Failed Abortions and the Washington Post Commentaters

I just came across this article from the Washington Post, about the appalling youtube video where a Planned Parenthood representative claims that any decisions regarding care towards an infant born alive after a failed abortion should be up to the medical practitioner, the mother, and her family. In other words, abortionists should not be required to provide basic or lifesaving care for an infant born alive after an abortion attempt.

Chilling.

But what I really wanted to point out was the reaction this article received in the comments section. Beyond the usual "Republicans only care about your right to life from conception to birth!!!" vitriol (I find it odd that no one seems to recognize the ridiculousness of these rants considering this issue in question deals with a baby after birth), a lot of people are expressing disbelief that such a situation could ever happen at all. For instance, OldUncleTom writes:

"I would be very surprised to see any legitimate case of an infant born alive not receiving care. This line of questioning sounded very hypothetical, and agenda-driven."

AnnabelleLee16615 says:

"There was no proof of this [infants born alive and left to die] occurring, no examples provided, this was an agenda driven attack by a group of Republicans looking to earn points for denying women health services." 

and

"When and where are these live births occurring after botched abortions? Most states don't allow abortions after 24 weeks. Babies born at less than 24 weeks of gestation tend not survive. This seems like a disingenous line of questioning designed to inflame the base, not address a real concern."

Curwood writes: 

"One might question 'botched abortions" ...and if here are actual proof of babies being born ... that far along developmentally... and who would pay for the 100 of thousands it takes to keep any preemie alive."

These people seem to be forgetting Kermit Gosnell, who is facing the death penalty for allegedly "deliver[ing] live babies and then deliberately sever[ing] their spinal cords, killing them." (from the Toronto Star).

I really do wonder where people get their information regarding late term abortion practices. And I wonder how these people can live with themselves, for instance: "who would pay for the 100 of thousands it takes to keep any preemie alive" as a reason in support of dismissing this rare (but not unheard of) event.

Never mind that I like to think the "100 of thousands" of dollars it took to keep me alive after I was born premature were worth it ... tell me to my face that I should have been left to die because keeping me alive is too expensive.

Seriously, abortion advocates, if even only one baby who is born (and is therefore considered a live human being by the law) is left to die or is deliberately killed by a doctor, then it is an outrage and even if you support abortion up to birth, YOU SHOULD BE PROTESTING AGAINST THIS PRACTICE.  

Quote of the Week: "God holds the keys to life and death - not men"

I've had a long absence, but now that my life finally seems to be less busy, I will be posting here a bit more :)

As many of you are aware, I am a HUGE fan of the American organization Secular Pro-Life. I'm such a huge fan, that I have spent much of my time wishing and praying that such an organization existed in Canada, so that I could join them. I am a Catholic, but I am extremely wary of using solely "religious" arguments against abortion because I know that for someone who isn't Christian (and actually for many Christians), the Bible holds absolutely no weight, and if we only focus on Bible quotes and eternal damnation, then we aren't convincing the abortion lobby of anything and lives will continue to be lost. Anyway, this tension between the "religious" and "secular" is often on my mind.

And lo-and-behold, I just downloaded abort73's book on abortion and Christianity, and the author managed to say exactly what I have always thought about this issue, only much more eloquently. So without further ado, here is the quote of the week:

"I had one explanation for why abortion is wrong: Revelation 1:18. God holds the keys to life and death - not men. That was good enough for me, but it didn't go very far in public debate. [...] Because I had framed abortion in such narrow, spiritual terms, I had almost no capacity to demonstrate its injustice. And so I stayed quiet. All these years later, it's ironic that I so often condemn abortion on scientific grounds while my opponents defend it on pseudo-religious grounds. I argue that abortion kills a living human being; they argue that they're not yet persons. I argue that there is no debate regarding the biological beginning of human life; they argue there is more to being human than biology. I argue that embryos and fetuses are just as human as we are; they argue that they don't have a soul (even if they call it something else). [...] [I]t can actually be easier to argue against abortion from biology than from the Bible."

- Michael Spielman (from his self-released book: Love the Least (a lot))

You HAVE to read this

link

Seriously, this is an awesome post about where to draw the line on abortion.

