The Painful Truth
An Ugly Dose of Reality
Be careful how you judge these people. We may not be
all that much better ourselves. Credit: Bundesarchiv.
Disclaimer: The opinions that follow are solely my own and in no way reflect any official position of FMG Publications. I am frankly amazed that they let me publish it.
In 1986, Robert Jay Lifton published a book called “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.” It is an amazing read that I would not recommend to anyone I truly cared about. That book will put images in your mind that are difficult to free yourself from.
During World War II, the Germans raised institutional murder to an absolute art form. They threw the resources of a thoroughly modern nation-state into the effort, and it showed. The total death toll was probably somewhere around 17 million. However, murder on such an astronomical scale wasn’t easy. There was a steep learning curve.
Killing a couple of hundred people is pretty straightforward. 17 million is another thing entirely. Figuring out the most efficient way to snuff folks by the literal millions required intentionality, planning and research. Josef Mengele and Company invested a great deal of effort in figuring out how to kill people quickly and efficiently.
They tried lots of stuff, some of it fairly bizarre. It’s all in the book. However, early on, one of their techniques was to take the victim and force them to their knees. An assistant twisted both arms behind the back, one across the top and the other across the bottom. The wrists were then manually held together with the knees pinned to the floor. In this state, the executioner then injected concentrated sodium chloride directly into the heart using a long cardiac needle and a syringe.
This particular technique worked like a champ. Death was quite expeditious. The problem was that doing this for a while began to take a toll on both the dude with the syringe and the other dude pinning the flailing limbs. The Nazis subsequently moved on to more palatable stuff like gas chambers and crematoria. Now, hold that thought.
Mass murder isn’t really so hard. It’s just a question of how you package it.
Numbers Tell a Story
A Pew Research Center survey conducted a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade showed that 62% of U.S. adults believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. 36% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Guttmacher reported that there were 930,160 known abortions performed in the U.S. in 2020. There were countless others that resulted from freely available oral medications. Those are innately untraceable.
Eighteen states allow abortions after the generally accepted age of viability, which is 24 weeks. According to Wikipedia, nine states and Washington, DC have no gestational limits at all. Those states are Alaska, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, New Jersey, Maryland, and Vermont. Per the law, a physician can abort a child right up until he or she is born. Ever wonder what that actually entails?
The Devil is in the Details
Abortions performed after the age of viability most often involve a progressive dilation of the cervix followed by manual removal of the fetus. This most commonly involves tearing the baby into pieces and removing it piecemeal. The dead child is then reassembled outside the mother to ensure everything is accounted for. Failure to remove everything will invariably result in a fairly ghastly infection.
Sometimes, that can get spectacularly untidy. You can read about an experience I personally had with the procedure in my previous article, “What’s in the Sack?” Seeing that is what shaped my own views on the subject.
The rub is that sometimes the kid doesn’t come to pieces as he or she should. Under those circumstances, the abortion provider runs the very real risk of yanking a viable child out into the world. Nobody wants that.
To ensure that you don’t have to suddenly fret with an unwanted screaming baby, the abortionist typically, under ultrasound guidance, will insert a needle into the baby’s heart or amniotic sac and inject it with either digoxin or potassium chloride. This injection intentionally stops the heart so as to eliminate the possibility of an unintended live birth. Sound familiar?
Dark Spaces
The abortion issue in America will be a pivotal force in the upcoming presidential election. It will quite likely determine the outcome. It is easy to pontificate about rights and autonomy when the procedure is clean, sanitary and abstract. The pro-choice lobby has a simply magnificent PR machine. So much so that few people appreciate the practical details. No kidding, I’ve asked.
Appreciate my perspective. I have looked into the eyes of terribly young women who were facing the prospect of unexpected and unwanted pregnancy. I see both sides. I really do. It is simply that we are going down a terribly dark path here.
Nothing about this is easy, tidy or unambiguous — not physically and not morally. In certain cases, it also has some pretty horrifying origins. I’m not preaching here, just relating facts.
Ruminations
Regardless of the particulars or circumstances, each of those nearly one million abortions is a potential little kid who will never learn to walk, play on a playground, go to pre-school or make their momma macaroni art. They will also never grow up to pay taxes, build stuff or become contributing members of society. It turns out that, independent of the innate rightness or wrongness of injecting little baby’s hearts with digoxin or potassium chloride, we actually need those people. The Western world is experiencing a soon-to-be catastrophic baby shortage, and we’re still killing them off to the tune of 930,160 a year.
As a nation, we are morally responsible for our policies. The world we live in today is unrecognizable from the one that produced me back in 1966. Personally, I think leaving this to the individual states lets us all have a voice in the outcome. Regardless, vote carefully, my friends. There’s a lot riding on it.
