The difference between Baby Body-Part Harvesting and autopsies

Last updated on: January 22, 2016 at 8:11 am by Jane the Actuary

The difference between Baby Body-Part Harvesting and autopsies 2016-01-22T08:11:39-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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(or, removal of organs for transplantation purposes):

I shouldn’t even need to say this, but I’m hearing in multiple places that even though it’s shocking to hear Planned Parenthood officials speak so casually about what they’re doing — talking about hearts and livers over lunch, aiming for “less crunchy” techniques while crunching on a salad — we have to understand that medical professionals do things which, taken out of context, would appear shocking and really aren’t. Autopsies, for instance, can be brutal in they manner in which they cut open a body and would appear horrific (in fact, weren’t permitted for most of the middle ages out of a belief that it’s disrespectful to the individual) to an outsider. A doctor preparing organs for transplant cuts into a person and takes out a heart, or a liver, or what-have-you. And these doctors need to distance themselves, and over time come to speak in ways that you and I would find shockingly indifferent to what they’re doing.

But:

in these cases, the doctor is dealing with a body that’s already dead.

In abortion, the doctor is actively killing a living being, via the rationale that it’s not yet a “person.”

Have we forgotten this difference?

Now, yes, there are violations of medical ethics and, likely, violations of the law, as well: it’s highly likely, but also likely not provable, that PP is charging whatever the market will bear in providing their specimens, rather than diligently determining their costs and passing them on; and PP officials have spoken quite clearly of changing the method of the abortion in order to obtain better specimens, though, again, whether it’s provable in any specific instance that there’s a material difference is another question.

But the bigger issue is this:

Everyone likes to think of abortions being done early enough that there is no heart, or liver, that could be identifiable. And everyone likes to imagine that if a late-term abortion, past the point when body parts are identifiable, is needed, it’s only for the most tragic of reasons (rather than, almost always, for the same financial or personal reasons as earlier abortions). These videos highlight what’s actually going on, and emphasize the fact that the abortion provider, and the industry, view the unborn child as, for all intents and purposes, already dead, and are indifferent to the fact that what they’re doing is killing.

Yeah. That’s it.

Except:

I do try to read the sites to get a left-wing perspective: The Atlantic, Slate, etc. And I have to admit: I haven’t yet read someone saying, “I’m prochoice, but these videos upset me and cause my to question what I believe and/or remind me that I believe there are limits to what’s moral.” The closest was that Ann Althouse called the video “harrowing” but provided no further commentary.

Instead, all the standard progressive opinionators (e.g., The New York Times) opine that Planned Parenthood is doing nothing illegal, and is instead doing a Good Deed by furthering medical research, and is being unjustly harassed. (Whether research using fetuses has actually made a difference in “H.I.V., hepatitis, congenital heart defects, retinal degeneration and Parkinson’s”, as cited by the NYT, and, specifically in ways that couldn’t have been done without it, I’m doubtful about, but haven’t researched it — and in any case, it’s irrelevant; bolstering the ethic rightness of abortion by citing fetal tissue research is no better than judging Mengele’s experiments as right or wrong based on whether they produced cures.)

And how are the non-pundit prochoicers reacting? The ones reading the news, not writing it? I don’t know. Trouble is, I doubt that these revelations will have moved the needle on what they believe to be right and wrong, because of the fact that the mainstream news outlets are reporting the videos with a defense baked into the “news” reporting.

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abortion

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