George Neumayr has a worthwhile piece up at American Spectator on Howard Dean's ties with Planned Parenthood. Much has been made of Dem agonizing about how they can reconnect with voters motivated by their faith. I got news for you, naming Dr. Dean the party chair won't help.
Here's a nice excerpt:
At the very moment Democrats are claiming to distance themselves from abortion, they run back towards it by making Howard Dean -- a former doctor for Planned Parenthood -- their public face. Though the press almost never mentions it, Dean did an OB/GYN rotation for Planned Parenthood in the 1970s and later served as an executive board member of Planned Parenthood New England, meaning that he directly oversaw the largest abortion provider in the region. Were the Democrats sincerely moving to the middle on abortion, selecting a former overseer of abortion would have been the last thing to do.
Now they have managed to lash themselves to abortion even tighter by turning a Planned Parenthood alumnus and mascot -- Dean received the organization's Margaret Sanger award -- into the party's chief spokesman. Yes, like Hillary Clinton, Dean will try and call a few audibles on his old colleagues and friends at Planned Parenthood. But that won't work. In politics, past is prologue and perception.
What the Democratic party doesn't understand is that a tight relationship with Planned Parenthood nowadays is not good resume' material. In an era when the womb has become more or less transparent, anybody with a conscience has become pretty uneasy with the idea of abortion.
1 comment:
No, a fetus is not alive in the same way we are if you define the fetus as a "collection of cells." A few points: (1) that fetus is human from the point it begins development -- as you note, they undeniably ARE alive and by DNA are designed as human from the get-go; (2) at some point the fetus reacts to stimulus, and while I doubt we can measure what you mean by "enough to produce and sustain a consciousness" science will prove that it can feel pain at a far earlier point than is currently legal for abortion (3) partial birth abortion is appalling to anyone, even "rational" persons, except they choose to value the convenience of the mother over the life of the child (which shows the particularly heinous values held by many "liberals) (4) looked at from a rational standpoint, we're all just a collection of cells that is going to die sooner or later and many people are not alive in the same way that I am. Choosing who should live or die based on my own value judgments calls us back to the origins of Planned Parenthood -- eugenics and murder of the "unwanted" (5) if undisturbed, this collection of cells will normally become a human life and should be valued in the same way I value a baby or young child, it has not reached its full potential but rationally is innocent and should not be killed merely because its existence is inconvenient (6) ultimately many of us look to God to validate the value of life, to reiterate an earlier point if all of us die anyway what difference should a couple years one way or another make and if you're in my way it's perfectly rational to eliminate you since you're not losing anything you won't lose anyway. Put another way, some of us think government exists to protect the weak but we rely on a higher value system than mere utilitarianism to justify this belief. If you define "rational" as pure materialism then, as the Dostoyevsky noted, everything is permitted. Surely killing you, raping your wife and having other adventures at other's expense are "reasonable liberalism" and in fact we see a permissiveness growing for these things all the time in the popular culture.
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