Pro-abortionists seek in vain for ways to justify abortion in 39th Week

By Dave Andrusko

On Wednesday NRL News Today carried a story about the sentencing of Sarah Catt to eight years in prison for what the BBC called a “full-term abortion.” The 35-year-old Catt, who previously had given one child up for adoption and aborted another baby, was sentenced for administering poison with intent to “procure a miscarriage” of her unborn baby in her final week of pregnancy in 2010.  To be clear, Catt had an abortion at 39 weeks.

There is a virtual blank check exemption in Great Britain to the law limiting abortions to 24 weeks or earlier (the woman’s life is at risk or meets the very elastic criteria of involving a substantial risk the child would suffer serious physical or mental handicap), but none applied to Catt.

After being arrested in September 2010, Catt initially claimed she had had an abortion at a Marie Stopes clinic in March. An analysis of her computer, however, showed she had secured a drug [never identified] over the Internet to “induce a miscarriage.” She then claimed the baby boy was stillborn and that she buried his body but no evidence of the child was ever found.

In sentencing Catt, Justice Cooke said,”The critical element of your offending is the deliberate choice made by you, in full knowledge of the due date of your child, to terminate the pregnancy at somewhere close to term, if not actually at term, with the full knowledge that termination after week 24 was unlawful and in full knowledge your child’s birth was imminent.” Cooke pointedly observed that if the baby had been born a few days later and she had then killed him, Catt would have been charged with murder.

If you are a pro-abortionist, you have two choices, broadly speaking. Ignore Catt or attempt to turn the case into something it is not; for example, argue that the baby’s death was not ACTUALLY an abortion.

Enter Amanda Marcotte, who routinely ventures where even the most militant pro-abortionists are loath to tread. We’ve written about her a couple of times because she gives you the unvarnished truth as seen by the most zealous wing of the pro-abortion movement.

Writing in the American Prospect under the revealing headline, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Abortion,” Marcotte seeks in vain a way out of the pro-abortion dilemma. By that I mean their firm resistance to declaring that ANY abortion at ANY point is unacceptable yet understanding that only the Marcottes of this world would not draw an unequivocal line at some point considerably before 39 weeks!

Her first argument lays the predicate for this mish-mash of an argument:

“The problem is that what Catt did doesn’t have much relationship to the cluster of medical procedures that get grouped under the common term ‘abortion’—which is how the British press is describing Catt’s actions. Inducing labor with intent to miscarry is a much different thing than procedures designed to prevent birth in the first place. This word choice conflates Catt’s actions with ordinary abortions—and does so in a world where a woman’s right to have one is hotly contested.”

I’ve read that several times and I still scratched my head, wondering how to respond. Reading the pro-life blogger jivinjehoshaphat helped me out. He wrote

“What? That’s absurd. Every year there are numerous abortion procedures which are designed to prevent live birth by killing the unborn before they are born. Like RU 486 abortions (sure the children are smaller but they still end up outside the woman’s body). Or like induction abortions.”

You don’t hear much about induction abortions anymore—injecting poison directly into the unborn baby’s heart—and then inducing the delivery of the dead child. This “procedure” took three or four days, for starters. But you hear lots and lots about RU486 abortions which are a new product line, so to speak, for the pro-death set.

You could compare Marcotte’s first untrue volley to the tennis player who hits her serve into the stands. But she was just getting started. Marcotte foot-faults and double-faults throughout the rest of her argument.

For example, she tells us that there aren’t THAT many “late-term” abortions. What is her point? Has Marcotte converted? Is she saying that however supposedly “rare” these abortions are (and remember, when there are 1.2 million abortions each year, even a small percentage means thousands and thousands of very advanced babies will have been killed), we all should be able to agree that there ought to be an endpoint?

Of course not. “[T]there are many reasons women should be allowed to have them,” she dutifully adds.

Marcotte also pretends that one practitioner who specialized in aborting second and third trimester abortions carefully documented his reasons, even getting a second opinion.

But the woman who signed off on the reasons the abortionist used to justify these abortions lost her license last June. As NRL News Today wrote at the time, “The decision by the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts ratified a decision made in 2011 by administrative judge Edward Gashler who found Ann Kristen Neuhaus negligent in conducting mental health exams for 11 patients, ages 10 to 18, who aborted between July and November 2003.” All of the eleven young women were in their sixth or seventh month of pregnancy.

An abortion is an abortion is an abortion and all the verbal gymnastics in the world won’t change that an unborn baby has been intentionally killed.

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