Thank Goodness I Can Still Cringe
Unborn Baby 26 Weeks
When speaking to the broader public—as opposed to what they tell each other—pro-abortionists will often feign an attitude that they, too, understand that abortion is serious business and not to be trivialized. They don’t mean it for a half-second, of course, but for public consumption it helps take the edge off their fanaticism.
I thought of that when a colleague at NRLC passed along a post from the webpage of the DC Abortion Fund. (The DCAF describes itself as an organization “ that makes grants and no-interest loans to DC area women and girls who cannot afford the full cost of an abortion.”)
DCAF tells us that they sent one of their activists to last week’s hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House Judiciary Committee on H.R. 3803, the “District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” The bill would ban abortions on pain-capable unborn children, beginning at 20 weeks fertilization age (22 weeks LMP) in the District of Columbia.
The musings on that post were NOT for the wider public—just fellow pro-abortionists—so they could mischaracterize and misrepresent and cavalierly trivialize to their heart’s delight.
But before I tell you what the DCAF “activist” wrote, let me set the stage for what really happened.
Years ago Anthony Levatino, M.D. performed abortions before he became pro-life. In his testimony last week before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House Judiciary Committee, Dr. Levatino went into considerable detail in describing a “D&E” abortion–an abortion technique that dismembers the baby.
He asked the subcommittee members to “Imagine, if you can, that you are a pro-choice obstetrician/gynecologist like I once was. Your patient today is 24 weeks pregnant (LMP).”
He went on:
“Picture yourself reaching in with the Sopher clamp [an instrument for grasping and crushing tissue] grasping anything you can. At twenty-four weeks gestation, the uterus is thin and soft so be careful not to perforate or puncture the walls. Once you have grasped something inside, squeeze on the clamp to set the jaws and pull hard – really hard. You feel something let go and out pops a fully formed leg about six inches long. Reach in again and grasp whatever you can. Set the jaw and pull really hard once again and out pops an arm about the same length. Reach in again and again with that clamp and tear out the spine, intestines, heart and lungs.”
As difficult as this is to read, it is twenty times more difficult to watch the video of Dr. Levatino’s oral testimony. When I saw that Sopher clamp, I swallowed hard. And then, holding the Sopher Clamp as he spoke, Dr. Levatino concluded his testimony with
“you know you did it right if you crush down, a white material runs out of the cervix. That was the baby’s brains. Then you can pull out skull pieces. Many times a little face will come back and stare back at you…And if you think that doesn’t hurt, if you believe that isn’t an agony for the baby, please think again.”
I wasn’t there but I was told that some of the subcommittee members were visibly moved. Those that weren’t were no doubt soul mates of the lady from DCAF.
After completely misrepresenting what Dr. Levatino said about why abortionists shifted to the dismemberment “D&E” abortion technique (ah, the beauty of paraphrasing—you can attribute whatever you want to the speaker), she offers this oh so revealing passage.
“Levatino said he performed abortions earlier in his career, and he described the procedure and his eventual dislike of it in explicit detail. Any medical procedure or routine trip to the doctor can sound positively gruesome when described with the proper adjectives (try detailing your last dental cleaning with the help of thesaurus.com). Anti-choice activists like Levatino are most successful when they have us all cringing instead of thinking rationally. But H.R. 3803 doesn’t allow for much science and reason.”
Ripping off arms and legs—and brains spilling out as a baby’s head is crushed—is just like “your last dental cleaning.” Only an “anti-choice activist” could NOT see the similarity.
This ability to be bored and annoyed in the presence of soul-sucking brutality is, I gather, the product of what she sees as a commitment to “science and reason.”
Thank goodness I can still cringe. I would hate to think what it would say about me if I couldn’t.
