The cognitive dissonance of the abortion debate captured in a single headline.
· Jul 9, 2022 · NottheBee.com

The Supreme Court's ruling that the Constitution does not include a right to abortion has brought to the forefront the central question surrounding abortion: Do the unborn have a right to life? This has resulted in a serious debate among our intellectual elites and a sincere and concerted effort to explore this most profound of moral questions.

Ha! Just kidding! Our intellectual elites are just going to pretend it doesn't exist!

That's how we end up with irony-free headlines like this, wholly unburdened with having to address the core argument of the pro-life movement.

 

The fact that they don't dare address the question of whether those 600,000 aborted babies a year count as "lives lost" shows just how rickety is the foundation upon which the entire pro-abortion lobby rests. There is no clearer proof of this than the unhinged rage the pro-abortion lobby has towards ultrasounds.

An ultrasound performed in public in Mexico this past October 3 enraged the militant pro-abortion movement and discredited their narrative, since it shows that an unborn baby is precisely an unborn baby and not a mere "clump of cells."

The event took place in Mexico City during the March for Women and Life, a national event in which more than a million protesters participated throughout the country as a whole, 300,000 of them in the capital alone.

The ultrasound showed the baby of Ana, a pregnant teenager in her 38th week of pregnancy. According to the news agency ACI Prensa, the young woman voluntarily participated in the event and she also had the consent of her parents.

Did I say unhinged?

Militant pro-abortion activists, however, were not only unmoved by the video, but even declared themselves "outraged" by Ana's free and spontaneous participation, calling it a "circus" and a "disgusting exhibition."

...Ana has the "right to decide freely, independently and informedly about her body and sexuality,..."

"Informedly." But not too informedly if you know what I mean.

...but "there's nothing touching about seeing an ultrasound performed on a pregnant teenager: on the contrary, it's troubling."

"Let's not normalize these kinds of images... It is not about religious ideologies, but about RIGHTS."

We must not normalize pictures of babies!!!

In fact, this whole science-y thing, once a reliable ally of pro-abortionists, is really starting to get in the way.

Activists like McGuire believe it makes perfect sense to be pro-science and pro-life. While she opposes abortion on moral grounds, she believes studies of fetal development, improved medical techniques, and other advances anchor the movement's arguments in scientific fact. "The pro-life message has been, for the last 40-something years, that the fetus … is a life, and it is a human life worthy of all the rights the rest of us have," she said. "That's been more of an abstract concept until the last decade or so." But, she added, "when you're seeing a baby sucking its thumb at 18 weeks, smiling, clapping," it becomes "harder to square the idea that that 20-week-old, that unborn baby or fetus, is discardable."

In many ways, this represents a dramatic reversal; pro-choice activists have long claimed science for their own side.

With science going against them, they simply ignore it as best they can.

Take this piece from The Washington Post:

She wanted an abortion. Now, she has twins.

What's interesting about this headline is that it could be taken either way.

This is a Rorschach test. what do you see?

Indeed. What do you see?

Early on in the piece, author Caroline Kitchener details all that was lost, the opportunity for the mother to begin a career in real estate, the father having to grow up faster than he had planned, and so on.

But credit where it is due. While late in this 4000-word piece, likely long after many readers have moved on, she tells an important truth.

She told herself that alternate life didn't matter anymore. She had two babies she loved more than anything else in the world. "I do," she said, tears in her eyes.

Life will be difficult, dreams will be deferred. But like most any parent, she can't imagine a world without those two babies. Her babies.

In an age where reality itself is subservient to fantasy, that is one truth that will become increasingly difficult to ignore.

Surely, at a bare minimum, it's worth discussing honestly.

A study came out in not long ago that examined the effects that both having an abortion, and being denied an abortion, had on women.

...recruited 1,132 women from the waiting rooms of thirty abortion clinics in twenty-one states. Some of the women would go on to have abortions, but others would be turned away, because they had missed the fetal gestational limit set by the clinic. Foster and her colleagues decided to compare the women in the two groups—those who received the abortion they sought and those who were compelled to carry their unwanted pregnancy to term—on a variety of measures over time, interviewing them twice a year for up to five years.

Oh, and in case you were wondering because of course you were:

Foster refers to the study's participants as women because, to her knowledge, there were no trans men or non-binary people among them.

The study suggested that 95% of the women who had an abortion still felt it had been the right decision five years later, and that by many measures the women who received abortions were less likely to live in poverty, less likely to be in an abusive relationship, and so on.

There have been many criticisms of the study, such as the fact that most of the women who were asked if they wanted to participate declined and even then only 58% of the women who were enrolled participated all the way through to the final interview. These problems together with methodological issues potentially skews the results so much as to render them meaningless. Research scientists and statisticians can argue over that but here's something else the study found that unsurprisingly doesn't get top billing: The women who were prevented from having an abortion? They were happy with the result, too.

But the vast majority of women who'd been denied abortions reported that they no longer wished that they'd been able to end the pregnancy, after an actual child of four or five was in the world.

It's worth lingering on that point. Despite the additional hardships and sacrifices, a vast majority of the women who were prevented from having an abortion were glad that someone intervened to stop them.

Maybe that's why the article headline was carefully crafted to claim only that the study debunked most anti-abortion arguments.

And of course, it left out out the single most important one.

For all the hundreds of interviews conducted over the course of the study, no one ever bothered to interview the children.

Perhaps that was because half of them never had a chance to be.


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