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| Memorial to the Unborn Child by Martin Hudáček |
The Month of Hell for Planned Parenthood continues with the release of another video, this one more gruesome and more disturbing than the previous ones. While the video has legal implications in that it proves that Planned Parenthood does indeed sell organs for profit, which is against US law, carry out procedures to ensure the organs are viable for donation, also against US law and the implication that the clinic where it was filmed carries out partial-birth abortions, ditto, and how the woman interviewed describes the lengths they must go to in order to ensure that the public remains unaware of this, it’s most infamous moment came when a technician is dissecting an aborted fetus, which is shown on the video, and upon discovering it’s sex, declares, “It’s another boy!”
Two years ago pro-choice feminist Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote a controversial article for —who else— Salon entitled “So what if Abortion Ends a Life?” where she departed from the conventional pro-choice case that an unborn child is a “clump of cells” or, in the eloquent words of actor Lucas Neff a few days ago, a “pile of goop,” Mrs. Williams admitted (emphasis mine) “throughout my own pregnancies, I never wavered for a moment in the belief that I was carrying a human life inside of me. I believe that’s what a fetus is: a human life. And that doesn’t make me one iota less solidly pro-choice.”
Her reason? The mother is “the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.” Thus, despite acknowledging an unborn child to be a life she still supported abortion from conception to the moment before birth in any and all cases whatsoever. A tad reminiscent of the Roman Pater Familias’s right to sell his progeny into slavery or even kill them.
Now, that sort of brutal, but honest, candor is rare in the pro-choice lobby. Instead they prefer to ignore the question of whether or not it is a life entirely. They frame the issue under broad-sounding banners such as “reproductive rights” and “women’s health” while casting the pro-life movement as a group of backwards misogynistic men trying to control women’s sexuality out of irrational fear.
In her 2013 article, Williams described the cognitive dissonance on that question:
“When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.”
She’s right, and that really is the central question isn’t it? Is is just a “pile of goop” or is it a living human being? And, if the latter is true, then the debate changes from the simplistic “war on women” the feminist left loves to the far more uncomfortable, but eternal, question of “When is it right to take a life?”, with the additional, “Is it ok to take the life of an unborn?” 36 weeks? 24 weeks? 12 weeks? Implantation?
That is not a discussion the pro-abortion lobby wants to have, but, it is one these videos are slowly dragging them, and all of us, into.
Note: I am posting the video here if you wish to see it, but I warn you, the video, especially the last couple of minutes, are not for the queasy: LINK
23 comments:
Williams' logic is despicable. I can use the same bit of logic to justify killing any dependent at any age.
In terms of the politics, I know the video is ugly, but don't expect the public to care. They won't see it and they've already been told it's political. Plus, it gets mixed too much with abortion rather than the crimes the video shows. The best way to use the video now would be prosecutions followed by attacks after convictions are obtained.
"The best way to use the video now would be prosecutions followed by attacks after convictions are obtained."
On one level, I agree. That is definitely where the state Republican committees should focus. Make it as non-partisan as possible and stay focused on the issue of criminal behavior.
Banning 3rd or 2nd trimesters can come later.
Kit, Mixing the criminal stuff with any attempt to pass abortion laws will instantly cloud the criminal stuff with the public. I think the public will accept punishing Planned Parenthood for crimes, but they won't accept it as part of an anti-abortion push. Once you go openly political, everyone just goes back to their normal battle lines.
Andrew,
Right now, the biggest anti-abortion push I see is the call to pull federal funds for Planned Parenthood.
OT: Rolling Stone is getting over their UVA article by three members of the fraternity and their managing editor has resigned. Good.
Andrew,
I doubt one the crimes can be separated from being anti-abortion. What the public will go for doesn't matter. The public objects to a lot of things, but if they don't object strongly enough to do anything about it, their objections doesn't matter to those with power. What matters is Republicans are firmly anti-abortion and they controlled most state governments and two of the three branches of power (including the Supreme Court) so abortions will continue to become less legal.
The raising of prices and decreasing availability have and will decrease abortions the same way it decreases anything, but the most desperate women will resort to self help, at which point the system is going to find itself prosecuting Jane Does rather than doctors.
Currently some states will try to avoid that by having loopholes for mothers, but other states make no such exemptions, and as Kit pointed out in a different context, logically selectivity is problematic (parents don't get special rights to kill their 9 year olds).
Cases such as Purvi Patel (sentenced to 20 years for aborting an almost six month old baby) and Jennifer Whalen (sentenced to 9 to 18 months for giving her 16 year old daughter pregnancy drugs to induce an abortion of what sounds like a first trimester baby) are going to become more common.
That is kind of similar to what one sees in Latin America (lawmakers are very anti-abortion, women less so). Latin America collectively has a higher abortion rate than we do here, but from a practical perspective the law only becomes an obstacle for females whose abortions go wrong or who aren't savvy enough to go to the black market when seeking an abortion (nods towards the 10 year old in Paraguay who was impregnated by her stepfather and whose mother was jailed after naively taking her to a hospital for an abortion).
Anthony, It absolutely matters what the public will go for because the abortion debate is toxic. It kills whoever touches it. So if you're going to go fight about abortion, you better have a strategy the public will accept.
