Infanticide and the infantilisation of women.
By James Taranto
"How safe is abortion?" asks the frequently-asked-questions page of the Potomac Family Planning Center,
a regional chain of four abortion stores in the District of Columbia,
Maryland and Pennsylvania. The answer: "Very safe. Our doctors are
gynecologists who have years of experience specializing in abortion
care. It's unusual to have even minor problems."
Tell that to Desiree Hawkins. Kirsten Powers
reported in USA Today recently on what happened when Hawkins, now 20,
visited Potomac's Hagerstown, Md., shop as a pregnant 16-year-old:
The clinic told her she was 19 weeks pregnant and referred her to [Philadelphia abortionist Kermit] Gosnell. When she recently retrieved her file in anticipation of testifying [at Gosnell's murder trial], she was shocked that her sonogram showed she had in fact been at 21 weeks, which meant she would have been 23 weeks pregnant by the time Gosnell performed the abortion. "I was so overwhelmed and hurt," said Hawkins. "If I had known I was 23 weeks, I would have (chosen) adoption."
She also would have avoided the trauma visited upon her by Gosnell. Hawkins described the licensed medical professional as laughing at her during the procedure as she cried and begged him to stop because of the pain. "Stop being a baby," he said.
"Stop being a baby." You know what we do to babies around here.
This story reminded us of the first item we wrote about the Gosnell case, back in January 2011 when he had just been indicted. We were commenting on a post by "science blogger" P.Z. Myers,
who was trying to argue that the charges against Gosnell do not in any
way implicate the abortion industry more broadly. We wrote that Myers
had gone off the rails with the following passage:
[Gosnell] has also been charged with the murders of seven babies, and there I have to disagree. There has to be a difference in degree, or the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as collaborators (they were all willing volunteers for this medical procedure, and they knew the result would be termination of their pregnancy).
Our response was an emotional one: We were shocked and appalled that
Myers was willing to step over the line, slender though it may be, that
separates pro-abortion extremism from endorsement of outright murder. We
stand behind that emotion, but it seems to us his argument also is
worthy of some careful analysis.
For one thing, Myers deserves some credit for his candor. Most
abortion advocates, when discussing the Gosnell case, simply refuse to
acknowledge that he is charged with murdering children after birth.
Instead they stress (as Myers also did) his alleged crimes against
women. One suspects that they share Myers's insouciance about
infanticide but are politically shrewd enough to be evasive about it.
Myers's argument is also revealing of
the deeper logic of America's regime of abortion on demand. His key
assertion is that in order for Gosnell to be held to account for murder,
"the mothers of those infants would also have to be charged as
collaborators." As a matter of legal analysis this statement is
demonstrably false, and was when Myers wrote it. None of the mothers
were charged in the case.
But Myers didn't really mean to make a legal argument. His point was
that if Gosnell was guilty of murder, the mothers who contracted for his
services were morally guilty. This logic is facially
plausible, but in due course we shall refute it. What's interesting
about it, though, is the structure of the argument.
Myers rejects the predicate (Gosnell's actions constituted murder)
because it leads to a conclusion he considers unacceptable (that women
seeking abortions were morally culpable). Another way of expressing this
is to say that for Myers, the mothers' innocence--the innocence of any
woman seeking an abortion--is an a priori assumption. His objection to
charging Gosnell with murder is a conclusion that follows from the
premise that the women are, by definition, innocent.
All beliefs and intuitions about whether and when abortion is moral
or immoral amount to a priori assumptions, although one hopes such
assumptions would be informed by an informed understanding of
reproductive biology. If you do not think abortion is immoral, it
follows that a woman who seeks or obtains an abortion is not morally
culpable. To put it more precisely, it follows that seeking or obtaining
an abortion cannot be a sufficient condition for moral culpability.
But Myers is making a far broader claim. He is asserting that a
woman's seeking an abortion is sufficient to establish that she is not culpable
for any consequences that proximately result from her "choice,"
including the deliberate killing, after birth, of the baby she sought to
abort. Myers is, in other words, positing that women who seek abortions
are categorically free of culpability.
