Update: If you don’t want the baby, PLEASE carry him/her to term and consider adoption. Choose life!
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In her own words (emphases added):
“I was still unsure when I entered Carhart’s clinic, so I began my day by interviewing patients. I learned their names, why they’d come to Carhart’s clinic and how they felt about it. I went with them through the pre-op routine. There was an ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy, blood work and pre-op medications, a patient advocacy session. We sat together in the waiting room, killing time [no pun intended, I'm sure] until a nurse called them in to surgery. When their names were called, and I’d spent all morning with these women, it felt unnatural to stop short of the operating room (one woman, who’d come alone, even asked me to accompany her). So I entered a small room that joins Carhart’s two operating rooms, where I could see patients on both sides.
“A first-trimester abortion, from my vantage point behind the glass window, looked like an extended, more invasive version of a standard ob-gyn exam. A woman with her heels in stirrups, clothes traded in for a hospital gown, a speculum holding the cervix open. Carhart used a suction tube to empty the contents of the uterus [content which consists of ripped-apart fetal parts]; it took no longer than three minutes. The suction machine made a slight rumbling sound, a pinkish fluid [never heard it called that before] flowed through the tube, and, faster than I’d expected, it was over. Women spent less than a half hour in the operating room. I’d anticipated some kind of difficulty watching an abortion; it wasn’t there.
“At least not physically. But there was a discomfort I hadn’t expected, my emotional reaction to watching abortions.”
I think any reasonable person with an ounce of a conscience would feel discomfort watching an abortion. The author concluded:
“Abortion involves weighty choices that, depending on how you view it, involve a life, or the potential for life. And my reaction, complicated and conflicted as it was, may have been a reflection of our national ambivalence about a private medical procedure at the center of a very public debate.”
Our view on the matter doesn’t matter. The life growing inside a woman is life, not mere potential life. The so-called ambivalence over abortion stems not from private procedure v. public debate. I believe most sane people know it’s wrong to slaughter unborn babies, especially through partial birth abortion. They just don’t like the idea of telling women what they can or can’t do with their bodies.
Doesn’t bother me. You can choose to use your body to hurt someone else. Unless it’s consensual (if you’re into that sort of thing), you’ll face criminal charges. But it’s okay to choose to hurt an unborn child? You’ll notice protection of the child turns on whether the mother wants him. If she doesn’t, it’s her “choice” to kill him, not anyone else’s. Anyone who harms a wanted baby faces charges. Harming an unwanted baby is legal. Why does the mother’s level of desire for the child dictate the legality or illegality of killing him?
Oh, right. The Supreme Court makes it so.
Women who become pregnant exercised a very important choice. They had sex, and sex leads to pregnancy. No birth control method is 100 percent effective. Choosing to engage in an activity that may produce a fertilized egg is a HUGE responsibility that too many people take MUCH too lightly. Choices involve trade-offs, and the trade-off should never be the death of the baby.
For the record, even in cases of rape and incest, I’m still pro-life. Killing a baby because of how he was conceived? Just as heinous.
That the killing of unborn children is legal in the United States is a curse on this country.
