In recent years, there has been a movement to soften abortion's image by offering what are supposed to be comforting rituals to women who seek abortions. This approach appears on the surface to be more compassionate than Planned Parenthood's position that an unborn child is nothing more than a blob of tissue. But look deeper and it's clear that the two views are essentially the same: Even those who encourage women to observe post-abortion rituals insist that it's up to the former mother-to-be to decide if her child was a human life.
That ideology was brought home to me upon reading a pro-abortion Web site's FAQ for women who use medications to induce abortion:
Will I know when I have passed the pregnancy?"The moment is yours." It sounds like something out of a deodorant commercial: "I'm so happy I switched to new Evacu-Baby! The old Flush-a-Fetus just didn't do the job."
You may or may not. For some women, the passage of the tissue is quite obvious, for others it is not. The pregnancy tissue will vary in size, depending on your stage of pregnancy. The sac is pinkish-white in color, and may look somewhat feathery or filmy at the edges. An early pregnancy (5-6 weeks) might be the size of a grape, while a later pregnancy (8-9 weeks) might be the size of a small lime. A few women may be able to see the embryo inside the sac at 8-9 weeks, although it is often too small for the untrained eye to detect.
Some women choose to view the tissue, others are happy not to. It is truly a private moment and women experience a range of emotions and decide to mark the moment in a number of ways. Some choose a ritual or a celebration; others flush the toilet with a sigh of relief! The moment is yours.
I'm sorry to joke, but I really don't what to say. The writer's chirpy image of flushing a baby down the toilet "with a sigh of relief!" is so absurd, it's too painful to bear.
Abortion advocates typically respond, "But a large number of women do want to 'celebrate' and breathe 'a sigh of relief' after an abortion." The idea is that "if it feels good," it can't be wrong. Well, if I could flush the unwanted people in my life down the toilet and never have to worry about anyone coming after me, I might feel pretty darn good too. But that wouldn't make it right.
At the vanguard of the kill-it-and-mourn-it movement is notorious late-term abortionist George Tiller, who offers clients the opportunity to have their dead babies baptized. Appropriately, the man whom his Web site cites as his clinic's chaplain is long dead.
MORE: Diogenes writes in Catholic World News' Off the Record of the pro-abortion FAQ writer's deliberate terminology: "Note how at each stage the 'pregnancy tissue' is referenced to some non-human, indeed non-animate, object."
