By Bosco – Irish Sentinel Contributor –
The far left and their millionaire mouthpieces, are presently losing it with the prospect of the poorly reasoned Roe v Wade being overturned. The pro-choice lobby have a rich history in pathological lying so their present antics seem rather consistent.
Bernard Nathanson, a successful New York obstetrician and gynaecologist and co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) in 1970 said of abortion in his 1996 autobiography, The Hand of God. “I am one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.” The former secular Jew Dr Nathanson converted to the prolife cause later in life as well as to the Catholic faith, but he recognised the role he had played in distorting figures and perpetuating common proabortion lies in furtherance of an agenda that has resulted in the torture and deaths of millions of innocent human beings. When Nathanson co established NARAL, now called NARAL Pro-Choice America he facilitated a regime of brutalisation and dehumanisation that he would come to regret. Nathanson knew the landscape and the terrain was populated with blatant and manufactured falsehoods. The organisation he helped found still exists as a major pro-abortion player today and continues to advocate for and advance complete and unfettered access to abortion for women, women conned into destroying their own children at the rate of millions.
Anyone who has ever read the Roe v Wade decision and its companion case, Doe v Bolton, would know that any overturning of the former would not make abortion illegal. Rather, Roe v Wade established a right to abortion, on spurious grounds, but its reversal would merely mean the substantial issue would be returned to the individual States to decide the matter. When the pro-choice brigade must turn to the likes of ex models such as Christy Turlington and Milla Jovovich you know the messaging will be weak, because it is all theatre. The messaging is weak precisely because there are no rational grounds for abortion. Pro-choicers such as Princeton bio ethicist Peter Singer have acknowledged the truth that abortion kills a human being. However, what Singer objects to is the notion, whether human beings ought to have intrinsic value at all, which is rather ironic considering three out of four of Singer’s Jewish grandparents died in German concentration camps for largely similar reasons.
The left seem to be discarding the façade of prevopis arguments that attempted to conclude that the unborn were not truly human, ergo no rights would attach. Nowadays, with the veil lifted the far left the progressive wing are patent in their admission that the child considered for butchery is fully human. The aforementioned Peter Singer has argued, on arbitrary philosophical grounds, that toddlers should not have an automatic right to exist. The left therefore seemingly have abandoned the argument of the clump of cells for reformulating post birth humanity.
Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam stated in January 2019 the following, “[Third trimester abortions are] done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labour, I can tell you exactly what would happen,” Northam, a paediatric neurosurgeon, told Washington radio station WTOP. “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
If the child is born “non-viable” but can be kept “comfortable” and then “resuscitated” (if the mother and medical team agree), what does this say about the intrinsic value of a child and their rights, even if the realisation of that right lasts naturally only hours. Is that poor child not deserving of the hour, or will that too be taken away from the child? Surely any parent would feel great comfort knowing the little time their child had on this earth was one filled with love and charity? Maybe there lies the problem. Compassion today is equated with ripping a baby to pieces, unnamed and thrown into a waste disposal bin. This was the “compassion” communist Sinn Fein and others argued in favour.
The pro choice side like to cite cases such as Erika Christensen, who found out while 30 weeks pregnant that her baby would never be able to breathe, meaning the child would choke to death within minutes of his birth. If the baby was going to die within moments of birth, why then the necessity of an abortion that rips the baby to pieces? The question the prochoice side never acknowledge is the life of the baby its right to life even if it was only for a matter of minutes. Is a life considered valuable now if it reaches a certain period of time? If a baby is denied its full life, even if that full life is only mere minutes, should we reconsider those babies who last for a day? A month? A year? 5 years? 10 years? The right to life should not be considered on the basis of arbitrary chronology.
Another woman, Phoebe Day Danziger had framed her decision to kill her baby with critical urethra, kidney, and lung development issues as end-of-life care—a way to compassionately and peacefully prevent the suffering of a son she very much wanted. I don’t recall people with last stage cancer being told that their forced killing, and without their consent, would be considered end of life care. In fact, a court would find such an intervention as an unlawful homicide.
In Northam’s Virginia, a woman can currently terminate a third-trimester pregnancy if three physicians certify that the procedure is necessary to prevent her death or to stave off “substantial and irremediable” harm to her mental or physical health. Something similar exists in Ireland. Radicals like Orla O’ Connor want to eradicate any gestational limits. What Northam and O’Connor don’t tell their audience is how tri mester abortions are performed.