Read. Share. That is all.

Chimeras and their impact on the pro-life movement

Hi Everyone!

This is my first post in awhile. First off, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I hope everyone had as an amazing holiday as I did.

Sadly, it is now time to head back to school.

This blog post will be short, and it is mostly to ask my fellow pro-lifers what they think of an interesting biology experiment I read about recently (scroll down to #14 to read about it. Also, read the rest of the article, a lot of it is really cool!).

Baby monkeys!!!!

Here's the quote:

"While all the donor cells were from rhesus monkeys [the cells were used to create baby chimera monkeys], the researchers combined up to six distinct embryos into three baby monkeys. According to D. Mtalipov, 'The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs.' Chimera species are used in order to understand the role specific genes play in embryonic development and may lead to a better understanding of genetic mutation in humans."

From my understanding of this blurb, what happened is sort of like the reverse of twinning? Do you think this has any impact on a complete pro-life philosophy, where we maintain that we are individuals at the moment of conception when we are (however briefly) still single-cell embryos? For that matter, do you think identical twins have any impact on this same pro-life philosophy?

I would LOVE to hear your thoughts!

I haven't thought too deeply about this yet, but my first impulse is to maintain that distinct (from the mother) human life begins at conception, regardless of whether it develops from a single embryo into multiple embryos or vice versa, and so the mother still does not have any right to end what nature has started.

Another (possibly really stupid) question for hard-core biologists - is it possible that what happened with the chimera monkeys could happen frequently in nature (i.e.: two eggs are both fertilized at once and instead of having fraternal twins, the embryos work together to form a single developing baby?)

Aside: If you have the background to understand more about chimeras, please enlighten us in the comments!

Cheers!

A Quick Hello and Update :)

Hello everyone,

So my blogging has been VERY very sparse lately. I really apologize, but I have been going through a lot in the past few months. Long story short, there has been a lot of negativity in my life for a very long time - negativity over where I am (grad school can do that to you - I try not to worry about this), negativity over missing home, and negativity in how I see the world. So a few months ago I decided to take some control. I took a look at my life, and tried to figure out where my awful feelings were coming from.

One thing that I noticed was that for awhile now, a new view had started creeping into my consciousness. I started seeing everyone around me in a new light. Instead of loving them for who they were, and taking them as they are right now, I started focusing way too much on the wrongness of their views. And lets face it, I'm at a Canadian university, which means that pretty much every single person I meet is pro-choice. It really takes a toll on you, and a toll on how you can relate to others, when you stop seeing people as flawed and instead see them as wrong. So I stepped back from my blog, and I stopped spending ages reading pro-life news (though I've stayed pretty active on my Twitter account). And I finally realized that I wasn't seeing other people as wrong per se, but I was actually seeing myself that way and was comforting myself by thinking "Well, at least I don't think that abortion is a good thing". And why was I telling myself this? Because, in all honesty (and I am very ashamed of this, which is perhaps why it took me so long to admit to myself), other than this blog and the odd debate with a friend or family member, I don't really do much to forward the pro-life cause. I don't attend rallies. I'm not part of my school's pro-life group. I've never gone to March For Life. I don't volunteer at a Crisis Pregnancy Centre. But as soon as I realized that I was actually feeling awful about myself, I started being afraid. And the more I thought about being pro-life the more terrified I became. Every time I met someone new I was worried that they would hate me because I am pro-life - and this is strange, because I have never, ever in my life before this point cared about what others thought of me. This part of the negativity was coming from the pro-choice side of the debate and all the blame and anger and terror that I see there. I was starting to view the average person, who is only pro-choice by default, as a pro-choice activist and someone who would immediately start hating me if they knew my views. So I knew I had to take a break from all of this - both to get myself in line, and to get my views of the people around me back to a healthy and normal place.

Therefore, my absence. 

