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The Unspeakable Cruelty of Abortion
Q. Do you support abortion after birth?
A. It’s always a woman’s right to choose.Q. So I can kill my two-year-old?
A. It’s her choice.Q. At any point in a child’s life?
A. It’s a woman’s right to choose.
The above is from a short clip from an on-the-street interview with a pro-abortion protester. The video conveys the obvious sincerity and conviction of the protester.
The interview was conducted by LiveAction (a pro-life organization) and so it was probably deceptively edited because that’s always true of those pro-lifers, innit? They are so darned clever at snipping out phrases, the ones which, left in, would’ve let that woman sound obviously sane and completely convincing — how do they do it?
Alternatively…
Maybe this time around they just chose an unusually unintelligent and inarticulate abortion rights activist, out of a number of more nuanced and representative interviews, and posted hers to make the whole crowd sound dumb?
Still, what is the essential difference between this woman’s remarks and the testimony offered by what we might call a high-ranking and obviously intelligent abortion rights activist questioned this week before Congress?
Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, stating the obvious — that it is not lawful and morally acceptable to take the life of a child at 10 — asked abortion advocate Aimee Arrambide “what is the principal distinction between the human being that is two years old, or nine months old, or an hour old, than one that is eight inches further up the birth canal in the uterus?”
Arrambide paused. Then: “I trust people to determine what to do with their own bodies. Full stop.”
What is it, exactly, that the woman has determined when she determines to have abortion done with her body? It is a medical procedure that is perfectly and totally okay: decent and virtuous, it is healthcare and healthy and normal…But it must not be publicly described. To do so — to describe it — is “inflammatory.”
Ah well. The practitioners of many medical specialties politely hold their tongues at dinner parties: Who really wants to hear, over a plateful of bolognese, about a bowel resection; share a plate of Buffalo wings with an orthopedic surgeon who peeled apart an elderly woman’s gluteal muscles so he could yank her femur out of its socket? Heck, I’m just a chaplain, and I have to be sensitive about what sorts of details “normal people” might want to know about the body of the drowning victim I helped recover last month.
Nonetheless, if I were testifying before Congress about the effect of prolonged immersion on the human body, I would not wax indignant should my interlocutor ask me whether de-gloving is a feature. I would describe it — all of it — without the slightest fear of “inflaming” public sentiment against the work I do.
Yashica Robinson, M.D. announced, “I am a physician and a proud abortion provider. There is nothing that you can say that makes it difficult for me to talk about the care that I provide.” And then went on to not talk about it, a move that was interpreted by the mainstream media as righteous disdain for the White Men who dared bring up the subject. None —a t least that I came across—were inclined to provide their readers with the details that Dr. Robinson withheld.
“White Men,” by this time, surely ought to be plainly understood as a signal that the facts do not favor the arguments of those who take refuge behind the epithet. After all, Ms. Arrambide had also affirmed, during the same hearings, that men can get pregnant — presumably, that includes white ones. Men must now be allowed to have an opinion, or at least raise questions, about abortion.
Meh. Like “racist,” “transphobe,” “white supremacist” and “misogynist,” none of it means much more than “shut up.” And I won’t.
Forget all that: I’ll simply confess: I don’t get Yashica Robinson, M.D. or her colleagues—these young, hip, obviously educated women. I don’t understand them.
An orthopedic surgeon planning to dismantle and then reassemble my husband’s hip casually described the procedure to me, and I thought I’d pass out. I loved the hip and its owner and what he described was a dramatic and unsettlingly violent procedure. However, the end-result was intended to be (and was, thank him and God) life-giving. I knew this, my husband knew it, the doctor knew it: It was not difficult for him to talk about the care that he provided.
As with hip replacement surgery, the recovery of a dead body can be a strenuous and clumsy thing, and from the outside, it might not look like love. Still, it is love. I have even held and touched the bodies, heavy-in-death, of dead children: A small human form should arouse in adults a strong instinct to protect, nurture, comfort. Speaking for myself, they do—even when they are decomposed or otherwise damaged, beyond all the repair available this side of heaven.
Abortion providers encourage us to pretend that abortion is just about a blob of undifferentiated cells. She’ll use euphemisms, like “product of conception” and “contents of the uterus.” But the provider herself — Dr. Robinson, say — knows that when she begins her procedure, the baby is alive. She must grasp the little arms and legs and ribcages, tear them loose, drag them forth, hold them in her hands. She must gaze into the faces, see the little eyes, the nose, the whorl of the hair already growing on the crown of the crushed head.
I’m not saying she’ll catch a glimpse of these in passing, I’m saying it is part her job to examine them. To manipulate, assemble and count the pieces, to make sure nothing remains behind, to make sure the perfect whole has been successfully killed, successfully extracted. How can she?
