February 21, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Following in the example of Dina Zirlott’s HuffPost essay declaring, “I Wish I’d Had A ‘Late-Term Abortion’ Instead Of Having My Daughter,” USA Today has published another op-ed purporting to frame late-term abortion not as a moral horror, but a humane answer to the most nightmarish of medical scenarios.
“I had a later abortion because I couldn't give my baby girl both life and peace,” reads the headline of the Feb. 19 piece by Kate Carson, a National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) member who lives in Boston.
“Desperate acts like an abortion in the 36th week of pregnancy are brought about only by the most desperate circumstances and are only available to those who can come up with a lot of money quickly,” she claims, detailing how her preborn daughter Laurel was diagnosed with catastrophic brain malformations in week 35, certain to have a “brief life of seizures, full-body muscle cramps, and aspirating her own bodily fluids.”
After being counseled on options including adoption, Carson says her choice was “very sad, but crystal clear: abortion,” and that its imagined “grisly” nature “surely could not compare with the suffering Laurel would have endured in her own broken body.” After a lethal injection courtesy of the notorious Warren Hern, “my baby was laid to rest in my womb, the purest mercy that I knew how to give my Laurel.”
Carson next called out President Donald Trump’s State of the Union remarks declaring on behalf of “living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and dreams with the world.” That’s not what Carson heard, though; to her, Trump “hasn't really listened to women like me or doctors like Dr. Hern” and simply “inflate[s] fear and horror until every last American thinks of unspeakable violence.”
Simply reading a description of what happens in a late-term abortion more than suffices to show the violence isn’t “inflated” in the slightest, but we can agree on one thing: more Americans should absolutely listen to Warren Hern.
Listen to him describe “crushing the skull of the fetus” (his own words) and the “sensations of dismemberment flow[ing] through the forceps like an electric current” (also his own words). Listen to favorable interviewers relay Hern’s displeased admission that real doctors “disdain” abortionists. Listen to former patients who describe him as a “very rude and paranoid doctor” who “made me feel uncomfortable and slightly scared.”
Oh, and ask and listen for why he once left part of a baby’s skull inside a womb, forcing one of his patients to get a hysterectomy.
Carson then claimed the Trump administration simply “needs the public to be angry at women like me and misinformed about what compels women to seek later abortions” when the (supposed) reality is that “Nobody loves Laurel more than I do. Her death was a gift of mercy. Mercy means different things to different loving families, and that has to be OK.”
Interesting. It “has to be OK” for some people to define “different things” as merciful, up to killing a suffering child, but those of us who don’t think killing qualifies are viewed as acting out of “hate and misunderstanding” rather than sincere disagreement. Seem legit, right?
“It is devastating to lose a child. But, unlike most bereaved parents, women like me will live out the rest of our lives as scapegoats, fuel for an agenda that seeks to strip women and families of our reproductive freedoms,” Carson complains – kneecapping the credibility of her moral indignation in the process.
Prenatal diagnoses like the one Carson describes are horrifying, and every decent person owes tremendous sympathy to parents who face them. A serious conversation about what to do in such cases would be valuable (in such a talk, the pro-life answer would be that however heart-wrenching a situation is, the ethics of when life may be taken don’t change based on whether a patient is in or out of the womb – and for the moment, at least, post-birth “mercy killing” is thankfully still a fringe position in America).
But Carson isn’t merely calling for the proposed late-term abortion ban to be amended with another limited exception. She’s using her family’s tragedy to stigmatize critical discussion of any late-term abortions (most of which are not done because of dangers to mother or child), to get people to take more seriously the same tired smears of pro-lifers – complete with the cliched “women’s rights” and “reproductive health care” euphemisms.
Articles like Kate Carson’s aren’t good-faith attempts to wrestle with moral dilemmas; they’re emotional manipulation in defense of mass killing. They’re also growing more common because pro-aborts don’t have anything else to offer…and they know it.