By Cal Thomas
3/6/2012
"Seeing is believing" is an ancient idiom. It teaches that a dispute can often be resolved by presenting physical evidence.
Opponents of the ultrasound bill passed last week by the Virginia legislature and expected to be signed soon by Governor Bob McDonnell, thought they could stop the measure because they said it would require an invasive vaginal probe to determine the age of the fetus in an early-stage pregnancy. The bill passed after it was modified to mandate only a non-invasive procedure.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, Virginia will join seven other states "that mandate that an abortion provider perform an ultrasound on each woman seeking an abortion, and require the provider to offer the woman the opportunity to view the image."
Before other surgeries, doctors and hospitals must present information to patients who are then required to sign documents consenting to the procedure. No one would deny women access to information about a kidney transplant. So then for abortions, as part of this information-providing process, why shouldn't ultrasound images be included? Shouldn't abortion-seeking women see the life they are about to end?
The debate in Virginia and elsewhere over ultrasound legislation should include the voices of women who favor ultrasound laws.
The media speak of "women" as a monolithic group who consistently subscribe to the liberal-secular line. But there are many women -- I have met a few -- whose voices are rarely, if ever, heard. These women either decided to give birth after seeing an ultrasound image, or regretted having had an abortion and would testify that if they had seen an ultrasound image before the procedure they would have made a different choice. Does not seeing an ultrasound image change the reality of abortion?
There are several websites featuring testimonies from some of these pro-ultrasound women. One is: http://www.projectultrasound.org/testimonies.html.
Why would anyone want to deprive women of the joy they experience after seeing a picture of their baby and deciding to preserve their baby's life? Why would anyone not want to protect these women from the pain many have experienced from not seeing a picture and going forward with the abortion, only to later regret it?
In Britain, two "medical ethicists" associated with Oxford University have published an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics entitled "After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?" which asserts that newborn babies are not "actual persons" and thus do not have a "moral right to life." As reported in the London Daily Telegraph, the professors argue, "Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are 'morally irrelevant' and ending their lives is no different to abortion." The authors, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, maintain that "killing a newborn should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled."
The Telegraph story quotes Giubilini and Minerva: "The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual. Rather than being 'actual persons,' newborns were 'potential persons'." They explained: "Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a 'person' in the sense of 'subject of a moral right to life'."
Let's hear "pro-choicers" argue against infanticide and present their reasons for doing so. Having ceded any moral high ground that defines human life as distinct from animal life, though some do equate the two, on what basis do they say "no" to the ethicists' argument? They have no basis.
This is where our indifference to human life and its Creator has led us. Requiring ultrasounds before a woman has an abortion will help restore recognition of a baby's right to live and of our own humanity.
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To read another article by Cal Thomas, click here.
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Ultrasounds Are Only 'Rape' If They Prevent An Abortion
By Steven Aden
3/6/2012
Virginia recently enacted a new law making theirs the eighth state to require an ultrasound to be performed prior to an abortion. As with other states that have passed similar measures, Virginia’s law provides the mother “an opportunity" to view the ultrasound image of her [baby] prior to the abortion,” but it is an option she can decline.
And because ultrasound technology poses a threat to the abortion industry—inasmuch as it allows a mother to see the life within her in a way that we couldn’t even imagine decades ago—supporters of death have been rallying the troops against the progress being made in Virginia and equating such ultrasounds with rape.
Their basis for making this claim is that women who want to have an abortion, but are less than 12 weeks along in their pregnancy, will have to have a trans-vaginal ultrasound: one in which “a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced.”
Straining to prove this mad assertion, abortion supporters are claiming that such an ultrasound requirement will result in women being “forcibly penetrated,” and therefore, violated by the state.
What’s strange is that these same people have no ethical qualms about allowing an abortionist’s scalpels and vacuum devices to be inserted into a woman as her baby is literally ripped from the womb limb by limb. And they apparently feel no angst over a pre-born child being injected with medicine that stops his or her heart so that labor can be induced and the stillborn child can be disposed of in a trash can (or a dumpster) in much the same way one would dispose of a banana peel or moldy bread.
Of course, there is no constitutional prohibition on providing women with full information about this life-and-death decision, as the Supreme Court has affirmed. Nor is the ultrasound requirement an unlawful “search” by the government, any more than would be a legal requirement that a doctor take an x-ray of a broken limb before setting it. In fact, even abortionists like Planned Parenthood admit that they routinely do ultrasounds before abortions to confirm gestational age – it is the standard of practice for this “business,” as confirmed by the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
If the truth were told, what bothers opponents is not really the ultrasound requirement per se, but the combination of the ultrasound and the waiting period which gives the mother time to see and think about things before making a decision which, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in a recent case, “she may come to regret.”
Here’s the exact wording of the law:
Except in the case of a medical emergency, at least 2 hours before the performance of an abortion a qualified medical professional trained in sonography and working under the direct supervision of a physician licensed in the Commonwealth shall perform fetal ultrasound imaging and auscultation of fetal heart tone services on the patient undergoing the abortion for the purpose of determining gestational age. The ultrasound image shall be made pursuant to standard medical practice in the community, contain the dimensions of the fetus, and accurately portray the presence of external members and internal organs of the fetus, if present or viewable.
The combination of a waiting period and an ultrasound is a one-two punch against the culture of death, and its proponents don’t like it. They’d rather keep everything moving quickly so the woman doesn’t have time to think about the fact that she’s ending a human life – one that is her own flesh and blood. Members of the culture of death, used to peddling what the Supreme Court has called “the abortion distortion,” can call it “rape,” but reasonable people see this for what it is—an attempt to appeal to every sensibility in the mother’s heart and mind in the hope that she will become fully aware of what she’s actually doing to her pre-born child.
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