The Daily Hatch

Richard Dawkins comments on Tim Tebow pro-life commercial.

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On the Arkansas Times Blog, a person with the username “November” posted:

You dont have the “choice” to kill and innocent child in the womb. No one gave the child a trial before killing it. The child is innocent, and the U S Constitution says you cant deprive someone of their life without due process. I always love it when someone has learned they are having a little one coming into their life….they dont say, “we are having a fetus!”…they say “we are having a BABY.!” because it is a child loooooong before it is born and you can see it. Thank God for Representative Griffin!!!!

A response came from username “Verla Sweere”:

I’m old enough to remember what it was like before Roe/v/Wade. And we’re heading down that road again. How sad, that women are willing to be treated like chattel. And why are anti-abortion people also against contraception, aid to women and children, public schools, etc.? Do they not see the connection? While they see abortion as the road to hell, they believe Gingrich has been redeemed. ?????

Later a response from username “Outlier”:

Me too, Verla. I asked Sam in the Romney thread where he would draw the abortion line—no response from him yet. Sam would allow abortion for a 12 year old rape victim with severe health problems. I posed some hypothetical situations for him and now I repeat them for November (I see his punctuation key is stuck again!!!!!). As some one once said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

“Sam, I would like to know where you draw the abortion line. It seems like you want it both ways, as long as you get to decide where the line should be
drawn. Is abortion okay if a woman is carrying an anencephalic (no brain except for a primitive brain stem) fetus which can only live a few hours or a day or two at most if carried to term? What if a woman is carrying conjoined twins with two heads and one torso and no hope of surgical separation? What about a woman who practiced birth control faithfully and had a failure? Keep in mind that most b.c. methods do not prevent conception; they merely prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall. How about a young widow with two kids already who can’t afford to take the time off from work, even if she is willing to put the baby up for adoption? How about a woman with mental illness or severe depression who is simply incapable of carrying a pregnancy to term?”

My response was as follows:

The issue is not the intelligence but the issue of personhood. Here is a great quote from J.P. Moreland:

“When do I become a full person? What is it about me that makes me only a potential person? The bad news is that for anything you say–for example, having rationality–it becomes real difficult not to say that real smart people are not more persons than uneducated people, because whatever criterion you use, if it’s quantifiable, it’s pretty tough to justify everyone having equal rights based on that. Maybe you could posit some threshold, or something. Joseph Fletcher says the minimum threshold rationality is 85 on an IQ test, I think it is. That’s enough to allow Down Syndrome to fall just below the line, I think, of personhood for him…

“What I’m trying to surface is, that if you’re of the view that there is such a thing as potential personhood–I’m not saying that everyone on the pro-choice side agrees with that; indeed they don’t–but if you think there is such a thing as potential personhood, so that personhood is the thing that, number one is what gives me value, and number two something I can have more or less of, then you do have to draw lines because that becomes a sliding scale that becomes terribly problematic. What you’ve got to do now is try to show why your view does not entail the idea that very self-aware, good, language-using people with a good self-concept aren’t more persons than plumbers that are out of touch with themselves and can’t speak very well.

“If this is your view–if you hold the potential person view–it becomes very difficult to justify abortion and not infanticide because the reasons that a person will give for justifying abortion will also apply to the two-week old child as well, and there are some philosophers that are in fact drawing that conclusion.”

J. P. Moreland, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at Biola Unviersity.

Superbowl commercial with Tim Tebow and Mom.

In Little Rock on January 21, 2012 in front of 100 pro-choice advocates met next to the Capitol to hear Loretta Ross speak. In that talk she pointed out something about her own experience. (Below is from another speech in which she recounts some of the same details.)

