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Of All the Rhetorical Questions You Could’ve Asked…
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, writing in The Washington Post today:
While our opponents have been working to create scandal and panic where none exists, doctors and nurses at Planned Parenthood health centers have continued to provide care to thousands of women, men and young people every day — contraception, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and safe and legal abortion. Whose efforts are doing more to help families and make our country healthier?
Whose efforts are doing more to help families than an institution explicitly dedicated to preventing their formation or expansion? Ms. Richards, virtually everybody’s.
Published in Culture
Haven’t seen Red Feline around. That quote makes me think of her and sounds like something she would say.
I’m still a little confused why everyone seems so shocked and surprised by these videos. Once you’ve accepted that abortion is just a medical procedure, and that the entity removed from the patient’s body is just excised tissue, why wouldn’t you then want to use that excised tissue for research and development? Selling the tissue without the patient’s knowledge or permission would seem to constitute a form of fraud and theft, but that is much less evil than killing a child.
Many people have rejected GMOs because of emotional arguments that GMOs are the work of Dr. Frankenstein. Maybe abortionists looking like Dr. Frankenstein will persuade such people on this issue in a that were not persuaded by the logical argument children are children, even when they are connected to an umbilical cord. I’d rather people be persuaded by reason, but if they have to be persuaded by emotion, I’ll just have to live with it
So many of us have never ever accepted that lie. The philosophy and process of abortion is shocking, and will always be shocking to me.
Those that think ripping babies out of the womb is just medicine and not a shocking event scare me.
An ultra-sound is used to document the growth and life of a fetus by one doctor, while another uses it as a guide to butcher the fetus into the maximum re-usable parts.
The medical device is just the tool. How it is used demonstrates the character of the user’s soul.
It’s really gobsmacking — though hardly surprising — that PP insists on referring to abortion as just another kind of health care.
I can’t decide whether they actually believe that, or if they’re just very careful with their words. Okay, it’s probably both, but…
This point is the direct counter to health and welfare of the women argument for infanticide. I remember when I first started reading about these studies back in the early 90s. For some reason they didn’t get much coverage. I wonder why?
So I guess Planned Parenthood is in favor of increasing Women’s risk of breast cancer.
Or, the crude bumper sticker version: Planned Parenthood puts you at increased risk for breast cancer.
Careful, the Party of Death is not too far gone from advocating a Logan’s Run world. Oregon is the canary in the coal mine.
They have to constantly change it because to do otherwise would be to accept that it’s the practice and not the label that turns people off.
Think of the impact of the ultrasound. This kind of thing forces people to come to grips with the reality that the thing in the womb is a human being. I wouldn’t put that as pure emotionalism. It’s the fact that no, this isn’t just a clump of cells. The child has hands, and a heart, and a liver.
It also puts another face on the movement arguing for “safe, legal, and rare.”
I’m sure most of you have seen these already: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/07/planned-parenthoods-week-in-pictures-2.php
Not to sure how exterminating an order of magnitude more people than the holocaust qualifies as “making the nation healthier,”
Considering that Margaret Sanger was one of the major founders of the organization and wrote extensively on trying to cull undesirables (which in her words were the poor, in particular minorities which she thought would out breed and “revolt” and take over America from its proper White Masters; pretty weird but America was in the cream of the progressive era).
As such talking about women’s health is more or less a propaganda point for cover. Many studies across multiple mammal species (rats for example) have shown the increase in breast cancer from induced abortions as being as high as 200% but you have to remember that there are tons of studies being released every day and the media back in the 90s wasn’t as powerful in terms of research capacity. The great strides in the internet have drastically increased the ability to research issues and aside from groups like CMP most people assumed that Roe v. Wade was impossible to be overturned and that the minimalist reforms by conservatives in state governments would restrict abortion to a small role (it is true that abortions are being performed less and less as time has passed)
To be honest, we don’t need an ultrasound to
thinkknow its a human being (I do agree though that empirical sensory evidence does move a person when they see the child move in the womb; it serves to motivate both emotionally and rationally).On a categorical truth though that child in the womb (even during conception) is a human; its DNA is completely human and its not a parasite (parasites have to live off another species and have to rely completely on other species for sustenance their entire lives).
It doesn’t matter if the brain is fully developed in a physical sense or not because its the human being maturing in the womb (I type this knowing my human brain hasn’t finished physically maturing). This whole premise that its merely a clump of cells completely ignores the truth of the matter.
Certainly for surgical abortions, especially if we’re talking 12+ weeks as in the case of the PP videos.
I don’t think the same holds true at all stages of development: it’s not until the sixth week after conception that a fetus begins to develop recognizable organs and — up to that point — I’d wager that greater understanding of fetal development often leads away the conclusion that it’s a baby (disclosure: I include myself in that description).
