ADF Alliance Alert

Tue, 16 Oct 2007

Lies and murder go together. This is not only true in history and theology, but also in modern legal advocacy. Findlaw’s latest abortion apologist Sherry Colb illustrated this principle well yesterday in her column supporting the idea that killing embryos inside women is not abortion.

Colb uses the recent Third Circuit case, Anspach v. City of Philadelphia, No. 05-3632 (3rd Cir. Sept. 21, 2007), as an opportunity to join the incessant drumbeat that the “morning after pill” is not abortion. In Anspach, a Philadelphia birth control agency gave a 16-year-old the morning after pill without telling her parents. They told the girl that the pills prevent pregnancy. She and her parents later sued because, among other things, the morning after pill can kill new embryos after they come into existence but before they implant in the girl’s womb a week or two later.

Colb cheers the decision as having the wisdom to agree with her own Orwellian dictionary. She condescends to explain that killing embryos isn’t abortion, because abortion is merely ending a pregnancy, and pregnancy really doesn’t have anything to do with embryos. How does she show this? Embryos can exist outside of women, by in vitro fertilization. The presence of an embryo therefore can’t mean that there is pregnancy, and the court was right to dismiss the suit.

But no one thinks that “pregnant” means an embryo exists–it means there’s an embryo in a woman. This is the common sense definition and the medical definition according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health “Medicine Plus Medical Dictionary” provided by Merriam-Webster, among other sources. Why, then, would anyone think that just because embryos can be made unnaturally outside of a woman, that disproves the idea that a woman is pregnant when she has an embryo inside her? So yes, it is deceptive to tell women that the morning after pill doesn’t harm pregnancy, or an “established pregnancy,” when the woman wants to know if it kills a human being, and the birth control peddler just wants its bloody industry to make money.

Oddly enough, I heard the same ridiculous in vitro fertilization example used in September at a hearing in Wisconsin, by supporters of a mandate that Christian doctors dispense the morning after pill. This script is making its way around. Abortion advocates changed the definition of pregnancy for political rather than scientific reasons, but that change is losing credibility.

So why don’t they just come clean and say it’s OK to kill people? It’s incompatible with their worldview–lies and murder go together. Instead, they have decided to up the ante. They speak as if anyone who does not adopt their incoherent rhetoric is not only ignorant but unscientific, like members of the flat earth society. Unfortunately for them real science (that is, science without a political agenda) every day shows us more than ever how human and how alive preborn children really are. My wife had a “4D” ultrasound done earlier this summer, and it was like having our own discovery channel special on life in the womb. Our daughter was born this weekend and she looks just like the picture we took of her so many months ago.

The abortion wars now are becoming a race to conception. As technology personalizes younger and younger babies, the abortion industry pushes to make abortions earlier and earlier, by using state coercion to force doctors to kill. Their goal is now more than ever brainwashing rather than education. They can’t stop science from showing us these babies, so they will train our minds such that when we see them we reflexively say “what a cute unterminated pre-pregnancy.” But those who have eyes, let us see.