web grab.jpgby JivinJ, host of the blog, JivinJehoshaphat

  • There is a silver lining to Judge Tanya Walton Pratt’s temporary injunction preventing the State of Indiana from defunding Planned Parenthood of Indiana. That is:

    … Pratt denied PP’s request to block the measure requiring doctors to tell women seeking abortions that “human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm.”

    “The inclusion of the biology-based word ‘physical’ is significant, narrowing this statement to biological characteristics,” she wrote in her ruling. “When the statement is read as a whole, it does not require a physician to address whether the embryo or fetus is a ‘human life’ in the metaphysical sense.”

  • Charmaine Yoest and Denise Burke have an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on efforts to defund Planned Parenthood.

  • Ross Douthat reviews Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men:

    The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal, misogynistic cultures. Patriarchy is certainly part of the story, but as Hvistendahl points out, the reality is more complicated — and more depressing.

    Thus far, female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less. In many communities, she writes, “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in “the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder….

    This places many Western liberals, Hvistendahl included, in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn aren’t human beings yet, and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins, Hvistendahl insists that she hasn’t written “a book about death and killing.” But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime that she’s uncovered….

    Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of Unnatural Selection, even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.

    The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.

[Image via amazon.com]

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...