Tag: abortion

Your lying eyes

In a desperate attempt to convince their idiotic readership that the fetus in early pregnancy is just a clump of tissue, the Guardian has published an article involving a series of images, provided by a pro-abortion group, of “pregnancy tissue” in a petri dish. They do this while also dating the ’tissue’ therein from the last menstrual period (LMP) rather than by the date of fertilization, usually two weeks later.

The article and the site play on a number of pro-abort tropes. Firstly, the one above, that the fetus even at this early stage is simply ‘pregnancy tissue’ and not a unified whole that is in the early stages of development. Secondly, it employs the trope that because the fetus is not visibly human it is not human, either because it is too small for the human eye unaided to see human features, or because these features are the marks of humanness and their absence speaks against the humanness of the fetus at this stage of development.

Each of these tropes are involved in their curious claim re fetal heartbeat. Here is the question and answer provided on the website the Guardian article relies on:

Does this tissue have a “heartbeat”?

There is no “heart” at 6 weeks of pregnancy, but there are cells that will come together to form the heart, and those cells already “beat.” This is the motion that is seen on ultrasound and that people refer to as a “heartbeat,” but again there is not yet a formed heart.

Notice the curious claim here. There is no heart here yet, only cells acting in concert, ‘beating’, but this unified action by a selection of cells within the ‘pregnancy tissue’, identified by an ultrasound, is not yet a formed heart. You would have to be in the grip of an ideological stupor to believe their attempt to explain away this ‘heartbeat’.

Here is an image of the fetus at nine weeks LMP, once removed from its mother’s womb:

Here is a video of the fetus in utero at 10 weeks LMP:

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide what is going on here.

Addendum: here is the heart 33 days postfertilization visualized by scanning electron microscope

Right/left atria (RA/LA), right/left ventricles (RV/LV), atrioventricular canal (AVC), & outflow tract (OFT).

Feminism, modernity, and the new mudsill theory

The news back in August that the state of Texas has outlawed abortion post-fetal heartbeat is welcome. I don’t entirely agree with the drawing of the line at a fetal heartbeat (or viability, or pain) understands the matter completely but I welcome it nonetheless as a step forward in the development of premises that when fully acknowledged and appreciated can only but end where justice demands.

However, that is not the point of this post. Here, I simply what to address what is intimated above, and that is that a women, unless she retains the right to kill her child in the womb, cannot and can never be free. This appears to be a signal principle of present-day feminism and the analogy I want to draw is between this claim and a view put forth by anti-abolitionists in the mid-19th under the heading of mudsill theory.

This theory purported that civilization must always depend upon a base class (the mudsill) that labours on behalf of all other classes above them and upon which these classes rest. Now, the unborn child does not ‘labour’ on behalf of the other classes here, what it does, through its sacrifice, is perpetuate the ‘civilization’ of the other classes. This isn’t just feminism, more broadly, it is the economic and social relations of modernity, i.e. mass participation in the workforce, ‘childcare’, ‘at-will’ divorce, extended adolescence, and the like, which all partly depend upon the free availability of abortion. This class of persons in its earliest stages of development is to be treated, under the new dispensation, as a class beyond the protection of the law, and it is for a time entirely dependent on the caprice of its parents, in order to fortify the economic and social relations upon which modernity rest. Thus, the promoters of abortion argue, just as the ‘freedom’ of women, and modern life, more broadly, depends upon its availability, they are to that extent, no different to the defenders of slavery who completely elided the moral status of the slave (as Caro does above the child in utero) and simply focused on their own alleged rights as slave-owner or beneficiary. In fact, they also treat the unborn child/ slave as chattel; to be treated or disposed of as they see fit.