and baby killing in general. In large part because there has been no change in national policy, but also because David Daliedan is now indicted and facing 20 years for this. Sure, he may not spend a day in jail, but it is not as if any PP officials to my knowledge are in the same boat. They have nothing to worry about. Right now, that seems to say everything.
Posted by DR84 | January 25, 2016 11:51 PM
It is a sad and strange world when PP, even after the public release of the videos, suffer no real national reputation downfall.
The Republican-majority Congress are practically useless. They are either indifferent about the issue or they're just incompetent in forming an argument to win any social issue. On second thought, maybe both.
Abortion is one of those "middle ground" social issues where the "right" of the woman and "bodily sovereignty" wins out. In the end abortion wins. And let's face it, woman are only snuffing the unborn child mainly for vain reasons (just want the sex, not the child labor). The cases for abortion due to rape and incest are truly in low figures.
Posted by GRA | January 26, 2016 3:49 AM
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/planned-parenthood-will-not-face-justice-because-there-is-no-justice-in-america/
"I guess if I want to keep my “To Catch a Predator” analogy going, this would be similar to a situation where a prosecutor investigating suspects from that show also happened to be a serial pedophile. And before you accuse me of comparing Planned Parenthood board members to pedophiles, just realize that, yes, that’s exactly what I did."
Got to love Matt Walsh for simply telling it like it is. I also like Doug Wilson's suggestion to ask every candidate if they would pardon Dalieden and Merritt. This indictment seems to be very revealing about who holds the levers of power. The pro-life movement may be popular, but it's not powerful.
Posted by DR84 | January 26, 2016 1:51 PM