My other sources of negativity I can't do much about. I need to finish my degree before I decide what to do with my life, and I'm stuck far from home until I finish my degree. I think my main worry here is that I love doing my PhD and I LOVE the work that I do, but ultimately my goal in life is to be a stay at home mom - and after spending so much time reading pro-life blogs I've become exposed to how sahm's are treated by the mainstream, and I've started feeling as if my friends and family would never accept my life's choices once I started a family, even though I have told them that I want to stay at home with my kids and everyone has seemed supportive of it (but really, I secretly think that they have lost their respect for me because I'm degrading myself by one day aspiring to be a homemaker). So you see, again, a source of negativity that I thought had to do with my circumstances, but instead has to do with reading too much on the internet.   

So, as I said before, I decided to take charge. I stopped blogging - or at least blogged much less. I focused more on school. I made a commitment to go to church at least twice a week, and I have mostly kept it. Things are looking up. My next step, once I have all these new habits down, is to start volunteering again. And once that has happened, I will start blogging regularly again. Hopefully by that point, I will have my life under control and I will be a strong person so that imersing myself in the pro-life movement won't take such a toll to the point that I am no longer able to sympathize with those who's minds I am trying to change. And maybe then I will be braver and more able to speak with eloquence and compassion about why abortion is wrong.

Oh, and unless I'm stuck working on an experiment, I will be at the March for Life this year. Hopefully I get to see some of you there!

Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know why I've been away for so long. You have all been so amazing, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of your comments, follows (both here and on Twitter), retweets, and prayers. Thanks and I will be blogging lightly again within the next week or so, so see you all then!

Love,
Me :)

A pro-choicer's views on life and suffering

A mini-abortion debate recently came to my attention, and I found the pro-choicer's thoughts to be particularly interesting:

  

Note: emphasis in the following quotations is my own. Comments or changes are enclosed in square brackets.

What I want to focus on first is this person's fixation with suffering: "if it [the baby]'s forced to be born [notice that the connotation here is that allowing a baby to be born is a bad thing because we are forcing life on him or her - as if a baby can express any other wish besides a wish for survival] to a mother that cannot or does not wish to take care of it, there is a fairly high chance of it being hurt (either through neglect or abuse) its entire childhood."

There are two things here that are problematic. First, the assumption that a reluctant mother only has two choices: to kill her baby or to keep her baby and abuse it horrifically (ever heard of adoption? Ever heard of empowering surprise mothers to be the absolute best mothers they can possibly be? Ever heard of helping mothers escape the negativity in their lives so that they can provide for their children?). This is far from an accurate representation of both what the mother's options actually are, and what surprise babies go through in their early childhood. There is absolutely no guarantee that a surprise baby will be abused, nor is there a guarantee that a wanted baby will not be abused.  I firmly believe that abuse does not happen because of "wantedness", but instead because parents view their children in some way as "sub-par" or under their own exclusive control (this ignores the fact that many people who have gone through horrific things in their own lives often act out these same patterns towards others - intervention, counseling, and love can go a long way in helping such parents or children break the cycle).

The second thing that is problematic here is this pro-choicer's view of suffering. According to him or her, future suffering is a legitimate reason to end a life. There is one thing that I want to make absolutely clear: it is not up to us to decide if someone else's life (or future life) as unlivable - to make such a judgement is the height of arrogance. But this ignores the very obvious fact that all of us suffer at some point in our lifetimes - and most people outside of the developed world suffer far more than we could ever imagine. However, even if one has the North American view of a picture-perfect life, one is still not protected from suffering. Horrible things happen all the time. Death does not solve these problems. And if it does, what is stopping us from euthanizing the very mentally ill and heavily addicted homeless drug abusers who drift through life hardly aware of what is happening to themselves and what is happening around them? What is stopping us from euthanizing the starving multitudes of families living in abject poverty who will likely die anyway? What is stopping us from euthanizing populations who are likely to be caught in the middle of a war zone, and who will either die instantly or suffer horrifically once the gunfire and bombing starts? What is stopping us from allowing car crash victims to pass "peacefully" into the night instead of attempting to save them?

The answer, I believe, to these question has two parts:

1. Hope that their lives can get better (the future, after all, is unknown).

2. The belief that their lives are still valuable because they have rights, and that their suffering is horrific precisely for this reason.

