In my 200+ posts since I started blogging I’ve never dedicated a post to the topic of abortion for a number of reasons. The main one is probably that people’s opinions are mostly set and so much has been written by both sides that I’ve never seen any angle where I could make any kind of meaningful contribution to the conversation. occasionally I’ll mention the issue as a sidebar to another story, such as the dishonest language that the Radical Left has to use to make their policies seem more palatable to the general public.
The content of the recently exposed Planned Parenthood videos has been just as interesting as the mainstream media’s attempts to ignore them, and there is a different angle that I want to look at. As you’ve no doubt guessed from the title of this post I’m wondering why the crowd against animal cruelty isn’t weighing in here? I took a look at PETA’s web site to see if they had anything to say. Here are some blurbs from their web sites, emphasis mine. First, in PETA’s mission statement we learn that
PETA focuses its attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: on factory farms, in the clothing trade, in laboratories, and in the entertainment industry. We also work on a variety of other issues, including the cruel killing of beavers, birds, and other “pests” as well as cruelty to domesticated animals.
To drill a bit further into their views as to whether or not animal experimentation saves human lives:
More lives could be saved and suffering stopped by educating people on the importance of avoiding fat and cholesterol, the dangers of smoking, reducing alcohol and other drug consumption, exercising regularly, and cleaning up the environment than by all the animal tests in the world.
And, as George Bernard Shaw once said, “You do not settle whether an experiment is justified or not by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments, but between barbarous and civilized behavior.” There are some medical problems that can probably only be cured by testing on unwilling people, but we don’t do it because we recognize that it would be wrong. We need to extend this same concern to other living, feeling beings, regardless of what species they may be.
As for checking their site for any mention of Planned Parenthood, listed is this curious story from 2012:
Susan G. Komen for the Cure is coming under fire today for cutting off hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to Planned Parenthood that were used to provide underprivileged women with breast cancer screenings. We’ve never been big fans of Komen because it funds cruel animal tests, so we are sending Planned Parenthood a list of cruelty-free charities to look into working with.
In a 2003 piece for The New Yorker called The Extremist, Michael Specter wrote about PETA’s founder and president, Ingrid Newkirk. Here is what she had to say on killing animals:
When it comes to feelings like hunger, pain, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.The day will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals the way they now look upon the murder of men
For the sake of the crowd that calls itself pro-science, let’s look at this in strictly clinical terms. When does a fetus start to feel pain? The answer isn’t as clear cut as I thought it would be. There is a lot of difference of opinion and honestly, the answer seems partially dependent on the bias of who you’re asking. The fairest source I could find offered a few opinions varying between 18 – 29 weeks. If you’re wondering what fetal development takes place throughout the pregnancy, here is a good week by week breakdown of what development is happening by week.
So here is my question to the animal rights activists: Don’t homo sapiens count as animals? If you are motivated by your desire to not see a mammal suffer, shouldn’t you be at least a little bit curious as to the procedures being done to harvest organs from an abortion? Assuming you are pro-abortion, wouldn’t you want to see the killing done in the most humane way possible, regardless of value to any tissue or organs that may be recovered for research? Or could the notion of potentially profiting from any organ harvesting potentially cloud the motives of the doctor performing the abortion and lead to unnecessary suffering?
These aren’t comfortable questions for the pro-choice crowd. And not that you’re wondering, but my personal views on abortion are best described as “Squishy pro-abortion”. At some point I might elaborate more in a future post, but for now suffice to say that I don’t approve of Planned Parenthood’s procedures that have been exposed in these videos. The reason for my clinical view is that I want to phrase the questions in terms that the pro-choice crowd can better relate to.
And in fairness to the PETA, there is only a finite amount of funding to go around, and they can’t be expected to take action on every issue that could be potentially be pulled under their umbrella. When her interviewer tried to mess with Newkirk by asking about deaths in Middle East conflicts, she quipped in Specter’s piece that “We are named People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, There are plenty of other groups that worry about the humans” (And in full context that quote is not as harsh as it appears here)
That said, animal lovers, while I’m not asking you to take a firm stand on this particular issue it would be interesting to hear what your opinions may be.
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Refuse to be lectured about science by people who think harvested livers come from a pile of goo.
— Razor (@hale_razor) July 30, 2015
https://twitter.com/CounterMoonbat/status/626584961961869312
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Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
