Wednesday, February 04, 2009


Surgeon Operates on Clump of Tissue
In this surgical procedure, the surgeon has removed the uterus, drained the amniotic fluid, and repaired the spina bifida lesion of a 21 week old fetus... Or baby, as we say in Greentown.

In this photograph the anesthetized baby's hand has flopped out of the uterus, and the surgeon is placing it back.

The "urban legend" surrounding this photo claims that the baby reached out and grabbed the surgeon's finger... Which makes a more dramatic story.

But I think the truth is pretty dramatic in itself.
....

12 comments:

janice said...

I don't know how people can look at this photo and still believe it's nothing more than a "clump of cells"...

Malott said...

Janice,

I figure, since this latest election, abortion will always be legal. But pictures and stories like this surely can change hearts.

Tsofah said...

Malott:

I hope you are right.

Looking at this picture, I wonder if a person who has had a premie, or a relative who has had a premie, tends to have a bit different viewpoint of abortion.

I mean, when you are hoping and praying that your child who was born weighing 1 lb or less will be able to survive, it would be hard.

Yet, abortions of babies the same age and weight are done everyday, and it is then they are thought of a "just tissue".

Sad.

Malott said...

Tsofah,

America's treatment of the unborn is much like the slavery issue in early America. There were slaves, and there were free blacks.

Like slavery, everyone senses and knows that abortion is wrong. Even liberals say they want there to be fewer abortions.

Why? If it isn't wrong... Why?

Grammy said...

I wonder how many women who have born children under conditions of extreme hardship would say they regretted it. I doubt you'd find many. Maternal instinct is probably the strongest passion on the face of the earth, even in the face of hardship. I can't imagine any greater sign of cultural corruption than mothers being convinceable (is that a word??) that abortion is an option. This is a legacy of feminism, the most anti-female movement of the 20th century.

Christina said...

What amazes and completely baffles me are the women that I have personally spoken with, who after struggling for years with infertility, finally get pregnant and KNOW from the moment that pregnancy is known (and in these cases, usually very, very early on) that they are carrying a baby...their child. If one of these women loses that baby (as also often happens), it is a terrible, life-altering tragedy. This will often occur very early on in the pregnancy (long before viability).

Then I have heard these very same women staunchly defend the right of women to "choose" to abort their babies at any stage.

I cannot reconcile how it can be a precious child to these women and a lifeless lump of tissue when it's someone else's pregnancy.

It's like their brains are turned off.

Grammy said...

Good point, Christina. How self-centered is that???? You're precious child in the womb, if I so choose.

Christina said...

Grammy,

I think that "choice" is a good word for this in some ways, but not in the way the pro-choice feminist crowd thinks.

Basically women do have a choice...keep the baby or kill it? Choose to be responsible or choose the easy way out? Choose to see the baby as a human being or as an inanimate bunch of tissue? Choose a lifetime of love along with the trials or convenience?

It's a choice we all have to make.

SkyePuppy said...

I always go back to the turtles. But first, I'll get the humor out of the way.

Years ago (before ultrasound was common) there was some discussion in Dear Abby about what you should say to those endless numbers of people who ask pregnant ladies, "Do you know what it's going to be?" One reader wrote in that she would tell people, "Well, at first we thought it might be a puppy, but now we're pretty sure it's going to be human." Love it!

OK. Now the turtles.

Turtles are endangered. Their eggs are protected. Why? Because everyone knows there are minute little turtles forming inside the eggshells, and if the eggs are destroyed, the baby turtle will die. And that's bad.

But the same people who will scream for the execution (OK, I'm exaggerating on that part) of turtle egg destroyers will scream for the right to destroy some"thing" even more precious than a turtle, and they'll claim not to know what's really going on inside the mother, when they know good and well what's going on inside the turtle egg.

It's not just that their brains are turned off. It's that they ran over in a hurry to turn off their own brains when they thought an image of a baby might be coming on.

Christina said...

Excellent point and argument Skyepuppy.

And I could not agree more with the determination to shut off the brain. If they don't do it fast, they might start thinking and that will lead to some scary thoughts they'd rather not deal with. Why think, when you can "feel"?

Jacob said...

Skye, when humans become an endangered species, then that argument might make some sense.

Grammy said...

Interesting thought, Jacob. Are you suggesting that you might not support abortion rights if humans were an endangered species? It seems that any way you look at it, in the pro-choice world, a fetus doesn't have an objective status as either a human being or a tissue blob. It's human if you want it's a tissue blob if you don't.