On Baby Seals and Babies
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 at 11:47AM I never thought ex-Beatle, Sir Paul McCartney had much of a voice. Now I wonder about his misdirected morals. Not that he doesn’t have any. Obviously he does. He lets us know he is a deep-feeling fellow. There he was, stretched out on the endless whiteness of a Canadian ice-floe with his wife alongside trying to pet a cute baby seal for the cameras. Sir Paul’s humanitarian message was that all human beings should be deeply moved against the killing of even a single baby. Seal.
The week before this photo-op there was a Chinese lady in all the papers who was being vilified by the whole animal-loving world for taking pleasure in killing baby cats. She would arrange videos of herself petting a little kitten and then slowly and meticulously crushing its head under her heel, in broad daylight. She saw it as a kind of performance art where the game is to be able to do such things without any show of feeling, and then you are a true artist. The entire Internet and media community experienced instant outrage over this intentionally vile act of cruelty. The message was that we ought to be deeply moved against the killing of even a single baby. Kitten.
But I don’t get it. Where is the outrage about the killing of cute baby humans? I promise not to exaggerate. I am just asking a question. Why have we never seen a photo of Sir Paul in a Canadian hospital reaching out with heart-rending sympathy to touch the nose of a freshly-aborted human baby? Or perhaps laying his head on the rounded belly of the mother, just before the act of extraction, his tears trickling down onto the sheet as the cameras grind?
I know, I know. Most human baby-killing is in the first trimester. They are, well, not recognizably human yet. Not like the cute little seal or the meowing kitten. I can hear it now: “Don’t play that game, buddy, this is about stuff that can really move you!” Okay, okay. But the human heart does start beating in the womb at 21 days. And the entire genetic endowment specific to each and every individual human baby – just like the baby seal’s and the kitten’s genetic endowment - is there at conception. I mean, I’m just having a little trouble with the value thing. About why the seal and the kitten rate so high with Sir Paul and the public, but human babies are off the radar screen.
Sir Paul even told Larry King that sealing is exactly like the ancient slave trade, and is a barbaric practice that continues without justification. So I find myself substituting just a couple of words and wonder how the world would have reacted if he had told Larry King, “killing baby humans is like the ancient slave trade, and a barbaric practice that continues without justification.”
Most people are unaware that somewhere around 2-3% of all Canadian and American abortions occur in the third trimester. These are definitely baby human beings. I didn’t say “persons”. Good heavens. That could get me into jail for a hate crime; for calling a human being a “person” without legal permission; that is, before it is fully born. The Supreme Courts of both Canada and the USA say that a human being is not a person until it leaves the womb alive. No lie. It’s called the “born-alive” rule. But they didn’t say it wasn’t a human being, or that it is not human life. Obviously it is not a baby seal, or a kitten. And maybe, in the public mind not as cute as those. But the rule has caused some inconveniences that ought to attract Sir Paul’s attention.
About 125,000 baby human lives are taken in Canada each year and over a million and a quarter annually in the USA. An unknown number of the third-trimester babies in the USA and Europe are killed by so-called “partial-birth abortion.” This technique is prohibited in Canada, so far, but not in the USA where former President Bill Clinton refused to sign a law prohibiting it. And anyway, unlike baby seals, it is not as if government inspectors are watching over abortion clinics to make sure human babies are killed “humanely.”
The inconvenience of the rule is that third trimester babies are very large. At least as large as a baby seal. Many second-trimester babies are killed and dismembered right in the womb. Pulled out an arm and a leg at a time. That is routine. Whatever. But it’s a tough assignment if there is a large kid inside. And the abortionist sure doesn’t want to go to jail for killing a “person.” So to make extraction easier and to remain inside the law, he turns the baby around in the womb and drags it out by the feet until just the head remains inside the mother. Then, with a special instrument he punches a hole in the back of the baby’s head and with a small vacuum hose sucks out the brains so that the skull will collapse and then he can drag the kid out easily. Not born alive. And so - we are asked to believe - not yet a person. And certainly not a baby seal. But it sure looks like a human being to me. So I still don’t get it.
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