Astonishing new levels of abortion advocacy cluelessness

When Obama Voted "No"

It's like picking on Hillary for her tales of dodging sniper fire, going after Dana Goldstein's "misspeaks". I'll give it a go purely for entertainment's sake, since it's not like she or any of her acolytes are about to stop misspeaking any time soon.

She's defending Obama for voting no on the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Just one single paragraph provides abundant fodder:

BAIPA targets the abortion procedure known as dilation and extraction, which anti-choicers have so successfully re-branded as "partial birth abortion." Dilation and extraction accounts for less than one-fifth of one percent of all American abortions, and is used most often to end wanted pregnancies in which expectant parents learn their baby will not be viable outside of the womb. During the operation, the fetus' skull is capsized inside of the woman, after which labor is induced and she delivers the fetus.

1. "BAIPA targets the abortion procedure known as dilation and extraction, which anti-choicers have so successfully re-branded as 'partial birth abortion.'" No, not really, since removing the baby's brain pretty much renders him or her incapable of being born alive. Now, should a baby manage to be born alive, then yes, BAIPA would apply, but only because he or she happened to survive. Repeat: BAIPA would only kick in if the baby managed to come out alive before the abortionist managed to stab him or her in the skull with a scissors and suck out the brain.

2a. "Dilation and extraction accounts for less than one-fifth of one percent of all American abortions, and is used most often to end wanted pregnancies in which expectant parents learn their baby will not be viable outside of the womb." And Jeffrey Dahmer killed less than one-fifth of one percent of all American homosexuals. I guess that means he wasn't a problem to be addressed, by Ms. Goldstein's reckoning.

2b. "Dilation and extraction accounts for less than one-fifth of one percent of all American abortions, and is used most often to end wanted pregnancies in which expectant parents learn their baby will not be viable outside of the womb." Not true. Ron Fitzsimmons admitted that he "lied through [his] teeth" when he passed this claim along. Most of them are performed for the same reasons any abortions are performed -- for social reasons. Others are performed for Down Syndrome or other non-lethal conditions that cause parents to judge the baby's life not worth living. (So much for diversity.)

3a. "During the operation, the fetus' skull is capsized inside of the woman, after which labor is induced and she delivers the fetus." Um, Ms. G., to capsize is to cause a vessel to flip over in the water. The word you were looking for it "collapse". If you can't even get your vocabulary right, I have little faith in your ability to get much else correct. Rightly so, as we've already seen.

3b. "During the operation, the fetus' skull is capsized inside of the woman, after which labor is induced and she delivers the fetus." PBA or D&X is not an induction abortion. Those are performed by our curious Georges, George Tiller and George Pendergraft. They inject digoxin into the baby's heart to kill him (thus ensuring that the BAIPA doesn't apply), then they start dilating the mother's cervix. In a PBA or D&X, the cervix is dilated, and the baby is pulled out feet-first until only the head remains undelivered. Then the abortionist sticks him or her in the base of the skull with a blunt, curved Mentzenbaum scissors to make a hole into which he then sticks a straw and sucks out the baby's brain with a suction machine. There is no labor induced.

On the state Senate floor on April 4, 2002, he explained, "This issue ultimately is about abortion and not live births. Because if there are children being born alive, I, at least, have confidence that a doctor who is in that room is going to make sure that they're looked after."

Anybody who believes that also believes in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. William Baxter Waddill (pictured) strangled a live-born baby in front of multiple witnesses. Raymond Showery attempted smothering a live born baby, to no avail, so he tied her up in a plastic bag and left her to suffocate. And these are just the guys who got caught.

Of course, the idea that otherwise viable babies are regularly "born alive" during abortions is an invention of the anti-choice movement.

First of all, nobody said it happened "regularly". We're just asserting that it does happen. And we weren't the ones to say so. Actually, it was Willard Cates, rabidly pro-abortion scion of the Centers for Disease Control, who said that around 500 such infants were reported as being born alive annually in the United States. And Cates said that surely there were many more that went unreported, since reporting these birth was "like turning yourself in to the IRS for an audit". (Liz Jeffries and Rick Edmonds, "Abortion, The Dreaded Complication," The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2, 1981, 4 page insert.)

Ninety percent of abortions are performed within the first 16 weeks of pregnancy through a procedure called aspiration, in which a surgical vacuum is used to empty out a woman's uterus. The second most common abortion procedure is dilation and evacuation, which takes place in rare cases after 16 weeks of pregnancy, often when a woman's health or life is at risk. Under that procedure, the aspiration process is sometimes preceded by an injection into the abdomen that ensures fetal demise.

1. Vacuum aspiration is only done through about 12 weeks.

2. If 90% of abortions are done in the first 16 weeks, that still leaves 10% done after 16 weeks. This hardly constitutes "rare". Especially when you consider that 10% of 1.2 million is over a hundred thousand. Compare that to 43,000 traffic fatalities per year.

3. Abortions past 16 weeks are done for the same reasons as abortions before 16 weeks. Social reasons. The maternal indication abortions make up a portion of the roughly 7% done for all "hard cases" combined -- maternal and fetal indications, and rape and incest. And "maternal indications" might be anything the woman decides consitutes a "medical" reason in her personal opinion. It could be anything from heartburn or wanting to avoid stretch marks to full-blown life-threatening medical emergencies. Nobody is doing any kind of breakdown. And "fetal indiations" can be anything from remembering that she had a glass of wine during the first trimester and thinking "Why risk it?" to anencephaly. Again, nobody is doing any kind of breakdown as to what percentage of "fetal indication" abortions are due to confirmed lethal conditions and what percentage are due to the mother just being uneasy and deciding she'd rather not risk giving birth to a less than perfect baby.

4. The doctor doesn't always do the injection, and sometimes it fails. Witness Ana Rosa Rodriguez, who was born at 32 weeks, minus her arm, in the process of what her mother thought was a 12-week abortion.

So the only abortion procedure that could ever result in an intact fetus outside the uterus is the extremely rare dilation and extraction.

Don't forget the induction abortions performed by Tiller and Pedergraft. Not to mention that sometimes the doctors screw up and miscalculate a gestational age. They try to perform what they think is an early abortion and it turns out the baby is nearer to term. Sometimes he or she is born alive. And sometimes somebody just figures he'll do an illegal third-trimester abortion, hoping he won't get caught. And sometimes those babies are born alive.

Dilation and extraction is such a rare operation that most hospitals won't perform one in a year, let alone conduct more than one in a day.

They're not done in hospitals. They're done in freestanding outpatient facilities. And they're done in groups. Tiller typically has about a dozen patients a day. Does anybody know how many Haskell and Pendergraft do a day?

I wanted to provide links substantiating what I say, but my internet is not working well. I have a small window to post this at all. I'll add the links as my service permits me access to the net. Rachael, et. al, please post what you can in the comments!

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