Dylan uses a liberal media organ against itself, as the Huffington Post unwittingly reminds us of the demonic vision at the heart of the modern Democratic party.
(When you get to the Huffington link, click on the "Read" button to the right of the article intro if you want to read the whole thing. Ignore all comments, mostly off topic and written by over 900 scatter-brained, politics-and-minutiae obsessed web-Gollum.)
In a contest to discover whose "life-issues" credentials are the most murderous, Hillary has apparently attacked Barack for being derelict in his support of abortion rights. But Obama's pro-choice credentials look pretty solid to me. This line, for example, should get your attention: "He voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive..." That would be the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, designed to prevent doctors from letting a baby who survives an abortion flop around on the table, like a fish on the dock, until his life is exhausted. A man who is okay with that could be your next president.
20 comments:
Loved this: "web-Gollum" - great imagery.
What does he have to do to earn their approval, vote in favor of stabbing the born alive infant?
Well, they'd probably prefer something more euthanasia-like, something more "merciful" and "painless", like lethal injection, so that it won't have so much the appearance of murder.
Perhaps you've heard of that famous case revealed in (I think) the California Medical Journal (something like that) back in the 70's or 80's in which one doctor walked in on another strangling a baby who'd survived the hysterotomy. "This baby just won't die," said the Strangler, and I don't there was any prosecution.
"and I don't believe, etc."
Compassionate is the word. It will have to be compassionate, which is a buzzword for "full and total assent to the liberal agenda."
A medical student once sent me a story of an 18-week's gestation baby born prematurely at his hospital. There was more to the story, but it wasn't an abortion in the usual sense. The doctors had induced labor, which in my opinion was gravely immoral, especially since they didn't intend to do anything to help the born child, but the mother had not requested this, wanted the child, and was more or less pushed into it because the doctors told her it was "medically necessary" for her and led her to think of it as labor induction rather than an abortion. Anyway, they expected the child to be born dead, but he breathed for quite a while--an hour or so, I gathered. The doctors were worried that the mother would be distressed by the child's struggles for breath, so they put him in another room somewhere until he was more peaceful towards the end. Then they let the mom hold him. While he was gasping and such in the other room, one of the doctors--a woman resident--seriously expressed the opinion that she ought to smother him with a pillow. She was sharply reprimanded by a black lady who heard her, a nurse. (Let's hear it for the nurse!) But it was my e-mail friend's opinion that if the resident _had_ smothered the child, without making a big announcement of it, it probably would have been hushed up.
All of this goes to show why the Born Alive Infant's Protection Act will never be enforced. Not only does it contain no enforcement provisions anyway, but if _wanted_ children are being left to die in this fashion because they are considered "too young" for the hospital protocols for breathing assistance, then it will be more or less impossible to prove that an abortion survivor child of the same age was left to die because he had survived an attempted abortion.
This whole issue is so grotesque and disturbing it makes me angry and want to cry at the same time. I didn't even know a baby could survive an abortion but the fact that they can, and that this country needs to have a law in place to "protect" those that do makes me sick. I know they'll get what's comin' to them in the end and I hope it's horrible.
The law was prompted by the regular practice of labor induction abortion at a hospital in Illinois called, bizarrely enough, Christ Hospital. They would induce labor at a gestational age at which the child could not survive without major breathing assistance and then simply allow the child to die after birth. The child was simply kicked out of his natural home when he was too young to handle it. Last I heard, the Born Alive Act had occasioned no change in this policy, and the practice continued at Christ Hospital, partly because there was no provision in the law for enforcement, and partly because it's very hard in any event legally to force doctors to offer treatment and assistance to early preemies.
Hi, sweetheart. :~) I love your passion.
No enforcement? So here I've been thinking that at least one practice had been done away with, but no, it's business as usual. One could begin to despair of anything ever changing.
Isn't a doctor's mantra supposed to be first do no harm?
Congress didn't put any enforcement mechanism into the law. Bummer, huh? Hadley Arkes, whose brainchild it was, was hoping that then the federal government would cut funding to hospitals if they didn't follow it, even though that wasn't written into the law. I guess it's the kind of thing they might be able to do. There's been some talk about maybe doing it, but the last I heard a news organization phoned up Christ Hospital, and they were still doing it.
