Shocking and Disgusting?

Sometimes I read CNN.com. I know, I know. But I need to see what’s going on out there. Today there’s this little blurb about a candidate who is airing campaign ads that show graphic pictures of aborted babies.

People are complaining because their children are seeing them. The station has its hands tied, because apparently there is a law that if a federal candidate wants to run an ad, it must be run in its entirety, no station may edit it. Now I don’t know anything about this candidate. At all. Other than the fact that Randall Terry is her campaign manager, which makes me cringe a little, because he is basically nuts.

Also, I’m not saying that I agree with airing images of dead babies on tv where children can see them. No more than I’d like to see images of dead Iraqi children, or victims of gang violence dead in the street on tv. It is my personal opinion (and nothing more) that showing images of aborted babies as a way of trying to make people pro-life is not a great idea. One reason for this is because I think that pro-lifers (who have very good intentions and lots of passion) are *using* these violent acts to prove their point. That little innocent child who was just ripped limb from limb from their mother’s body has already suffered enough and had their human dignity violated in the worst way. It seems to me to be disrespectful to that child to show his or her mangled body to the world, in order to make the point that abortion is wrong. Again, just my two cents.

That said, the most interesting part of the article is the part where they talk about the ads being taken down from YouTube, which gave the following reasoning for taking them down:

“This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy on shocking and disgusting content.”

Really? I am seriously very interested in this statement. Actually, I’m rather confused. I have a lot of questions. Maybe some of you can help me answer them.

If abortion is an acceptable thing, or at the very least morally neutral, and it must be, right, because it’s legal, and there are more than one million of them performed each year, then why is it bad to see pictures of what it is? Abortion is just a medical procedure right, like heart surgery? A fetus is just a clump of cells, the same way a heart is, right?

clump of cells that makes up a human heart:

clump of cells that makes up a fetus:

If I wanted to publish a video of heart surgery on YouTube, and then show everyone what the heart looked like both before and after the surgery, would that be “shocking and disgusting”? Would YouTube let me do it? I wanted to find out, so I looked up “heart surgery” on YouTube and I found this:

Yes, if you’ve got an hour to spare, you can watch a heart transplant, and even see both hearts!

So apparently, even though I think the sight of blood, and bodies cut open, and seeing the inside of a human body is gross and I’d be willing to bet there are many people out there who agree with me, it does not meet the standard for “shocking and disgusting” on YouTube. But showing images of an aborted fetus does. What’s the difference? They’re both clumps of cells right? Why is a bloody clump of cells that used to be a fetus any more “shocking and disgusting” than the clump of cells that made up the bad heart that was removed from the patient?

Unless of course…

Abortion is different. Unless a fetus isn’t just a clump of cells the same way a heart is. Unless abortion is not morally neutral. Unless the product of abortion, which is a dead person, is the exact opposite of the product of heart surgery, which is usually a living one. Unless the sight of an aborted baby *is* shocking and disgusting, because that’s what abortion itself is.