Why Is This So Political?
NEW ULTRASOUND BILL SHOULDN’T BE SUCH A BIG DEAL
FITSNews - April 18, 2008 - When we first wrote about South Carolina’s controversial ultrasound bill last year, we were dogging out a couple of political opportunists on the Bible-thumper side and didn’t take a position on the proposal itself - which would have required women having abortions to view an ultrasound image of their child prior to destroying it.
Now that a weakened version of the bill is back in the limelight, however, we figured it’s probably time we confronted that ageless libertarian dilemma - namely, whose individual liberties do we support, a mother’s freedom to choose or her unborn child’s freedom to be born? And where should the ultimate resolution of that question be decided, at the state or federal level?
Personally, we believe there’s a reason that “life” comes before “liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness” in that famous litany of elemental American freedoms. We’re not saying abortion should be criminalized, we’re just saying we think it’s morally wrong.
As for adding an ultrasound image to the stack of pro- and anti-abortion literature that government already carpet-bombs pregnant women with, what’s wrong with that? We don’t see how this is in any way “forced emotional terror,” as some critics have contended, and we think the fact that 80% of women who view an ultrasound image of their baby ultimately decide against aborting it speaks volumes …
According to the website Read The Truth, the most common type of abortion performed during the first trimester is called “suction aspiration.” Here’s a description:
General or local anesthesia is given to the mother and her cervix is dilated.
A suction curette (hollow tube with a knife-edge tip) is inserted into the womb. This instrument is then connected to a vacuum machine by a transparent tube.
The vacuum suction, 29 times more powerful than a household vacuum cleaner tears the unborn child into pieces which are sucked out through the tube into a bottle and discarded.
Yeah … all we’re saying is that if you’re going to do that to somebody, the least you can do beforehand is look ‘em in the eye.
Comments
By enough on April 18th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
every legislator who votes for this bill, plus you and your new wife (whom we are sure has a fabulous plastic rack), should be forced to adopt 100 unwanted children
By just me on April 20th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Will: This is - sadly - a typical male view. And this bill is another attempt by our largely-male legislature to make abortion more difficult. If the legislature really cared about stopping pregnancy it would fund sex education that works - as opposed to abstinence-only. An abortion is a medical procedure and is the business of a woman and her doctor. Quite frankly, we have a lot more things to worry about in South Carolina than this . . . as above, we should focus on our abysmally-high/third-world-equivalent teen pregnancy rate. But, no, that would mean we actually acknowledge - gasp - that teenagers are sexually-active.