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January 10, 2010

Devotion to Truth and to Evil

Justin Katz

Joseph Bottum places two anecdotes side by side:

It's hard to keep up the illusion of abortion as a positive good when the ugly reality of it is always lurking just behind the abstract idea. The wall of illusion came crashing down for Abby Johnson when, after working for Planned Parenthood in Texas for eight years, she witnessed an actual abortion on ultrasound. In a television interview, she explained, "It was actually an ultrasound-guided abortion procedure. . . . And my job was to hold the ultrasound probe on this woman's abdomen so that the physician could actually see the uterus on the ultrasound screen. And when I looked at the screen, I saw a baby. . . . I saw a full side profile. So I saw face to feet. . . . I saw the probe going into the woman’s uterus. And at that moment, I saw the baby moving and trying to get away from the probe. . . . And I thought, "It's fighting for its life. . . . It's life, I mean, it's alive."

Ms. Johnson quit her job and joined a pro-life organization after what she'd witnessed. Next up is another professional in the abortion industry:

... a doctor in the Midwest who wrote about her own moment of disillusionment. It came as she performed an abortion on a woman eighteen weeks pregnant while she herself was eighteen weeks pregnant. "I felt a kick—a fluttery 'thump, thump' in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement. There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a 'thump, thump' in my abdomen. Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes—without me—meaning my conscious brain—even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling—a brutally visceral response—heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics."

The doctor soldiered on, though. and is struggling to overcome these inconvenient pangs of conscience. Training and politics demand that she continues to slaughter babies, so her instinctive understanding of the evil of the act must be suppressed.

There are, of course, historical comparisons that could be made, but people don't like to hear them.

Comments

If it's alive and human and someone is killing it isn't it murder?

Mother's are murdering their own children.

Is this the truth?

SV

Posted by: Sol Venturi at January 10, 2010 8:07 AM

Another story about Mrs. Johnson
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2010-02-01/letterfrombryan-1.php?utm_source=headgrabs&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=20100108

Posted by: anon at January 10, 2010 10:24 AM

I wonder, anon, whether the truth of Johnson's personal conversion or the accuracy of her description of the procedure is the adequate proof of abortion's evil.

Posted by: Justin Katz at January 10, 2010 6:52 PM

Justin, based upon the many posts under his name, including this one, does not shrink from graphic descriptions of the abortion process. The verbal depictions are awful and unvarnished. He might have more "sensitivity" credibility if he would apply the same verbal graphics to, say the war in Afghanistan and Iraq regarding the deaths of innocent civilians, which include a large number of women and children, but those deaths don't seem to affect his otherwise dainty sense of morality.
OldTimeLefty

Posted by: OldTimeLefty at January 10, 2010 9:15 PM