The problem is that the public does not view Planned Parenthood like the right does. They don't hate it, they don't obsess over it. They accept it. And right now, to the public, this is just some video created by right wing zealots, which the public will never see because they don't want to talk about abortion.
So an attack on Planned Parenthood that sounds like an attempt to shutdown an abortion provider will piss the public off because they will see it as yet another attempt by the obsessed right to upend a debate that the public sees as settled and doesn't want to see re-opened.
That's why the only way this won't blow up on the GOP will be if it begins with criminal prosecutions and then the GOP follows up with attempts to neuter Planned Parenthood as punishment for the criminal acts only.
But that's not what's coming. The GOP is planning to shut down the government over this, and it will come as a great shock to them when they get their asses handed to them.
BTW, Anthony, Abortion is probably the biggest reason the GOP has become toxic in Colorado. They obsess over it here. Last election cycle, the state GOP was handed two amazing gifts by the governor: a poor-ish economy and massive gun control legislation. What did our recently elected GOP members in the legislature do? They shifted the focus to a series of pointless abortion bills that couldn't pass.
These videos could be The Jungle. Could be. By which I mean they could achieve something other than what the filmmakers were hoping for, but still achieve a net positive for society.
At the end of the day, what the public has no stomach for is putting women in jail. on that point, I'll agree with the feminists that patriarchy is alive and well. Inherent female virtue and other such Victorian nonsense.
tryanmax, I think you're right that the public has no stomach for putting women in jail, but I also think the public simply doesn't want to deal with the abortion battle anymore.
OT: There is nothing more poisonous that sports "fans" these days. Sports websites and talk radio have become bastions of seething hate and mind numbing ignorance. In fact, if we exterminated everyone who commented on those pages, I suspect the world would instantly become a better place.
Anyways, for the past month, the mindless hate has been aimed at Russell Wilson for demanding that he get paid a fair amount in his new contract. Today, Wilson agreed to a contract which is good for both sides and is which disproves all the claims the hate squad made. So do they admit they were wrong? Ha. Yeah, right. No, they flipped right over and mocked him for believing in God. Retards.
What I find amazing is that a bunch of fat, middle-aged losers whose athletic prowess extends to waddling to the bathroom between games of Madden Football and whose mental prowess doesn't even go so far as to having a working knowledge of the only language they "know" would offer such hate for a man they don't even know and whose body of work and apparent character should be admired. Those are people with sick souls.
I think the moral point is the only way the videos will have a short-term effect. And even then the effect will be minimal.
Unless an investigation is a thorough, months-long investigation, it will turn up exactly zero evidence of wrong-doing, like it just did in Indiana. So, Planned Parenthood just won a victory.
LINK
The one thing it might do is lead to decrease financial support of Planned Parenthood by the Feds. If people are stupid enough to eliminate their own prodigy, then let them BUT I don't want to pay for it.
As for when to definitely make it illegal, I think if the odds of the fetus surviving are very good (>90%) then it should be under the same laws as killing a newborn. That is past 28 weeks gestation of a genetically normal fetus.
OT: I'm not sure who you listen to Andrew, but most of the people I was listening to regarding Wilson was of the opinion that the Seahawks should pay him because he is worth it. They didn't have to and if they chose not to, the discussion was whether that would upset Wilson enough for him to leave next year.
My sister is a huge Seahawk fan and I have heard about Wilson's faith. I also pointed out that Kappernick has biblical passages tattood on his body but she said that's different because the 49ers are own by Satan or something.
Koshcat,
"As for when to definitely make it illegal, I think if the odds of the fetus surviving are very good (>90%) then it should be under the same laws as killing a newborn. That is past 28 weeks gestation of a genetically normal fetus."
80% of Americans support you there.
It is the other 20% that bother me. Are they sociopaths? And then I think "perhaps they shouldn't be having children anyway."
Andrew,
Interesting. Haven't been following politics in Colorado.
Koshcat, My wife's family are Seahawks fans and they are thrilled. But some of the football sites I visit, like ProFootballTalk, are packed with the most hateful idiots on the planet and they have been spewing hate at Wilson to a stunning degree.
I need to learn not to read the comments at these places. They are just vile people.
Anthony, The GOP finally won a Senate seat (Cory Gardener) for the first time in decades and the way it happened was that Gardener dropped all the fringe stuff and ran against things like the economy and Obamacare. He flat out refused to delve into the abortion and gay debates and that won over a lot of people even as the left tried to call him an abortion extremist.
A more interesting issue is in my own county, which is one of the most conservative counties in the country by registration. Despite a massive registration edge, the Democrats have been winning lots of local offices (which never happened in the past) because the local GOP has gone batsh*t crazy and is acting more like a religious cult. Even in races for things like school board, the GOP candidates are talking about gays and abortion, and that is losing the public more and more every year.
OT2: By the way, Hillary has brought in $15 million... Bush has brought in $103 million.
Cruz $38 million, Walker $26 million, Rubio $16 million and Perry $16.8 million all beat Hillary.
Andrew,
Ha... Ha... Ha...
Kit, Hillary is the least competent, least supported, least... just least major candidate I've ever seen. If she wins, it's going to be because all the other candidates go down in flames in scandals that involve things like horse genitalia and cannibalism.
I do not want to know which candidates had scandals involving cannibalism and horse genatalia.
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