Observing the
Infinite Capacity for Self-Deception
Part One of Three
By Dave Andrusko
Part Two
is a reprint from the Robert Powell
Center for Medical Ethics.
Part Three
brings together three items in a brief,
readable way. Please send your comments
to
daveandrusko@gmail.com. If
you'd like, follow me at
www.twitter.com/daveha
"What do you do with
experiences and sensations like mine?
Providers of second trimester abortions
see things that most people don't. What
kind of dissociative process inside us
allows us to do this routinely? What
normal person does this kind of work?
This brings me to the issue of
violence."
-- Abortionist Lisa H. Harris, "Second Trimester
Abortion Provision: Breaking the Silence
and Changing the Discourse."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My e-mail box began to
fill up minutes after we posted "A Long
Night's Journey into Dehumanization and
the Moral Incoherence of Abortion."
Since we have lots to cover today in
Parts Two and Three, I will try to be
relatively brief. What follows is
inspired by the brilliant, passionate
responses of a ton of readers to the
outrageous remarks of abortionist Lisa
Harris.
The most frequent
response was bewilderment. On second
thought, I take that back. By far the
most common response was to offer
prayers for a woman who was able to
abort a woman carrying an 18-week-old
baby at the same time Harris herself was
carrying a baby of the same age.
To understand fully you
have to have read yesterday's edition.
If you haven't, please doand then pass
it along to all your friends, pro-life
and otherwise.
Harris' essay, which
first appeared last year in
"Reproductive Health Matters," was
brought to a different (and presumably
larger) audience when she recently
posted on
http://abortioneers.blogspot.com. I
heard about it because a pro-life friend
brought the essay to my attention.
I mention the blog
because it recently lamented that we
"antis" are "stalking our blog, taking
our words out of context, twisting our
work, and bringing yucky negativity our
way." I took great pains not to commit
any of these grievous offenses (although
the latter was unavoidable) as I tried
to understand how the same woman who
became unglued when her unborn baby
moved while she was aborting another
baby could descend so far as to be proud
that she subsequently had skillfully
cajoled her own abortion clinic into
aborting children at the edge of
viability.
If such a thing were
technologically possible, I am sure the
e-mails I received would have been
soaked with tears. I've been in the
Movement since the mid-70s, and writing
about abortion since the late 70s. In
all that time I have never seen people
so rocked back on their heels.
"Speechless," "total
shock," "bewildered," "unfathomable and
"heartless" were typical of the
comments.
After reading them and
reflecting on what they said, it dawned
on me why everyone, including me, was so
stunned. Think about this for a second.
Harris writes that she "felt a kick a
fluttery 'thump, thump' in my own
uterus. It was one of the first times I
felt fetal movement. There was a leg and
foot in my forceps, and a 'thump, thump'
in my abdomen." Did she heartlessly
brush this Dantesque moment aside? No!
"Instantly, tears were
streaming from my eyes without me
meaning my conscious brain - even being
aware of what was going on. I felt as if
my response had come entirely from my
body, bypassing my usual cognitive
processing completely. A message seemed
to travel from my hand and my uterus to
my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming
feeling a brutally visceral response
heartfelt and unmediated by my training
or my feminist pro-choice politics. It
was one of the more raw moments in my
life."
So, what happens in an
abortion--and to whom--was as clear as
it could be for any human being. But
there was more to the continuing
education of Lisa H. Harris,
abortionist.
Later in the essay she
talks about performing an
"uncomplicated" abortion on a
23-week-old baby just before she "rushed
upstairs to take overnight call on
labour and delivery." What did she
encounter there?
The first patient that
came in was prematurely delivering at
23-24 weeks. As her exact gestational
age was in question, the neonatal
intensive care unit (NICU) team
resuscitated the premature newborn and
brought it to the NICU. Later, along
with the distraught parents, I watched
the neonate on the ventilator. I thought
to myself how bizarre it was that I
could have legally dismembered this
fetus-now-newborn if it were inside its
mother's uterus - but that the same kind
of violence against it now would be
illegal, and unspeakable.
I've concluded that it
was Harris' ability to ultimately blow
by that combination of incredible
experiences that so knocked my readers,
and me, for a loop. The insanity of
abortion is made clear to Harris in ways
that no one could possibly miss. Yet
here she is rallying abortionists to
"build team cohesion" and not to forget
all the "unique rewards" that killing
babies well into the second trimester
brings to them.
One correspondent said
this shows how you cannot "dialogue with
evil." I'm not sure how I feel about
that.
But what I do know is
that in watching Harris preen about her
ability to overcome the "stigma" of
killing huge unborn babies, we have been
afforded an almost unparalleled
opportunity to witness the human
capacity for self-deception.
Please send your comments
to
daveandrusko@gmail.com.
Part Two
Part Three
