Pictures of the Unborn Make the Front Page

Now it’s Newsweek‘s turn. Last November, Time magazine ran an eleven-page special cover story entitled, “Inside the Womb.” It pictured an unborn baby on the cover and subtitled the special report, “An amazing look at how we all begin,” plus “The latest science on how healthy babies are born.”

Some complained that the text was not very pro-life but the photographs and computerized pictures were worth tens of thousands of words and there were twenty four-such pictures in all. We were astonished at the power of this presentation by an avowedly not pro-life publication. We bought extra copies and showed it to everyone.

Newsweek Feature on Rights of the Unborn

Now Newsweek seems to be getting the message that the truth is coming out there. It really is a baby after all and Newsweek even highlights “Unborn Baby” in its text. Newsweek even goes Time one better and asks on its cover, “Should a Fetus Have Rights?” It’s subtitled “How Science is Changing the Debate.” A two-page spread with large headline, “The War Over Fetal Rights” uses eight 4-D ultrasound photographs of the baby from seven weeks through 35 weeks and says the politics of the womb are becoming ever more personal and complex.

Taking off on the current Lacy and Carson Peterson murder case in California and the 1992 killing of Tracy Marciniak’s in-utero son Zachariah, the article by Debra Rosenberg looks at the evolving laws that are attempting to protect unborn babies and that have the abortion crowd going into cardiac arrest. What will happen to their abortion rights if these are really babies? Serious question. Abortion will be murder, which of course it has been all along.

While the article tries hard to steer a middle course it does lean toward the reasonableness of declaring an unborn child a human being deserving of some protection, and even though the writer tries to weaken pro-life conviction that human life be protected from fertilization, by introducing conflict over the use of embryonic stem cells for medical reasons, she focuses most pointedly on the abortionists’ worries.

Vain Effort To Find a Middle Way

Here’s an example of her vain effort to give each side half-a-loaf: “When abortion foes are willing to destroy embryos for lifesaving medical research and abortion-rights supporter are willing to define a fetus as a murder victim, the black-and-white rhetoric of the 1970s abortion wars no longer applies.” Incidentally, the answer to that is simple: no genuine pro-lifer supports destroying embryos for lifesaving medical research, and anyone with a brain stem knows killing an unborn child is murder.

But her introduction of conflict and compromise probably makes the story more exciting to some of her readers. She does admit that “new high-tech fetal ultrasound images allow prospective parents to see tiny fingers and toes, arms, legs and a beating heart as early as 12 weeks.” But they “also pack such an emotional punch that even the most hard-line abortion-rights supporters may find themselves questioning their beliefs.” Rosenberg says further:

[T]he new science is also fanning long standing, divisive political feuds — over the legality and morality of ending a pregnancy . . . and ultimately the meaning of human life. . . . For decades, abortion opponents have offered moral and ethical arguments about protecting the fetus. Now they’re building a legal case defining the fetus — and even the embryo — as an individual entitled to basic human rights [while] abortion-rights supporters are finding it increasingly difficult to claim credibility that a fetus just a few weeks, or even days, from delivery is not entitled to at least some protections under the law.

The story also considers the more than 400,000 frozen embryos and what to do about them, and shows the graphic picture of a baby’s hand reaching out of an incision in his mother’s uterus and grasping the finger of a doctor, with the story of Samuel Armas who is now three -and-a-half- years old. When this photograph first came to light it was banned by TV stations and news magazines across the land. Now it gets a half-page showing in a national news magazine that reaches millions.

Treating the Tiniest Patients

The final section of this four part series is on operating on the unborn and even hands a tribute to our old friend Sir Albert William Liley of New Zealand, who is credited with the first successful fetal operation back in 1963. Dr. Liley and I spent a scorching afternoon in Boston one July driving around in an air-conditioned car to keep cool, exchanging shaggy dog stories.

Liley described the fetus as “a young human” and rallied for rights of the unborn until his untimely death in 1983. He had perfected the use of ultrasound and was devastated that it was being used as a search and destroy technique by unscrupulous doctors who would kill injured babies rather than try to help them as he had been doing. We have always blamed the abortionists for hastening this good man’s death by perverting his life-saving technique.

Some good lines from “Treating the Tiniest Patients” by Claudia Kalb:

“That wasn’t our fetus. That was Samuel.”
“Technology is introducing parents to their unborn children.”
“A Mother can now identify a little human being.”

Of course, the stories all have the routine pro-abortion twist to them, but these little inserts pale against the powerful truth of the photographs and drawings of this tiniest patient. Right about now we’d hate to be trying to justify abortion. They are losing.

Join Us Saturday

Come down to the Federal Plaza at 10:00 A. M. Saturday, attend the free workshops at the Congress Hotel at 3:00 p.m. and tickets are still available for the banquet at the Congress at 7:00 p.m. You will never regret attending this “Bring America Back to Life” victory rally.