That is the sort of moral immunity we normally extend to persons who
lack the capacity to understand either the consequences of their actions
or the difference between right and wrong: very young children, extreme
mental defectives and, more controversially, the severely mentally ill.
In absolving women seeking abortions of all moral culpability, then,
Myers is infantalizing them. Yet even Myers's dubious premise,
that women seeking abortions are innocent by definition, does not lead
to his monstrous conclusion, that Gosnell is innocent.
It is among the many peculiarities of contemporary feminism that when
carried to its logical extreme, as Myers has so ably done here, it ends
up making blanket claims of feminine innocence. In truth, many women
who seek or obtain abortions do not see themselves this way at all.
Their own moral intuition tells them they are doing something grievously
wrong, and the abortion industry seeks to persuade them otherwise.
In Desiree Hawkins's case, according to her account, that was
accomplished in part by misinforming her about the baby's gestational
age. In our lengthy reflection on the Gosnell case last month, we quoted this passage from an article about abortion-clinic workers who changed their minds:
Linda Couri, who worked at Planned Parenthood, described how she responded when a teenager considering abortion asked her the following question: "If I have an abortion, am I killing my baby?"
Couri said: " 'Kill' is a strong word, and so is 'baby.' You're terminating the product of conception."
But Couri was haunted by the girl's question and troubled about her [own] response. She began questioning whether providing abortions was really moral. She recalls asking her supervisor if she had done the right thing. The supervisor did not deny that abortion was killing a baby but told her that in the teenager's case, abortion was a "necessary evil." Struck by the use of the word "evil," Couri continued to question her position at the clinic. Eventually, she left, and now she is a pro-life speaker.
It's the Bizzaro World Garden of Eden: Eve walks in with full
knowledge of good and evil, and the snake tries to disabuse her of it
with doubletalk.
The antiabortion group Live Action
today released the results of the fourth undercover video in its series
of investigations of late-term abortionists. This time the target is a
high-profile one: LeRoy Carhart,
whose name will forever be linked with partial-birth abortion--the
barely prenatal version of Kermit Gosnell's "snipping"--through a pair
of Supreme Court cases:
Stenberg v. Carhart
(2000), which struck down a Nebraska ban on the abortion method, and
Gonzales v. Carhart
(2007), which upheld a federal ban. (The difference was owing not to some jurisdictional subtlety but to Samuel Alito.)
In the Live Action investigations, two women late in pregnancy
visited Carhart's Nebraska clinic, where they falsely claimed to be
seeking abortions:
Both investigators asked if Carhart's abortions "hurt" the babies. He replied by arbitrarily inventing his own parameters for when a fetus feels pain. "so, after about two to three weeks after birth . . . I think then they have pretty good knowledge of pain, but before that I'm not so sure that they do." In fact, there is wide consensus in the scientific community that babies feel acute pain by 20 weeks of gestation. . . .
Carhart blatantly lied to both our investigators about the danger of his abortions, coercing his patients into a risky procedure. "I've never had to send anybody to the hospital." Less than a year before, his staff were forced to call 911 after he injured a woman in an abortion.Our second investigator asked Carhart if she should call an ambulance if she goes into labor in her hotel room. With callous disregard for her safety, Carhart replied, ". . . don't call 911 . . . you're gonna be within 10 minutes or 15 minutes of a clinic, just get in the car. Call me."
LeRoy Carhart delivered false medical information to his patients, rendering them unable to give informed consent to a dangerous abortion procedure.
"Coercing" is too strong, for the putative patients did not actually
go through with the abortions, which they never wanted to begin with.
And Carhart, unlike some of Live Action's other targets, did tell them
that it is illegal to kill an infant after birth (while also assuring
them that his procedures posed no possibility of a live birth).
The stories of Desiree Hawkins, Linda Couri and (notwithstanding
being partly fictional) Live Action's investigations refute both the
pro-abortion myth that abortion on demand is all about "choice" and
Myers's claim that women seeking abortions are innocent.
In truth, many women have abortions despite their moral intuitions
thanks to the abortion industry's deceptive, high-pressure sales
tactics. Gosnell may be an outlier, but he's nowhere near as much of one
as the pro-abortion side would like you to think.
No comments:
Post a Comment