Tag Archives: Unborn Child

Commentary

Which side of the abortion debate is uncomfortable with evidence?

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Here’s a short, sweet post by Eric Metaxas sent to me by Mary.

Excerpt:

It’s hard not to blame the influence of technology for the seemingly inexorable spread of the culture of death. Accurate and safe prenatal testing has led to the destruction of an estimated 90 percent of unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome. Sonograms reveal that the sex of yet-to-be-born children has led to a “small-h” holocaust against girls in places such as China and India, where boys are often preferred.

But technology can also be a huge advantage in the fight to recognize and protect the sanctity of human life—every human life. For example, pro-lifers have worked diligently to place sonogram machines into pregnancy care clinics, and the presence of these high-tech wonders—which clearly show the humanity of the fetus—has no doubt contributed mightily to a substantial drop in the abortion rate, as well as a marked increase in the percentage of Americans who consider themselves to be pro-life.

It seems that our technological prowess doesn’t so much corrupt our hearts as reveal what’s in them.

You can see this principle in action in a recent article in Slate magazine. The writer, Allison Benedikt, recounts “the latest in baby-making fads,” such as midwives and birth photographers. But what really gets her attention: “Pregnant woman are Photoshopping sonograms onto their naked stomach glamour-shots.”

[…]For Benedikt, such uses of technology are troubling—even “bad for women.” She writes, “… the more we treat fetuses like people—including them in our family photo shoots, tagging them on our Facebook walls, giving them their own Twitter accounts—the harder it will be to deny that they are people when the next, say, personhood amendment comes up, with legislators and activists arguing that ‘the unborn child’ inside a pregnant woman’s womb should have the same rights as the living among us.”

In other words, don’t believe what your lying eyes tell you about fetuses, because if we start viewing them as people, those mean ol’ anti-choicers might start demanding that we treat them that way.

This approach to the unborn—“nothing to see here, folks, just move along”—says so much about the pro-choice worldview. But it gets worse.  Writing about the recent congressional debate over sex-selection abortion, instead of bemoaning the elimination of millions of future women, Benedikt urges pro-choicers to embrace sex-selection abortion.

She writes: “No matter how many ultrasound pics get posted to Facebook, these are fetuses with female genitals or male genitals—not little girls and little boys. If pro-choicers object to aborting because of the sex of the fetus, aren’t we then saying that abortion is ‘murdering’ girls?  . . . That is not the case to make if your goal is to protect abortion rights. Gulp for a second if you must, then get over it.” Wow!

What does this tell us about the pro-abortion crowd? Is the pro-abortion view reasonable? Does it fit with what we know about the unborn from science? Which side cares about the truth in this debate?

News

China confirms that photo of forced late-term abortion is authentic

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From AFP:

Chinese authorities confirmed Thursday that a woman was forced to abort seven months into her pregnancy, several days after her plight came to light when images of her baby’s corpse were posted online.

Rights groups have blamed authorities in north China’s Shaanxi province for forcing Feng Jianmei to abort her pregnancy because she failed to pay a hefty fine for exceeding China’s strict “one-child” population control policy.

The Shaanxi provincial government said in a statement that a preliminary probe had confirmed the case was “basically true”, and the investigators have recommended action be taken against the perpetrators.

[…]Chinese web users have reacted in anger to the abortion, with one comparing it to acts perpetrated by “Japanese devils and Nazis”, after photos online showed Feng lying on a hospital bed next to the blood-smeared body of her baby.

A relative told AFP on Wednesday that Feng and her husband had opposed the termination.

[…]China has implemented its draconian family planning policy since the late 1970s in an effort to control a population that has grown to 1.3 billion people, the world’s largest.

Under the policy, urban families are generally allowed to have one child, while rural families can give birth to two children if the first is a girl. They have to pay a fine if they contravene the rules.

Rights groups say that as a result of the policy, thousands of women have been forced by authorities to terminate their pregnancies.

Blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who recently left China for the United States after fleeing house arrest, was once jailed after angering local officials for bringing to light hundreds of forced abortions.

Official statistics show that since the start of the policy, the number of abortions peaked in 1983, with a total of 14.37 million terminations that year.

You can see the absolutely horrifying photo of the woman and her child here on Life Site News. China is, of course, a country whose official state religion is atheism. There is no grounding for human rights – like the right to life – on atheism. The strong can do anything thing they want to the weak if it makes them feel good – there is no objective morality, so things like this are rational on atheism.

Would the Democrats be any different than China on the issue of coerced abortions? Vice president Joe Biden expressed support for China’s one-child policy, and presumably for their methods of enforcing it. Not only is Barack Obama the most pro-abortion President ever, but he also has voted for infanticide several times and he opposed the ban on partial birth abortions. Additionally, Obama appointed John Holdren to be his “science czar”, and Holdren had previously advocated for mass sterilizations and coerced abortions.

Take a good look at that picture. That’s what happens when a country turns its back on God and his moral laws.

News

5,300 UK teens who aborted a baby in 2010 had at least one prior abortion

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Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Pro-life campaigners said young women were being ”let down in an appalling way” after it emerged three of the 38,269 teenagers who had a termination in 2010 had undergone the procedure at least seven times.

NHS figures released to the Press Association under the Freedom of Information Act show another two teenage girls had their seventh abortion in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, while four more teenagers had a termination for the sixth time.

Fourteen teenage girls had their fifth abortion in 2010, 57 teens had a termination for the fourth time and 485 women aged 19 or under went through the procedure for a third time.

Rebecca Mallinson, of the Pro Life Alliance, said: ”There is something seriously wrong with a country where teenagers are having even one abortion, let alone repeat abortions to this extent.

“We are failing these young people in an appalling way, and storing up serious sexual health problems for the future, whether the direct issue of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the effects that multiple abortions can have on future fertility.

[…]Of the abortions carried out on teenage girls in 2010, more than 5,300 were on teenagers who had already had at least one termination.

In the UK, taxpayers are forced to provide free abortions as part of their government-run socialist health care system. Many Christian voters are OK with subsidizing abortions because they think that wealth redistribution is a good idea. They think that people should be able to live any way they want, disregarding morality, and then have someone else violate their conscience in order to pay for the messes that result. It’s just wrong, but many Christians who care more about feelings than economics support it. They think that paying for someone else’s murders is “fairness”.

Christians should support individual charity, and the best way to support that is to let people keep more of their own money and give them tax deductions for charitable contributions. Whenever you get a secular government involved in helping others, it quite often just makes it easier for them to sin and to do harm. Thoughtful Christians should not support that. When you make sin “free” for someone by paying the costs, they will sin even more. We should never make it easier for people to sin. The first rule of sound economics – which Christians should know – is that when you subsidize a behavior, you get more of that behavior.

If you want to help someone in trouble, then use your own money – don’t take someone else’s money through taxes. People who make mistakes learn not to make them when they are accountable to the person who bails them out of it. There has to be oversight over how charity is being done at the individual level – not everyone deserves charity just because they are in a jam. Only if they have learned their lesson should they get it – go and sin no more, as Jesus says. That’s why individual charity is morally superior to government-run social programs. In a very real sense, Christians who claim to be pro-life can actually be pro-abortion in practice when they make it easier for women to have abortions.

In a previous post, I also wrote about how Christians should not tell women that premarital sex is a valid pathway to marriage – that men can be shamed and coerced into marriage after recreational sex with slogans like “man up”. That’s another mistake that many pastors make that increases the number of abortions. We have to start thinking things through if we are going to stop abortion.