Some leftists have argued that the “right” misrepresented the agenda of Northam but is it a misrepresentation? Let’s look at the recent Californian bill which was drafted in September 2021 where Governor of California Gavin Newsom helped form the California Future of Abortion Council. The council whose stated mission was to make California an abortion “sanctuary state” if Roe v. Wade were overturned. The Council released a document listing “legislative, executive, and administrative actions for state policymakers to implement in order to meet the needs of people seeking abortions.” In line with these goals, on April 20, 2022, the California Assembly Health Committee passed AB-2223.
AB-2223 is part of a national movement to de-criminalize perinatal or infant death. Maryland recently proposed a similar bill. Make no mistake about it: AB-2223 intentionally opens the door to infanticide. Its key provision, §123457, immunizes both the mother and anyone who “aids or assists a pregnant person in excising their rights under this article” if there is a “perinatal death due to a pregnancy-related cause.”
What is “perinatal death,” and what is a “pregnancy-related cause”? AB-2223 is conspicuously silent on these questions, but the silence offers plausible deniability for the few leftists who still think abortion access is about “human rights”. However, the ambiguity falls apart when the California law makes clear elsewhere that the perinatal period includes the time after birth. This legislation puts into sharp focus the comments by Northam in Virginia and obliterates the leftist sham that the Governor’s comments were misrepresented by prolifers as a promotion of infanticide. Clearly, laws now being enacted across blue liberal States across America seem to be heralding what many prolifers knew in the beginning; that the prochoice movement was indeed an agenda that aimed to dehumanise babies, and not just unborn ones, but post birth too.
Given the way the unhinged responses to the prospect of Roe v Wade being overruled, which included a crazed black activist exposing herself as she gyrated on the ground outside ST Patrick’s Cathedral yelling “ I’m killing my baby” as she tore a doll to pieces, suggests the pro baby brigade will make their ire well known and it may translate to Ireland. In Ireland the unhinged element was in full view outside Dublin castle when the referendum passed in 2018 where every effeminate men and butch women sang and rejoiced the prospect of dismembering babies, and dismemberment it is, just ask one ex abortionist, Dr. Anthony Levatino.
The Testimony of DR Anthony Levatino, MD, JD before the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives exposed Planned Parenthood and their Abortion Procedure on the 8th of October 8, 2015. Levatino, much like Dr Bernard Nathanson had carried out thousands of abortions. He said second trimester abortions were typically performed using saline infusion or, occasionally, prostaglandin instillation techniques. He goes on to state the realty of child dismemberment far removed from the abstractions of prochoice lies.
He stated “These procedures were difficult, expensive and necessitated that patients go through labour to abort their pre-born children. By 1980, at the time I entered private practice first in Florida and then in upstate New York, those of us in the abortion industry were looking for a more efficient method of second trimester abortion. The Suction dilation and evacuation (D &E) procedure offered clear advantages over older installation methods. The procedure was much quicker and never ran the risk of a live birth”
Dr Levatino then explains the procedure, a procedure most pro-choicers will conveniently ignore.
“Your patient today is 24 weeks pregnant. At twenty-four weeks from last menstrual period, her uterus is two finger-breadths above the umbilicus. If you could see her baby, which is quite easy on an ultrasound, she would be as long as your hand plus a half from the top of her head to the bottom of her rump not counting the legs. Your patient has been feeling her baby kick for the last month or more but now she is asleep on an operating room table and you are there to help her with her problem pregnancy. The first task is to remove the laminaria that had earlier been placed in the cervix to dilate it sufficiently to allow the procedure you are about to perform. With that accomplished, direct your attention to the surgical instruments arranged on a small table to your right. The first instrument you reach for is a 14-French suction catheter. It is clear plastic and about nine inches long. It has a bore through the center approximately ¾ of an inch in diameter. Picture yourself introducing this catheter through the cervix and instructing the circulating nurse to turn on the suction machine which is connected through clear plastic tubing to the catheter. What you will see is a pale-yellow fluid the looks a lot like urine coming through the catheter into a glass bottle on the suction machine. This is the amniotic fluid that surrounded the baby to protect her. With suction complete, look for your Sopher clamp. This instrument is about thirteen inches long and made of stainless steel. At the business end are located jaws about 2 ½ inches long and about ¾ on an inch wide with rows of sharp ridges or teeth. This instrument is for grasping and crushing tissue. When it gets hold of something, it does not let go. A second trimester D&E abortion is a blind procedure. The baby can be in any orientation or position inside the uterus. Picture yourself reaching in with the Sopher clamp and grasping anything you can. At twenty-four weeks gestation, the uterus is thin and soft so be careful not to perforate or puncture the walls. Once you have grasped something inside, squeeze on the clamp to set the jaws and pull hard – really hard. You feel something let go and out pops a fully formed leg about six inches long. Reach in again and grasp whatever you can. Set the jaw and pull really hard once again and out pops an arm about the same length. Reach in again and again with that clamp and tear out the spine, intestines, heart and lungs. The toughest part of a D&E abortion is extracting the baby’s head. The head of a baby that age is about the size of a large plum and is now free floating inside the uterine cavity. You can be pretty sure you have hold of it if the Sopher clamp is spread about as far as your fingers will allow. You will know you have it right when you crush down on the clamp and see white gelatinous material coming through the cervix. That was the baby’s brains. You can then extract the skull pieces. Many times a little face will come out and stare back at you. Congratulations! You have just successfully performed a second trimester Suction D&E abortion. You just affirmed her right to choose.
