Make Up Your Mind
We love babies. They're cute and cuddly and they make us talk like idiots. Fetuses? Well, fetuses we don't seem to mind aborting. And yet, are we really that sure of the difference between the two? The media reaction to the murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett and the subsequent theft of her baby?/fetus? is revealing the pathetic confusion within the pro-"choice" world about what constitutes a human being and what is supposedly nothing but a "clump of cells." An article by Rich Lowry on National Review deals with this linguistic confusion in a pretty poignant way. I encourage you to read the whole thing (but in case you're too lazy, I have attached some excerpts below). One just has to wonder, for how long are pro-choicers going to continue in this appalling state of denial? Lowry says:During the coverage of the crime, the status of the Bobbie Jo Stinnett's unborn girl steadily changed. All at once on AOL News during the weekend, there were headlines tracking events in the case: "Woman Slain, Fetus Stolen"; "Woman Arrested, Baby Returned in Bizarre Murder"; "Infant in Good Health." Note how a "fetus" something for which American law and culture has very little respect was somehow instantly transformed into a "baby" and "infant" for which we have the highest respect. By what strange alchemy does that happen?
An AP story effected this magic transition all in one sentence: "Authorities said Montgomery, 36, confessed to strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett of Skidmore, Mo., on Thursday, cutting out the fetus and taking the baby back to Kansas." At one point, when Montgomery was still at large, an Amber Alert went out about the Stinnett girl, putting news organizations in the strange position of reporting such an alert for what many of them were still calling a "fetus."
Given that fetuses are routinely destroyed in America (and legally can be destroyed up to the point of delivery), it was odd to see such an uproar about the welfare of one. Indeed, it is tempting to say that from a pure legal point of view, Lisa Montgomery simply killed the wrong victim, taking the life of the mom instead of the fetus.
But that's not entirely true. Earlier this year Congress passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act partly in reaction to the Peterson case, making it a crime to harm an unborn baby while assaulting the mother. Kate Michelman, president of NARAL, complained that President Bush is doing "everything in his power to restrict a woman's right to choose." Right to choose what? To have her baby harmed by an assailant?
(...)When we mourn not just for the women, but for the babies destroyed in such terrible acts, we commit a kind of transgression against the strictest pro-choice orthodoxy. Pro-choicers have a hard time explaining why, if Bill Clinton was right that abortion should be "legal, safe and rare," the practice should be rare. One reason is that there is a continuity between the "fetus" and "baby."
Otherwise, why do we rejoice over ultrasound images of the unborn? Why do we give them names? Why do we pray for their health and happiness? Why are we so quick to go from calling them fetuses to babies?
posted by ertandberni @ 8:27 PM
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