{"id":2237,"date":"2015-07-27T05:55:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T05:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=2237"},"modified":"2025-09-29T20:23:04","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T20:23:04","slug":"nyt-op-ed-looking-away-from-abortion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=2237","title":{"rendered":"NYT op ed “Looking Away from Abortion”"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Ross Douthat<\/a>, who is the token, once a week Catholic on the NY Times op ed pages – although I believe Maureen Dowd<\/a> says she is Catholic.<\/p>\n

Douthat's column could also have been titled "Facing Reality" as he writes about the recent Planned Parenthood expose' videos.<\/p>\n

IN an essay in his 1976 collection, \u201cMortal Lessons,\u201d the physician Richard Selzer describes a strange suburban scene. People go outside in the morning in his neighborhood, after the garbage trucks have passed, and find \u201ca foreignness upon the pavement,\u201d a softness underfoot.<\/a><\/p>\n

Looking down, Selzer first thinks he sees oversize baby birds, then rubber baby dolls, until the realization comes that the street is littered with the tiny, naked, all-too-human bodies of aborted fetuses.<\/p>\n

Later, the local hospital director speaks to Selzer, trying to impose order on the grisly scene. It was an accident, of course: The tiny corpses were accidentally \u201cmixed up with the other debris\u201d instead of being incinerated or interred. \u201cIt is not an everyday occurrence. Once in a lifetime, he says.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Selzer tries to nod along: \u201cNow you see. It is orderly. It is sensible. The world is not mad. This is still a civilized society\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cBut just this once, you know it isn\u2019t. You saw, and you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Resolute abortion rights supporters would dismiss that claim of knowledge. Death and viscera are never pretty, they would say, but something can be disgusting without being barbaric. Just because it\u2019s awful to discover fetuses underfoot doesn\u2019t mean the unborn have a right to life.<\/p>\n

******<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s precisely this argument<\/a> that\u2019s been marshaled lately in response<\/a> to a new reminder of the fleshly realities of abortion: The conversations, videotaped covertly<\/a> by pro-life activists posing as fetal organ buyers, in which officials from Planned Parenthood cheerfully discuss the procedures for extracting those organs intact during an abortion and the prices they command.<\/p>\n

******<\/p>\n

And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn\u2019t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience \u2014 the reasoning that notes that it\u2019s precisely a fetus\u2019s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one\u2019s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just \u201cproducts of conception\u201d or tissue for the knife.<\/p>\n

Enough excerpts – hit the link – it takes about four minutes to read the whole column.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ross Douthat, who is the token, once a week Catholic on the NY Times op ed pages – although I believe Maureen Dowd says she is Catholic. Douthat's column could also have been titled "Facing Reality" as he writes about the recent Planned Parenthood expose' videos. IN an essay in his 1976 collection, \u201cMortal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8182,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2237\/revisions\/8182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}