For abortions from 24 weeks to near term, the most commonly used procedure today is called the MOLD technique. The name is an acronym of the names of the drugs and devices used to accomplish it, namely: M (Misoprostel), O (Oxytocin), L (Laminaria) and D (Digoxin). In reply to Dr Levatino a member of the committee responded Dr. Levatino. So, for $10,000, a woman 27-weeks pregnant gets to labour alone, unattended, in a hotel room, with no one there to watch her vital signs or otherwise attend her. And if her baby delivers into a toilet, her own dead son or daughter, so be it”
Dr. Levatino nodded in affirmation. Babies born into a toilet bowl and flushed down into sewer having been chemically dismembered, is, apparently, progress, at least in the minds of the far left. Then again, the same far left are doing their utmost to sanitise child grooming and establishing indoctrinating programmes in schools for children in primary school. If you don’t believe me, check out the Irish National Teachers Organisation and their cartoon aimed at transgender inculcation.
Dr. Levatino during the same committee hearing (infra) was adamant to establish the truth concerning a common pro-abortion falsehood when he gave the following testimony.
“I often hear the argument late-term abortion legal is necessary to save women’s lives in cases of life-threatening conditions that can and do arise in pregnancy. Albany Medical Centre where I worked for over seven years is a tertiary referral centre that accepts patients with life threatening conditions related to or caused by pregnancy. I personally treated hundreds of women with such conditions in my tenure there. There are several serious conditions that can arise or worsen typically during the late second or third trimester of pregnancy that require immediate care. In many of those cases, ending or “terminating” the pregnancy, if you prefer, can be lifesaving. But is abortion a viable treatment option in this setting? I maintain that it usually, if not always, is not. Before a Suction D&E procedure can be performed, the cervix must first be sufficiently dilated. In my practice, this was accomplished with serial placement of laminaria. Laminaria is a type of sterilized seaweed that absorbs water over several hours and swells to several times its original diameter. Multiple placements of several laminaria at a time are absolutely required prior to attempting a suction D&E. In the mid second trimester, this requires approximately 36 hours or more to accomplish. When performing later abortion procedures, cervical preparation can take up to three days or more. In cases where a mother’s life is seriously threatened by her pregnancy, a doctor more often than not doesn’t have 36 hours, much less 72 hours, to resolve the problem. Let me illustrate with a real-life case that I managed while at the Albany Medical Centre. A patient arrived one night at 28 weeks gestation with severe pre-eclampsia or toxemia. Her blood pressure on admission was 220/160. As you are probably aware, a normal blood pressure is approximately 120/80. This patient’s pregnancy was a threat to her life and the life of her unborn child. She could very well be minutes or hours away from a major stroke. This case was managed successfully by rapidly stabilizing the patient’s blood pressure and “terminating” her pregnancy by Caesarean section. She and her baby did well. This is a typical case in the world of high-risk obstetrics. In most such cases, any attempt to perform an abortion “to save the mother’s life” would entail undue and dangerous delay in providing appropriate, truly life-saving care. During my time at Albany Medical Centre I managed hundreds of such cases by “terminating” pregnancies to save mother’s lives. In all those hundreds of cases, the number of unborn children that I had to deliberately kill was zero”.
Largely, the same people who argued “follow the science “when it came to the unscientific lockdown and covid 19 response, now dismiss it when it comes to abortion, or at least those who persist in the idea that the unborn are not human. However, new technology makes it easier to apprehend the humanity of a growing child and imagine a “foetus” ( latin for offspring) as a creature with moral status, and this is the segue that pro abortion movement is not taking because they have to avoid scientific data to make their case, instead turning towards arbitrary philosophical claims based on theories of utility.
