Steal a Fetus; Find a Baby: MSM Struggles with Reality
John on July 30, 2009 at 11:14 am
It’s a terrible story. A Massachusetts woman named Darlene Haynes was 8-months pregnant. She was murdered and her baby was cut from her and kidnapped. Police have now Julie Corey who apparently lived in the same apartment building at one point. The baby was “found” alive at a local hospital and is doing well.
As I looked at differing media accounts, I noticed that some members of the media seem to be struggling with the proper language to use in this case. Technically, Darlene Hayes had a fetus inside her. But when she was murdered and cut open, was a baby kidnapped or a fetus? Here are a few headlines, starting with this one published yesterday by Fox News:
Pregnant Massachusetts Woman Killed, Fetus Taken
But today Fox has a new story:
Woman Suspected of Cutting Baby From Massachusetts Mom’s Womb Held on $2M Bail
Okay, ABC News covered this yesterday with this headline:
Mom-to-Be Darlene Haynes Killed, Cops Search for Her Fetus
ABC posted a new story later the same day:
Baby Cut From Slain Mom’s Womb Found Alive
Today, ABC has a third follow-up story:
Slain Pregnant Woman Lived in Same Building With Accused Fetus-Stealer
The Boston Globe had this yesterday:
Authorities in Worcester seek killer in case of fetus cut from womb
CNN had this yesterday:
Woman killed, fetus cut from body
And here’s CNN’s follow-up today:
Baby cut from slain mom’s womb found alive
The Boston Herald had this yesterday:
Officials search hospitals for victim’s fetus
And today the Boston Herald has this:
Suspect in brutal murder, baby snatch held $2M bail
Are you seeing the pattern here? A fetus was kidnapped but a baby was discovered.
Now I realize that the editors at these MSM institutions are probably following some style-guide which tells them that a baby inside a mother is fetus and a fetus in the hospital is a baby. What this case points out so clearly is that it’s a distinction without a difference. If we wanted to lay aside the style-guide we’d have to admit it was a baby when it was kidnapped and it was a baby when it was discovered alive in the hospital. Calling it a fetus didn’t change anything about it except its implied location. So why do it? I think the answer is obvious. You don’t have to look any further than yesterday’s NY Times hagiography of George Tiller for an answer. From the Times story:
[T]he other 2,800 abortions involved viable fetuses. Some had serious but survivable abnormalities, like Down syndrome. Many were perfectly healthy.
Those were healthy babies Tiller dismembered. Babies.
Finally, the prize has to go to the Bostonist which published this headline yesterday:
Fetus Cut From Womb Found Alive In N.H.
They found a fetus! But notice the first line of their story:
The baby cut from a slain mother’s womb was found alive in New Hampshire Wednesday night.
The Bostonist might be confused about the style-guide rules of journalism, but they got it right.
Category: Pro-Life |
In Oregon you’re not a human until you take your first breath.
July 30, 2009 @ 11:35 amAh, I see… so personhood is a matter of geography in some cases (news articles above)
…or lung density in Oregon.
So I wonder, if I’m in Oregon, and happen to be wandering through a maternity ward just as a woman was giving birth, could I rush in and clamp my hand over his mouth and nose and wring his neck without consequence from the law?
Didn’t take a breath, after all…
July 30, 2009 @ 12:01 pmDoesn’t surprise me. Oregon is pretty far left on life issues.
Of course it’s a completely arbitrary distinction. The baby is just as much alive before it breaths as after.
July 30, 2009 @ 12:08 pmI wish there were a clapping emoticon I could insert here. Schizophrenic society we have. Fetus is just a stage of development, as is newborn, toddler, tween, teen, and senior citizen. To deny that an unborn child is a human being is to turn a blind eye to science. Ironic, as those who are most likely to intellectually support abortion also claim to adhere fiercely to science and reason.
July 30, 2009 @ 12:22 pmOnly if you had permission first? (Assisted suicide is legal in oregon.)
July 30, 2009 @ 1:13 pmWait, who do I need permission from? That baby isn’t a human yet, right? Do I need a non-human’s permission to end his non-life?
July 30, 2009 @ 1:18 pmJames, that’s another dichotomy in the law. If a mother gets an abortion, there’s nothing wrong with it. If someone intentionally or accidentally causes the unborn baby’s death, they can be tried for murder (depending on the state). The explanation I commonly hear from pro-aborts is that a mother “owns” her fetus. Since when do we own other people? Well, really not since the times of slavery. My guess is if you wanted to ill the baby prior to breathing, you’d need “permission” from his or her “owner”.
How’s this for a scenario: if a pregnant mother is hit by a car and the baby dies, the person who caused the accident can be guilty of murder or manslaughter. What do we then say if the mother was on her way to the abortion clinic when the accident happened?
