5 Mar 2009
Recently, a truly horrifying story surfaced in the media. Sycloria Williams, an 18-year-old pregnant woman, went to a Miami abortion clinic to have laminaria sticks inserted into her cervix and to get a prescription for Cytotec. The next day, after having her labor induced by the laminaria sticks and the Cytotec, she went to a different clinic outside of Miami for a scheduled abortion. When the abortionist, Dr. Jean-Jacque Renelique, failed to show up at the scheduled time, Sycloria became ill and shortly thereafter gave birth to a baby girl.
According to Sycloria, “pandemonium ensued” in the abortion clinic the moment her baby was born. As Sycloria “watched in horror and shock,” a staff member of the clinic, Belkis Gonzalez, came into the room, cut the umbilical cord, “scooped up the baby” as it “writhed” and “breathed,” placed it in a red biohazard bag, and tossed it into a trash can. Later, when Dr. Renelique finally arrived, he attempted to comfort Sycloria by telling her that the “hard part was over.”
Although this horrifying crime occurred back in 2006, the medical license of the abortionist was just revoked by the Florida Board of Medicine three weeks ago. Furthermore, no criminal charges have ever been filed, despite the fact that an autopsy proved that Sycloria’s baby had air in her lungs and was trying to breath.
Compare the media attention and public outrage over the tragic death of Shanice—the name Sycloria gave to her baby—with the media attention and public outrage generated recently over the tragic death of Caylee Anthony. How much more media coverage and public outcry would Shanice’s story have generated had it occurred anywhere else in America besides an abortion clinic. If this newborn baby had been tossed into a garbage can by anyone else besides an abortion clinic worker and anywhere else besides an abortion clinic, the media would have covered the story around-the-clock and the public outcry would have been deafening.
It appears to me that in today’s America morality and ethics are suspended on abortion clinic grounds and banned from consideration in our public discourse over abortion, the most divisive political issue of our time. Why? How do we explain the desensitizing of modern-day Americans to the sanctity of human life, as is proven by the fact that 50 million abortions have been performed in our nation without so much as a collective shrug of our country’s shoulders?
To begin to understand this darkening of the American heart, we must go back to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. This infamous decision by our highest court legalized abortion in our land. In the majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmum wrote, “The word ‘person’ as used in the 14th amendment, [the amendment that forbids depriving a person of their life, liberty and property] does not include the unborn. The unborn have never been recognized in the law as persons in the whole sense.” Justice Blackmum then added, “a fetus is not a person but only potential [human] life.”
Just as the German Supreme Court in 1936 had to dehumanize Jews to justify the Holocaust, and just as the U. S. Supreme Court in 1857 had to dehumanize blacks to justify slavery, in 1973 Justice Harry Blackmum had to dehumanize the unborn to justify abortion. Ever since the black-hearted Blackmum wrote the unborn child out of the 14th amendment, abortions to end unwanted pregnancies have been callously considered mere medical procedures comparable to appendectomies to alleviate side pain. For example, the late Dr. Alan Guttmacher, a former president of Planned Parenthood, once likened an abortion to “operating on an appendix or removing a gangrenous bowel.”
In the April 22, 1990 edition of Parade Magazine, the late star of PBS’s Cosmos, Carl Sagan, called the unborn child “a kind of parasite” that “destroys tissue” and “sucks blood from capillaries.” According to famous feminist Gloria Steinham, “A woman has a right to an abortion just as she has a right to remove any parasitic growth from her body.” In view of this blatant profaning of human life, in particularly the lives of unborn children, is there any wonder that radical feminists proudly wear “I Had an Abortion” T-Shirts, while abortion clinic workers unconscionably toss newborn babies into trash cans?
I guess the dehumanizing of unborn children is our way of padding our consciences against our country’s unconscionable crime against the Innocents. How else could we live with ourselves if we failed to convince ourselves that a fetus—the Latin word for unborn baby—is not a baby, but just a blob of tissue or a “parasitic growth”? If we are ever forced to face the fact that the blood of 50 million babies is on our hands, it may prove too much for even this conscience-seared country to bear.
Don Walton
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