This position is either incredibly circular or deeply Calvinist.

Professor argues that aborted fetuses lack a moral status because they have no future since they are going to be aborted.

Probably the former since the Calvinist position takes the decision of moral status out of the hands of the person making the decision and places it in the hands of a voluntarist God.

You have to wonder about intellectuals like this who create such an obviously fallacious intellectual system to justify an end like abortion.  Does it never occur to them that the same argument could be used to justify the Holocaust? After all, if fetuses who will be aborted lack a moral status because they have no future, what is to stop an antisemite from saying that Jews lack a moral status because they have no future?

That must be what comes from living in an echo chamber.

Is this a "slippery slope" or the logical working out of a principle?

Mom was negligent while baby was in utero. The baby survived, was born and lived for six days when he or she succumbed to the injuries that occurred pre-birth.

This is a tough case.  Mom must be grieving, but everyone deserves the protection of the law.

Ultimately, do we want a rule that says that people cannot be protected from injuries inflicted prior to birth?

Ultimately, do we really want a rule that says that a person was not the SAME person immediately before birth?

Forced speech is unconstitutional...

....except in California where the Gospel of Abortion must always be shared.

//A federal judge earlier ruled that such forced speech is peachy keen because the communication is simply “factual.” Now, a Court of Appeals is allowing the law to go into effect. From the San Francisco Chronicle story: A federal appeals court has refused to block a new California law requiring religiously sponsored antiabortion clinics known as “crisis pregnancy centers” to notify patients that the state makes reproductive health services, including abortion, available at little or no cost. The clinics argued that the law violates their freedom of speech. The state-mandated notices are “the equivalent of a referral for abortion,” attorney Francis Manion of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal organization, said in a court filing this week. But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied a request by three Northern California clinics Wednesday for an injunction that would have blocked the law while they challenged its constitutionality. The panel of Judges Edward Leavy, Milan Smith and Sandra Ikuta, all Republican appointees, said the clinics were unlikely to prevail in their appeal of a federal judge’s ruling allowing the law to take effect Friday. Needless to say, abortion clinics do not have a similar requirement of forced factual speech, such as informing women that counseling and support is available to them to maintain their pregnancy for free, with phone numbers and locations of where the help can be found.//

The Carly Factor.

Abortionist want to say (a) cutting apart born alive children for their organs doesn't happen but (b) if it does it doesn't matter because they are not people so who cares? and (c) anyone who would suggest that they support such awful things that don't happen and don't matter is a horrible slandering liar for suggesting that they would do something so horrible that doesn't happen and doesn't matter.

Short response to this pleading in the alternative: It does happen; it does matter; Carly wasn't lying.

Deal with it, but stop being a "good citizen of Omelas."

What? This can't be...

...but we are the compassionate, morally-evolved ones!!!!

In 1973, award-winning science fiction author Ursula Le Guin published a very short story-essay titled “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” It described a dreamlike summer festival in Omelas, a beautiful city that embodies everyone’s utopia, a magical place where everyone was joyful, a place where sorrow never touched the citizens or guests. But beneath that city lay a secret: all its joy and pleasure depended on the suffering and misery of a single lonely, abused child living in a filthy basement. If that child were saved, all of Omelas would fall, its beauty and perfection lost.

The citizens of Omelas, when they reached a certain age, were taken below to view the child so that they might understand their civilization. Most rationalized the suffering, as was encouraged: the child was mentally defective anyway, it could never be happy now if taken out, it was incapable of appreciating the beauty of the world like others. Only a few could not bear the truth, but instead of removing the child and Omelas be damned, they walked away, leaving for parts unknown.

America has had a summer of Omelas. We are being shown how our society has built itself around the suffering of children about whom no one cares: babies just formed who are sacrificed for the sake of convenience and science. Mothers who are unready to become mothers (though the life in their wombs proves that decision has already been made), their partners who are unwilling to support a child emotionally or financially, women who are simply afraid or pressured into having an abortion — all seek euphemisms for the life-shattering act they are about to take: ending a pregnancy, taking care of the problem, taking care of their reproductive health. There are fifty ways and more to say it.//

The logic of abortion.

Left wing loon says that abortion shouldn't be rare.

The normally calm Brit Hume is Impassioned. 

Pushback against the Culture of Death.

The encouraging thing about this video is that liberal Kirsten Powers says that she does not accept the murder of 20 year old healthy fetuses.

