Elle ‘flabbergasted’ that fetus looks ‘like a baby’ instead of ‘actual pregnancy’

liveactionnews.org ^ | December 22, 2015 | Katie Yoder

[Morgana]

One women’s magazine is hyperventilating over the fact that an image of a fetus actually looks like… a baby.

Writing for Elle magazine, Sady Doyle recently criticized a Newsweek December cover in a piece titled “Why Does Newsweek’s ‘Abortion Wars’ Cover Show a Cartoon Fetus Instead of a Woman?” Doyle commended the magazine for tackling abortion in its new cover story – but bashed the cover illustration for showing a fetus that looked “more like a baby” than an “actual pregnancy.” Puzzled yet?

In a rant, Doyle described what made her “flabbergasted” by the cover: the fact that the image showed a “well-developed, relatively late-term fetus” with “no sign” of the woman in whose “uterus it is presumably housed.”

Guessing that the fetus was between twelve and fourteen weeks old, Doyle criticized the picture for making the age “hard to tell.”

“[I]t looks about five times bigger than the translucent, two-inch-long fetuses you normally find at that stage,” she wrote, “this image looks less like an actual pregnancy, and more like an adorable computer-generated alien.”

“Or, to be blunt: More like a baby,” she added.

Doyle had a problem with the idea that abortion would destroy anything cute – or anything resembling a baby.

With the word “abortion” placed next to the fetus image, she complained, “we can assume it’s not going to be around for long.”

Because of this, the cover “sums up what’s wrong with how we talk about abortion” or “Everything is about the fetus, which is humanized, and the actual pregnant person is erased.”

(Has she read the news lately? Or ever?)

That led Doyle to warn about the “long history of fetal images being used to scare people and rile up anti-abortion sentiment” which has “entered the mainstream of conservative politics.”

Furthermore, Doyle protested, the cover was “misleading” because it wasn’t “exactly representative.” Most abortions happen before twelve weeks, or, in her words, “the embryo being removed is less ‘futuristic Gerber baby,’ more ‘lentil-sized clump of cells.’”

Plus, she added, if a fetus is aborted after twelve weeks, the “pregnancy is in many cases not healthy” with issues such as birth defects.

“So even in cases where a fetus was carried long enough to look very human,” she pushed, “it probably wouldn’t look like a healthy, happy baby.”

In the end (as in the beginning), she decided the fetus was “beside the point.”

What mattered, she insisted, was a “decision made by one person,” whether by a woman or a non-binary person or a transgender man (yes, she went there).

“By focusing exclusively on fetuses, and promoting the imagery of endangered, persecuted ‘babies’ in the womb,” she wrote, “people who oppose abortion are able to totally avoid talking about the ways in which their positions endanger and persecute the actual people carrying those fetuses around.”

According to Doyle, Newsweek ignored the victims of abortion with the fetus image alongside the words “abortion wars”:

It ignores Robert Lewis Dear’s victims, murdered abortion doctors, and rape victims forced to carry their rapists’ children to term. It erases poor women forced to have children they can’t afford, and people who aren’t able to pursue educations because they had children too early. It leaves out any person who wants to control their own body, but can’t, because of abortion restrictions. Put ‘abortion wars’ next to their faces, and you get a whole different message – one that’s much closer to the truth.

A “truth” that would censor the 57 million American babies lost since legalized abortion, that is.

[Morgana]

They really can't handle the truth!

[a fool in paradise]

It’s apparently subhuman,just as the Nazis considered Jews.

[21twelve]

Twelve weeks? IIRC from my old Biology books, it was just a tadpole or salamander at that stage - before it turns into a fish anyways.

[GilesB]

Since she equates human value with appearance - I am assuming she is a very ugly person, resembling a bowl of cold broccoli cheese soup.

[Aria]

What an unbelievably stupid _unt.

[soycd]

Ghetto moms still can’t figger out how those they pinch off in the streets turn out to be Dindus who just keep getting their lives turned around.

No surprise.

[CodeToad]

[Politicalkiddo]

I assume you are being sarcastic, but here is a baby at 10 weeks after conception.

[LTC.Ret]

Ah, the old “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” theory.

[Spok]

Totally delusional. You can show cancerous lungs on tv to scare kids not to smoke, but not the nondescript “tissue mass” that is an aborted human being. The really evil ones know they are children but many are just hopelessly clueless.

[21twelve]

Well - I guess I was at least off on the gestation stage! I’m just glad women are usually done with pregnancy at 9 months, or they’d be having elephants or something!

[Don Corleone]

Their prejudice and ignorance knows no limits.

[Shelayne]

According to Doyle, Newsweek ignored the victims of abortion with the fetus image alongside the words abortion...
_______________________________

Umm... seriously?? Sometimes all I can do is shake my head....

[I was Spartacus]

They really do not like real science either.

[Politicalkiddo]

“I’m just glad women are usually done with pregnancy at 9 months, or they’d be having elephants or something!”

We’re thankful for that fact, too. ;)

[hinckley buzzard]

Not even close. A 12 week fetus has arms and legs, fingers and toes. Better refresh your memory.

[taterjay]

We are increasingly shown how an animal can feel pain, how our brain works, how this and that work together on the microsopic level to make our body work in harmony, but man that ultrasound of a real person inside a woman just never makes sense to these folks.

[dfwgator]

It’s apparently subhuman,just as the Nazis considered Jews.

In his memoirs written in prison, the Kommadant of Auschwitz, Hoess, remarked how shocked he was that the Jews heading towards the gas chambers for the most part looked "Aryan", and nothing like the stereotypical portrayals in Nazi propaganda.

[Morgana]

I can do one better. I heard some jewish babies were smuggled out of the death camps by the Nazies if they had blonde hair and blue eyes and adopted by out side German families. Don’t know if it’s true but I read it once.

[TontoKowalski]

I recall reading that Aryan-looking (blonde/blue-eyed) Jews were generally spared.

It was the more stereotypical darker Jews who were slaughtered more frequently.

I wish I recalled where I read this. Perhaps it wasn't academically sound.