July 30, 2009 @ 1:36 pmFetuses are just lumps of cells. So are all other living creatures. That’s why I don’t eat meat, bugs, or micro organisms. That’s why I moved to outer space. Yep, it’s just me and the atomic particles up here. I am transmitting this signal with my nipple antennae right now.
All of this electro magnetic radiation has mutated my genes. I have recently evolved into a new species during my isolation. I am considering a return to Earth in order to attempt to further my species, but the problem is that I can’t procreate with human women. Therfore, I am going to just procreate with all of them just in case one of them are also compatible.
July 30, 2009 @ 3:10 pmYatze??
July 30, 2009 @ 3:42 pmThis is a simple matter of law. A fetus in the womb is the property of the host, i.e. the mother carrying the child. Any invasion of her womb without her consent is illegal [minimally assault maximally capital murder] and any entry into the womb with her consent, by a qualified physician is protected under doctor patient confidentiality. All other entry by those not licensed medically becomes a matter of criminal or civil procedure under the laws of the jurisdiction [city, county, state what have you]. Under these guidelines the mother bearing the fetus in this case had her baby [since it remained alive] kidnapped.
July 30, 2009 @ 4:51 pmSlavery was a simple matter of law too, once upon a time.
Evil is often simple, even banal.
July 30, 2009 @ 5:56 pmGeez, that’s funny. It had to cause some real heartburn in Liberaland.
July 30, 2009 @ 7:51 pmFetuses actually breathe the amniotic fluid easily in the third trimester. So this needs further clarification.
July 30, 2009 @ 7:54 pmThat’s exactly what Oregon Right To Life is saying.
July 30, 2009 @ 10:40 pmMy point is, gentlemen, that this is not an emotional religious or political issue; it can only be from your side a matter of racial and cultural fear of lost privilege and for everyone else a matter of LAW and the right to medical privacy.
If you truly want to win this battle I can give you the key that will assure your victory peacefully. But you will reject it out of hand immediately and therein lays your failing.
The solution is to pay women to not have abortions. I even have a figure, 3 876 USD tax free.
July 31, 2009 @ 1:50 amCavalor,
First, if you’d ever been to a pro-choice rally the idea that it is not emotional, political and even religious in a broad sense would sound as absurd to you as it does to me.
Second, the idea that this is a matter of law and medical privacy is talking around the point. Slavery was also a matter of law and private property…until it wasn’t. Laws change. And according to at least one recent poll, a plurality of Americans are now pro-life, with the numbers higher among younger Americans than old. It’s a matter of time until the law is changed.
Third, medical privacy does not include the right to murder an infant. It shouldn’t, therefore, include the right to kill a fetus, at least not after certain milestones are passed. Viability is an easy one. After 22 weeks, abortion is infanticide. This is what the law recognizes in Britain and other places currently.
Finally, there is a network of Crisis Pregnancy Centers across the country that already essentially pay women not to have abortions. Usually the money comes in the form of goods and services to help cover the costs of keeping the baby. And of course adoption sometimes involves covering costs associated with the birth. In addition, there are state and federal welfare programs devoted to women with infants (WIC for instance) which essentially represent payments to women and probably tops out above $4K.
Your idea is neither new nor particularly shocking. It is however wrong in the sense that it hasn’t put an end to abortion. Apparently the value of human life is a bit above your estimate.
July 31, 2009 @ 7:12 amLOL Earl.
July 31, 2009 @ 8:20 amBingo.
July 31, 2009 @ 11:45 amWe call it a fetus to define the humanity of the baby out of existence. It assuages the conscience of a guilty person. The bottom line is we’re g\killing children here. Cavalor and the legal types hide behind their law and their absurd reasoning to defend the indefensible. They’re parties to an abominable evil.
July 31, 2009 @ 12:43 pmOh, so fetus are human babies… :/
But zygotes and blastocytes… those are still safe to kill, I mean abort, right?
July 31, 2009 @ 12:45 pmIsn’t anyone at all interested in my newfound genetic abilities?
First of all, I have developed a kind of immortality via some kind of asexual reproduction. You see, I can open my mouth and collect various elements shooting through the universe and then vomit out all the substances needed to form a new living creature. Once I vomit out this cocoon like blob I can then use my new mental abilities to transfer all information from my previous being into the new one.
In hand with these new mental abilities is the ability to control people’s thoughts and actions, kind of like the Jedi mind trick. I can project my will to anyone on Earth, except for Jim strangely enough.
I have also finally transcended all causality by means of an organ, kind of like a particle collider in my left butt cheek. It is linked directly to my brain, and when it turns on it kind of sounds like a vacuum cleaner but it produces random events by which I can base my life decisions on thus achieving total freedom of will.
