Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on an op-ed article in today’s New York Times:
There are some in the medical profession who deliver babies to pregnant women in the morning, and terminate the babies of other pregnant women in the afternoon. Lisa H. Harris is one of them. She wrote about her experience as an obstetrician-gynecologist-abortionist in an op-ed column in the October 24 edition of the New York Times. [Note: She identifies herself as an obstetrician-gynecologist.]
Do those who perform abortions know they are taking the life of an innocent human being? Of course they do. The remains of the body are not that of a turkey. So how do they justify their job? They convince themselves that they are non-judgmental facilitators, doctors whose job it is to render whatever service the woman wants. That’s what Harris believes she is doing.
Does she really admit that she is aborting a human being? Here are some of her comments:
- “I know that for every woman whose abortion I perform, I stop a developing human being from being born.”
- “I know that for each of them [all of her patients], there was a second entity there—a baby, a person, a potential life, a life, depending on your beliefs.”
- “Abortion feels morally complicated because it stops a developing human being from being born, which of course it does.”
To say that all of her patients recognize the life of their baby is quite an admission. At least they don’t believe the fiction that what they are aborting is nothing but a clump of cells or tissue.
Twice Harris speaks about the preborn baby as “a developing human being.” This is true. It is also true that newborns are still developing: Brain development does not peak until the third year.
Princeton professor Peter Singer, who is the “father” of animal rights, believes it should be legal to kill newborns. He concedes that those opposed to abortion are right to say that there is no moral difference between killing an unborn baby and killing an infant—it’s just that for him both should be legal.
It is not clear where Harris stands on the morality of infanticide. But it is clear that her concessions make it easier to justify.
