I won’t add too much to this story other than one of the surest way to measure the evil of an action is by the way it changes those who perpetuate it. From the Weekly Standard:
…Another study, published in the October 1989 issue of Social Science and Medicine noted that abortion providers were pained by encounters with the fetus regardless of how committed they were to abortion rights. It seems that no amount of ideological conviction can inoculate providers against negative emotional reactions to abortion.
Such studies are few. In general, abortion providers have censored their own emotional trauma out of concern to protect abortion rights. In 2008, however, abortionist Lisa Harris endeavored to begin “breaking the silence” in the pages of the journal Reproductive Health Matters. When she herself was 18 weeks pregnant, Dr. Harris performed a D&E abortion on an 18-week-old fetus. Harris felt her own child kick precisely at the moment that she ripped a fetal leg off with her forceps:
Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.
Harris concluded her piece by lamenting that the pro-choice movement has left providers to suffer in silence because it has “not owned up to the reality of the fetus, or the reality of fetal parts.” Indeed, it often insists that images used by the pro-life movement are faked.
Tragic and horrific.
Give to the Salvation Army
The troubling comparison of unborn humans to animals aside, this comment doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
@Michael, Wow.
Jack,
One of the few exceptions to this silence is the approach encouraged by the “November Gang” to confront the grief and have the mothers write love notes to their aborted children. Man, I don’t know which is worse — silence or cold blooded killing cloaked as good intentions. Can barely shake my head as I write that.
It’s not like the unborn child is an ape, and it only happens to resemble a human – it has human characteristics because it’s the offspring off two humans. It’s no mystery.
I personally think this is a very cogent observation, and one that forms part of the basis of my opposition to abortion – though I come to somewhat different conclusions.
It is the very fact that we don’t know when a ‘fetus’ becomes a child that should compel to do what we can to protect it. Lack of knowledge isn’t an excuse in this case.
The way I think about it is this. If I discovered a locked box on my porch, and I heard crying coming out of it and felt something moving inside, while I might not be able to accurately identify what the contents are, my uncertainty doesn’t absolve me if indeed there is a baby inside.
And that happens to be one of the major points of the article; increasingly we can ‘peer inside the box’ as it were, and as we gain that ability, it becomes increasingly obvious that what is inside is human.
Well that is the point of the article; a number of doctors are coming to the conclusion that what they are seeing is human.
I think conception is the only the definitive point; the rest are merely arbitrary matters of degree. And I don’t know what specific adverse effects you are talking about; I would question whether there are any such effects.
Well, I think it goes without saying that if something is alive, is genetically human, and in every way resembles a human, we should seriously consider whether or not it is in fact human. It should at least give us pause if not serious reflection.
Well, it’s not just another arbitrary point – it is the beginning point of every human that ever lived. That should go without saying, as the very reason we call it ‘conception’ is because that is when we are conceived – that is when we come into being. Before that point individuality doesn’t exist. It certainly is less arbitrary than any point that comes after. All the potential you and I have begins at that point.
I am not convinced that any potential benefit embryonic stem cell research might have has been harmed by our careful consideration of what the consequences are.