How can she look at an unborn fetus kicking on an ultrasound screen — the same image that surely moves any normal human being to tender wonder — and see not a member of her own human family, but the target for her instruments? How can she not recoil at the thought that the fetus could feel pain as she crushes and tears him to pieces? I don’t get it.
This is a violent act — strenuous, even. One of the abortion providers caught on the (deceptively edited) Planned Parenthood tapes laughed about having to go to the gym to build up her biceps so as to have the strength required to pull a fetal thigh from its socket.
Like Yashica Robinson, that doctor didn’t look like a sadist. She looked like any nice young woman I might encounter at the YMCA, each of us going through our strength-training routines, building the same muscles for different purposes.
Do not all the atrocities of human history become wholly comprehensible in the light of this? What more evidence do any of us need for the existence of our original and ineradicable sin, our desperate need for forgiveness and grace?
Published in Healthcare
By their standards, some men do and some women don’t.
Infanticide has a long and rich tradition across all human cultures.
I actually went back an looked at the twitter video. I wonder if she would support her mother’s right to choose now if her mother sees this and decides she made the wrong choice years ago.
I think that the problem is feminism. I do agree that both men and women have behaved reprehensibly with regard to sexual morality.
But women have a problem that men don’t have. They are the ones who get pregnant. This gives the woman a good reason to say no, absent the availability of birth control (which doesn’t actually work well in practice) and abortion (when birth control does not work).
The key to killing another human being is to establish distance from them. Moral distance (they are evil / want to kill me) is a common one. You can also dehumanize them to make the target not be a person by various ways. You can also distance yourself from the action, like how we handle executions. It’s not that terribly hard – infanticide has a long history.
No one ever discusses the cause of death for women who die after an abortion. Tonya Reeves bled to death. Jennifer Morbelli had an embryonic fluid embolism. We are being warned that there will be violence after the Supreme Court decision is announced. Everything about abortion is nothing but violence.
You mean like a cult of death?
Interestingly the early feminists were opposed to abortion on exactly that ground, i.e., that it reduces women’s power.
I thought contraceptives worked pretty well if used properly.
That requires responsibility.
I think it’s been shown that while any single instance of use of the contraceptives prevents a pregnancy, the culture it creates results in a parabolic rise of unwanted pregnancies. We are awash in contraceptives. Have unwanted pregnancies gone away? Other than perhaps pre-teens, who today doesn’t know of contraceptives? No one. Have unwanted pregnancies’ gone away? No. In engineering we look at an entire system, not one element in the system. The system in our culture of a mentality of contraception results in more unwanted pregnancies. This is why Planned Parenthood pushes contraceptives. They feed on this.
Actually, more uterus-owners oppose abortion than non-owners. Also, half the babies being killed have a uterus, and their opinions are not being consulted.
I hadn’t thought of this.
Her body, her choice, in utero.
Silence is not consent.
Granny, this is the best written, most tightly-argued exposition of the pro-life position that I have ever encountered. Thank you for this.
That’s not true at all. Data on the effectiveness of birth control don’t take into account patient motivation and the degree of physician counseling.
In 31 years practicing gynecology and reproductive endocrinology I had one (1) patient conceive against her will while on prescribed birth control. That’s one out of perhaps five thousand patients, one out of perhaps 10,000 woman-years, maybe even 20-30,000 woman years.
On the other hand, I saw at least 12 patients who had conceived while taking birth control pills under the care of other Docs, including Planned Parenthood. A common theme in their stories was choosing too low a dose pill, or a triphasic pill. This taught me to avoid those like the plague.
Yes, the ugly truth they ignore and that I have been called a racist on Twitter for pointing it out.
The definitive description for today
https://townhall.com/columnists/laurahollis/2022/05/05/good-riddance-to-roe-v-wade-and-its-culture-of-coercion-n2606789
Without Roe v. Wade, what questions will the Dems have to ask prospective justices?
That is the cancer called abortion…..it destroys more than babies…. Civil society, norms, justice, politics, culture, women,marriage, religion.
Our cities, and to some extent, our country, are the modern day Sodom and Gomorrahs, awash in the fruits of the sexual revolution: reduction in marriages and religion, high numbers of feral males from single parent households, gangs, drugs, crime, failing schools. Abortion enabled sexual liberation, which became more destructive than liberating. Just like pneumonia is the killer that covid ushers in, cultural Marxism is the killer the above sins ushered in. Were Sodom and Gomorrah real or their stories created to tell a moral fable warning of real destruction in societies that give in to the “seven deadly sins”? Does it matter when we can see for ourselves the byproducts of human frailties?
So here’s how I talk with my son and daughter about this, because
they hear podcasts with me on occasion and those podcasts talk about grown-up things and range from PG to R in discussion presentation.
One particularly nefarious pattern running though them is what appears to be within-context replays of public “influencers” saying things.
We heard a person in a Congressional hearing say – that is answer this question, “are you saying a man can get pregnant” with “yes.” We also heard a then-tentative to the Supreme Court indicate an inability to define “woman.”
