SOGC worried Trig Palin will prevent abortions

First read this, and note the response of the vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080909.wxldown09/BNStory/lifeFamily/home

Then read this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090902519.html?hpid=opinionsbox1#

There is something wrong with an obstetrician who wishes more parents would abort babies they might actually want, who is lamenting a role model that belies the scare tactics many geneticists use when counselling the parents of unborn babies with Down Syndrome. And there is something wrong with the SOGC for allowing a V-P to say this in public.

Let me say this: I have no desire to ever be pregnant again because of how ill I get, but if God told me tomorrow He was giving me the blessing of a child with Down Syndrome, I'd sign up for my PICC line the next morning. Different and challenged is NOT wrong or evil or unwanted or unneeded. I think the world needs people with Down Syndrome in it. They are teachers.

Full disclosure: I won a reporting award from the SOGC in 2004.

Abortion as art

Warning to HGers: please do not read if sensitive to discussion of abortion. I'm about to lambaste someone.

My girlfriend Megan recently blogged about a woman at Yale who claimed to self-induce abortions as an art project.

This is what I wrote in her comments box.

As someone who volunteers with pregnant women whose pregnancies are life-threatening, many of whom contemplate aborting much-wanted babies and some of whom do abort against their true wills in order to stay alive, this makes me want to vomit.

I'm going to be blunt: I know what an abortion looks like, a real one at a Morgentaler clinic. It is NOT art. If you're pro-choice, it's a nasty surgical procedure. If you're pro-life, it's homicide (note I use the word "homicide," which means the killing of another human being, and not "murder", which has a different legal definition.)

If you haven't guessed, I consider abortion homicide. Full disclosure: For a full week (week 18 of gestation, to be exact) I considered killing my youngest child in the womb due to a terrifying and life-threatening pregnancy disease called hyperemesis gravidarum (for more info check out www.helpher.org). I'm holding that sleeping child, alive and well and 20 months old, in my arms right now as I type this.

I cannot stress how deeply I feel abortion is a subject where brutal honesty is necessary, no matter what you believe about it. And this kind of artsy-fartsy nonsense is nothing but pretense and lies.

An embryo or fetus is not menstrual blood and semen, but a living human organism with a system that is dependent yet distinct from its mother. Any scientist will tell you human life begins at conception, duh. So we need to cut the bullshit about this and be honest. We need to say: when is it OK to kill a defenceless human being? Is it ever OK?

My eventual decision was the disease which threatened my life may take both of us, but it wasn't taking just my daughter. It was the hardest decision of my life, choosing death or life together. I never got to a place where I had to reconsider; I found a treatment regimen that relieved most of the disease's effects. I won't judge a woman who chose to abort in order to live. I often spend my spare time mourning with her over the Internet.

But people like this woman, who has taken that week I spent on my bathroom floor wishing my daughter dead and made it into some kind of game, some school art project to cause scandal and attention? Yeah, I'm going to judge her. What a f*cking bitch.

*With apologies to those with sensitive ears, and to my Lord for my judgemental attitude. But I have to be honest, Lord, and I am very angry at this woman and her flippant nonsense. Trying to pray for her and failing utterly.*