The Ohio legislature will soon hear “testimony” from it’s youngest witness ever:
A fetus has been scheduled as a legislative witness in Ohio on a unique bill that proposes outlawing abortions after the first heartbeat can be medically detected.
Faith2Action, the anti-abortion group that has targeted Ohio to pilot the measure, called the in-utero witness the youngest to ever come before the House Health Committee at nine weeks old.
[. . .]
An aide to committee Chairman Lynn Wachtmann said a pregnant woman will be brought before the committee and an ultrasound image of her uterus will be projected onto a screen. The heartbeat of the fetus will be visible in color.
Most other pro-life groups aren’t even bothering to support the bill since it would never survive a challenge in the courts. Still, you have to give Faith2Action credit for their creative attempt to bring attention to this issue.
(Via: The Atlantic Wire)
March 2nd, 2011 | 11:45 am
Excellent! This will certainly help.
March 2nd, 2011 | 12:08 pm
It’s back to the game that was played in the 1980s. The state legislatures would vote restrictions on abortion knowing that they would be dead before the ink was dry to keep the pro-life consitutents happy and not have to take any responsibility for themselves.
March 2nd, 2011 | 2:16 pm
A salamander has a beating heart; that doesn’t make it a human person.
St. Thomas Aquinas, “Doctor of the Church,” told us that Reasoning, a reasoning mind or soul, makes us human; and that does not appear until well after conception for example.
March 2nd, 2011 | 3:05 pm
“A salamander has a beating heart; that doesn’t make it a human person.”
Sure, but a human being with a beating heart is.
“St. Thomas Aquinas, “Doctor of the Church,” told us that Reasoning, a reasoning mind or soul, makes us human; and that does not appear until well after conception for example.”
As great as Aquinas is and believe me he is great, he isn’t infallible.
But, more importantly, how do you know?
March 2nd, 2011 | 4:59 pm
A salamander has a beating heart; that doesn’t make it a human person.
And yet, if you did to a salamander what abortionists do to a baby, you’d be violating cruelty laws.
The question here is – and remains – a serious one: how do we puncture the cognitive dissonance that enables dehumanization?
March 2nd, 2011 | 10:53 pm
While this may seem like a bit of a circus, it’s a whole lot better than some of the other anti-abortion tactics.
March 3rd, 2011 | 8:41 am
Nikolai, Aquinas never argued for abortion and if Jamie were honest he would acknowledge that.
March 3rd, 2011 | 8:42 am
Well, what a salamander would be doing in a woman’s womb I have a hard time imagining. Anyway, by that “Thomistic” criterion it would be OK to kill a newborn like a chicken.
Hearing that heartbeat is a surprisingly powerful thing; it gets to much more than your consciousness. I remember hearing my daughter’s the first time. And afterwards thinking how it was perfectly legal to violently stop that heartbeat. And how perfectly obscene, even blasphemous.
The stratagem seems bright and clever — almost a type of the youthfulness at the heart of the pro-life movement (I speak as an old man of 63). But I’m inclined to believe its effects are likely to more profound than one might reckon. One can hope, and pray.
March 6th, 2011 | 3:45 am
I completely disagree with the author’s declaration that this law couldn’t possibly stand a court challenge.
I think it has the potential of overturning Roe v. Wade — precisely because the Roe opinion is based on the justices’ agnosticism on the question of when life begins. They arbitrarily set the line at “viability.” They could just as arbitrarily set it at “detectability of a heartbeat.” The latter criterion has the advantage of being very concretely, empirically detectable for every individual baby — whereas viability of a particular baby at a particular gestational age is always just a guess.
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