Today, NARAL is hosting a “Blogging for Choice Day”. So, my friend Jill Stanek is countering with a “Ask Them What They Mean By ‘Choice’” Blog Day Read the link at Jill’s if you want to get in on disrupting their day on twitter and FB by asking them what exactly it means to “choose”.
When Jill put out the call to pro-life bloggers, I answered immediately. 99 pro-life bloggers have rallied around Jill’s call. She is the Founding Mother of the pro-life blogosphere, and days such as today with the graphic she designed and shown here illustrate why she continues to command the respect and admiration of pro-life bloggers.
First, we should all begin this day with a serious and solemn prayer for NARAL’s members. It is one thing to be a frightened young girl in an unexpected pregnancy and to seek abortion as the escape from the fog of fear and uncertainty. It’s quite another to make it one’s life’s work to see to it that the floodgates are wedged open as wide as possible for the wholesale slaughter of infants in the womb.
53 Million and counting.
So we pray for the Holy Spirit of God to open their eyes to the humanity of the unborn, to accept the imperfections of their own lives in order that they may accept the imperfections of other’s lives. We pray that they are led to abandon the hopelessness and despair that drives their behavior, their nihilistic vision, and to be filled with a spirit of hopefulness, of optimism, of charitable forbearance. We pray that their hearts of stone are healed and turned to hearts of flesh, that they commit their energy, time, and resources to helping frightened women bring to fruition their budding motherhood, rather than pandering to the doubts and fears that grip even the best of parents.
We pray that these women of NARAL see that the child of the womb is not the enemy, that handicapped babies are a blessing that call their parents, siblings, and extended family to depths of love hitherto unimagined by spouses; and that they see the true enemy of domestic peace and prosperity is the combined effects of fear and faithlessness.
It was through Adam and Eve’s faithlessness that death entered into the world. It was through Jesus submission to the Father’s will that we were restored to life. And so we pray today for the restoration of NARAL’s members. Amen.
Now, to business.
Some observations and questions for NARAL. Large scale atrocities, such as the NAZI Holocaust, which killed 14 million Jews, Catholics, and other undesirables, are NOT, I repeat, NOT solely the results of the will of a tyranical dictator such as Hitler. One deranged art school flunkie can’t murder that many people on his own. He needs help.
Atrocities grow in proportion to the number of individuals who CHOOSE to participate in them. When the body count climbs into the millions, an entire nation has been complicit. Germany was a great example, the gold standard, actually.
Judges, physicians, nurses, police, the military, teachers, all played a part through their respective roles. Each CHOSE to do so. Many chose not to, and became a part of the body count. And so, a few questions for NARAL. So how many such choices are the difference between bad policy and human atrocity?
How are the eugenic physicians of the Third Reich different from the eugenic obstetricians today who screen genetic differences, label them as “imperfections”, and then categorize such perceived imperfection as so severe as to make the human individual unworthy of continued life?
How is the concept of the “Master Race” in Germany seventy years ago at all different from our eugenic screening of babies in the womb, sex-selective abortions, and desire for genetic engineering and human cloning?
The choice to terminate a life ought to carry with it some set of grave criteria. What constitutes sufficient criteria to literally pull a baby apart, limb by limb?
In what system of jurisprudence, anywhere in the world, are babies put to death because of their father’s status as a rapist, or because their mother fears an uncertain future?
That’s enough for now.
More questions later.
Coming Home 
Great post, Dr. Gerard!
God bless your efforts.
“What constitutes sufficient criteria to literally pull a baby apart, limb by limb?”
I can answer that. When I was 5 months pregnant with our older son, I briefly considered a late-term abortion.
I had an ultrasound, and the doctor couldn’t see all of my son’s heart, and couldn’t get the baby into a position where the heart would be visible. Something was beating, but it was possible it was a malformed heart lacking chambers — not just a little defect, but a heart incapable of sustaining a human body, perhaps not even for the duration of a pregnancy.
I asked if I could come back next month, but the doctor wanted me to have lunch and come back the same afternoon. He said, “If your baby doesn’t have a complete heart, it’s best not to wait a month, and get even more attached to him.”
Before I had lunch, I called my main OB/GYN’s office to make sure he did late-term abortions. He wasn’t there — I left a message. By the time he got back to me, I’d had the second ultrasound — as the first doctor had predicted, the baby moved around after I’d had lunch, and all of the chambers of his heart were visible. He was fine.
My main doctor called me back, and I told him why I had been calling. He assured me that yes, he did late-term abortions, but was glad to hear that I wouldn’t be having one.
I know many mothers who would have carried their babies to term — or even induced labor early — and let a baby with an incomplete heart be born, and then die in their arms. I would never be critical of such a choice.
But I would have had my son pulled apart, “limb by limb,” as soon as my doctor could possibly have scheduled it, to spare myself labor and delivery. This would have been MY choice.
