Wednesday, January 25, 2023

What does an abortion look like?


     Never underestimate the role of imagery in Christianity’s march toward world domination. Christ crucified on the cross. The Virgin and Child. The Last Supper. The faith would circle the globe and centuries pass before anyone wondered how it was exactly that Jesus ended up a pale white northern European.
     I don’t want to credit good graphics for the religion’s entire success; violence was also key, along with a doctrine that sounds good on paper. But compelling visuals, executed by craftsmen like Michelangelo, Raphael and El Greco, were in the top five.
     So it was surprising Monday to turn to the New York Times editorial page and see images of early abortions that did not resemble diced up Gerber babies. The gore that for years volunteers from Joe Scheidler’s Pro-Life Action League displayed along Madison Street in color photographs five feet high.
     These were not the babies conjured up and branded into the public mind for years, but splotches of tissue an inch or two wide. Illustrations from a guest essay, “Early Abortion Looks Nothing Like You’ve Been Told,” by a trio of doctors, Erika Bliss, Joan Fleischman and Michele Gomez.
     ”Primary care clinicians like us who provide early abortions in their practices have long known that the pregnancy tissue we remove does not look like what most people expect,” they write. “It’s important to us to counter medical misinformation related to early pregnancy because about 80 percentcq as published of abortions in the United States occur at nine weeks or earlier. So much of the imagery that people see about abortion comes from abortion opponents who have spent decades spreading misleading fetal imagery to further their cause.”
     “Important”? How about “kinda late”? “Important” would have been decades ago. Now, the damage is done, the zombie baby army that anti-choice fanatics conjured up and relentlessly flaunt as if real has already conquered the country. The right to an abortion, assumed in most of the civilized world, already has been yanked away from half the women in the United States. The debate not focused on whether women should be in charge of their own reproductive care or whether men should make those choices for them. But on saving babies.

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4 comments:

  1. You can take the quote from your column, “So much of the imagery that people see about abortion comes from abortion opponents who have spent decades spreading misleading fetal imagery to further their cause.” and apply it to any issue to read:
    So much of the information that people see about [name the issue] comes from [issue] opponents who have spent decades spreading misleading information to further their cause.

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  2. Recently Frank Pavone was defrocked by the Catholic Church for not only travelling with a fetus but using it as a prop and posting pics on social media. It's more likely Pavone was laicized for placing the fetus on an altar, since I guess there are rules. This was not an embryo but what would be the shock value in that?

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  3. The docs point out that it's just another life in the day of the conservative assault on truth. A bunch of lying sacks of shit...every goddamn day

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  4. "The zealots will lose this one, too, eventually."

    But what a remarkable rearguard action single-issue anti-abortion voters have managed to effect. For quite a while, Roe v. Wade was categorized, even by conservative nominees to the Supreme Court, as "settled law." Had Hillary Clinton been elected in 2016, rather than the promiscuous, hypocritical charlatan who was elevated (despite getting 3 million fewer votes), it very well may have been settled for the next generation, at least, then perhaps from then on.

    Instead, 1 illegitimate justice (via a selection stolen from Obama) and 2 Catholic crusaders have not only overturned the supposed "settled law" with regard to abortion, but seem to have perhaps set their sights on contraception, same-sex marriage and who knows what other progress that has been made in making this a less-theocratically inclined nation.

    As this column cogently indicates, it's worth noting the relative ineffectiveness of the pro-choice folks at combating some of the misinformation that has been so prominent in bringing about the current state of affairs.

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