Jane Chastain : Politically Direct

Justice Anthony Kennedy did the unthinkable when writing the majority opinion for Gonzales v. Carhart, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision that upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban. He described this procedure with painstaking detail, exposing this barbaric practice to the harsh light of day. Furthermore, he referred to the subject targeted for destruction as an “infant,” not a “fetus.”

Horrors! Stop the presses! We have allowed medical profiteers to kill defenseless babies in this most brutal, painful way!

Upon reading about this decision, any decent, moral human being would be hanging his or her head in shame. The conscience of the nation would be seared. All would be applauding this decision. And perhaps, just perhaps, we would be ready to re-examine Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision that made abortion on demand the law of the land, in light of the more recent technological discoveries that have given us a window to the womb.

But the presses didn’t stop. Our newspapers ran stories about this decision being a victory for abortion opponents and a setback for abortion advocates. They published innocuous comments from both sides but continued the cover-up by presenting the controversy as one about women’s rights and women’s health, not about the health of the checking accounts of the nation’s late-term abortionists and the feminists who shill for them.

Thank God for the cable news networks! When confronted with the ugly truth, a few feminist leaders were forced to give us their bottom line. In so many words it is this: We are killing partially delivered babies in a most inhumane way. Nevertheless, every war has it casualties. We are fighting a war for women’s rights and, yes, we are willing to accept these causalities.

It’s enough to make any self-respecting woman sick to her stomach. Don’t get me wrong; I support women’s rights, but this one is about women’s wrongs and it makes me want to vomit.

Are radical feminists so frail that they have to step over the bodies of tiny innocent babies, dismembered in the very act of birth, to compete with men in the marketplace? Does each dead baby put them one step higher on the ladder toward the glass ceiling?

Every war has it heroes, but these women are cowards, hiding behind the rhetoric of choice, women’s health and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Yes, it’s true. ACOG has defended this inhumane procedure to protect the bottom feeders in the profession from the most feared complication of a late-term abortion: a live birth.

ACOG is a trade association, pure and simple, and this trade association it is not about to kill Santa Claus! That is why many obstetricians and gynecologists have refused to join ACOG. Dr. Joseph DeCook, a founding member of the Physicians Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth put the PBA in the proper perspective when he said, “It’s a maverick procedure devised by maverick doctors who wish to deliver a dead fetus. Such abortions could lead to infection, causing sterility.”

In 1997, the American Medical Association, a much larger trade association of physicians, sent a letter in support of the act that would ban this procedure, but the media ignored the AMA as it did one of its favorite doctors, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. Dr. Koop has stated on several occasions that this procedure is never medically necessary.

Yes, the media have helped perpetuate the myth that it sometimes is necessary to turn an unwanted child in order to deliver her in the breach position and, with only her head lodged in the birth cannel – with little hands grasping and feet kicking – puncture her skull, suck out her brains and crush her skull.

Another myth perpetuated by the media is that this procedure is done only when the fetus (medical term for baby in the womb) is badly deformed and doomed to die anyway. Not so! According to the best information available, 80 percent of these children are normal, and most are viable infants.

These truths should make us all uneasy.

If we as a nation, Democrat and Republican, can’t come together and say this is reprehensible, then we have lost our moral compass and our underbelly has become too soft to survive.

It is little wonder that so many of us are willing to accept defeat in Iraq. Excuse me, phased withdrawal. Damn the troops, damn the people who live there who will be slaughtered – make that aborted – by the terrorists.

Don’t give me any bad news. I don’t want the facts. Just pass the bonbons and hand me the remote.