If you stop to think about the past, sometimes you can gain really great insight. Now, this is not my idea, but Craig Carter has thought about something very significant in this whole debate about abortion.
In the past, you might recall that pro-slavery legislation ultimately defined a “person” based upon societies decision/will that slaves were not persons, they were more like cattle. The same thing applies to pro-abortionist legislation and thinking today. The only reason that someone can say that a baby in the womb is not a person is through an “act of will” that denies the reality that the baby in the womb IS a person in and of themselves! In other words, it’s the 19th century all over again!
Or, as someone once told me, “post”-modernism is the drunk after he’s wrecked his car into a telephone pole and the resultant fire is about to burn him to death while he waves his last, shiny bottle in the air thinking nothing about his impending death… The lesson? Today is not a new mindset, it’s just the fulfillment of and, at the same time, a denial of what has come before!
So, here is what Mr. Craig Carter had to say:
“The Globe and Mail tiptoes carefully through the semantic minefield in this story on an unborn baby having heart surgery in utero. Notice the terms used [my bolding]:”
“TORONTO — In what’s being called a Canadian first, Toronto doctors have successfully performed a heart procedure on a fetus inside the womb.
A team of doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children and Mount Sinai Hospital expanded one of the baby’s heart valves using a balloon catheter. The device was inserted through the mother’s abdomen and then into the fetus to reverse heart failure before delivery.Sick Kids Hospital says the procedure allowed the baby to remain safely in utero for a crucial extra month before her birth on April 15.
Within an hour of Oceane McKenzie’s birth, she had another procedure, and a third followed a few weeks later. Doctors say Oceane is well on the road to recovery and will soon be going home.”
Carter concludes:
Now the pro-abortion types are going to hate this article. It refers to this little girl as “fetus-baby-fetus-baby-Oceane McKenzie.” This is clearly a fetus, which is also a baby, who also has a name.
But under Canadian law her mother could have changed her mind after the heart operation and had Oceane killed by an abortionist at any moment up to the moment the baby emerged from the birth canal. So how can the pro-abortionists say that abortion is not killing a person? There is only one way to do it: Oceane was a person because her mother wanted her. So one human being can bestow and remove personhood from another by an act of will. The last time that sort of thing was legal was in the days of slavery. How “progressive” we are – not!
[HT: James Grant]