Living out here in outerspace has also shown how important it is to be able to detect all manner of radiation, from solar winds to gamma rays. So now I can see all things in the full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. In addition to this, I can illuminate my surroundings by expelling a gaseous cloud of photons out of my colon. I also have learned to use this gaseous pressure to propel myself around out here in zero grav.
To combat all of the cosmic rays bombarding my body, I have developed a thick layer of highly mineralized blubber that covers my whole body, including a second overlapping eyelid.
Some more features are fins, webbed toes, a 5d6 breath weapon, self-trimming nostril hairs, and I now only have one vent just like a chicken (makes things so much easier too.)
So you can clearly see how unique I have become and why it is important for me to try to procreate with every woman on Earth. I can only replicate myself, but I am lonely and it is not good for mamnkind (that’s my new species name) to be alone. I need a helper and a partner. I will even accept your wives if I must.
July 31, 2009 @ 1:06 pmJust imagine me zipping around in space with your wife riding a colorful dazzling comet tail of gaseous emissions shooting out of my butt. I’m so excited.
July 31, 2009 @ 1:13 pmYes, but I have a question. How do you plan to procreate? I thought your were asexual now? Do you still have your old sexual organs too?
July 31, 2009 @ 1:15 pmPublic,
Haven’t you been listening? What, did you go to public school or something? I told you! I will vomit out all of the genetic and organic and molecular material needed, but this time directly into your wife’s womb.
July 31, 2009 @ 1:16 pmCan’t you just create new creatures using your regurgitable abilities combined with your random particle collider while transfering information to your cocoon? Or maybe you could inject different molecules together randomly, like on the backs of crystals, until you have a dinosaur?
July 31, 2009 @ 1:20 pmNo, I already tried that. It was about as crazy as a wash machine full of squirrels.
July 31, 2009 @ 1:21 pmROFL Earl. 5d6? You nailed the nerd in me with that one.
Are you zipping around the universe just like the number 3? (if that reference hits home, you’re my new BFF)
July 31, 2009 @ 1:43 pmJohn,
I have been to many pro life rallies and every time I see photo banners of dead fetuses used as emotional appeals and many Biblical quotes and a lot praying and toting of crucifixes. From that I gathered they were both emotional and religious. The fact that religious organizations have allied themselves almost exclusively with the pro life movement also points to this. It almost appears good man that somehow you are ashamed of being associated with organized Christianity and their emotional and religious appeals to “morality.”
Slavery was the ownership of another living human being with an existing ability to self-determine and self-direct. Fetuses have no such power nor outside the desire of their host any rights whatsoever. If this is an appeal to black minority persons it is not only a hollow argument it is an insult to the intelligence of the people as a whole.
Third, my friend, you are correct that medical privacy does not include infanticide which is murder. However under the explicit laws of the several states of your nation abortion is legal, even in the one center in South Dakota. What you are trying to do is impress your morality for emotional or religious or even racial purposes on the lives of people who have the right to determine their own reproductive course.
You have every right to feel that they are committing a sin; you do not have the right to tell them they do not have a right to a legal medical procedure. All the proof I need of your failure is that you did not even address the need to merely pay women to take their children to term and turn them over for adoption and reap the 3 876 USD in profit. Are you afraid that women would sign on just to get the money? Curious, is a baby worth less than what is printed daily for waste by the United States Treasury which is passed off as currency? You do still hold that you are pro life, yes?
July 31, 2009 @ 1:47 pmYes, he does have the right to tell people that they can and can’t do certain things, as long as he exercises that right in accordance with procedure. So he has every right to do this from the ground up, from discussion to group effort to lobby to petition all the way through introducing bills and ensuring that they are passed and enforced. All law is based on personal convictions of right and wrong, good and evil, valuable and invaluable, reason and emotion. No law is strictly based on science, physics, or nature.
July 31, 2009 @ 4:02 pmDr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a minister. That didn’t make civil rights a religious issue. Just because religious people are involved in it doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue of science and law as well.
Neither do newborns. Are you agreeing with the current administration, that even out of the womb babies have no rights? For that matter, neither do the severely disabled. They often depend wholly on others to keep them alive.
I think you’re missing the point. The LAW defined black people as 3/5 of a person. In so doing, they were able to deny basic human rights to a whole group. THAT is where the parallel lies; the unborn are defined as less than human (but, curiously, only in CERTAIN circumstances), and that is why mothers are currently able to legally kill them.
Determining your “own reproductive course” happens before you reproduce. Once a mother is pregnant, she has already reproduced. The only issue now is whether she has a live baby or a dead one. To say that reproduction happens at birth is to deny science.
