Two threads by me.
‘Abortion doula’ founder admits: ‘those pictures pro-life activists flash are real’
November 16, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The dictionary defines a “doula” as “a woman who assists women during labor and after childbirth.” But there is a new group of men and women calling themselves “doulas” who are challenging that definition in radical ways.
Volunteers with “The Doula Project,” located in New York City, not only help women who give birth to their child, but also accompany them as their unborn child is killed by abortion.
According to a recent article in the New York Observer profiling The Doula Project, volunteers with the organization have provided “doula” services - “counseling, back rubs and reassurance” - to some 4,000 women who have undergone abortions.
Pro-abortion activists can no longer face
the truth: this is what abortion looks like.
But in one of the more startling passages in that article, the co-founder of The Doula Project admits what many pro-abortion activists have furiously disputed for years – that graphic photos of aborted babies used by many pro-life activists are legitimate.
“Those pictures pro-life activists flash are real,” Mary Mahoney told the Observer. “That is what a fetus looks like when its head is crushed.”
Mahoney made the chilling remark while explaining that she is sometimes hesitant to admit pro-choice activists into the abortion doula program, since the reality of abortion can challenge the the pro-choice rhetoric in a powerful way.
“When you see the procedure, you must decide, as a pro-choice person, whether you are in or out,” said Mahoney, adding: “I have never been more in.”
Mahoney’s statement strikes a deathblow against the claims of pro-abortion activists that graphic images of abortions are faked, or simply photos of stillborn babies.
One article on about.com, titled “Top 10 Anti-Abortion Myths,” typifies this pro-abortion attitude. In response to the “myth” that “This is what an abortion looks like,” author Tom Head responds: “Almost always false. Many abortion protest photographs are artist’s renderings or the result of image manipulation, and the bulk of the rest are of very late-term fetuses aborted for emergency medical reasons.”
It isn’t hard to see why abortion supporters might want to write off the images as fake: the graphic images are devastating. Faced with the body of a dead and mutilated baby, you must make a choice.
To her infinite discredit, Mahoney has seen the mangled bodies, and she has made her choice. But many pro-choice activists haven’t – they’ve simply gone along with the crowd and accepted the status quo. They don’t know what abortion really is. They haven’t seen it. And when they do, the experience can shake their pro-choice conviction to its very core.
“The quickest way to change a pro-choicer’s mind is to let them see the procedure,” says Kelly Brunacini of Feminists Choosing Life of New York.
“A lot of the argument is intellectual: ‘My body, my choice’ sounds really good. When you see an abortion or you go through the mourning process with a woman who has aborted, it becomes less intellectualized, and more real.”
Of course, a graphic picture of an abortion isn’t necessarily a 100% foolproof way to back an abortion supporter into a corner. Instead of facing the truth and making a choice for or against, they may simply choose to deny that the truth is the truth: in other words, deny that the picture of the abortion is really a picture of an abortion.
But in the age of the ultrasound and brutally honest abortion activists like Mary Mahoney, who confess themselves perfectly content with crushed heads if that’s what it takes to protect a woman’s “right to choose,” denying the truth of the pictures is becoming an increasingly untenable position to hold.
A major coup for proponents of graphic images came in the form of a 2009 article in the New York Times, which exposed the fact that a large percentage of the photos of aborted babies used by pro-life activists were taken by Monica Miller, director of the Michigan-based Citizens for a Pro-Life Society.
That article, published in one of the most widely read publications in the United States, simply took for granted that the photos by Miller depicted what they purported to depict – aborted babies. And pro-abortion activists have been doing damage control ever since.
But their desperate efforts are doomed to failure. The truth can no longer be denied. And the truth is this: “That is what a fetus looks like when its head is crushed.”
And they wonder why pro-lifers compare abortion to the holocaust.
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Scientist: Human Life Begins at Conception, Fertilization
When one considers the ethics of manipulation, the question of whether we ought to, or whether we may manipulate an organism or entity depends on the answer to the first and most fundamental question:
In the fields of obstetrical medicine and reproductive medicine the ethical debates have raged for four decades. Enlightened discourse between opposing parties must assume good motives by all involved, and then go about asking the essential questions, following where the truth of science and reason lead.
Many claim that life begins at some point distant from fertilization, always beyond the point at which they propose some manipulation (abortion, embryonic stem cell culturing, etc…). There are always a list of biological functions that are given to define when human life begins: Cognitive capacity, etc.
The simple biological truth of the matter is that the Cell Theory states that all cells arise from pre-existing cells. There is no blackout period between sperm and egg uniting, and then the emergence of ‘life’ at some point distant.
The Carnegie stages of human development indicate that human development begins in the zygotic stage. Then there is the assertion of developmental biologist and leading textbook author in the field, Scott Gilbert. In his text, Gilbert takes us through the life cycle of a dog. His text, Developmental Biology, is arguably the leading text in the field. According to Gilbert:
“Traditional ways of classifying catalog animals according to their adult structure. But, as J. T. Bonner (1965) pointed out, this is a very artificial method, because what we consider an individual is usually just a brief slice of its life cycle. When we consider a dog, for instance, we usually picture an adult. But the dog is a “dog” from the moment of fertilization of a dog egg by a dog sperm. It remains a dog even as a senescent dying hound. Therefore, the dog is actually the entire life cycle of the animal, from fertilization through death.”
First, note how he sets the word dog off in quotes at one point, to communicate the very essence of the organism:
But the dog is a “dog” from the fertilization of a dog egg by a dog sperm…
The same may be said of all vertebrates, including cats, giraffes, chimpanzees, and humans. Substituting the word human for dog in Gilbert’s analysis gets to the heart of the matter. We are human for our entire life cycle. We are whole and complete in form and function at every stage of our development, for that given developmental stage. The prepubescent child is fully human, even though they lack the capacity to execute all human functions, such as abstract reasoning, or reproduction.
In the same way, the early embryo is alive and fully human, though it has not yet executed all human organismal functions.