“We need not resolve the difficult question of when life
begins.” Thus spake Justice Blackmun,
writing for the majority in the U.S, Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision in
January, 1973, the 42nd anniversary of which will be observed next
Thursday (January 22nd). And so the
era of virtually unlimited abortion in the United States burst upon the
nation in a flurry of obfuscation and falsehood. There never was, in fact, any question of when “life
begins”, certainly not on scientific grounds: the only question was whether all
human life was deserving of protection, or only certain lives. For more than four decades now, the abortion industry and
its apologists have relied on verbal smokescreens like Justice Blackmun’s to
provide just enough cover that Americans can avoid the ugly truth about
abortion.
It’s getting
harder all the time to keep the charade going.
In 1973, ultrasound was not yet commonly used by obstetricians in the
United States, and so for the vast majority of Americans unborn babies remained
invisible, out-of-sight . . . and therefore fairly easy to dismiss. Not anymore.
Virtually all expectant mothers have pictures of their babies in the
womb long before the birth, pictures that have become increasingly clearer and
more life-like. If it looks like a baby,
squirms like a baby, gives a “thumbs up” like a baby (see photo above), well, what
can one conclude? Of course, women who
go to abortion clinics are unlikely to be offered such pictures, even if an
ultrasound is performed, because women who see an ultrasound of their unborn
baby are much less likely to abort (see here).
Howard Slugh, an
attorney, addresses the ultrasound issue in an article [here] in National
Review Online called “The Life-Affirming Power of Ultrasound”. He discusses in particular the growing number
of state laws in the U.S. that require the abortionist to perform an ultrasound and to show the images to the mother of the unborn baby. There are some interesting features to the
legal battles over these laws. First of
all, even though abortionists deny that ultrasounds change minds, they “in fact
have conceded the point in lawsuits challenging mandatory ultrasound laws”,
which they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to stop.
That’s not the
only revealing thing about the abortionists’ legal arguments. “No one” Slugh tells us, “asserts that the
images are misleading or that the laws require additional pro-life
commentary.” The abortion providers can
only argue that simply requiring them to show truthful, unaltered pictures of
what (which is really, as the images show, who) is being aborted will dissuade some of their
customers. A federal court, in striking
down one of these laws in North Carolina, said in its decision that the law
“explicitly promotes a pro-life message by demanding the provision of facts
that all fall on one side of the abortion debate.” Notice that the law does not require the
suppression of “facts” that fall on the other side of the debate: it simply
requires that the mother know all the facts before undergoing abortion, and the facts happen to be pro-life. And so the abortionists are reduced to asking
the court to help them hide the truth.
As Slugh notes:
All these sources agree that the
more a mother knows about her child, the less likely she is to abort him. This is not because ultrasound images are
misleading or politicized; it is because they supply a mother with truthful
information necessary for making an informed choice.
It’s good to bear this in mind as we work to protect life:
truth is our ally. We should continue to publicize the truth by educating and informing our fellow citizems, by participating in pro-life events over this next week, and by supporting pro-life laws such as
the ones mentioned above that give women more access to full and accurate information. But more than that, we should also be sure to pray to the Lord of
Truth, that He continue to open our eyes and those of our fellow people to the Truth
of humanity of the unborn, and to the sanctity of all human life.
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