Loretta Ross: Frankly, I’m a woman who at 14, became pregnant through incest. It was not voluntary at all, OK? At the time my son was born, and I had to carry that pregnancy to term, because it was pre-Roe. 1969. I had the option of giving my child up for adoption. I found I couldn’t do it. I took one look at his face and I couldn’t do it. So I ended up parenting that kid and I’m glad I had him. I’m glad I parented him. but at the same time, anyone who acts like it’s just so easy to carry a child to term, give birth and them just hand the baby over to somebody else obviously has never done it. And the women I’ve talked to who have done it, often regret having done it. Even more so than the so-called women who regret having abortions. So it’s a scheme designed to make black women feel guilty, it builds on the fantasy of adoption being easy and it ignores the fact that something like 4 out of 5 children in adoption agencies that are hard to place are African-American.

Notice her words: “I took one look at his face and I couldn’t do it. So I ended up parenting that kid and I’m glad I had him. I’m glad I parented him.” In other words, it was not a blob but a baby!!!

Let me share a similar story. I used to write letters to the editor a whole lot back in the 1990’s.  I am pro-life and many times my letters would discuss current political debates, and I got to know several names of people that would often write in response letters to my published letters. One of those individuals was a Dr. William F. Harrison from Fayetteville. Later I found out from reading an article by David Sanders that Dr. Harrison was an abortionist. Dr Harrison died from leukemia on September 24, 2010. Here is a post from Jason Tolbert from July of 2010:

KFSM in Fayetteville is reporting that abortist William Harrison is closing the doors to his abortion clinic in nothwest Arkansas for health reasons. In an ABC News story a few year ago, Harrison said he had performed over 10,000 abortions and was comfortable with the taking of life.

I now write a column for Stephen Media in a spot once held by conservative David J. Sanders who is currently running for the Arkansas House of Representatives.  Sanders shadowed Harrison in his abortion clinic and wrote of series of columns on the experience.  I think these are prehaps Sanders’ best work…

Harrison is sure that what he does is right, but he confessed to the enormous costs that come in his line of work. There were threats against his wife and children and staff. He commented that if he “had known” everything – the threats, the risks – that would take place over the years, he might not have decided to provide abortions.

Some years ago, a 16-year-old daughter of a close friend of the family had gotten pregnant. “Their Baptist minister had advised her parents that she shouldn’t have an abortion and that (if she did) she would regret it the rest of her life. But had I had the choice, at the time, I would have advised (the mother of the teenager) to have that child aborted,” he said as he stared at his desktop.

“Well, she had her baby. She’s as smart as a whip,” he said. Now, years later, that baby is grown and about to finish her doctorate at the University of California at San Francisco.

I asked him if that sent chills up his spine. His response: “Absolutely.”

The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D.,

Chapter 12 is titled To The Thanatoriums, an allusion the Walker Percy’s terrific book Thanatos.

Nathanson explains the reason for the acrimonious debate continuing still over abortion: It was decided by the courts and not through the public opinion in a public vote. Judges were legislating from the bench,

Like Dred Scott, Roe v. Wade…attempted to remove the abortion decision from politics and thus effectively radicalized the debate, discouraging compromise, political half-measures, or even edifying discussion. In particular it denied to pro-life forces the ordinary tools of politics…They were left with only two options, one largely illusory.

Politically, they could pursue a constitutional amendment banning abortion…But…in the absence of a national moral consensus on the issue, it is simply too large a step to be the first step. An America capable of passing a pro-life amendment would not need one; an America that needs one cannot possibly pass it. Emphasis mine. p. 178

Nathanson suggests another,
[A]lternative that seemed open to pro-lifers was to wage a war of conscience, to educate, advocate, and nonviolently protest the horror until the nation was moved to reconsider. Meanwhile, if the protesters, advocates, educators, and pamphleteers could not move the nation at least they might save individual mothers and children from the monster. p. 178

“Resistance to the injustice [of abortion] may take many forms. Henry David Thoreau wrote the following in his monumental treatise “Civil Disobedience”:

This is such a great video series “The Silent Scream.” I have never seen it until now and I wish I had seen it 30 years ago.  Take a look at the video clip below.

