Posted on 08/30/2009 6:33:09 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
BELLEVUE, Neb. | At the end of a day of performing one abortion after the next after the next, LeRoy Carhart phrases the question himself.
“Do I think I’ll get shot? I hope not,” the physician says. “Is it a possibility? I think it’s a very, very good possibility.”
Meantime, the potbellied military retiree, grandfather and horse lover carries on the same steady abortion business that has defined, dominated and directed his life for the last two decades.
Now he stands at the most thinly manned front line in America’s abortion wars — almost daring the opposition to stop him from performing late-term abortions.
The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue mustered its troops for rallies outside Carhart’s clinic Friday and Saturday in Bellevue. When the pitch of protests fades, the group promises to recruit a local resistance to do everything it can to shutter his offices.
That, in turn, has brought abortion rights activists to join forces on Carhart’s behalf, mounting counterprotests and promising legal help to keep him at work.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
Careful getting the lawyers involved. There was a drunk driving case in Missouri a couple of years ago. The state legislature had passed a law saying life began at conception, and some lawyer tried to use that as a defense saying that if life began at conception then his client was 21 years and 5 months old when he was arrested for DWI, and therefore shouldn't be charged under the more strict underage drinking laws. I don't think he won.
No. Kennedy wrote a long whiny self-justifying letter to the Pope, who responded with what was basically a form letter essentially telling Kennedy that he would pray for him and he hoped he had a nice day.
I'm not an attorney, but I'll try to answer your question.
Among pro-choice people, only the idiots try to deny that the fetus is alive and that it is human. These are scientific facts and can't be effectively disputed.
In Roe and its followup decisions, the Supremes have decided that while the fetus is a living human, it is not a person under the law and has none of the rights of a person, not even the right to not be intentionally killed.
We thus are in the interesting position of having as a society decided that legally some living humans are persons and others are not.
We aren't even consistent in this, as fetuses can still be considered murder victims in some states and result in increased penalties for the killer of the pregnant woman. Fetuses can also inherit and sue for damages, after they're born, of course.
In practice, the only difference between a fetus that is a person and one that is not is the attitude of the pregnant woman. She wants the baby, it's a person. She doesn't want the baby, it's a blob of tissue that can be discarded at will with no legal consequences.
Oddly enough, despite the general liberal admiration for Europe, they ignore that, AFAIK, every European country has more restrictions on abortion than the USA.
Do you have an example of a genuine medical condition that would require a partial-birth abortion rather than allowing the baby to be born the rest of the way?
I doubt there is one.
Sounds as if he has a death wish - how appropriate. Those case numbers are mind-boggling.
I don’t need a legal opinion to determine what I need to know about most abortions. If it is viable and has to ability to grow fingers, toes, limbs, eyes, mouth ears, etc. that are in normal ‘human’ form, aborting them for trumped up reasons is MURDER, plain and simple.
So let's say he has been performing abortions for 25 years and works dang hard doing it every year for 300 days a year.
That is 10 murders each and every day.
More than 1 murder for each and every hour for his working career.
Got to be some kind of hellacious record.
So Carhart gets ALL the money now.
When it's that late, a c-section is more appropriate. An unscheduled c-section takes twenty minutes, an emergency one takes two. A partial-birth abortion takes two DAYS. That's not an emergency procedure. The only reason for an abortion that late to assure yourself of a dead baby.
As an actual individual hands-on killer, no doubt you are right.
Guys who set up organizations to do their killing could beat him out with one day’s “production.”
Example: the Mongols, who quite frequently murdered 100,000+ people on the fall of a city.
I’m afraid that there alot of docs like him out there. Maybe not in every city, but certainly in every region of every state.
I was working in Springfield, IL some years ago, filling in at a local hospital.
I was shocked and amazed at the number of young girls I’d see coming in for physical exams before starting a job.
More than once, I’d comment on someone with an obvious late term abdomen, and I’d ask, “So when are you expecting?”
And they’d say, “Oh, I had an abortion last week.”
And the abortion occurred in the 7th month for no medical reason.
I think there are fanatics on both ends of the spectrum on this. Without advertised orphanages and homes for pregnant mothers, and pro life options for young girls who find themselves pregnant, by a family member...you are going to have doctors working over time to do abortions.
I just can’t see how anyone can justify...performing a casual abortion in the 7th to 9th month of life....
Sadly, the most effective way to stop the murders is to stop the murderers...pretty soon, there won’t be enough money to convince “doctors” to perform this atrocity...
Our early forbears knew this, when the local customs/tax collectors were routinely tarred and feathered that left no one to carry out the oppressive laws..Perhaps we need to return to that method....
What I find interesting is what I see as a disconnect in pro-life circles on this issue.
Few of us would deny that killing a man about to take the life of a three-year old is fully justified, indeed laudable, if it is the only way to stop him.
Many prolifers claim to consider abortion to be murder, yet decry any violence against abortion providers.
This inconsistency can only be resolved in two ways, that I can see:
1. Many if not most prolifers don’t “really” see abortion as murder, at least not in the same way they do the killing of a born child. They just claim to.
2. Many if not most prolifers aren’t willing to carry their premise to its logical conclusion. They shrink from the consequences if they did.
The good doctor has made it very clear he’ll keep aborting babies as long as he’s alive. Seems to me someone who really considers abortion to be murder would draw the obvious conclusion.
I think the term abortion as a medical procedure is the wrong term. No one performs “an abortion” for an abruptio placenta or placenta previa”.....A C-section is done.
In fact, there really shouldn’t be many reasons for a late term abortion. My understanding is that Tiller was performing almost all of his abortions on the pretense that the birth would cause psychological harm.
I suspect CARHART is using the same rational.
I think claims that this is done primarily for money are likely to be inaccurate.
Nobody continues an obviously highly dangerous practice “only” for the money.
I disagree strongly with the doc, but it’s pretty obvious he believes what he is doing is right.
Would love to read that.
I looked him up. He’s listed as an ER doc family practice.
You raise a good point. Let’s assume he did 50,000 abortions since 1993 the year he signed a compliance letter for the state of Nebraska.
So he’s doing abortions 25 years...
He works 200 days out of the year. That comes to 5,000 days in 25 years.
You’re right, that’s 10 per day. And if he performed 25,000 that would be 5 per day.
If he performed 75,000 abortions, that would be 15 per day.
In short, this clearly is the ONLY thing this guy does.
Or, perhaps he needs to get up in the morning and explain himself all day to anyone who will listen that he's right. Probably deep in the recesses of his dark soul, there's a dying conscience imprisoned in a cage. He just needs to return to it constantly and recheck the lock.
Humans have an infinite capability to deceive themselves.
In nothing are we more ingenious than in the development of rationalizations for evil.
Late term abortions pay pretty well, as much as $5K per. Compare that to lopping off the feet of diabetics for a lousy $700, or creeping into little chirldren’s rooms to steal their tonsils. If he does 15 a day, that’s $75,000 per day. I doubt Teddy Kennedy’s genius brain surgeon does that well. Tiller was brining in millions per year.
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