Flaming doublespeak

Note: I was originally going to cover two topics in this post, but I also hope to get at least some dialogue going about them, especially the second. For the sake of keeping conversations orderly, I'm going to do two posts. The second will come a bit later.

Here's an interesting article about post-abortion practices. It seems that at least one UK hospital has taken to disposing of aborted fetuses in the garbage incinerators. This strikes me as a rather disgusting development, but what really astounds me about it seeing the reactions presented in the article.

This one should serve as a good example: One woman, after learning that her aborted fetus suffered this fate, had this to say: "I am furious and very hurt. Imagine my horror when I discovered that my baby was incinerated in the same furnace as the hospital rubbish."

Wait a minute: "my baby was incinerated"? Isn't it a primary tenet of pro-abortion arguments that fetuses don't count as "babies" (that is, humans) and therefore "babies" are never aborted?

The most surprising thing to me about the article is that the doctors and the women who had abortions (the "pro-abortionists") talk about the fetuses as if they were human beings. I expect that kind of language from anti-abortionists, but pro-abortionists base their arguments largely on the claim that fetuses are not human beings.

If fetuses are human beings, then aborting them amounts to murder. It seems odd for murderers (the doctors) and their accomplices (the parents who seek abortion) to say that their victims deserve "dignity in death" after they've denied them the chance to have dignity in life. It is a confused (I might even say "deranged") mind that gives more respect to the dead than to the living; the murderer who dignifies the murdered seems to be an extreme case of this confusion.

(As an aside: My comments about abortion in this post generally do not apply to abortions that are meant to save the life of the mother. Such circumstances don't change the fact that abortion is (or is not) murder, but an abortion that is medically necessary for the safety of the mother allows for both "murder" and remorse for the victim.)

On the other hand, if fetuses aren't human beings (the contention of most pro-abortion advocates), then what's wrong with tossing them out with the used Kleenex? We dispose of the latter collection of nonliving biological matter without a second thought; why get worked up over any other collection of nonliving biological matter?

I am disgusted by the post-abortion trash-incinerator-disposal for the same reason I am disgusted by abortion itself: It violates the dignity of a human being. I don't understand how a woman could be horrified about how her baby's corpse was disposed of without also being horrified by the fact that her baby wouldn't have been a corpse apart from her own choices. But to my mind, if you consider abortion acceptable, you have no place condemning such disposal practices.

A member of a pro-life organization is quoted in the article as saying, "Has our society lost even a minimum concept of the humanity of the unborn child and the respect due to these tiny victims of our ruthless legislation?" I think "society" lost the "concept of the humanity of the unborn child" when it decided that abortion was an acceptable practice. I don't see why anyone would be surprised at this turn of events.