Royal Babies, Abortion, and Birth Defects: Why Are We So Confused?

 

My friend Denny Burk asked an incredibly insightful question: Why don’t we call it the royal fetus?  The remark, of course, was in reference to Prince William and his lovely bride Kate Middleton, who are—as we used to say—“with child.”  They are expecting. But what are they expecting?

 

Well, they are not expecting a fetus. They are not expecting a pony, a kitten, an alligator, or a gorilla.  They aren’t expecting a collective mass of biological matter.  They are expecting a baby, and everyone knows it. No one wonders about their fetus.  Folks wonder about the child. They wonder about a prince or a princess, but not a fetus.  Denny supposes the only difference between the baby developing in the womb of the Duchess of Cambridge and a baby abiding in the womb of a mother seeking an abortion is that one baby is wanted, and the other is not:

 

What is the difference between this “royal baby” and the unborn child in the womb of a mother in the waiting room of an abortion clinic? There’s no intrinsic difference in terms of their humanity. The only difference is that one is wanted and the other is not. Thus, the one gets the status of “baby” and the other is euphemized as a fetus, blastocyst, or blob of cells.

 

Denny is so helpful in this observation. He helps us to see again that there is an impalpable hypocrisy in our social psyche when it comes to abortion.  We all know it’s a baby, but we allow euphemisms like “fetus” to persist so we don’t have to admit the obvious (to ourselves).  By and large, Americans still are not at ease with abortions. Thus, we live in a contradictory world of human hypocrisy.

 

We say that women should have access to a “full range of reproductive services,” but we also say abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare.”  Just to be clear, abortions are never safe for the baby. But still we say things like this to mask the “yuck” factor of facing what abortion really is.

 

If you were to imbibe tonight in your favorite bottle of Belgian ale, you would be subjected to the government’s warning label, cautioning pregnant women to think twice before partaking of a potentially toxic cocktail. Alcohol may cause birth defects—meaning, alcohol affects your baby. It’s probably best not to drink this product while your baby is developing in your womb.  The glaring hypocrisy of such a warning is this: The same women who are warned not to drink this beer because it could damage their developing child are also told by the same laws that it is fine to dismember the child and remove it altogether through abortion. Why care about a baby’s defect if we’re not supposed to worry about its death by abortion?

 

O, that God would finally rid us of this demonic curse we are under that diminishes the value of human beings created in His image!  We are hypocrites. We protect the eaglet so it develops in its nest, and we protect babies from mothers who drink beer, but we will not protect babies from abortions. How twisted and confused we have become!

 

Related articles

• Questions for pro-choice candidates (geneveith.com)
• Woman sentenced to life after fetus abduction (itv.com)