I wanted to pass along a portion of the excellent article “Bernard Nathanson: A Life Transformed by the Truth about Abortion.” (Feb 11, 2011)

LifeNews.com Note: Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. This article previously appeared in Public Discourse:

In the mid-1960s, with the sexual revolution roaring after Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent but influential “scientific” studies of sex and sexuality in America, Hugh Hefner’s aggressive campaign to legitimize pornography and, perhaps above all, the wide distribution of the anovulant birth control pill, Nathanson became a leader in the movement to overturn laws prohibiting abortion. He co-founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), which later became the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and is now NARAL Pro-Choice America. Its goal was to remove the cultural stigma on abortion, eliminate all meaningful legal restraints on it, and make it as widely available as possible across the nation and, indeed, the globe.

To achieve these goals, Nathanson would later reveal, he and fellow abortion crusaders pursued dubious and in some cases straightforwardly dishonest strategies.

First, they promoted the idea that abortion is a medical issue, not a moral one. This required persuading people of the rather obvious falsehood that a normal pregnancy is a natural and healthy condition if the mother wants her baby, and a disease if she does not. The point of medicine, to maintain and restore health, had to be recast as giving health care consumers what they happen to want; and the Hippocratic Oath’s explicit prohibition of abortion had to be removed. In the end, Nathanson and his collaborators succeeded in selling this propaganda to a small but extraordinarily powerful group of men: in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade,seven Supreme Court justices led by Harry Blackmun, former counsel to the American Medical Association, invalidated virtually all state laws providing meaningful protection for unborn children on the ground that abortion is a “private choice” to be made by women and their doctors.

Second, Nathanson and his friends lied–relentlessly and spectacularly–about the number of women who died each year from illegal abortions. Their pitch to voters, lawmakers, and judges was that women are going to seek abortion in roughly equal numbers whether it is lawful or not. The only effect of outlawing it, they claimed, is to limit pregnant women to unqualified and often uncaring practitioners, “back alley butchers.” So, Nathanson and others insisted, laws against abortion are worse than futile: they do not save fetal lives; they only cost women’s lives.

Now some women did die from unlawful abortions, though factors other than legalization, especially the development of antibiotics such as penicillin, are mainly responsible for reducing the rate and number of maternal deaths. And of course, the number of unborn babies whose lives were taken shot up dramatically after Nathanson and his colleagues achieved their goals; and they achieved them, in part, by claiming that the number of illegal abortions was more than ten times higher than it actually was.

Third, the early advocates of abortion deliberately exploited anti-Catholic animus among liberal elites and (in those days) many ordinary Protestants to depict opposition to abortion as a “religious dogma” that the Catholic hierarchy sought to impose on others in violation of their freedom and the separation of church and state. Nathanson and his friends recognized that their movement needed an enemy–a widely suspected institution that they could make the public face of their opposition; a minority, but one large and potent enough for its detractors to fear.

Despite the undeniable historical fact that prohibitions of abortion were rooted in English common law and reinforced and expanded by statutes enacted across the United States by overwhelmingly Protestant majorities in the 19th century, Nathanson and other abortion movement leaders decided that the Catholic Church was perfect for the role of freedom-smothering oppressor. Its male priesthood and authority structure would make it easy for them to depict the Church’s opposition to abortion as misogyny, for which concern to protect unborn babies was a mere pretext. The Church’s real motive, they insisted, was to restrict women’s freedom in order to hold them in positions of subservience.

Fourth, the abortion movement sought to appeal to conservatives and liberals alike by promoting feticide as a way of fighting poverty. Why are so many people poor? It’s because they have more children than they can afford to care for. What’s the solution? Abortion. Why do we have to spend so much money on welfare? It’s because poor, mainly minority, women are burdening the taxpayer with too many babies. The solution? Abortion. Initially, Nathanson himself believed that legal abortion and its public funding would reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing and poverty, though (as he later admitted) he continued to promote this falsehood after the sheer weight of evidence forced him to disbelieve it.

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The Silent Scream part 2

Development of the Unborn Baby.  Prolife Video

There are people all around you who have been affected by humanism. Abortion is one of the results of humanism. Nevertheless, we can befriend those who are considering abortion and speak into their lives with love and truth. There may be those who say hateful things to us when we do that but it is worth it.