Science now overwhelmingly establishes that mammalian reproduction begins with the fusion of a male’s sperm and a female’s egg and results in a new mammalian organism. This new organism is a single cell called a ‘zygote’, and it is in the first stage of the mammalian life cycle. When a zygote is the result of a human sperm’s fertilization of a human egg, the zygote has a human genome that is distinct from both of its parents. Therefore, based on its biological classification, rooted in its genetics and development in the human life cycle, the zygote can be described as a Homo sapiens zygote (i.e., a human) to distinguish it from a Felis catus zygote (i.e., a cat).
Scientific data now makes it clear that a child’s heart begins to form 3 weeks after conception. By the fifth week, her heart begins to beat, pumping blood throughout her little body, and her arm and leg buds begin to grow. Her brain begins to develop. Her eyes and ears begin to form. By the sixth week, her hands and feet begin to form. The following week, her toes can be seen. During this time, she kicks and will jump if startled. By 8 weeks, the baby’s facial features become more distinct. In weeks 9 through 12, the baby may begin sucking her thumb. By 10 weeks, she can yawn. By 11 weeks, she can make a wide variety of facial expressions, including a smile. By 12 weeks, which marks the end of the first trimester, she is capable of making a fist. However, regardless of the expressions of humanity by such mechanical movements, a human being, albeit at a particular stage of development begins at the fertilisation of the ovum by a successful sperm.
During the same committee testimony in 2015, it was revealed that , on any given day, an unborn child’s developing parts, including her heart and brain, may be harvested at many Planned Parenthood clinics that participate in this practice across this country. If the baby’s organs are harvested, he or she will not carry a name. At most, he or she will be referred to as a product of conception. This is where the real battle lines are drawn because the abortion industry cares nothing about women, it cares about profit, and profit made from the dismembered parts of tiny babies. The vice president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains stated in testimony in 2015 that in some cases, babies are being born intact. She further stated, Sometimes we get–if someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then they are intact. But that’s not what we go for.”
Ms. Susan Thayer who had worked for nearly 18 years as the centre manager of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Storm Lake, Iowa was fired in December 2008 when she expressed concerns about webcam abortions. She has since become a strong voice for life and educates the public about abortion and specifically webcam abortions.
In harrowing testimony Ms Thayer stated
“In 2002, the remains of a new-born, a full-term child, were discovered in a trash dump in my small Iowa town. After determining that the child had been born alive, the sheriff investigating the murder of this child came to my clinic to seek medical records of potential suspects”.
While ex models Turlington and Jovovich, deliver the most asinine slogans such as the respective “no uterus, no opinion”, or “women always had and always will have abortions so let’s make them safe”, the two women indulge in the same tired rhetoric that has no rational basis. For one, one doesn’t need to have a uterus to know an action is wrong, no more than a person who has never starved, been raped, or tortured, need personally experience starvation, rape or torture to know that such experiences are harmful. Moreover, these arguments conveniently ignore the fact that prolifers, whether women or men, advocate on behalf of the soon to be dismembered baby, not the woman who will go on to enjoy her life, post abortion.
Jovovich’s claim is equally irrational as it is an appeal to tradition, that simply because x happened in the past, then it should be made available today. Well, rape and murder happened in the past, do we make it easier for rape and murder to happen in the present and future? Jovovich’s second claim is equally puerile when she states that abortions should be safe, but abortions aren’t safe, they result in the murder of a baby. But here lies the predicament for the pro baby killing movement, to acknowledge the baby means acknowledging a right that comes with it, therefore they conveniently ignore the baby. The only time they don’t ignore the baby is when these celebrities fall pregnant themselves and being wanted, the baby suddenly becomes human with all the rights that should attach.
There are two distinct interpretations of the question of when life begins: descriptive (i.e., ‘When is a foetus classified as a human?’) and normative (i.e., ‘When ought a foetus be worthy of ethical and legal consideration?’). As stated previously, the former is grounded in indisputable fact, the latter is at the mercy of arbitrary claims made by men and women in academic ivory towers. It is within these ivory towers where vain men and women chose language and haughty abstractions that can appear benign until they become transformed into the policy and then laws of lunatics. It doesn’t take long for an idea stored in some manuscript to become an ideology where human beings are stripped of their innate value at the stroke of a pen. Dangerous ideas have consequences and history is littered with great minds and their dull moral compasses.
We often read about history’s tyrants and evil-doers but surely the most evil of all is one where a regime that tries desperately to dehumanise the obviously clearly human is feted by so called human rights organisations like Amnesty international, is celebrated by elitist virtue signalling celebrities and fawned over by a self-righteous mass media. The aforementioned notwithstanding the greatest champions of barbarity is the ever so compassionate far left. However, as T. S Elliot lyrically reminds us “Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions”, and pro abortionists seem effortlessly insatiable in their quest to pursue good intensions.
