South Dakota, Abortion, and Ice Cream

WARNING: the following post is graphic in nature, and not for the faint-of-heart.

The bill passed last week by the South Dakota legislature which makes it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion has not surprisingly ruffled many a feather of those in the pro-abortion realm. Perhaps in an attempt to perpetuate the “back-alley — coat-hanger” mythology, one blogger has posted “For the Women of South Dakota: An Abortion Manual.”

In a tone that has all the glibness of a manual for doing the dishes, “Molly” gives instruction on how these newly-deprived South Dakota women can perform abortions for their friends:

As you grasp the sac with your forceps, twist it away so that it detaches. You will now need to remove small pieces of fetal material and membrane from the uterus with the forceps. Some of these pieces will be distinctly identifiable as fetal material. Save the material until the end of the procedure on a piece of plastic, so that you can be sure the entire fetus has been removed. If doing this sounds too ethically challenging, remember that fetuses do not have the capacity to feel actual pain until the third trimester. You are not “hurting” it, and it has no awareness, nor the capacity for awareness, that you are extracting it.

Nice that this blogger has concern for ethical matters, because it gets worse (emphasis mine):

Scrape from the uterine walls, scraping material toward the cervix. Use the same general form of stroke you would use to scoop ice cream, and don’t be afraid to scrape fairly hard. Scraping softly could leave tissue behind, and if there’s anything you don’t want, it’s that.

If abortion a la mode isn’t enough to make you squeamish, consider her clean-up procedures:

When you feel the curettage and removal is complete, make sure you examine the fetal material you have already extracted. If you’re missing anything obvious — for instance, a head — make sure to find and remove it.

The abortion issue generally hinges on the question of just where and when humanity is found. While the discussion of humanity generally lies with the fetus, in the case of the manual’s author, I wonder just how much humanity is present in her own apparent frivolity.

The danger with the culture of death is not that it champions death so much as that it trivializes life. I’d wager that few are the women who have experienced an abortion that think of it with the fondness of a trip to the ice cream parlor.

1 thought on “South Dakota, Abortion, and Ice Cream”

  1. Jared, this makes my stomach turn. Such frivolity about the murder of infants is only the consistent outworking of philosophical naturalism. There is no difference between trimming the bushes and aborting babies since both are just biological matter.

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