Semantic gymnastics over abortion

Back in the 70s an article ran in the New England Journal of Medicine that talked about the "semantic gymnastics" necessary to the abortion debate. It stated that pro-abortionists use word games to dissociate themselves from the fact, a fact everyone really knows, that unborn children are living human infants from the very beginning. The semantic gymnastics continue today, but occasionally a bit of honesty breaks through the shroud of lies. Sometimes, however, the honesty paints an even more grotesque picture than the lies.

Such is the story of abortionist Lisa Harris who acknowledges that second trimester abortions do, indeed, involve violence. She describes aborting an 18 week old infant at the same time she was 18 weeks pregnant with her own child:

With my first pass of the forceps, I grasped an extremity and began to pull it down. I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg. Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick - a fluttery "thump, thump" in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement. There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a "thump, thump" in my abdomen. Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes - without me - meaning my conscious brain - even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely.

A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling - a brutally visceral response - heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life. Doing second trimester abortions did not get easier after my pregnancy; in fact, dealing with little infant parts of my born baby only made dealing with dismembered fetal parts sadder.


Harris' "sadness" has not led her to stop doing 2nd trimester abortions. In fact, she continues to justify them describing that she rationalizes her actions based on whether the child is in or out of the woman's body. This is similar to using the rationale of "wantedness" which judges the baby's value by the mother's feelings about the pregnancy. Both rationalizatons have nothing to do with the baby, but involve extraneous and irrelevant issues. Many people have been unwanted at one time or another and targeted because of where they live. Lisa Harris and others who follow her logic play a dangerous game, one that isn't new.

History is full of examples of "unwanted" peoples whose murders were rationalized by their killers: the Christians unwanted by the Armenian Turks were robbed and murdered while Christians in other nations were unmolested. The Jews unwanted in the Third Reich died in the death camps. They would have survived in America. The Tutsis were unwanted "cockroaches" to the Hutus, but those who escaped to other African nations survived.

But there is another death, worse than the death of the body: the death of the soul. The results of such evil rationalization is the hardening and brutalization of the killers. To go on living their lie they must dissociate from their own humanity and become more beasts than men (or women). Their wills are hardened. The likelihood of them turning back to God becomes remote.

Lisa Harris' rationalization is so complete that she claims acknowleging abortion as violent will be a virtue actually strengthening the "pro-choice" movement. "Honesty," she says, "[can] be the basis for a stronger movement - one that makes it easier for providers and the teams they work with to do all abortions, especially second trimester abortions." If this is so it will be because the killers have become so brutal and hard-hearted they can kill as easily as stepping on a spider. The cost of "easier" abortions is to destroy the capacity for compassion. Harris' strange sentiment is so dissociated from reality, it boggles the mind. It is like Dr. Mengele claiming his grotesque experiments would be easier if he acknowledged the Jews were equal in value to himself. But in fact, he dehumanized his subjects as did the entire Nazi machine. Jews were subhuman; so experimenting on them was no different than using laboratory mice or monkeys. There is no "golden rule" among those who murder the weak and vulnerable. 

Frankly, I don't believe Lisa Harris' testimony. Her claims remind me of another pro-abortion woman who has defended murdering children for years. In 1988 responding to an article by Harry Blackmun who feared Roe v. Wade, the decision he authored, would be overturned, columnist Anna Quindlen responded with a piece titled "On Abortion: We Can't Really Ever Go Back." In it she stated that "Millions of us have had [abortions] ourselves." Writing in the first person she seems to include herself in the number of aborted women, but it is a strange way to put it as though she wanted to admit to abortion, but in a collective way that minimized personal responsibility or left a question in the reader's mind. "Is she including herself among those millions of aborted women?".

Two weeks earlier she had penned a column about baking "guilt cookies" whenever she had to go on a business trip and leave her three children. They were well cared for, but still she "felt" guilty. But isn't that Quindlen's mind playing the same rationalization game as Lisa Harris? Quindlen can't allow herself to feel guilty about her involvement in abortion (She admits in another column helping a fellow Barnard College student procure one), so she transfers it to something innocent, i.e., going on a business trip. Dissociated from the real crime where guilt is appropriate, Quindlen can absolve herself of something obviously innocuous. She can unload her guilt while continuing to endorse murdering children. It's one of the games pro-abortion feminist play.
 
Lisa Harris is playing the same game. She admits abortion is violent and that she is "sadder" now when she kills. But she continues to justify it. Does her "sadness" make her actions less monstrous or more?

Mary Ann Kreitzer writes at Les Femmes and is a founder of the Catholic Media Coalition.