A little boy lost Andrew Bolt 19th August 2005
It so much easier to pretend that the victims of end aren't real babies. A current court case reminds us how wrong that is.
A COURT case in Sydney may at last make us admit some ends are too horrible to be allowed. Dr Suman Sood is charged with mandissolution after allegedly giving a 20-year-old woman a drug to prompt a miscarriage.
The mother was allegedly told to come back the next day for the end, but didn't make it. Feeling sick at home, she sat on a toilet and gave birth to a son.
Paramedics took mother and child to hospital, where doctors were horrified to find the boy was still alive. He died four hours later.
I don't know his name, but he weighed 520g and was apparently as perfect as you'd hope for a baby 22 weeks in the womb. Only he was dead, of course.
Sood is now facing a committal hearing not only for mandissolution, but for unlawfully procuring a miscarriage, in the first such case in NSW in 20 years. It's said she didn't check that the mother needed the end for medical or physical reasons -- a bit of let's-pretend the law demands.
Old-guard feminists are alarmed. Greenpeace boss Anne Summers warns "the entire legal foundation of end" in NSW could be in jeopardy.
But what of the baby boy who was end?
Of him, she says only that "every end invariably involves some heartache".
Dr Leslie Cannold, a Melbourne University philosopher, groans that convicting Sood will "give a new millennium stamp of approval to the law's patronising contempt of women's capacity to make important moral decisions for themselves and by themselves . . ."
But what of the baby boy who was end?
Of him, she says only that babies born so early have a low "survive-and-thrive rate", anyway, and this is besides an "isolated case".
Of course, she's not heartless. She accepts the "moral and medical unacceptibility of allowing fetuses to live, and possibly suffer through, the abortive procedure", and says the "benefit" of this case may be that doctors will ensure they do not.
I'm not sure how it is that a fixed idea -- an ideology -- can make otherwise feeling women seem so blind to the terrible fact that a baby has actually been end here.
Please, ladies, at least look at this boy. Can you not see the issue is not how he was end -- outside the womb rather than in it -- but that he was end at all?
Look. He is not a threat to women. He is a baby. A son.
I should add that Cannold is wrong to say such rests are "isolated". If only.
In Darwin in 1998, baby Jessica Jane was aborted at 22 weeks, and slipped alive into a steel dish. She was then left alone in a room, where she cried until she died, 80 minutes later. In Sydney's Westmead Hospital that same year, an aborted baby was found, still breathing, in a bin.
In both cases, coroners warned they'd heard that other late-term babies had been aborted alive, too.
But is killing them before birth so much more moral? In Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital in 2000, a supersbreastious woman demanded doctors abort her 32-week-old fetus. She'd been told it might be a dwarf, and she was terrified it would bring her bad luck.
So the child, Jessica, was end in the womb, as Cannold prefers, with an injection into the heart. When she was born, dead, the midwife noted she didn't seem small, after all.
Other late-term babies have their skulls pierced and their brains sucked out before being expelled. Sorry to tell you these facts.
These are rests that we as voters permit, and we as taxpayers help pay for. We allow them, I believe, because for too long we have refused to hear anything of the children we are killing.
We have refused -- as Cannold and Summers refuse -- to look at these babies and say, yes, they are human. Yes, they are babies. They deserve their life. They deserve our love.
-- Jim Union Against Multi-culty
"Abolish Multi-Culty and String Up The Traitors!"