L., Please view the January 20th broadcast of http://www.awmi.net/tv/2011/week3 , little Audrey was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome.
There is a way which seems right to a (wo)man, But its end is the way of death. Proverbs 14:13
Yep, I’ve heard of hypoplastic left heart syndrome — it’s sometimes treatable and survivable — and I’m sure even more strides have been made in pediatric cadiology in the 16 years since I was pregnant.
I’m glad little Audrey’s story had a happy ending, but being a natural skeptic, I can’t help but wonder if examples of faith healing, like this one, might instead be examples of faulty diagnosis? Audrey was discharged from the hospital a week later, and were parents were told they didn’t even need to bring her back to the hospital for any heart-monitoring because her heart turned out to be perfectly normal after all?
Doctors make mistakes. When I was pregnant with my son, I was in a big city (Los Angeles), and I had health insurance and the time and means to have sought several opinions on my baby’s prognosis, instead of believing one ultrasound doctor.
But if could be determined that my baby lacked a vital organ, and (at least at the time, in 1995) faced zero odds of successful treatment — no, I would not have carried to term, hoping for a miracle.
I would have had an abortion.
L.
I normally don’t jump in on the threads, but feel compelled to here. You didn’t answer the question with anything other than radicalized autonomy (the brute exercise of raw political will).
What is it about suffering that you fear? It isn’t the baby’s suffering that you fear, as you would have had him literally torn apart.
It is your own suffering that you fear, to the point that you would contract the brutal and agonizing slaughter of your own child-a death far more agonizing than anything involving a missing organ.
Something to think and pray over.
The baby wouldn’t have suffered because I would have asked that anesthesia be used (it was not required by law then). If the baby had not been able to survive outside me, I saw no point in continuing the pregnancy, and would have opted for an abortion — or perhaps, to have labor induced, and deliver at 5 months instead of 9, a smaller baby and therefore easier delivery (instead of, as it turned out, a c-section).
You asked a very direct question, Dr. Nadal. I responded. I also just posted my response on my own blog, as my own contribution to NARAL’s Blog for Choice.
L.,
Respectfully, very respectfully, I submit that you did not answer the last question.
What is it within you that causes the avoidance of emotional suffering that would lead you to kill your own child? Anesthetizing the baby is really just a means of anesthetizing your conscience in the headlong pursuit of avoiding suffering.
What is it that leads you to be so intolerant of imperfection in others, in your own children, that would lead you to murder the child rather than experience their imperfections and the demands those imperfections would make on you?
All right, I will answer — because I fail to see any benefit to anyone, from me carrying a doomed baby for four more months (though, as I said, I would never criticize the choice of any woman who viewed it differently, and decided to do it). In such a case, I would have acted to minimize medical risks to myself, rather than engage in an exercise of futility.
L.,
None of us gets out of here alive. We’re all doomed.
The calculus that you lay out is utterly bereft of love. It is an ice-cold cost-benefit analysis of relative physiologic states.
If you had a child dying of stage 4 cancer and awoke to a house in flames, would you risk your life, would you risk severe third degree burns to save that doomed child if the path were blocked by flames, or would you simply employ the same calculus?
Is the doomed child receiving so much morphine that he/she wouldn’t suffer? Then I might act differently, if I knew he/she were suffering.
There is no end to the “what if” game, of extreme hypothetical situations. What if I had two children in the burning house and only time to save one — should I save the healthy one first, and then try to go back for the dying one? Or should I die myself, trying to save both?
There was a real example, not too long ago, right here in the blogosphere. A woman had five children, ages 2-12, home in the care of the 12-year old. The 9-year old boy played with matches, and started a house fire. The woman was nearby — she ran home, to find the 12-year old had gotten two of her younger sisters out safely, but her son and her 2-year old daughter were still in the house. She ran into the house to try to save them — but she wasn’t able to. The heat was too strong.
She lost two of her children. She didn’t “risk severe third-degree burns,” to save two HEALTHY children, because she decided not to give her own life attempting to do something she deemed impossible. Loveless calculus?
As I said, there’s no end to the “what if” game.
My son, at five months gestation, was not a “blob of cells.” He was wanted. He already had a name. But I would have ended his brief life even sooner, to minimize risks to my own reproductive health, in the interest (at the time) of doing all I could to enable future pregnancies.
You’re right, L. There is no end to the “what if” scenarios. What I am driving at is where you draw the line between the absolute value of each of your children, and the utilitarian value you place on potential reproductive events in the future.
A child with a missing organ places a woman at no further risk of future infertility than any other child, so I’m not certain I see the connection there.