We personally know several people who have told us that their mother wanted to get an abortion, but later changed her mind. I am thinking of one lady that we knew from our Sunday School class who told us that she was in the parking lot of an abortion clinic and changed her mind. Now that she has two beautiful children she can not believe she even considered it.

My wife Jill befriended a lady that was visiting our church around 15 years ago. The lady shared that she was pregnant and her muslim boyfriend was pressuring her to get an abortion.

Jill prayed with her and the lady gladly met with a Christian doctor that Jill recommended. The doctor offered his services totally free throughout the remainder of the pregnancy and even said he would take care of all the expenses  involved. The lady was thrilled. However, soon after the lady was taken to the abortion clinic by her boyfriend and had the abortion. She later contacted our pastor and told him how rude the people at the church were to her.

Planned Parenthood gives their workers several talking points and one of those points is that the unborn baby does not feel pain until the 28th week. Take a look below at these facts:

Fetal Development; From conception to birth;

Day 1: fertilization: all human chromosomes are present; unique human life begins. Day 6: embryo begins implantation in the uterus. Day 22: heart begins to beat with the child’s own blood, often a different type than the mothers’.

Week 3: By the end of third week the child’s backbone spinal column and nervous system are forming. The liver, kidneys and intestines begin to take shape.

Week 4: By the end of week four the child is ten thousand times larger than the fertilized egg. Week 5: Eyes, legs, and hands begin to develop. Week 6: Brain waves are detectable; mouth and lips are present; fingernails are forming. Week 7: Eyelids, and toes form, nose distinct. The baby is kicking and swimming.

Week 8: Every organ is in place, bones begin to replace cartilage, and fingerprints begin to form. By the 8th week the baby can begin to hear. Weeks 9 and 10: Teeth begin to form, fingernails develop. The baby can turn his head, and frown. The baby can hiccup.

Weeks 10 and 11: The baby can “breathe” amniotic fluid and urinate. Week 11 the baby can grasp objects placed in its hand; all organ systems are functioning. The baby has a skeletal structure, nerves, and circulation.

Week 12: The baby has all of the parts necessary to experience pain, including nerves, spinal cord, and thalamus. Vocal cords are complete. The baby can suck its thumb.

Week 14: At this age, the heart pumps several quarts of blood through the body every day. Week 15: The baby has an adult’s taste buds. Month 4: Bone Marrow is now beginning to form. The heart is pumping 25 quarts of blood a day. By the end of month 4 the baby will be 8-10 inches in length and will weigh up to half a pound. Week 17: The baby can have dream (REM) sleep.

Week 19: Babies can routinely be saved at 21 to 22 weeks after fertilization, and sometimes they can be saved even younger. Week 20: The earliest stage at which Partial birth abortions are performed. At 20 weeks the baby recognizes its’ mothers voice. Months 5 and 6: The baby practices breathing by inhaling amniotic fluid into its developing lungs. The baby will grasp at the umbilical cord when it feels it. Most mothers feel an increase in movement, kicking, and hiccups from the baby. Oil and sweat glands are now functioning. The baby is now twelve inches long or more, and weighs up to one and a half pounds.

Months 7 through 9: Eyeteeth are present. The baby opens and closes his eyes. The baby is using four of the five senses (vision, hearing, taste, and touch.) He knows the difference between waking and sleeping, and can relate to the moods of the mother. The baby’s skin begins to thicken, and a layer of fat is produced and stored beneath the skin. Antibodies are built up, and the baby’s heart begins to pump 300 gallons of blood per day. Approximately one week before the birth the baby stops growing, and “drops” usually head down into the pelvic cavity. Sources Used: Bergel, Gary (Produced by NRLC) “When You Were Formed in Secret.” 1998. Flanagan, Geraldine Lux. Beginning Life. The Marvelous Journey from Conception to Birth. New York: DK Publishing Inc., 1996. Hopson, Janet L. Fetal Psychology. Oct. 1998. 07 Jan 2003. http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/tul/psych… Internet Sources: “Fetal Development.” 07 Jan 2003. http://www.w-cpc.org/fetal1.html. Video from the public domain.