PrintFebruary 21, 2011
No Due Diligence on Abortion?
The Texas legislature is considering a law requiring sonograms before abortions. The loudest voices objecting to this bill have evidenced a panicked desperation to embrace irresponsible ignorance and to alienate and dehumanize the baby in the womb. This "science over ideology" crowd has once again shown itself to be anything but, willfully subordinating both love and scientific facts to a cold and brutal ideology.
The Houston Chronicle described the proposed law in these terms:
...imagine being informed by the doctor that, at least two hours before the procedure, the government has required him to perform a sonogram.... You'll have to lay there as a computer screen reveals the grainy, jittery image of a fetus, as the doctor describes the length and internal organs....Now imagine this cruel, invasive mandate isn't coming from the federal government, but from Republican state Sen. Dan Patrick and the state of Texas....
Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast claims:
The bill in its current form adds more needless restrictions on abortion access....If a woman chooses not to view the image [author's note: image of what?] or hear the description or heartbeat, she will have to shut her eyes, plug her ears and hum a tune while the doctor complies with these requirements.
In other words, "Hurry up and kill it!"
This willful promotion of ignorance is beyond irresponsible given what's at stake. We already know that a baby's heart beats in 18 days, brain coordinates movements in 43 days, organs function in 8 weeks, fingerprints form in 9 weeks and a smile forms in 12 weeks. Despite these facts, now pro-abortion forces are desperate to avoid having an accurate picture shown to the mothers of these babies.
Theirs is an incredible goal. All of our responsible decisions are made with some degree of due diligence -- we look both ways before crossing, read a menu before ordering, test drive before buying a car, check the rear view before backing out, get an inspection before buying a house and interview before taking a job. Yet we are now told it is unacceptable to view a snapshot before aborting a child.
Of course we all understand their opposition to the sonogram. The opposition exists precisely because of what the picture will show, not because there is any debate. It is well understood by all that the fetus looks like a human being, moves like a human being, smiles like a human being and bleeds profusely like a human being -- that the fetus is a human being.
These facts and scientific images are irrelevant to abortion advocates. They consciously and purposefully dehumanize to achieve their ideologically pure goal -- the goal of making killing in the womb as easy as possible. Planned Parenthood has the added inducement of profit.
The Houston Chronicle, Planned Parenthood and other euphemizing voices of the left are working hard to create distance between mothers and their aborted victims, when the victims are in reality as close as is physically possible to their assailants.
Merriam-Webster defines alienation as the act of making "unfriendly, hostile, or indifferent especially where attachment formerly existed." Alienation by design is nothing new.
In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt described the alienating effects of adding distance in The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism. We know that denying the humanity of and alienating a targeted group is key to its effective genocide. The Nazis understood this as well -- loading Zyklon B poison gas pellets from the roofs of Auschwitz gas chambers was antiseptically procedural, but it was antiseptically procedural murder.
Likewise, pro-abortion ideologues use antiseptic euphemisms to alienate their target group. In lieu of "baby" or "human being," these humanitarians prefer "potential human being," "products of conception," "pre-embryo," "fetus," "fetal tissue," "fetal matter," "medical waste," "garbage" and my personal favorite, "parasite." One abortion doctor even described an abortion as a "defense mechanism ...against the local invasion ...and deleterious effects of the parasite." Nice, Adolf.
To see the pre-abortion sonogram is to know the hypocrisy of those who both joyfully congratulate when shown sonograms of welcome pregnancies and support abortion by mothers of other babies. Such duplicity must be difficult to manage - imagine congratulating an expecting mother on the acquisition of her parasite.
To advocate for abortion without the benefit of a sonogram is to advance a murderous irresponsibility in the face of an opportunity to reconsider the facts. In this supposed age of "science over ideology," to oppose the Texas law is to oppose the science of the sonogram, the stethoscope and the ultrasound in favor of the ideology of "choice", irresponsibility and murder.
Deliberately turning away from the sonogram is a desperate attempt to maintain the fiction of "fetal matter" when presented with the picture of a baby. It is to seek an escape, a distance from the reality of the human life within. The Texas sonogram law aims to prevent this intentional alienation. The law is a humane one, for humans.