Of course, the real problem is with inducing labor that early in the first place, but they couldn't outlaw that directly. They were hoping to outlaw it indirectly by requiring them to take care of the child, which would make it, obviously, not worth it to them to induce labor. But how to make them do that is apparently a real problem.
If the bill got that much debate _without_ enforcement provisions, just think of the squawk if it had contained them. The world is a very strange place in many ways.
If they couldn't get the bill passed with enforcement provisions, then the only reason it did pass is that it allowed certain pro-choice legislators to look good voting for it while knowing that it would have no effect.
Bern, yes. That's why these days you have to choose one carefully. Of course, babies don't get to choose.
so what did you get for chritmas mr. luse? i'm dying here.
or christmas. either one. don't you *hate* it when people don't proof read before they send? grrr...
You forget my occupation. I'm used to it.
Jill Stanek is a nurse who blew the whistle on that horrible practice. Did you know that it has even been done in Catholic hospitals? Elective induction of labor for infants with anomalies incompatible with life - EFWAIL for short. google it. Providence Hospital in Anchorage, I think, was one hospital mentioned.
I have argued repeatedly against this form of live-birth abortion, but the proponents (many of whom consider themselves pro-life, BTW) argue that the baby is going to die anyway, and so why should the mom be put through the risks of pregnancy etc etc.....
A few years back there was a big kerfuffle in Catholic mom blogdom about a mom who did just that - induced labor for a baby diagnosed prenatally with (I think) holosproencephaly. She claimed that even her priest supported her decision (and maybe he did).
It is seen as 'compassionate'. For another POV, and lots of stories from families who chose life, see www.benotafraid.net
Alicia, that's fascinating, not to mention horrible.
One thing I've never understood, even psychologically, is the drive to kill a baby that has an "anomaly incompatible with life." I mean, we're talking about babies who are maybe going to live a few minutes or a few hours, or who may even die during delivery, of entirely natural causes. What's the rush to abort them earlier? I try even to think about the amoral or selfish mother. Okay, I can see the selfish mother who doesn't want to have to care for a disabled child, but that doesn't apply here, because the child's going to die the day he's born. I think of the selfish mother who has an unintended pregnancy and doesn't want the baby. Well, that doesn't apply here, because the baby is going to die.
Now, with these early labor inductions, the labor can't be significantly easier than just waiting and going through labor at the usual time. If anything, induced labor tends (I'm told) to be more painful than natural labor. So you have to give birth to the baby anyway. Why not wait a few months and not have any potential regrets? I would think that even a person without _much_ morality would think there was little to be gained by this.
And as for more gruesome methods of abortion, which some women do elect for such severely disabled babies, they sound even _more_ physically and psychologically painful for the mother herself than regular labor, much more. So why not just wait until the child is born and dies naturally?
I've never understood it. To me, "The child is going to die anyway" ought to be an argument that the most morally stunted person can understand _again_ abortion. "The child is going to die anyway. Why bother killing him actively?"
Can the urge for control and "closure" a couple of months sooner really be that great?
Yes, as can the urge to 'clear things out' and start to try for another pregnancy../
http://mydomesticchurch.blogspot.com/2007/11/eifwail-and-catholic-teaching.html will get you links to the story I referenced...
http://ourhomeschool2.wordpress.com/2005/03/08/eifwail/ is that mom's self-defense
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/szy/szy_01prenatalethics.html
is a link to a great article on this topic
with these early labor inductions, the labor can't be significantly easier than just waiting and going through labor at the usual time.
It probably isn't. I think what they're doing would be called, under other circumstances, 'mercy killing.' Except they don't call it that. They probably just call it a mercy.
So what's all this stuff in this woman's blog about how her life was at risk? I've gotta say, I'm finding it implausible that there was any significant risk. And she never goes into detail about it. Just asserts it. Sounds to me like the doctors said it to her to make her feel better about inducing. When she really gets on a roll she envisages "carrying her dying baby for five more months and having a nervous breakdown." Why does it sound to me like that's what it's really all about? That somehow she just found it a big emotional strain and wanted to get it over with? And the risks to her life? Well, I suspect she convinced herself to believe them, but she sounds intelligent enough to realize people might be curious as to what these risks were, and why she thought they were so exigent, and nary a word.
Not that I would consider that to make a decisive difference. It's just a sort of sad comment on the whole situation, the way people try to convince themselves of things.
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