The LA Times ran a piece about abortion that is hard to categorize. Meant to make abortion look acceptable, it has so many disturbing passages that I suspect it does the exact opposite.
The piece revolves around an Arkansas doctor (William Harrison) who believes passionately in abortion up to 26 weeks. He has performed 20,000 abortions, but also believes in life. The proof? He delivered 6,000 babies. The doctor says the women for whom he performs abortions are "born again." He gives them a new life. The article also indicates that he's the calm, scholarly type that refutes all-comers in the abortion debates, yet it's clear the man makes a living from killing. It kinda reminds me of the Nazi concentration camp guards who listened to Wagner and Beethoven during their free time.
Anyway, here are a few of the passages that I'd think any person would find highly disturbing.
A passage describing an 18-year-old patient's abortion:
A nurse has already given her a local anesthetic, Valium and a drug to dilate her cervix; Harrison prepares to inject Versed, a sedative, in her intravenous line. The drug will wipe out her memory of everything that happens during the 20 minutes she's in the operating room. It's so effective that patients who return for a follow-up exam often don't recognize Harrison.
The doctor is wearing a black turtleneck, brown slacks and tennis shoes. He snaps his gum as he checks the monitors displaying the patient's pulse rate and oxygen count.
"This is not going to be nearly as hard as you anticipate," he tells her.
She smiles wanly. Keeping up a constant patter – he asks about her brothers, her future birth control plans, whether she's good at tongue twisters – Harrison pulls on sterile gloves.
"How're you doing up there?" he asks.
"Doing OK."
"Good girl."
Harrison glances at an ultrasound screen frozen with an image of the fetus taken moments before. Against the fuzzy black-and-white screen, he sees the curve of a head, the bend of an elbow, the ball of a fist.
"You may feel some cramping while we suction everything out," Harrison tells the patient.
A moment later, he says: "You're going to hear a sucking sound."
Quotes from women who have chosen to have an abortion and the "compelling" reasons they cite:
"There's things wrong with abortion," she says. "But I want to have a good life. And provide a good life for my child." To keep this baby now, she says, when she's single, broke and about to start college, "would be unfair."
A high school volleyball player says she doesn't want to give up her body for nine months. "I realize just from the first three months how it changes everything," she says.
Kim, a single mother of three, says she couldn't bear to give away a child and have to wonder every day if he were loved. Ending the pregnancy seemed easier, she says – as long as she doesn't let herself think about "what could have been."
His first patient of the day, Sarah, 23, says it never occurred to her to use birth control, though she has been sexually active for six years. When she became pregnant this fall, Sarah, who works in real estate, was in the midst of planning her wedding. "I don't think my dress would have fit with a baby in there," she says.
The first says it would be unfair to bring a baby into the world because she wants to go to college, but it's fair to kill it. The second wants to keep her volleyball body in shape. The third can bear to kill, but not bear to birth it. The fourth doesn't want to mess up her wedding dress.
We're dealing with moral morons here. There's no other way to put it. The pro-life people concentrate on the iniquity of the doctors, but perhaps they oughtta take a harder look at the absolute depravity of the women.
Finally, there's a quote from Harrison that probably summarizes why America has such depravity in its midst:
"It's not a baby to me until the mother tells me it's a baby," [Harrison] says.
It's the same relativity and lack of objective norms that Pope Benedict has been castrating.
