Yesterday, pro-life blogger Jill Stanek posted a cartoon called “Occupy Womb Street” that originally appeared at the leftist website The Daily Kos. The target of cartoonist Jen Sorenson was the pro-life leadership of the House of Representatives, which passed the Protect Life Act last week.
The cartoon is clever, despite its hateful attitude towards both the unborn child and childbirth (which even some feminists cherish as the special province of women). I credit Sorenson for her creative play on the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, as well as her pun on the word “labor” in the cartoon’s last panel.
But what impresses me most about this 4-panel comic is panel 2, in which a fetus holds a picket sign reading “Will work for nutrient rich blood.”
Here Sorenson unwittingly highlights the humanity of the child in the womb, not only by recognizing the child’s utter dependence on its mother at this early stage of life, but drawing what can only be called a cute little fetus.
Sorenson comic (high res here)
What’s more, that picket sign can’t help but evoke sympathy for the unborn child. The whole purpose of a picket sign is to demand justice in some fashion. The suggestion—though unintentional—is that there is, after all, some justice due to the unborn child.
From where I’m sitting, Sorenson’s cartoon illustrates a point very far removed from her original purpose: that even the most passing encounter with the unborn child cannot but point to the value of that child’s life.
In the end, Sorenson and other advocates of legal abortion have a much bigger problem than the modest Protect Life Act, which seeks only to prevent health care workers from being involved unwillingly in abortion or taxpayers from paying for it. No, their biggest problem is the simple truth that the being growing in her mother’s womb is a human child.