Wasn't this what legalizing abortion was supposed to prevent?

30th Abortion Clinic Closes in 2013 After Killing Woman in Abortion

Operation Rescue had publicized a medical emergency at Nova involving a 35-year old diabetic patient suffering from heavy bleeding after an abortion who was rushed to the hospital on March 3, 2012. Operation Rescue had reason to believe that the clinic owner, Mi Yong Kim, may have been involved in the botched abortion even though her medical license had been surrendered in 2007 amid findings that she improperly sedated a patient in 2005 and failed to realize that the woman had gone into cardiac arrest.

Kim did not attempt to resuscitate her and the woman died as a result. Operation Rescue filed complaints against Kim and the clinic.

An unannounced inspection of Nova was conducted by state officials two months later, which revealed numerous health and safety violations, generally substandard care, and an additional botched abortion patient that required emergency hospitalization.

Abortion - no longer a necessary evil and a tragic decision...

...now it's best thing ever.

Sexual and reproductive rights are “at the core of human life,” said Princess Mary of Denmark. Until women have power not to have children, they won’t have power to improve nutrition, grow crops, or deliver babies safely, said Melinda Gates.

“Pregnancy is not natural,” said Francis Kissling, the former head of Catholics for Choice.

And with that, the sharp divide became apparent between first-world activists who want a universal right to abortion and the poor women they believe should have fewer children.

Of course, abortion does advance the core principle of wealthy Westerners, i.e., "too many of you, just enough of us."

Sad mother's day.

It's easy to sympathize with everyone in this story, but it does suggest that perhaps forgiveness might be an answer.

Date rape victim refuses to meet daughter.

Well, that's ...not "ironic"..."coincidental," perhaps...or maybe "meaningful"...

Eric Holder’s wife co-owns abortion clinic building run by indicted abortionist

This is not Gosnell's clinic. It is one in Georgia.and the clinic owner has been indicted on Medicaid Fraud.

However, pro-lifers are saying that this explains attacks by Holder on pro-lifers.  Whether true or not, it doesn't look good.

How Abortion Poisoned Public Discourse

James Taranto observes:

Which brings us to the poisoning of American politics. In this respect neither side is innocent, though it is our impression that the pro-abortion side is far more aggressive. We hasten to acknowledge that our observation here may be biased by experience. We have lived almost all our life, and the entirety of our professional career, in big cities or upscale suburbs where the "pro-choice" view is dominant. Someone from Houston or Salt Lake City might have a different perspective. Then again, we are very widely read, and it seems to us that, say, National Review is a lot more respectful toward opposing viewpoints than the New York Times editorial page, and that antiabortion news sites are models of civility and reason compared with leftist and feminist ones. 

Perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of this incivility is the effort to turn the sexes against each other--or perhaps more accurately the effort to cow men into submission. The imaginary "war on women" rages on: "Man, the feeding frenzy over Gosnell is a sobering reminder of how much hatred there is out there towards women," tweeted Slate's Amanda Marcotte Saturday. Over at Salon, Irin Carmon casually dismissed critics of the media's noncoverage as "almost uniformly male," a gendered argumentum ad hominem and quite a thigh-slapper given that she, like this column, opened by citing Kirsten Powers. 

If you're a man and you're opposed to or uncertain about abortion, you've almost certainly had a woman tell you that because of your sex, you have no right to your opinion about the subject. (We've heard it from antiabortion women too, though much more rarely.) It's idiotic, offensive and indicative of a war on men. 

The gist of Carmon's argument is that the horrors of the Women's Medical Center were caused by "politicized stigma, lack of public funding or good information, and a morass of restrictive laws allegedly meant to protect women." She favorably quotes a Philadelphia writer, Tara Murtha: "The bottom line is that politicizing abortion led to Gosnell. Their answer? Politicize it more." 

In other words, if only abortion opponents were out of the picture, abortion would be safe and legal in no time. Problem solved. That conclusion, while arguable, strikes us as dubious. But the premise is delusional. 

We live in a free society. People have an absolute right to form opinions about matters of public concern, and a nearly absolute right to express those opinions, individually or in concert with others of like mind. "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Accused murderer goes on trial.

The accused is an abortion doctor who felt that his mandate extended to babies born alive.

The story is grotesque.

When the story broke about Sativa's death, I was outraged.

