Archives for January 2011

…a pro-life journalist could do a semi-sympathetic profile on this “health care professional.”

First question to ask him: “Will you be available for an interview after serving time for multiple counts of murder?”

A great little story from my homestate and homecounty. (Regarding Red Bank, NJ: I first learned to sail in the Navesink River; read and wrote poems on its banks; and kissed a girl in a boat we took out on it the evening before I left for California and my future).

At first flush, the article is surprising for a Mother Jones entry – until the reader realizes it was all a set up to set the prolife dogs eating one another at the end.

All in all, I would rather have heard the lawyer defend himself against pro-aborts than fellow pro-lifers.

But then that would have been my story, not Blustain’s.

The first impulse is to say, “Why can’t prolife journalists get access to and present abortionists in such a sympathetic way while at the same time maintaining the prolife case?” But when the passions cool, one realizes this has less to do with the journalist’s will and more to do with the abortionist’s.

Would YOU want to go on record for anything remotely akin to what abortionists do?

Best part, this – showing the subject’s conversion. It’s quite salient – and as I’ve said before it is perhaps a fruitful place to have the discussion – how abortion has adversely affected adoption in the US.

That began to change in 1990, when a couple came to him after their child was born with Down syndrome. The doctor had not done an amniocentesis, which might have diagnosed the condition, and they wanted to sue for “wrongful birth”—claiming they would have aborted had they known. Cassidy declined the case. “In this particular instance I was thinking, ‘What would it be like for me and for this little girl if I stood in the well of a courtroom and argued to a jury that they had to give lots of money to her mom and dad because they didn’t get a chance to kill her?'” he says. “That case forced me to ask the question, how did the law get this cruel?…It all led back to Roe v. Wade.”

He also started paying attention to the legal discrepancies between adoption and abortion. What impressed him, he told me, was that a woman thinking about giving away her baby can only terminate the mother-child relationship after the state helps ensure she’s making the right decision: In many states, she must wait until after birth to relinquish the child and must be offered counseling. “Those [maternal] rights are treated with the most profound respect,” Cassidy says, but “in the context of abortion, there is no respect…. My first question that I had for everybody—I’m talking about the courts, about people going into the courts claiming they represent the rights of women, about the pro-life community, the churches who like to talk about this issue—where is their discussion and defense of the mother, the real rights of the mother?”

H/T Margaret Cabaniss, IC