‘They’re evil humans. They are butchering children for a living’

‘They’re evil humans. They are butchering children for a living’ August 29, 2014

Two stories. One is a real story about real people. The other is a real story about imaginary people.

The first story is from Ananda Rose at Pacific Standard, in “A Tale of Two Abortion Wars“:

At a 35-week ultrasound, Julie Smith of Medford, Massachusetts, saw the big black mark on her daughter Alice’s brain. “When I saw that dark hole on her cerebellum, I knew right away that it wasn’t good,” she says, “but I was still in shock and denial.” Expecting nothing but good news and wondrous images of her nearly full-term baby, Smith had gone to the routine ultrasound appointment alone.

“After the exam,” Smith recalls, “when I was sitting in the waiting room, the genetic counselor came out to get me. I was knitting a sweater for Alice. With the saddest look on her face, the counselor said, ‘That’s a beautiful sweater.’ Then she said, ‘There are serious problems with your baby.’ That’s when I lost it.” Overcome with grief, Smith wept in the storage closet of the medical office until her husband arrived.

Alice had been diagnosed with the most severe form of Dandy Walker Syndrome, a congenital brain malformation. Along with an abnormal cerebellum and hydrocephaly (fluid in the ventricles of the brain), Smith’s 35-week ultrasound also revealed the complete absence of Alice’s corpus callosum — the neural fibers that connect the left and right cerebral hemispheres. While some children born with the mildest form of Dandy Walker Syndrome may have normal cognition and only moderate physical disabilities, Smith’s neonatal neurologist informed her that those like Alice are doomed to a short life of interminable suffering. “Her brief life was going to be a tortured existence,” says Smith, who explains that her daughter would have needed a feeding tube from the start and that she would have thrown up and seized constantly. “The counselor told us that Alice would not be able to sleep comfortably, even with medication,” Smith says. “When I heard that my baby wouldn’t even get peace from the pain in her sleep, that was it for me.”

… Smith chose what she believed was the most compassionate option: to terminate the pregnancy. “I am a mother, and I would do anything in my power to save my child,” she wrote on her blog. “That’s how the most difficult situation I’ve ever faced, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, was also the clearest choice.” The doctor that Smith’s obstetrician had long been sending patients to, Dr. George Tiller, who ran Women’s Health Care Services in Wichita, Kansas, had been murdered in 2009 by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. As a result, Smith was sent to a Boulder, Colorado, clinic run by Dr. Warren Hern, one of only four late-term abortion providers in the U.S.

The second story is from “pro-life” Christianist radio host Janet Mefferd. Mefferd is responding to a documentary about Dr. Tiller — the same man who was gunned down while at church because of his role specializing in cases exactly like the one described in the first story above.

Mefferd describes what she calls “late-term abortion providers.” Those are the same words Ananda Rose uses, but Mefferd means something very different by them:

That’s right. Four weeks after a baby can feel pain these butchers do their duty work.

Plastic
Francis Schaeffer transformed American Christianity by teaching us that plastic dolls can be piled on salt.

The filmmakers interviewed [four doctors who perform late-term abortions] for the documentary, examining their motivations and attempting to humanize them for audiences that might be inclined to think of them as monsters.

Because that’s important, you know — we need to humanize the butchers. We shouldn’t humanize the babies they’re killing, but we should humanize them.

You know, we don’t need to humanize them. They are human, they’re evil humans. They are butchering children for a living. And I can tell you what the motivation is: It’s cash. It’s always cash. And perhaps the inability to find any meaningful work, because well-respected doctors don’t want to have anything to do with abortion.

Mefferd, I think, epitomizes white American evangelicalism’s failure of the “test” that C.S. Lewis describes in Mere Christianity:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.


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