Given the continuing proliferation of emergency contraceptives, chemical abortions, and improved pregnancy tests, I think pro-lifers need to be careful about simply prescribing more sonograms.
Recognizable organs = humanity. Got it.
I would think its a rights issue though. How can I enjoy a right to free speech, association, due process, or unreasonable search and seizure if I am not recognized as having those rights since I am physically formed (at any size)?
Without a right to life there is no right to anything else logically speaking. The only time a need for abortion would be if the pregnancy life threatening, in which case the mother can decide for herself.
It doesn’t matter in terms of whether or not it’s human — I agree with you that, as an empirical matter, even a freshly conceived zygote is absolute, 100%, fully human — but the underlying question is whether all human life is equally infinitely precious qua human life.
It seems to me — and I’m in the minority here on this, and I don’t expect to sway anyone on it — that what distinguishes humans and makes us morally significant is our cognitive abilities and capacity for moral reasoning. That’s why we (rightly, I think) have moved to considering brain death as the “true” moment of death, rather than the ceasing of the heart.
As such, I simply can’t ascribe infinite moral value to a being that doesn’t even have a brain. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s of no moral value — and, as I’ve said, I believe abortions after around 10 or 12 weeks should be treated as homicide — but I simply don’t intuit calling it murder.
Isn’t the point of the whole ultrasound movement that “Hey, this is just a tiny little baby! Just look at its arms, legs, eyes, etc.”? If not, what is the point?
I wasn’t commenting on the ultrasound movement. I was commenting on your peculiar criterion (recognizable organs) for granting human status to young humans.
Grabbing the moral high ground when your business is killing babies and selling their parts requires a lot of creativity, flair, and chutzpah.
Okay, but the comment you quoted from was in direct response to Leigh’s about ultrasound; that was the context. My point was that ultrasounds of very young fetuses might — and, I’d wager, do — lead to the opposite conclusion as do those of older ones; i.e., that early stage fetuses are not tiny babies in the way those after 10 or twelve weeks are.
I concur that morally speaking our free will (which is linked to our mental functions) is necessary for moral value (after all what is moral about doing something without the free will to act on it in the first place) but deciding that which has it defined in their existence isn’t worth it because it hasn’t developed it yet doesn’t seem logically convincing.
After all as you and I agree our free will (rationality) gives us the worth we have and as far as we know that is what makes us what we are. Its coded into our existence so I would argue that human life is important at any stage since it comes with us (even if we haven’t developed that organ yet, it categorically should appear, thus far we don’t exactly know of any humans that are born or develop in the womb without a brain).
Am I misrepresenting your position that recognizable organs should differentiate humanity from nonhumanity?
Troy, thank you. Its beginning to hit me hard today, what weve become and how putrid is the wasteland of our so called advanced civilization
Holy scripture is the only place i find strength to endure this farce and plain explanations for the monstrous deeds being committed in the name of health and care and apple pie
: : the lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually
: : woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness
: : men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth
Basically not, though I’d quibble that I’m not questioning an early stage fetuses humanity, but whether that humanity — in and of itself — makes it as morally significant as you, I, or even an older fetus.
Again, my comment was in response to Leigh’s regarding the usefulness of ultrasounds to pro-lifers and I stand by it as such.
Speaking of which, I’m still curious for your answers to my questions: what is the point of ultrasounds in the context of abortion other than to show that a fetus is just a little baby? Do you think that accurate images of fetuses five weeks or younger would have the same effect as those of fetuses older than 12 weeks?
Where is Upton Sinclair?
Doesn’t the very desirability and flexibility of embryonic stem cells suggest anything about the inherent humanity of a zygote, embryo, or fetus’ formed by the joining of human ovum and sperm?
For heaven’s sake, in 1978 the US amended the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 to include protections of Bald Eagle Nests.
What is inside a Bald Eagle nest? An egg.
What’s inside a Bald Eagle egg? A bald eagle.
This irony compared to Roe v. Wade in 1973 has never escaped me.
We’ll protect and mourn the potentiality of everything but a human zygote, embryo or fetus?
I’m sorry but what does “morally significant” mean?
If its the same public response then we will have tons of people clamoring for cleaner methods of attaining the organs though man, people didn’t have a fit about the living conditions of the proletariat (which is what Sinclair was after) but about the food itself. However, its these CMPs that are the muckrakers in this case.
But isn’t our very moral significance the very aspect of ourselves that should protect one of our own, while in a voiceless state of weakness?
Its Malthus striking with his pseudo economics again. The tosser!