If a Heart Beats in the Woods…

“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” -Mother Teresa

Upon new Texas legislation requiring that women must undergo sonograms of their unborn babies before having abortions, a group headed by pro-abortion blogger Denise Paolucci has taken upon itself to raise money to provide free iPods to abortion clinics – namely Planned Parenthood – so that mothers can block out the sounds of their babies’ heartbeats.

Set aside the obvious immaturity of this childish tactic (I’m not listening, na na na na boo boo!), and it raises an interesting conundrum for the pro-abort crowd.

If the sonogram of an unborn fetus displays quite clearly a miniature human and transmits a heartbeat for the doctor and mother to hear (of course it does, that’s what sonograms are for), the argument of said fetus being nothing but a blob of tissue is easily and solidly rebuked.

Traditionally, pro-aborts dismiss the moral depravity of their argument on the grounds that what’s being terminated isn’t a real baby, but a messy compilation of organs.  But with their recent iPod drive and subsequent admittance that these unborn blobs do in fact have a heartbeat and human form, the “it’s not really a person” house of cards comes crashing down.

This is where we see the true colors of the liberal pro-abortion warriors: they are willing (not just neutrally, but fervently and passionately) to fight – harder than on any other singular issue, by the way – for the encouraged right of a woman to kill something they must now admit is a human being.

Along the same demented ideological lines as Ms. Paolucci is 72 year-old Susan Heath who, in a recent New York Times op-ed, told her abortion tale, reminiscing on the good old days of “No judgment, no showing me pictures of fetuses, no trying to make me feel guilty.” Yes, because God forbid someone be discouraged from ending the life they conceived.

Heath’s story is read with a wince and a cringe by those with an even slightly elevated moral conscience, but what’s most egregious is the logical conclusion that she, like the iPod crusaders, must necessarily make as a result of her stance.

She states quite emphatically (with each meriting its own one-line paragraph, mind you),

“I didn’t want this child.”

“I’m pregnant, but not trapped.”

“I didn’t want this child.”

Notice her language? I didn’t want this child. Not a blob of tissue, or some soulless embryo, but a child.

One with fingers, toes, and a heartbeat.

Heath complains that she already had four sons, and simply didn’t want to deal with the burden of a fifth child, even if it was the girl she and her husband had hoped for. Well! At least she isn’t sexist!

And this is where the liberals’ logic (ha!) experiences a cataclysmic breakdown. Either the lump inside a mother’s womb is a lifeless clump of tissue, or it’s a human being.  Pro-aborts have already acknowledged – through Paolucci’s “Turn up Lady Gaga so we can’t hear the heartbeat” and Heath’s “I shouldn’t have to bear an unwanted child” – that that pesky inconvenience inside a mother’s uterus is a living being.  Their action and advocacy of abortion, then, entails a supremely evil and vile connotation. If terminating a pregnancy means ending the now-admitted life of the fetus, that’s murder. No two ways about it.

More consistent are the Austrian “ethicists” who recently came out in support of after-birth abortions (when President Obama was a Senator he supported this very “procedure”) because birthed babies aren’t people either (you read that correctly).  This repugnant line of thinking is absurd, of course, but it is more logically consistent.  If unborn babies can be killed, so can post-birth babies, toddlers, the elderly, the infirm, the disabled, basically anyone who bodes an inconvenience to anyone else.

Liberals contend this notion is crazy, that of convenience killing, but it’s precisely what they’re doing.

The singularly plausible justification for abortion is that a baby is not really a baby until it is fully born. By acknowledging pre-birth heartbeats (we’ve had sonograms for awhile now, what’s taking these people so long to come around?) and confirming the “child” language, even liberals must now admit that argument holds less water than a spaghetti strainer.

Pro-aborts attempt to defend their stance, but must accept their own contradictions. They can pretend otherwise, but the logic remains that their ardent prepotency of abortion equates to one thing and one thing alone: murder of an innocent life.