I explained to my kids a few things:
1. The now-Supreme Court justice should have come up with a better answer than deference to qualified biologists. There is a legal definition and that is “an adult human female.”
2. The woman (Aimee Arrambide) answering questions in Congress is actually stupid. However, so was was Rep. Bishop (R-NC) for not following-up and clarifying for the record with, “let’s be clear, Ms. Arrambide, you are referring to trans-man, that is a person of the female sex who is identifying as a man, who has not yet or may not ever, undergo surgical procedures such that the person’s female organs of childbearing, i.e., a uterus, and so forth, are rendered inactive or removed altogether. Thus such a person, who identifies as a man, certainly can become a pregnant person.” Science agrees with that: a female, regardless of how she identifies, with all the working parts thereof, can get pregnant. And can get pregnant, as such, against “his” will, i.e., impregnated through rape. A man, however, that is, a male human being, cannot become pregnant, cannot lactate, cannot bear a child – without extra-natural means, that is, weird surgical procedures that add working childbearing organs. Such a process would be pursued specifically for purposes of getting pregnant. And while these extremely procedures currently only exist for female humans, there will be a time when it’s possible for trans-women as well. And it’s probable that artificial vaginas, at some point in the future, will function accordingly and thus one day a man can really be transformed into as close a heterosexual woman as possible.
The main point of the abortion battle in the culture war, as I see it, is that a pregnant person wants an abortion on-demand, does not want a reason for it, does not want to die having it, and does not want to have to apologize to anyone for it, due process, including council, for the baby has no relevance.
The pro-abortion crowd’s real argument is that the unborn is not a person and is part of the woman’s body until after it is born, and being a part of the woman’s body, the woman exercises complete, supreme control over it. They also do not believe that any religious doctrine, including science, should govern over this.
How old are your kids?
I actually think it’s grimmer than you describe. I think they really aren’t even arguing over the personhood of the unborn child. Their argument is total bodily autonomy pre-birth even if it means killing a person. And full-on infanticide is built-in to their position.
Even ancient pagans weren’t this homicidal.
I’ve seen this argument, Tabby. It’s nonsense, of course. There is a big difference between Adam—presented as inert flesh, or even clay—being breathed into life by God, and a human fetus which is already living (kicking, swimming, jumping) flesh. As far as “breath” goes, she receives oxygen from her mother through the effervescent lifeline of the umbilical chord, and that little person is, from an early age, actively practicing breathing, not merely passively awaiting it: She exercises her tiny diaphragm, expands and contracts her little lungs, pushing and pulling amniotic fluid in and out to prepare for the lighter medium of air.
We might notice, by the way, that in Genesis 2, God creates Eve…and yet does not need to breathe life into her. Derived as she is by already-living human flesh (albeit “cast into a deep sleep”—God used anesthesia, why can’t the abortionist?) there was no need for a new, separate external source of life.
21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
That’s what I don’t understand.
I suppose I retain this sentimental? primitive? notion that the mere sight of a small human feature—a hand, an ear—must automatically bring forth mercy, pity, compassion. Of course it doesn’t. Where have I been? As several have pointed out, infanticide is so common in human history as to be considered normal.
Fine. But as I said to one of my pro-choice friends (actually, we’re all mean to say “pro-abortion” now, because pro-choice sounds like abortion is bad…!?) most and perhaps all of the most horrible human behaviors are common, normal features of human society: Rape, slavery, murder (of course) torture…that doesn’t mean I have to count these as acceptable, or withhold judgement on physicians who are not Phoenicians or Ottomans or Maoiri, but modern Americans who should damned well know better.
I understand the psychology: All of us are prone to seeing what we want to see, hearing what we want to hear, believing what it makes us more comfortable to believe. I empathize with the woman having the abortion. She doesn’t see what the doctor doesn’t show her, and she isn’t the one getting paid.
I have a daughter who is, right now, pregnant (YAY!) with a baby who swam right past an IUD like it was nuttin’…
We think he’s pretty spiffy. (He’s a boy).
Yes. And if it’s a part of a woman’s body, why does she expel it, along with the placenta.
I knew one pro-abortion guy who described the fetus as a “parasite”.
From Roger Kimball’s piece, Liberty, Equality, and the Biden Administration on Abortion:
He continues:
Emphasis mine. However, doctors who perform abortions? Pretty closely related to wolves.
I had a friend who made just this argument justifying her abortion in 1977. Just two days before she said it, we had attended the funeral of a friend who had died in a car accident. I said to her: would you rather Nick be alive but you’ll never see him for the rest of your life? Or prefer him dead?
I don’t doubt giving a baby up for adoption is traumatic. But I don’t understand how it’s more traumatic than an abortion. That said, I know many people who have had abortions. I’m amazed at how casually mere acquaintances make mention of it.