The point is we’re trying to change the law such that it is no longer a legal medical procedure, just like slavery was deemed to be no longer legal.
Silly, but I’ll take the bait. Any mother currently seeking abortion can come to me and I will pay her $3876 to place her baby for adoption instead. If the quantity of mothers coming to me is too large, I will find other individuals to help me foot the cost.
July 31, 2009 @ 4:22 pmCavalor,
Two responses.
One, there is an appropriate emotional response to killing another human being. If the pictures elicit that response, and they do, that should tell us something.
Second, while I’ll grant that this is an emotional appeal, you fail to appreciate that it’s also an appeal to fact. For decades, Planned Parenthood has been telling women that it’s “just a blob of cells” or “just tissue.” When you see an aborted fetus with your own eyes you learn something. It’s not an indistinguishable blob, it’s a baby.
It was primarily religious groups that opposed slavery as well. Far from running away from my faith, I see this as clear evidence that Christians show compassion for others well in advance of other groups.
Here you’re conflating two issues. One is the ability of the fetus to exercise self determination. Let’s deal with that first. A 6 month old infant also doesn’t have the ability to self-determine. Left to its own, it will die. So on the basis of this argument alone, what’s wrong with infanticide?
The second issue is rights. There are two ways to look at this issue:
1) Rights are recognized by law but established in something more foundational, i.e. morals and religion. This is the approach that Jefferson took in the Declaration. Rights are not granted by governments but by God. Governments merely seek to insure those “self evident” rights are protected.
2) In the absence of God or universal morality, rights are in fact conferred by consensus (in a democracy) or by fiat (in a dictatorship).
Now, getting back to the topic at hand. If rights are conferred by God then moral and religious arguments are appropriate and should be ultimately persuasive, i.e. pro-lifers have reason to hope for a victory.
If, on the other hand, rights are conferred by consensus, then pro-lifers can note that their position is increasingly popular and may now be a slight majority position, i.e. pro-lifers have reason to hope for a victory.
Put simply, we can win either way.
If infanticide is the unjust killing of a helpless infant, one totally dependent on others, how are we to distinguish this from the killing of a viable baby in the womb.
Seems to me the only distinction available is law. But as I’ve pointed out, laws change. And yet I suspect that if Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow, you would not be content to abide by the law. You would in fact think it was wrong. On what basis I wonder? An appeal to emotion perhaps…the poor pregnant teenager? The victim of rape or incest? If not emotion then what?
All argument is an attempt to appeal to people’s reason and their better (moral) nature. What I’m doing is no different that what you’re doing right now.
It seems to me you haven’t distinguished the idea of a moral notion from the idea of sin, which is a an appeal to a universal truth. Sin is sin whether I feel it or not.
If murder is wrong and if late-term abortion is equivalent to infanticide, then I have an obligation to seek to prevent it where possible.
In any case, I’m not telling them they don’t have the right, they surely would even if abortion were illegal. I’m telling them/you that abortion is indistinguishable from infanticide and therefore wrong.
In addition to persuasion of individuals, I also have the right to seek to change the law to make it more just. Science and technology have progressed a long way since 1973.
I did address it. I’m not sure how you missed it. In the case of adoption, which I didn’t mention before, the adoptive parent is taking on the entire expense of the child’s development, which is dozens of times the $4k figure you’re touting. If your theory worked, it should have worked by now. And to some extent it does, but not enough to eliminate abortion.
July 31, 2009 @ 6:50 pmGravity.
July 31, 2009 @ 7:22 pmWhat is gravity?
July 31, 2009 @ 8:05 pmI am not a law. I am a force. You foolish blobs cannot even begin to understand me. Try as you might to describe me with your silly little symbolic picture thinking shadow-of-reality mathematics, but I am not a law; it is you blobs that try to call me a law. I AM.
July 31, 2009 @ 8:36 pmInterestingly, the woman and man who committed the crime were able to make the distinction since they cut the baby from the mother and took the child with them. They did not want a “fetus”, they wanted a baby.
Last year there was a similar case in the midwest where a woman murders the mother in order to have the child.
It does not surprise though that the politically correct, elitist publications and broadcast news are incapable of stating the truth.
August 1, 2009 @ 3:50 amSnort @ Gravity. Well played.
August 3, 2009 @ 12:30 pmNo one these days mistakes the meaning of “The Final Solution” for other than what it always meant. And the fellow-eugenicist basta*d offspring of the final solution’s architects’ and their aborttoir-industry operator axis will not much longer get away with calling the victim of their Final Solution by other than its name, either:
Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby Baby
Get it yet Tillerists?
Brian Richard Allen
August 4, 2009 @ 5:45 pmLost Angeles Califobambicated 90028
And the Far Abroad
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