All we ever have the assurance of is the child before us, and the responsibility to respond in selfless love to the needs of that child. Yes, L., the doomed child will die very soon. However, in its brief time on earth it is deserving of a mother’s love. It is deserving of a death where it is fully imbued with warmth and caring, of tenderness and compassion. They deserve to transition into eternity from the loving embrace of their parents to the loving embrace of God.
Far too many women have learned a hard and bitter truth, that the calculus you mentioned has led them to an abortion which then rendered them incapable of sustaining future pregnancies. It is a searing residue left behind by the decision to transition a child from the warmth and peace of the mother’s womb to a violent and unnecessary death.
I agree that abortions have risks. But weighing the risks, I would have to say that those of an abortion don’t outweigh the risks of a full-term pregnancy and delivery (especially, as it turned out, in my particular case, since delivery entails major surgery). If the baby’s survival was deemed no longer a possibility, I would have acted to minimize risks to myself.
It’s one thing to believe that every child “is deserving of a death where it is fully imbued with warmth and caring, of tenderness and compassion.” I repeat, I would never criticize such a choice — I would support it fully.
It’s another thing to try to legislate compassion, and tell someone that she must carry a doomed baby inside her body for another few months. I could never support that, because I wouldn’t have made such a choice myself.
//What is it about suffering that you fear//
//It is your own suffering that you fear//
The fear of trauma defeats reason consistently.
Ah, the innocent, the sufferer, the redemption, and the empowerment of abortion.
“Within the condition of the Pre-TSD, the stress is the outcome of a phantasmic imaginary episode set in the future(based on past trauma of family history,etc.), an event that has never taken place. Unlike the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, in which stress is realised as the direct reaction to an event that (may) have taken place in the past, within the state of Pre-TSD, the stress is formed as the outcome of an imaginary potential event. Within the Pre-TSD an illusion pre-empts the conditions in which the fantasy of future terror is shaping the present reality.”
And so we have the event(abortion), which never took place. Only the trauma of “scientific cutting.” was real.
That doctor played you like a maestro.
Maybe I’m missing something here…
“L,” what struck me immediately is how quickly you wanted act to abort upon the assurance that your unborn child had a fatal abnormality…an assurance that proved to be utterly false.
And you learned nothing from that? You didn’t learn that medical diagnoses are never absolute? It doesn’t chill you to think that you would have quickly ended the life of a perfect baby, based on a diagnosis that proved to be wrong?
Wow. Just…wow.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think you can “legislate compassion.” When it’s clearly missing from a human heart, no law will put it there.
Yes, Astran — and I was an eager instrument in his hands.
And as usual, I have no idea what you’re talking about, with your “pre-trauma” talk.
No, it doesn’t “chill” me to think that I would have quickly ended the life of a “perfect baby” — I received no diagnosis, merely a concern that proved to have been unfounded when I went for the second ultrasound.
As I said above, I had the means to have sought many opinions on the baby’s prognosis — and if he’d had a potentially treatable condition, I would have tried to treat it.
I immediately called my doctor to make sure he did late-term abortions in a worst-case scenario, because I didn’t want to add “search for new OB/GYN” to what would likely have been a lengthy medical process of evaluating the baby’s chances.
//Yes, Astran — and I was an eager instrument in his hands.
And as usual, I have no idea what you’re talking about, with your “pre-trauma” talk//.
GROWING C-SECTION RATES
By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY
While the proportion of U.S. births delivered by cesarean section rose 53% from 1996 to 2007, it jumped more than 70% in six states concentrated in the East and the West, a report Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows.
Those states were Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Nevada, Rhode Island and Washington. Florida also is one of five states where the preliminary 2007 C-section rate was more than 35%. That year, the U.S. rate hit 32%, the highest ever, compared with about 21% from 1994 to 1998.
Of course you were a tool in his hands. Your medical knowledge in matters of reproduction is filled with pain and scars.
He knew your family history of birth trauma, and made sure your fears were heightened.
Past trauma( of your mother,family) leaves fear in the child. You did write about a scar left by childbirth in your mother/grandmother.
Really, you never had a mechanic play upon your fear of being stranded on the roadside?
Pay me now, or pay me latter!! Those brakes are looking worn to me, and if they aren’t…… Those tires look worn, and a blow out might……….
If one has had a tire failure/brake failure in the past, the trauma makes one aware of their tire condition/brake each time they drive.
Fact is, the older one gets, the greater the fear increases in trying to prevent trauma( in others and self), until the fear becomes a oddity in the personality of the person. Comedy is built upon such persons.
“the fantasy of future terror(of childbirth) is shaping YOUR present reality.” But it’s fading away since your years to birth are fading too. Now, it’s your duty to instill fear in your female prodigy to continue the cycle of your ideology(abortion) based on fear and the pre-stress built into your personality, by your female forebearers.
L., Astran,
What I do not understand is the disconnect between mother and child, the conditionality of love being predicated on perfection.
