The news out of Nebraska this week is both sobering and shocking. Pro-life Americans hear that the abortion industry is dwindling, but Dr. Leroy Carhart, infamous abortionist in the U.S. Supreme Court partial-birth abortion case Gonzales vs. Carhart, would take issue with that apparent false claim.
Carhart is in the process of opening three new abortion mills—one in Iowa, one in Indiana and one in the Washington, D.C. area. Carhart claims he had no choice but to move on since Nebraska has a law in place that prohibits surgical abortion past the twentieth week. Carhart claims the law is more favorable in these other locations.
As appalling as this is to those preborn children whose mothers may patronize Carhart’s growing business, it is also a sign of the times in which we live and a sign of the enormity of the power the abortion industry has over the media—not to mention the political atmosphere.
Examples of this prejudice against the human rights of an entire class of persons abound. Why hasn’t the recent recommendation of Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, for example, been reported in major media throughout the United States?
The College issued a statement which endorses the requirement that “information on possible mental and physical risks to the woman should be part of good practice in abortion provision.” The doctors point out that there are higher rates of mental disorder, for example, among women who abort a preborn child versus those who carry a baby to term.
Using the usual rhetorical subterfuge, a minister with Britain’s Department of Health stated that “advances” have been made “to ensure women have ‘safe, legal abortions.’” A sad statement, indeed. But then again, killing the preborn is a protected practice in Britain just as it is in the United
States.
The media has been silent on this debate.
Time magazine recently published an editorial discrediting a recent study finding that anorexics are more likely to have an “unplanned” pregnancy and abortion. The Norwegian study involved over 62,000 women and found that 24.2 percent of women with anorexia aborted a child versus 14.6 percent of other women.
The media has been silent on this debate.
But, when the Food and Drug Administration proposed using graphic pictures on cigarette packages, including pictures of cancer patients, diseased organs, or a crying baby next to the statement, “Smoking during pregnancy can harm your baby,” the media went wild. The Washington Post defined the use of some of the suggested pictures as “gruesome.” Jeffrey Lord suggested in his blog that this insistence by the government on warning against cigarette smoking opens “unwelcome” questions for the pro-aborts. He stated, “Cigarette smoking is, of course, a choice. It’s your body, if you choose to smoke, smoking is perfectly legal.” Lord likens the government’s use of pictures intended to warn people away from smoking to a pro-life activist’s pictures that warn against the horrors of abortion. He wonders what message our government is trying to send. Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure—if there is a danger posed to the multi-million dollar abortion industry, the media will not be silent.
Pro-life efforts to establish in the law that all human persons have human rights will continue to agitate those who look upon abortion as a simple right that belongs only to the child’s mother. As Bryan Kemper pointed out in a recent commentary, explaining why pro-life activists use pictures of the Jewish Holocaust to make the case for human personhood and against abortion, “We want to the world to understand that what makes us so sick about Jewish Holocaust is precisely what makes us sick about the Abortion Holocaust. We talk about the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision because we want people to see that Roe v. Wade is just as despicable.”
We have a moral responsibility to make it clear that there is a human person in existence from the beginning of his biological development regardless of media or political hypocrisy. We are obligated to use every tool at our disposal to expose the truth and debunk the lies of those who favor direct killing of preborn persons. Then and only then will the human rights of every person be equally respected and protected by law and society.