The unborn, as clearly evidenced by this pro-choicer's views, do not enjoy these two protections, in spite of the fact that many (I would argue the majority of) unplanned babies in the developed world have a much better chance at a cushy, relatively pain-free life than the majority of humans on this planet, and in spite of the fact that they have whole lives of possibility ahead of them in which they can make decisions for themselves as to the value of their own lives.

 The other point I want to emphasize is this person's opinion of what human life actually is and therefore what constitutes harm: "... a baby does not have a brain that is even remotely aware of anything until after 20 weeks [I think what she means to say is that it does not have detectable brainwaves before this - loosely defined - cutoff]. So while this baby looks human, it isn't capable of feeling and therefore cannot be hurt. [...] If someone is only a mechanism of reflexes, without the ability of any cognition, they are not yet human, in my opinion." 

First of all, expecting a baby to prove that it is "alive" and "human" by showing signs of cognition above its developmental ability is both ridiculous and extremely unfair. Never mind that this understanding of human life is patently inaccurate. This view is firmly placed in the realm of philosophy, not science, and to present it as otherwise is highly misleading. It also excludes an inordinate amount of our disabled and mentally ill populations from enjoying the so-called status of "human life" and has the overtones of eugenic thought woven into a seemingly "sophisticated" and "fair" worldview. Look into philosophies espoused by Peter Singer or the recently published "After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" to see where such opinions will logically lead. The idea that we cannot be hurt if we are not aware of the harm is particularly pernicious, as such a view could be ascribed to anyone, not just an unborn baby before 20 weeks. If I am killed in my sleep, I will never know that my life has been ended and so I do not have a chance to either mourn or become aware of my loss. If I die instantly in a car crash, I will at the most feel only momentary pain and will never know what has been taken from me. If I torture and murder someone who has overdosed on drugs or alcohol they will never know or understand what has happened to them. If I steal a misplaced lottery ticket that happens to win me millions of dollars, the true owner will never know what they lost. If I am raped in my bed in a drug-induced sleep, but not hurt or stolen away, I could be totally unaware that anything horrible ever happened to me. If I slowly murder a severely mentally-challenged or ill patient, they cannot understand that they are about to lose their life. If a slaver (or a husband) takes advantage of his slaves (or his wife) who have been conditioned to believe that they are property, the slaves (wife) have no concept of harm being done. Now, the After-Birth Abortion paper does attempt to circumvent these types of objections (at least, when applied to healthy, cognitively-abled people), but I am not convinced that they succeed (perhaps this is because I do not understand their argument, but I truly believe that it is a weak one). And I would hope that most people can view an entire life being stolen away as harm - with the assumption that the unborn baby is a "human life" and not a "preparatory stage for life" (when exactly, then, does this "shell" of an unborn child accept the life that it has been preparing for? flipping weird way to view human development imo, especially because - other than conception - there is no hard and fast line between one stage and another). Never mind that many people no longer believe in the presence of a soul, and many Christians believe that the body and the soul are intricately intertwined, and very clearly the baby's body exists before 20 weeks - so I ask again, what is this change that suddenly turns a body into a human life?

I want to leave you with one last quote, which to me is very chilling in its sincerity:

"... if we already have the choice of whether to create life or not create life, I think we should have a choice to end the preparatory stage for a life that has not yet begun ... I understand why you don't agree."

One final thought - this person's views seem to indicate that he or she is against abortions after 20 weeks gestation. Such a view necessitates support for gestational age limits on abortion (which we do not have in Canada) and Motion-312, which would have addressed the question of when life actually begins (currently defined in Canada as the moment a baby completely exits the birth canal). How much are you willing to bet that this is actually the case? 

Note: you can find the paper I discuss above under the "Abortion Arguments" tab.

Also note: The last quote is also an example of the "Contraception Mentality" that so many pro-lifers have a problem with. I know that using contraception or supporting contraception does NOT necessitate use or support for abortion - but it is thought processes like this which demonstrate why I believe we as pro-lifers have to be very careful when discussing contraception.  

Video of the Week: Sensology

You have to watch this full screen. This is just the best thing ever. Art + Music = Mind Blown.