Saturday, January 22, 2011

This is supposed to be a counter-argument

PZ Myers, the militant anti-Christian science blogger, is totally not impressed with images of aborted fetuses:

Secondly, the standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I'm a biologist. I've guillotined rats. I've held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors. I've used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog. I've opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I've been elbow deep in blood, I've split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle. I've extracted the brains of mice…with a pair of pliers. I've scooped brains out of buckets, I've counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.

You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.

Demonstrating one's complete indifference towards animal (and human suffering) is a real asset to the pro-choice movement.

NOT.

Contrary to what he says showing people the product of abortion is not a "bullying" tactic.

How can showing people a picture be bullying?

Are there bullies in the school yard going: Hey you, if you give me your lunch money, I'M-- I'M-- I'M-- GONNA SHOW YOU A PICTURE!

Are there bully victims pleading NO! DON'T SHOW ME A PICTURE! ANYTHING BUT A PICTURE!

Trying to persuade people of your point of view is not bullying.

Trying to get people to see an ugly truth is not bullying.

Even if people don't WANT to see the truth, it's not bullying.

He says that showing a picture of a fetus is "intimidation"?

What intimidation? Showing people the truth is intimidation?

Perhaps he means that if we produce unwanted guilt in others, that's intimidation.

But don't leftists do that all the time? Tell people they're horrible for doing this or that and try to shame them into rejecting their actions or views?

But continue to be completely heartless towards the unborn. That's what has advanced our cause.

During the partial birth abortion debate, the public saw how abortion supporters were completely indifferent to babies having their heads stabbed and their brains sucked out. The public woke up to the horrors of abortion.

And it's the same thing all over again with the Gosnell case.

They talk about the infant newborns being stabbed as being atrocious.

But nary a word about the late-term babies-- of the same gestational age-- being killed in the wound.

It poses no moral or intellectual problem for them. If babies have to die in the name of feminist empowerment, their attitude is: well tough luck little babies. You were on the wrong side of the uterus.

Like this scientist, feminists think these aborted babies were no more special than guilltoned rats, dissected cats, or lobotomized mice.