Help Aleteia continue its mission by making a tax-deductible donation. In this way, Aleteia's future will be yours as well.
*Your donation is tax deductible!
The Gosnell abortion trial was so graphically revealing of what abortion is and does, it made some pro-choice people re-think their beliefs. And others redouble their efforts to ensure it’s available on demand at all times, no matter what.
They came out in force last week in Texas over a proposed law to outlaw abortions after 20 weeks and make abortion clinics safer. That should make sense to anybody who’s reasonable. Which puts what happened around the statehouse in perspective.
It was a circus. First act.
That, alone, calls for attention.
Vice-president Joe Biden’s wife Dr. Jill Biden got into the act and tweeted this, strangely and sadly:
Seriously? Our president and the wife of the vice-president are tweeting these things about this legislation, that seeks only to stop Gosnell-like late term abortions and regulate clinics for women’s safety? Really?
So a bill trying to protect unborn children after 20 weeks has been defeated, and we’re celebrating a victory for “women” and “health” and “freedom”? When do we get tired of this?
We already have. It’s happened. Women Speak For Themselves don’t ‘stand with Wendy.’ In fact, because the abortion industry has made Sandra Fluke and now Wendy Davis the faces and voices of their strong-arm campaign to demand the indefensible and distract an already complicit media away from the real point of their arguments, more and more women in groups and individually are speaking out for the other ‘choice,’ the one the alleged ‘choice’ movement won’t tolerate. Or at least for laws and social policies that stand for women’s health.
What does ‘standing with Wendy’ mean?
The fatuous charge that opponents of abortion use the issue as a way of “controlling women” was quite popular. But dress it up as they might, the truth remained ghastly: What Wendy and her team of protesters were trying to do was block a bill that would have made it illegal to deliberately kill an unborn child after 20 weeks of pregnancy. And that is a disgrace.
The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson wrote that, during the filibuster, Davis explained “how a pregnancy unfolded — all points on which, she noted, her male colleagues seemed vague.” Perhaps Davis is right that many of her fellow human beings know embarrassingly little about how they grew. I’d venture, though, that this is to her advantage: It is precisely the knowledge of how babies develop that informs my revulsion at their execution.
We might recap: By the time that a baby has been in utero for one month, blood is pumping around the body. In the second month, facial features develop, including the growth of ears, eyes, arms, legs, toes, and fingers. At six weeks, the baby’s brain, spinal cord, and central nervous system are all pretty well formed — in outline at least. By the two-month mark, sensory organs begin to develop and bone replaces cartilage.
Three months in, arms, hands, fingers, feet, and toes are fully formed, and the baby can grab with its fists as well as open and close its mouth. Teeth are on their way, as are reproductive organs. In month four, the baby is fully formed, and eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, and hair develop. At this point, a baby can suck his thumb, yawn, hiccup, stretch, and make faces. At 18 weeks, the baby can move around, and experience REM sleep, including dreams. At 20 weeks, some studies show, it can recognize its mother’s voice.
Emphasis added.
Former Clinton administration staffer Kirsten Powers agrees. In a Fox News discussion on this story, Powers said “I think it’s sick.” In her Daily Beast column, she declared “I Don’t Stand With Wendy Davis.” Nor, she says, would most women.
A Texas legislator and her pink sneakers have been lionized for an eleventh-hour filibuster against a bill that would have made it illegal for mothers to abort babies past 20 weeks of pregnancy, except in the case of severe fetal abnormalities or to protect the life or health of the mother.
And that ‘health of the mother’ loophole includes anything, stress or depression or change of mind or anything in a highly elasticized category under the ‘health’ label.
This is a call for clarity, and it’s about time. We’ve had too few bold voices saying these things in big media, or voices getting access to media to say it. Now, ‘gatekeeper’ media don’t matter as much and they certainly can’t mind the gate. It’s unhinged.
Right. Now we’re talking.
There it is. Exposed.
Which is probably why there’s such desperation in the pro-abortion movement. And that’s getting chilling. The abortion movement is huge, powerful, very well funded and backed by some of the most powerful people in the country. But they’re now on the defensive.
Because the truth of the abortion logic is out, in so many glaring ways.