Now, it seems that the story may have been based on dubious premises.

Sativa was the mother who reported to an Irish hospital with pregnancy complications. She was reported to have died because the abortion she begged for was not provided by the hospital.

Now, it seems that the initial report was provided by a single, understandably biased source:

The journalist who broke the story about Savita Halappananvar's tragic death now admits that the facts were "a little muddled".

 

In an astonishing radio interview, Kitty Holland of The Irish Times admits that her report was based on the husband's version of events, but that in fact there may have been "no request for a termination". Her earlier account stated that Mrs Halappananvar, an Indian in Ireland who was expecting a baby, had begged for a termination when complications arose with the birth; hospital staff denied her the abortion, allegedly saying: "This is a Catholic country".

 

Holland's exclusive tale of the tragic death made headlines around the world. Pro-abortion groups seized upon the story to condemn any review of abortion laws. Protesters chanting "Never again!"marched in Irish cities. Holland's report ensured that abortion was hailed as a life-saving operation; that it should be cruelly denied a young woman was further proof (if any were needed) that the Catholic Church was backward and barbarian.

Except that none of this may be quite as it seems. "I'm not satisfied of anything," Holland says in her radio interview. She maintains, perhaps a tad disingenuously, that Savita Halappananvar's death would have received the same kind of media attention even if it had not been linked to a termination. Yet she admits that Savita was only healthy "as far as we know" before going into the Galway University Hospital. In other words, the young woman might have been suffering from a fatal condition even before her hospital admission. But in their rush to make a pro-abortion point, journalists and editors did not check their facts.

 

What a tragedy – twice over: a young pregnant woman's premature death; and an account of that death that, if the facts are indeed muddled, does no justice to her memory.

Slouching to Gomorrah Carthage...

...to toss a child into the fire for Baal.

Chelsea Handler laughs about her abortion with Conan O’Brien.

The "tragic conflict of life with life" has become the fodder of jokes by the winner?

That is very disturbing.

When the Christian interlude ends.

John C. Wright pens a thoughtful and erudite piece, which presents a vision of Spartans flining their rejects into the Apothetae and and Morlocks dancing in the ruins and Aztecs whose slogan might have been "if you don't want human sacrifice, don't be one":

My eldest child was diagnosed, before his birth,with spina bifeda. Rather than raise an inferior genetic product, the doctor gently suggested we “examine our options”, which included the modern equivalent of the Spartan practice of flinging the inferior births into a chasm on Mount Taygetos, called Apothetae.

Of course, I am white, and of Germanic descent, so the doctor who tried to talk me into murdering my unborn son did not try as hard as he might, and Thank God my wife who was a Christian (at that time I was not) would not even heed nor consider such a thing.

To this day I regret and with revulsion and horror that I even contemplated such a thing even for a moment; I despise and I hate — no softer word will do — that I live in a nation of Morlocks who make such conversations as I had with my doctor, and such temptations, possible.

I feel as you would feel if you were living among barbaric, savage and sadistic Aztecs, all of whom thought mass human sacrifice by means of grisly torture atop dark and smoking pyramids was not only tolerable, but right and just.

As it turns out, the doctor’s advice to murder my child was based on a faulty diagnosis. He was, and is, perfectly healthy.

Just how popular is abortion among Democrats?

Missing! Nobody Attends Planned Parenthood DNC Rally

Two pictures from the same DNC pro-abortion rally:

And:

Via Lifesite News.

"Children conceived in rape can be the most compelling witnesses of that unanswerable truth: that every human child is a gift from God...

... And we have prominent examples: Attorney and much sought after speaker Rebecca Keissling and activist Ryan Bomberger come to mind."

Here is Rebecca Kiessling's story.

I like to consider myself pragmatic. I have long accepted the "Lincoln approach." Abraham Lincoln's pre-Civil War strategy to slavery was to restrict it where possible, and put it on the road to extinction. It seems to me that the rape exception is pragmatically justified as a trade-off against abortion as a form of birth control, and because of the trauma associated with rape.

And then I run into this:

And I think, "no, she didn't deserve the death penalty."

Our pro-infanticide President.

Audio: Obama Says "That Fetus or Child" Was "Just Not Coming Out Limp and Dead"

For Obama it seems that the policy of abortion outweighs the policy of extending legal protection to the weakest and most vulnerable of human being, newborns.