The Partial-Birth Abortion Controversy

Insensitivity to the sacredness of human life comes in increments. During the German holocaust of World War II, Nazi soldiers who were involved in exterminations at the concentration camps soon found that after killing hundreds and hundreds of men, it presently generated little concern to execute either women or children. The conscience becomes dulled and eventually reaches a point of callousness.

The same phenomenon has occurred with the abortion industry here in America.

John Leo, a regular contributing editor to the prestigious, U. S. News & World Report, is one of my favorite secular journalists. I occasionally have opportunity to see his columns, and I have been impressed with a number of the essays I’ve read.

A recent one (“Partial Sense Decision”) caught my eye. Mr. Leo dealt with the egregious approach that our U. S. Supreme Court has taken with reference to the issue of partial-birth abortion.

The article contains a chilling account of a partial-birth abortion, as conveyed by a lady named Brenda Shafer, a seasoned nurse, who, incidentally, is pro-choice in her philosophy, i.e., she believes that every woman has the right to choose to murder her unborn infant.

Read this with care:

The doctor delivered the baby’s legs and arms, everything but his little head. The baby’s body was moving, his little fingers were clasped together. He was kicking his feet. The doctor then took a pair of scissors and then inserted them into the back of the baby’s head and the baby’s arms jerked out in a flinch, a startled reaction, like a baby does when he thinks he might fall. Then the doctor opened the scissors up. Then he stuck a high-powered suction tube into the hole and sucked the baby’s brains out . . . I still have nightmares about what I saw.

After getting past the nausea the paragraph above invokes, a casual analysis brings to light a startling fact.

In this country, it is a crime to kill a post-partum baby. That is infanticide. However, ever since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, it has been “legal” to abort a fetus. What is the abortionist to do, therefore, when he wishes to eliminate an infant developed enough to be born and survive? He performs a partial-birth abortion.

Note that, in the horrible description above, the infant’s entire body has been removed from the mother’s body—with the exception of a tiny fraction of the head. There is enough room for the “doctor” (Dr. Frankenstein, I presume!) to puncture the lower portion of the skull.

For all practical purposes, therefore, the baby has been born. It is that minute upper portion of the skull that supposedly makes the difference. What an absolutely sickening, gnat-straining distinction!

America has become a nation without a conscience, guided by spineless politicians with no moral compass! Weep for her. She appears to be terminal; only God knows her eventual destiny.