It is always instructive when your extremist opponents reveal who they are.
Pro-abortion activists who acknowledge that the prenatal child is a little human being — but offer a nuanced account of, say, what the law’s role should be (particularly given the history of exploitation of women) — are worthy of pro-lifers’ respect. They are wrong about what justice for vulnerable and voiceless populations requires, but most are honest brokers who are genuinely struggling with something complex.
Unfortunately, that does not describe those who hold power in academia, the Democratic Party, and most of our corporate media. These extremists hold the most extreme position imaginable: abortion on request for any reason paid for by pro-life tax dollars as just another health care procedure.
Watch their rhetoric carefully: Virtually the only way to arrive at such an extremist position is to completely erase the biological reality of the prenatal human being. In a recent Georgia Senate election debate, for instance, Democrat Raphael Warnock said, “A patient’s room is too small a place for a woman, her doctor, and the U.S. government.” Republican Hershel Walker was forced to remind him of someone else who is in that room: the baby.
Another recent example of this was an article in The Guardian ostensibly trying to show “what a pregnancy actually looks like before 10 weeks.” The takeaway was supposed to be, “Look at these photos! Stupid anti-science pro-lifers who talk about ‘babies’ being killed in abortion don’t have any idea what they are talking about.”
But the photos were not of a living human being inside her mother’s body. They were of manipulated pregnancy tissue (provided by a pro-abortion group) after a violent abortion had taken place. After public outcry took place on social media showing that The Guardian was being dishonest in removing the baby from the photos, they made the following update to the story: “this article was amended on 19 October 2022 to include the detail that at nine weeks the nascent embryo is not discernible to the naked eye.”
But the reason why the baby was not discernable to the naked eye was because the violence of abortion had made her unrecognizable. When the baby is wanted, of course, we are honest about her biological reality. Consider this description of a nine-week-old prenatal child from The Bump:
Now that baby’s nearly an inch long, they definitely look like a miniature baby! Baby has ear lobes now, clear fingers and toes and a little nubbin of a nose. This is the final week of baby’s embryo status, and with that comes a head that’s a bit more rounded and straightened up. Baby’s arms are now bent at the elbow—ideal for working out all those little muscles that are forming!
The group Secular Pro-Life did a nice job showing what The Guardian’s nine-week image would have looked like if the baby had only been a half-inch long and had not been made unrecognizable by the violence of abortion:
This baby is easily recognizable by the naked eye.
Showing the post-abortion photo and trying to gaslight everyone who knows the biological reality of the prenatal human is obviously journalistic malpractice and a classic example of what Pope Francis calls “throwaway culture.” One needs to dehumanize and erase these populations from the moral community so they can be discarded. It is no wonder, then, that Francis describes abortion as a “white glove” Nazi crime.
This is actually a good development for pro-lifers. It reveals that our most determined opponents have incredibly weak arguments and are getting desperate. In an attempt to win the argument for their radical position, they must insult the experience of millions of women who have had miscarriages at these stages — including women who have held these babies in their hands and cried the deepest kinds of tears imaginable.
One reason pro-abortion politicians have lost ground after the first few weeks of post-Dobbs discussions is that this kind of extremism is just so alienating. So take heart, pro-lifers. The biological facts are on our side, and our most determined opponents have been reduced to dishonest game-playing. Justice for vulnerable prenatal children will prevail.
