Singer Lizzo railed against Texas’ abortion ban this week, indicating that it was a “regressive” attack on long-established access to the procedure.
“I’m not proud to rep Texan politics right now,” she reportedly said Sunday at the SXSW film festival. “There are very regressive laws being passed.” The 33-year-old entertainer pointed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s fight against hormone therapy for minors, and attacked the state’s heartbeat law, which she described as “atrocious.”
In making those comments, Lizzo may have unknowingly honed in on a critical question for the party that claims to champion human rights: Has the so-called “progressive” movement lost its humanity?
For Lizzo, progress and freedom entail politicians staying out of a woman’s uterus. “Mind your business,” she said. “Stay out of my body. This is not political,” But it would be a mistake to define “progress” as throwing off the shackles inhibiting our freedom to do what thou wilt.
Abortion is Regressive
Progressivism itself was born in the excesses of industry and sought to use the law as a means of restricting how much business could exploit human beings through practices like child labor. By contrast, today’s progressives make the “business case” for abortion and browbeat corporations into supporting cost-effective slaughter — whether that manifests in Planned Parenthood’s budget, millions in federal grant money, or the balance sheets of major corporations.
A more accurate framing would portray liberal abortion access as regressive since it evokes an ignorance that preceded advances in detecting the humanity of unborn children. Abortion, as pro-choice advocates will note, isn’t a recent development for civilized society. Neither is letting disabled or unwanted children die after birth.
What is new is the level of sophistication we’ve employed for ending life despite having an unprecedented window into the reality of its existence.
“Nearly 50 years of scientific advancement have literally unveiled the humanity of the unborn child,” Dr. Tara Sander Lee of the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute told Fox News last year. The Harvard-trained scientist added that before Roe “the unborn could barely be seen inside the womb via grainy black and white ultrasound images while now-debunked science claimed the unborn couldn’t feel pain.”
“After Roe, advancements in fetal ultrasound developed rapidly, paving the way to see the unborn with clarity, allowing the diagnosis of fetal malformations with more accuracy and surgical repair of some conditions inside the womb.”
Decades of scientific observation after Roe have led to a slew of pro-life laws that find their basis in biological facts. Texas’ six-week ban is one of many that have been passed with the justification that at that point in a pregnancy, babies harbor one of the most basic signs of life — a heartbeat.
Bleeding-heart social justice warriors should ask themselves: Is it progressive to poison an innocent child’s vital organ or crush the skull of someone who has their own, unique set of DNA? Never mind the dehumanizing process of sifting through their body parts in order to ensure an arm or aorta weren’t left behind in the process of dismemberment.
Discovering the Womb
The surgical precision of abortion procedures betrays any pretense that “cardiac pulsing,”as the media describes it, is just incidental to a particular “clump of cells’” existence. Abortionists specifically inject digoxin into fetal hearts in order to precipitate what they call “fetal demise.” Abortion’s mechanistic features – the surgical dismemberment, heart-stopping injections, and flesh-tearing suction – are all part of an effort to intentionally end the life of another human being.
As if to make the brutality more obvious, abortionists utilize ultrasound technology to ensure precision in how they dispose of the fetus’ body. That same technology, however, has made converts out of at least one former Planned Parenthood director (Abby Johnson) as well as a former abortionist and co-founder of NARAL. After seeing an ultrasound-guided abortion, Dr. Bernard Nathanson turned away from the practice and produced a documentary highlighting the procedure’s depravity.
Dubbed the “Silent Scream,” his 1984 film put on full display the flailing and apparently desperate movements of fetal life encountering an abortion instrument. Johnson similarly described seeing an 13-week fetus attempt to flee from suction. For some reason, though, those visuals aren’t among the many in progressive media that are apparently used to elicit sympathy for the downtrodden.
Lizzo’s vision for progress harkens back to a time when physicians blindly jabbed a woman’s uterus or grasped inside of her for fetal body parts. The darkness shrouding abortions is what presumably allowed Nathanson to be responsible for 75,000 of them and Johnson to pursue purported quotas for the number of abortions at her clinic.
What appeared to be mere numbers quickly became flesh when she stood in front of the screen of an ultrasound.”Nothing prepared me for what I saw on the screen – an unborn baby fighting back, desperate to move away from the suction … The last thing I saw was a spine twirling around in the mother’s womb before succumbing to the force of the suction,” Johnson said during her speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Pro-choice advocates like the American College of Obstetricians Gynecologists (ACOG) have framed the debate over fetal pain in terms of human perception. As one abortionist noted, fetuses don’t start developing the thalamocortical fibers for processing pain until 23 weeks. Moreover, ACOG says, the “perception of pain requires more than just the mechanical transmission and reception of signals.”
But Dr. Stuart Derbyshire, who previously dismissed “fetal pain” as a “misnomer,” penned a paper in which he suggested that the prevailing consensus of pain at 24 weeks could be wrong.
“[T]he evidence,” Derbyshire wrote in his 2020 paper, “and a balanced reading of that evidence, points towards an immediate and unreflective pain experience mediated by the developing function of the nervous system from as early as 12 weeks.”
Progress for Everyone Except the Unborn
Amid the various conditions that progressives lament in modern America, are there any more oppressive than the potential pain and violence a 12-week-old fetus faces at abortion clinics? How about a fetus at six weeks of pregnancy, when they’ve only begun to have the chance at a beating heart?
In the last century, American feminists have seen an explosion of wealth and technology that’s fueled their ascent in social and economic structures. More recently, other minorities touted by the left have also seen historic levels of purported progress. For example, immigration levels are at a record high while the cap on refugee admissions has been raised to its highest level in U.S. history. The U.S. Supreme Court has also declared a “right” to “gay marriage” while taxpayer money funds the “transitions” of those who believe they are a different gender.
But the unborn – in all their helplessness – continue to face new and bolder threats from politicians, who want to not only legalize late-term procedures but fund them with taxpayer dollars as well. Despite what progressives may argue, the most marginalized, oppressed group you can support isn’t the men leading our cities’ pride parades or the plus-sized black women who are currently en vogue. Instead, it’s the unborn – who can’t even keep their hearts beating after the powerful insist on annihilation.
