tell me another

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Nov 10, 2009

Get this. The Chicago Tribune digs up a doc who says the problem with the Stupak-Pitts amendment is -- can you guess? -- its threat to the health of the mother:

Dr. Willie Parker, a board member at Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, said the amendment could have the greatest effect on women whose underlying health conditions require hospitalization for a safe abortion.

One might point out that if the health conditions referred to are truly underlying conditions, then they are therapeutically distinguishable from the choice for abortion and it is disingenuous to make a connection with abortion in the first place.

But then mendacity would seem to be second nature to the abortion industry -- as natural as breathing out, at any rate, for it seems incapable of exhaling without transmitting a falsehood. Ramesh Ponnuru's classic essay on the subject is still pertinent:

The abortion regime was born in lies. In Britain (and in California, pre-Roe), the abortion lobby deceptively promoted legal revisions to allow "therapeutic" abortions and then defined every abortion as "therapeutic." The abortion lobby lied about Jane Roe, claiming her pregnancy resulted from a gang rape. It lied about the number of back-alley abortions. Justice Blackmun relied on fictitious history to argue, in Roe, that abortion had never been a common law crime.

The abortion regime is also sustained by lies. Its supporters constantly lie about the radicalism of Roe: even now, most Americans who "agree with Roe v. Wade" in polls think that it left third-term abortions illegal and restricted second-term abortions. They have lied about the frequency and "medical necessity" of partial-birth abortion. Then there are the euphemisms: "terminating a pregnancy," abortion "providers," "products of conception." "The fetus is only a potential human being" -- as if it might as easily become an elk. "It should be between a woman and her doctor" -- the latter an abortionist who has never met the woman before and who has a financial interest in her decision. This movement cannot speak the truth.

Doctor Parker's fictive concern for the fate of the pregnant woman in an eminently elective procedure recalls an op-ed that ran in the New York Times (1996) after Congress banned partial-birth abortion, urging that President Clinton's veto of the ban be upheld, and partial birth abortion thus be permitted to continue unhindered:

Three procedures available for later abortions are complicated and can be dangerous. The vetoed bill would have criminalized only one -- a technique called dilation and extraction -- that medical experts say is the safest of the three.

We know that the three procedures were equally safe for the child: dead in every case. So who was the abortion enthusiast so keen for the dilating and extracting as to fetch from afar the relative benefits for Mom? The Rev. Robert F. Drinan, S.J., late of Georgetown Law School. For a movement that cannot speak the truth, a lamentably imaginative mouthpiece.