By Dave Andrusko
I meant to address this first thing today but there was so much going on–including pro-life President Donald Trump’s announcement that he is naming his Supreme Court nominee next week–I put it off until the end of the day.
In the meantime there have been several fine pro-life rebuttals of Moira Weigel’s “How Ultrasound Became Political,” originally titled “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person.”
It is so stupendously stupid that I would leave it at that, except that the closer we get to Friday’s annual March for Life, the greater the likelihood we will be inundated with a flood of similar wacky irrationality.
As Rachel Stoltzfoos noted, the original subhead was also outlandishly inaccurate. The changes came, she writes, “after making a series of major edits to the story.”
The initial headline read, “How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea That a Fetus Is a Person,” and the subhead read, “The technology has been used to create an imaginary ‘heartbeat’ and sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus.”
The headline later Tuesday was changed to read, “How Ultrasound Became Political” and the claim about fake heartbeats was removed from the subhead, which was changed to read, “The technology has been used to create sped-up videos that falsely depict a response to stimulus.
At the very end of the spiffied up post, we now read, “This article originally stated that there is ‘no heart to speak of’ in a six-week-old fetus. By that point in a pregnancy, a heart has already begun to form. We regret the error.”
Even in a post as long as Weigel’s (some 2,600 words), it’s amazing she has room to pack in so many errors and non sequiturs.
Weigel is ticked that ultrasounds have such an impact on the abortion debate, so she has to turn them into an instrument of the Patriarchy that is so painfully sophomoric, it makes your skin crawl.
“The origins of fetal ultrasound lie in stealth warfare,” she intones, before chasing down a rabbit trail that begins in the 1880s and includes (I kid you not) the sinking of the Titanic. “Before ultrasound, medical care received by pregnant women had depended on their testimony, or how they described their own sensations.”
The Federalist’s Sean Davis responded perfectly:
And before modern medicine existed, patients depended on leeches to rid their bodies of toxins and holes drilled through their heads to allow the evil spirits making them ill to escape. Medical technology is great and all, but can you believe doctors are using it to take care of unborn babies, too? How gauche. [1]
What is the mega-point? To make the case that ultrasounds do not reduce the number of abortions and legislation that requires that women even have the opportunity to look at who it is they are about to dispatch is to “add insult to inconvenience.” After all her ranting and raving, Weigel tells us (and herself), “Yet it remains unclear what the popular enthusiasm for fetal images actually means.”
Really? Davis again is spot on in his analysis:
Is it really unclear? The popular enthusiasm for pictures of unborn babies is popular enthusiasm for the eventual entry into the world of those babies and the unlimited potential they represent. How jaded and bitter a person do you have to be to feign shock at people who express joy over the creation of human life?
Like most treatises from abortion activists about how babies aren’t real people, Weigel’s comes across more as a sad attempt to convince herself than a credible attempt to convince her readers. No amount of euphemisms can obscure the truth that unborn babies are alive, that their hearts beat just as ours do, and that the abortion industry is dead set on killing as many of them as possible
[1] What really sets Weigel off is that ultrasounds are making their way into popular culture: “Today, the kinds of photographs that stunned the readers of Life in 1966 have become commonplace. Every rom-com involving an unplanned pregnancy—from Knocked Up and Juno to Bridget Jones’s Baby—seems to include an obligatory scene in which the reluctant mother is shown an ultrasound and decides to keep her child. Celebrity ultrasounds have become their own subgenre of tabloid ‘baby bump’ stories