I was pleased to see both the National Right to Life Committee and Steve Ertelt at LifeNews.com cover the New York Times October 10 photo essay of aborted babies.
nyt headline.jpgI wondered if they would acknowledge the piece since both, the last I knew, opposed the use of graphic photos of aborted babies in pro-life advocacy [clarification: in public protests].
Hopefully as time goes on, maybe even thanks to the NYT piece, they will see their value. One less argument to have. It would be great if LifeNews.com would begin covering activist protests.
I’ve searched a couple times the last few days for pro-abort thoughts on the NYT piece, but haven’t found anything. Did anyone else?
Dave Andrusko of NRLC wrote quite positively about the photo exposé, even linking to the photos – twice – and describing them. Andrusko also had good insights on the comments to the article….

The history of [Monica Miller’s] involvement, and her evolving views on how best these photos might be used, can be found on the Times’s web page. Cave’s fascinating interview with the woman whose photographs of aborted babies have appeared all over the country “since the mid-1990s,” and the four photos of aborted babies can be found at http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/behind-19/?scp=2&sq=damien%20cave&st=cse.
What is amazing for pro-lifers, of course, is that the topic was discussed at all and, even more breath-taking, that the Times would have the gumption to show photos of aborted babies on its website.
We see a mid-1980s photo described by Mrs. Migliorino Miller as “Unborn baby, 5 months’ gestation, aborted with saline abortion technique”; “Foot–broken at the ankle,” a 14-16 week-old baby killed by suction abortion in 2008; “Hand of baby aborted 16 weeks gestation by suction method” in 2009; and “The feet of unborn baby 6 months, prostaglandin abortion method” from the mid 1980s.
Almost as riveting was the heated give-and-take in the comment section which followed. You expected what you read in the first few (which were indicative of many), people whose hatred for pro-lifers is almost clinical. They need to distance themselves from the horror of what they saw, assuming they had the courage to look, and, I suspect, from their own involvement, at least in some cases.
So, they string together the usuals – that pro-lifers only care about “fetuses”; we hate women; what about “unwanted children?”; most abortions are done in the first trimester when the unborn have “flippers” [!]; we couldn’t care less about babies after they are born; and, in general, mind your own business.
But to find in the NYT the eloquence – and the number – of the pro-life responses was startling.
They debunked each of these threadbare pro-abortion rationalizations. One of my favorites is, “An 8 week old fetus does not have flippers or a tail. It looks like a tiny human.”
Perhaps most revealing is that the pro-life respondents refused to be pigeonholed. As one writer put it, “What does it matter liberal or conservative, republican or democrat, religious or secular?
These are human beings and what the abortionists do to these babies would not be allowed to happen to dogs.”
Which helped put the e-mail from the self-described “classic, left-clinging liberal in all ways but the abortion issue” in context. Her eyes had been opened when, many years ago, she took a friend to a clinic to have an abortion.
“Although these photos are horrific they do speak a truth, a truth that so many pro-choice types refuse to admit,” she wrote.
And then there was that most telling voice, the voice of sad experience. “I was once fooled into killing my child,” wrote one woman. “It ate my heart out from within until I found help and healing. Now a part of the pro-life movement, and still a single woman, I have had the great privileged of adopting 2 children whom the pro-abortion movement would have preferred to see dead.”
Finally there was the woman who wrote about her involvement many years ago in the pro-abortion movement which was, I gather, a reflection of her liberal views. “I haven’t changed in my political principles and values, but there has certainly been one change: I am now against abortion, and now – for the first time – speaking out against the violence of dismembering our children.”
She concluded with this remarkable statement: “Do not tell me that my own two babies expelled from my womb are something subhuman or sub-personal. It is I who failed the test of being ‘human’ or ‘personal’ when I aborted them…”
Please take a few minutes to visit http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/behind-19/?scp=2&sq=damien%20cave&st=cse. I would also encourage you to write the Times to thank the paper for its courage.

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