By Dave Andrusko

Prince William, Duchess Kate, and their first baby
Earlier today we posted a fine story by Alissa Tabirian written for CNSNews.com (MSNBC: Royal Baby? Parents’ ‘Feelings’ Say When Life Begins, ‘Not Science’). There were a few other considerations raised by the topic of Tabirian’s story—another tiresome, logic-free rant by MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry that I’d like to address at the end of the day.
To be fair, it would asking too much of Harris-Perry to resist the temptation to attempt to colonize the birth of the first baby born to Prince William and Duchess Kate. Not every birth is a “fairy tale,” she scolded/hectored/lectured her audience, and she was off to the races.
So naturally—inescapable—she offers as a contrast examples of the toughest scenarios to prove to us “that an unwanted pregnancy can be biologically the same as a wanted one” but “the experience can be entirely different.”
Then in one of those famous Harris-Perry head-scratching leaps that you don’t see coming, she transitions to ask the rhetorical question, “When does life begin?” She immediately answers her own question:
“I submit the answer depends an awful lot on the feeling of the parents, a powerful feeling, but not science. The problem is that many of our policymakers want to be [making] sweeping laws on these feelings.”
Huh? Science tells us nothing about when life begins? It’s all “feelings,” so your feelings, my feelings, policymakers’ feelings, Harris-Perry’s feelings, a gerbil’s feelings all carry equal weight and all are equally irrelevant to public policy?
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Of course, she’s talking about Texas’s HB 2 and there is a question at issue was an altogether different one. It was a question science has answered but which was run over by a freight train of emotion and attempts to intimidate: the simple fact the unborn child can feel pain by no later than 20 weeks.
Harris-Perry would rather ignore the question on the table by implying it’s all about something else (when life begins) and then thoroughly muck up the answer.
I would, too, if the real question is whether I can live with myself if I am so heartless that I would allow a pain-capable unborn child to be torn to smithereens.
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