Pro-Lifers Artfully Dodging Reality
In the drawings all you see of the woman is a womb.
The graphic black and white sketches used in the debate over late-term abortions don’t show the shock on Vikki Stella’s face when a routine pregnancy became “Oh, my God.”
They don’t show Tammy Watts’ expression when the doctor reading her ultrasound said quietly, “There is something I did not expect to see.”
Nor do they show Coreen Costello’s pain when she discovered that there was something horribly wrong with the child she was expecting and that the amniotic fluid puddled in her uterus could rupture at any time.
The woman, her family and her humanity have been cropped out of the illustrations shown on the Senate floor as if they were irrelevant.
The fetus in this pro-life portfolio is a perfect, Gerber-baby outline in the birth canal. It doesn’t look much like the one in Viki Wilson’s sonogram, with two-thirds of her brain lodged in a separate sack, looking “as if she had two heads.” Nor does it look like the Watts’ fetus which had no eyes, six fingers and six toes and a mass of bowel and bladder outside of her stomach.
Would full-color, real-life illustrations be too graphic for legislators? Would it have been too sensational to show torn cervixes on television, fetuses for whom the decision wasn’t life or death, but what kind of death? Or are they too vivid a portrait of the real tragedies that force families and doctors into painful decisions?
Over the past months, we have watched the phrase “partial-birth abortion” forced into the political language by sheer repetition. It’s been used over and again to mislabel a rarely used medical technique called “intact dilation and evacuation.”
A bill to criminalize this procedure - described with inflammatory inaccuracy as the scissor-stabbing murder of a conscious baby - sailed through the House. It barely lost momentum in the Senate and was temporarily detoured last Wednesday to the judiciary committee.
But when the hearings begin this coming Friday, the chamber will once again be turned into an anti-abortion art gallery.
What is clever about this visual tack of the anti-abortion leaders is that any late-term abortion is gruesome. What is malicious about this attack is that it’s aimed at families that wanted babies, at women whose pregnancies went terribly awry.
A reckless Maureen Malloy of the National Right to Life Committee described “healthy women carrying healthy babies.” An overheated Bob Smith, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, waxing on about the trip through the birth canal, called the doctor “an executioner.”
They talked as if women carried their pregnancies for 36 weeks and then decided, “oops, I changed my mind.” As if doctors performed such treatments “on demand.”
If you only saw these drawings on the board, you would not know that state laws already restrict late-term abortions except for the life or health of the woman. Nor would you know that this procedure is sometimes the best of the rotten options - the one that may best enable a woman to have another baby. You wouldn’t even know that anesthesia ends the life of such a fetus before it comes down the birth canal.
But this artwork is just the most recent rendering of the anti-abortion strategy. For years, they have targeted doctors, the “weak link” of abortion rights, through harassment, death threats, violence. Now they are threatening them with jail.
For the first time, Congress has been asked to outlaw a medical procedure. If it works, right-to-life advocates hope to eliminate abortion, one procedure and one prosecution at a time.
Under the current bill, doctors who don’t practice the congressionally approved protocol risk two years in prison. Even if the Senate amends the law to permit this technique to save the life of a woman, it would not be allowed to “merely” save her health. What would that mean? A legislated ruptured uterus? A “mere” hemorrhage? Who would decide?
Sen. Barbara Boxer, a mother and grandmother, spoke to her colleagues last week and asked these senators to, yes, think about “babies.” She asked them to think of their own babies, growing and grown daughters, whose futures could be at risk.
Now the hearing room is set to become a “drawing room.” Stark, black-and-white renderings of womb and fetus will carry all the easy appeal of propaganda into the judiciary committee.
But life doesn’t always imitate art. And in this real world, only the women whose pregnancies turned into “Oh, my God” can paint the whole picture.