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(LifeSiteNews) — The left often decries systemic or “institutional” bias while justifying sweeping policy changes, like unrestricted abortion access, as a way to combat purported oppression.
But while so-called progressives use abortion to remedy women’s marginalized status, they simultaneously create a system by which the most innocent bear the ultimate burden of unjust social forces. The apparent impact of those forces was put on full display this week as photos of fetal remains from a D.C. abortion clinic circulated online.
Showing just how “privileged” the born-alive are, the Biden administration and D.C. government barely responded to the photos and shirked calls for an investigation into the babies’ deaths. After all, D.C. allows abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. So ignoring these remains is easier than overlooking the bodies of murdered adults. It’s apparently even easier than ignoring a rabid fox, whom media outlets peppered with coverage for its threat to politicians and others on Capitol Hill.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, fetal remains were found near another apparent predator — Dr. Cesare Santangelo, who has been caught on camera indicating that he would refuse to provide federally mandated, life-saving care for the babies he aborted. But instead of publicly criticizing the abortionist, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser directed her scrutiny toward the pro-life activists who uncovered the remains and their potential signs of illegal abortions.
The Biden administration also indicted one of those pro-life activists – Lauren Handy – and several others last month for allegedly hindering the so-called right to abortion at a clinic nearly two years prior. Finally, and as expected, social justice warriors in Hollywood and the media have been relatively mum about D.C. victims while progressives continue to decry the plight of “LGBTQ+” and others.
In summary, the public response to the D.C. babies has once again illustrated how institutional forces feared by progressives (in law, politics, and culture) have sanctioned the denial of preborn life.
The prevailing and callous indifference to preborn life, however, can only last so long. Pro-choice leftists may argue that it’s inappropriate to even consider preborn babies as the type of humans who could experience social injustice. But science has “literally unveiled” humanity in the womb – and in doing so, indicated preborn babies are humans who feel the weight of social burdens even more acutely than victim groups routinely cited by the left.
There are only so many ways that feminists can spin the D.C. photos, which show the brutality of abortion in a way that many likely haven’t seen. Perhaps most notable was the photo of apparently intact boy who experts estimated to be past 30 weeks, and who could have been born alive.
Also striking was a baby girl who appeared mostly intact, in the second or third trimester, and with injuries that indicated partial birth abortion (PBA) – a gruesome procedure that Congress outlawed in 2003. Rather than lamenting the loss of life, the administration has flatly denied the existence of PBAs. Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told Republican U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorne of North Carolina that partial birth abortion was a “politician-created term.”
“It is not a term that physicians use – not a term that my wife as an OB-GYN uses to address the issues of pregnancy,” he said.
Regardless, Congress provided a definition for legally punishable PBAs and medical experts have repeatedly stated that one of the baby girls experienced trauma consistent with that procedure. Her head, for example, appears to show evidence of PBA-type suction to remove her brain. It’s unclear whether she experienced any fetal abnormalities, but her estimated gestational age – 28-30 weeks – suggested she would have had a series of developed features recognizable on a newborn.
Based on the National Library of Medicine’s website, that baby’s suctioned brain matter would have been “rapidly” growing at the time of her abortion. She also would’ve been able to open or close the eyelid that was seen ajar in her photos. Her body would have had “well-formed” eyebrows and eyelashes, fully developed eyes, genitals, fingernails, toenails, air sacs in her lungs, and a detectable heartbeat.
It’s at least somewhat consistent for progressives to acknowledge the preborn’s humanity while prioritizing the “right” to kill their offspring. But, if anything, that framing reinforces their position within the template of power-based oppression often decried by pro-choice activists.
As pro-life progressives note, preborn babies experience an oppression that is “redistributed” — all the way from the legislator’s pen to the abortionists’ bone-crushing medical instruments. The preborn not only face direct discrimination for their age and location, but also shoulder the burden of whatever cumulative pressures prompt a woman to seek an end to her own child’s life.
Of course, those pressures don’t excuse abortion. My point is that rather than viewing the abortion clinic as a terminus for injustice, progressives might be wiser to see it as a staging ground for oppression’s most dehumanizing act.
Many progressive theories surrounding “microaggressions” and other phenomena are difficult to prove. It’s unclear, for example, how social scientists would accurately track the cumulative impact of “covert” or “implicit” bias. But if those forces do, in fact, keep minorities in poverty or produce skewed incarceration rates, why wouldn’t they underlie the dismemberments that take place at Planned Parenthood?
Properly extended, progressives’ narrative would depict the abortion clinic as a place where verbal “violence” becomes actual violence, industrial capitalism discards the inefficient, and women endure physical and emotional pain to placate the patriarchy. Despite what feminists may argue, abortion is not a tool for liberating women or helping them dismantle paternalistic power structures. Instead, it reinforces one of the oldest and simplest modalities of hierarchy; that is, the strong dominating the weak.
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