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NRL News
Hysterical Pro-Abortion Reaction Speaks Volumes This forces doctors into making a tough decision about whether they follow through on women’s health care needs or they protect themselves from the long arm of the law,’ said Tim Stanley, a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood.” -- From the March 4 St. Paul Pioneer Press, referring to a bill introduced in Minnesota that would ban sex-selection abortions “Ultrasound bill is an outrageous intrusion by the Texas Legislature: Sen. Patrick’s bill to shame women seeking abortions is wrongheaded” -- Headline of an editorial that appeared in the March 2 Austin American-Statesman “Still, no matter how much we may wish it life doesn’t come with a rewind or a pause button and can only be lived moment by moment.” -- Joseph J. Mazzella, author “When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can’t live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.” -- Judith Martin, author Although it holds true 99% of the time, I’m sure our benighted opposition would disagree vehemently that the louder they scream, or the more inflammatory their language, the more likely it is they are swimming against the tide of public opinion. But I offer the following two examples to illustrate just how true this is. It is a stretch, even by the elastic logic that clothes pro-abortion feminist thinking, to argue (as does Mr. Stanley) that refusing to allow female babies to be aborted just because they are female “forces doctors into making a tough decision about whether they follow through on women’s health care needs.” Unless there’s been a new medical breakthrough—“Flash: Carrying Females Harmful to Mother’s Health”—obviously it has nothing whatsoever to do with health. And, please, the “long arm of the law”? Give me a break. They employ these logic-chopping, throw-in-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink tactics because they know the American public is staunchly against them. To take just two polls, in 2007, Ayres, McHenry Associates asked if respondents thought “abortions should be legal or illegal in your state” and then listed various situations, including, “Woman does not like the gender of the fetus.” An overwhelming 79% said abortions should be illegal in this circumstance. A 2006 Zogby poll gauged the support to make these abortions illegal at a whopping 86%. The Austin American-Statesman editorial on the proposed ultrasound bill in Texas can charitably be described as hysterical. The writers flipped through the pages of their pro-abortion thesaurus for every buzz word they could think of while simultaneously disparaging the authors of the bill personally in a display of what amounted to the equivalent of holding their breath. Women are “force-fed information designed to humiliate them” (information which “misinform[s] women”], courtesy of two “leading culture warriors” who are in league with “anti-abortion activists” who are “shaking their collective fingers” at pregnant women! And that’s just the nice part of the editorial. But, to be fair, it’d hard to imagine two proposals more likely to receive a positive response from legislatures (those not thoroughly in hock to the Abortion Establishment, that is) and the public at large. Killing female babies in the name of women’s equality? What’s wrong with that picture? Speaking of pictures, I honestly don’t think we can exaggerate how important is the impact of ultrasound technology. Ultrasounds—especially 3-D, full-color—are the best salesmen the unborn child has ever had. It doesn’t matter what a person thinks they think about abortion. You see that little one frolicking around, doing everything but handstands (at least I don’t think unborn babies perform handstands), and it is very difficult to persuade yourself this is anyone but one of us. The other editorial that begins on page two talks about Today’s News & Views, NRL’s daily blog, which is part of our communications outreach. On March 5, I wrote a piece about a new novel, Handle with Care. Best selling author Jodi Picoult deals with the incredibly destructive fallout from a “wrongful life” suit brought by a mother of a child born with a severe genetic anomaly. (You can read my take at www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/Mar09/nv030509.html.) The mother in Picoult’s novel sues her obstetrician, “arguing that if the diagnosis of osteogenesis imperfecta [brittle bone disease] had been made at the first prenatal ultrasound, she would have been able to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy at 18 weeks,” in the words of the Washington Post’s reviewer. This perfectly illustrates that ultrasound is the ultimate two-edged sword. It can bond a mother and father so tightly to their unborn child that a team of wild horses couldn’t pull them apart. But ultrasounds can also be employed on search-and-destroy missions, whether it be against children with genetic “defects,” or against children who are the “wrong” gender. But as author Joseph J. Mazzella explains in one of the quotes that begins this editorial, “life doesn’t come with a rewind or a pause button.” You play life as it comes, “moment by moment.” I do not minimize the difficulties associated when kids are severely injured, but I do not dwell on them to the exclusion of all the joy. The genetic difficulty is unwanted, but that oughtn’t to make the child herself unwanted. Over and over again parents and siblings turn the dross of what is often a prenatal diagnosis tinged with recommendations to abort the baby into pure gold. I cannot begin to convey to you the fierce loyalty and utter devotion that is such a part of the e-mails I receive every time I write about this. As one girl wrote me just this week, “I have a brother who is Down Syndrome and he is the best thing in our lives to have.” Good luck to all state legislatures this year as they find more and more creative ways to bring home the truth about the humanity of unborn children. Ears are being unstopped and hearts softened. |