I admit that I am biased. I am the father of a handicapped child.
Developmental disability forces one to respond to the disability by either embracing the child and pouring all of one’s heart and soul into an uncertain outcome, or to cut one’s losses and flee. The response is predicated on one’s underlying emotional and spiritual health, which brings me back to my original question, L.
Why are you so afraid of suffering that you would resort to murdering your own child. Talk of future reproductive considerations do not address the level of fear that leads to murder.
[…] Gerald Nadal’s recent blog entry made me realize it was past time I comment on the ultimate incivility in our midst. Never mind how […]
//What I do not understand is the disconnect between mother and child, the conditionality of love being predicated on perfection.
I admit that I am biased. I am the father of a handicapped child.//
Either life becomes more precious or less precious, as you age.
When I moved into my neighborhood many years ago, I heard this person yelling and “grunting” down the road.
I thought, WTH, and let it go as another person who “ain’t all there”. As I met the neighbors, I also met Kathy, the person who ‘wasn’t all there”. She acted up all the time, which meant at 4’oclock in the morning!!. As the years went by, and as a neighbor, I would help them with projects around their house, Kathy would come up to me and yell/grunt in my ear. Well, that would test your patience, and increase your “work load.”
Then one day, it dawned on me, that they were embarrassed from her actions, and I felt lousy/embarrassed for thinking of myself and my reaction to Kathy. I began to see the mental anguish it took on her sister and parents. I met Kathy over 35 years ago, and as a youngster, I thought why had they born her anyway?.
By law, they couldn’t have a abortion, was my first reaction, and left it at that. Science wasn’t able to predicted her future condition those many years ago. As the years went by, it didn’t matter what I thought, she was alive. Her mother died at 83 years old, and Kathy was suppose to die many years before her mother. Her mother was more concerned with what will happen to her precious Kathy more then her self known, approaching death. I never have asked what medical condition Kathy has, and it doesn’t matter.
What did I learn?
Mercy.
//Mercy is love shown not only to those in need or love shown not only to those who are in want, but mercy is love shown to those who are not lovable.
Mercy is love shown to those who do not love—that is as far as we can tell. Mercy is love shown to those who have rejected our love.
Mercy is love shown to those who have been unjust to the one who now is supposed to love them.
Mercy is shown not only to those who fail in love but to those who fail in justice, those who cheat us, those who steal from us//
Father Hardon.
According to the magazine although w e want to believe that unwed mothers are teenagers who have been careless or clueless about 1.1 million unmarried women in their 20s become pregnant each year four in 10 of whom have at least some college education. The survey found that single women are less savvy about birth control than they think according to Self. Researchers found that some women have a passive or ambivalent attitude about pregnancy with one in four women choosing the responses If it happens it happens or It would be no big deal. Sarah Brown CEO of the National Campaign said We have a large number of single young adults who say they are not actively seeking pregnancy but their actions dont match their words. She added Theyre not really trying but theyre not really not trying. The survey also revealed disturbing gaps in pregnancy-prevention knowledge with more than half of participants responding that they knew little or nothing about Depo-Provera the vaginal ring diaphragms intrauterine devices and natural family planning Self reports.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you can “legislate compassion.” When it’s clearly missing from a human heart, no law will put it there.”
I quite agree. What is so very sad is that a mother could kill her child for autonomy, for fear of suffering..
I have often wondered about the verse in the Bible where God says “Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even the may forget, yet I will not forget you.”
I believe God saw all the unrepentant women who have freely chosen to kill their babies.
What have we become that a child is not even safe beneath his mother’s heart because he has a defect?
May God forgive these women.
re: “scared young girl seeking an abortion …” many are seeking help, answers or referrals but instead get strong-armed, deceptively counseled or aggressively sold abortions often in concert with a “support network” that is also pushing or demanding abortion.
Research shows most women are seeking help and accurate information when they talk to licensed professionals who are often wolves in sheep’s clothing. If it’s a clinic, some go in their for advertised free pregnancy tests or other slickly marketed “health services.”
But this doesn’t just happen at clinics, also in hospitals (one young gal fought off her dad who took her to the hospital, an abortionist and tried to fight off a 2nd abortionist her dad brought in only to be overpowered by him and 3 nurses he ordered to restrain her till the anesthetic took effect.
Also, medical social workers deceptively counsel as do schools with meddling authorities who bypass parents (one school ran a weekly bus to the clinic), or social service gatekeepers, even a few misguided pastors, family physicians, families or even homeless shelters have used blackmail or coercion to push or demand abortion.
Others are violently forced or killed if they resist. (Homicide is #1 killer of pregnant women.)
The presumption that she is “seeking” abortion overlooks new evidence that most abortions are unwanted. See Forced Abortion in America report http://www.theunchoice.com/coerced.htm Share with others. Thanks!