April 21, 2010

By Dave Andrusko

At the sight of more and more pro-abortionists displaying ever-increasing levels of anxiety, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that a significant segment of the anti-life set desperately pines for the land that time forgot. Just go away ultrasounds and prenatal surgery and sex-selection abortions and waves of pro-life young people and studies documenting the soul-sapping reality of fetal pain and…and... You get the point.

Our pro-life friends up north, probably because the sledding is so rough, often have a very keen insight to what's happening in the Canada and the United States. Writing in the Calgary Herald a few days ago, Susan Martinuk wrote under the headline, "It's been a tough week for pro-choicers."

Gov. Dave Heineman (left) signs Nebraska's historic "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” With him are  Speaker of the Legislature Mike Flood, who worked tirelessly on behalf of the bill, and Julie Schmit-Albin, executive director of Nebraska Right to Life, who did a wonderful job of shepherding the bill through the legislature.

While we've written about both pieces of evidence Ms. Martinuk surveys, she has an interesting take on each. For example, she says of Nebraska's landmark Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, "If you doubt the need for such a law, simply cut your finger off and then imagine the greatly exaggerated pain that is felt by the unborn as it is literally torn apart and evacuated -- just because it has been labeled a biological inconvenience."

Opponents in Nebraska have a two-track defense, and the insistence that there is no evidence for fetal pain at 20 weeks is one. Problem for them here is that the evidence does exist and each time they deny the undeniable it gives us the opportunity to document this.

The other track is the oldest chapter in the pro-abortion playbook: hard cases. (I'll deal with that specifically tomorrow.)

Martinuk then looks at another event that has contributed to "reveal[ing] the various incongruities that underlie the pro-abortion philosophy and forced pro-abortionists into a position where they must confront the humanity of the unborn child." And, like fetal pain, this too is a kind of "hush-hush" subject.

In this instance it's that sex selection abortion "still occurs among cultural groups (from countries such as China and India) that value boys more than girls," as a current article in the Journal of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada notes. While officially condemned by Canada's Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, it continues.

The authors ask for new guidelines, noting that doctors in British Columbia apparently already practice something similar. In a general way, without withholding information about a baby's sex, the recommendation is that physicians don't go out of their way to tell parents "until after 20 weeks, when it is supposedly more difficult to attain an abortion," Martinuk writes.

Clearly physicians are uncomfortable with killing babies because they are girls. Martinuk simply points out what difference does it make WHAT the reason is if the only issue on the table is a woman's "right" to abort?

"Yet that leaves many feminists twisting in the wind of their own rhetoric," she writes. "[H]ow can feminists support the practice of killing girl babies on the basis of their sex? And, how can they deny women a right to a sex selective abortion, yet still claim that abortion is about a woman's right to choose, not what's best for society?"

Too much information, too much truth, the exposure of too much hypocrisy = a "very tough week for abortion proponents."

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com and read our new pro-life blog "National Right to Life News Today" found at www.nationalrighttolifenews.org.

Part One