20-week Sonogram and Partial-Birth Abortion

For those of you who have had your first baby, expected it with sweet anticipation, and charted its growth with frenzied concern and frequent examination on babycenter.com or some such monitoring website, you’ll remember how you felt when it was time to discover the baby’s gender around 20 weeks or so…if you so chose to find out. Like a huge piece of the pregnancy puzzle was about to be revealed.

This time around I did not permit Jeff to come with me to the sonogram. I want at least one child to be a surprise. I allowed us to find out Gideon’s gender because Jeff was too anxious and we really did need to budget and plan as best we could, and I allowed Jeff to find out Scarlett’s gender because he was so puppy-like and eager. You will remember, however, he was unable to keep the secret from me. In fact, I figured it out on the way home from the doctor’s office as he was talking to his mother on the phone. To ensure my surprise THIS TIME, I forbade him to join me. The technician didn’t even look at the genital area, though I almost asked her to, to make sure that if this baby was a little boy he didn’t have two wee-wee’s or something grotesquely uncommon. I refrained.

However, it never ceases to amaze me that even at 20 weeks, barely past halfway through the process, how well-developed the baby is. “He” (because that’s our guess) kept waving at the technician and I, as if he knew we were spying on his doings. He gave me a few kicks for invading, then waved his long skeletal fingers at us (they still don’t have very much fat on their bodies at this point). I could see the black spot that was his heart, the other black spot that was his stomach, his brain, his spine, his fingers, his toes, his eyeball sockets, and his little puckered up mouth. You name it, if the technician could point it out, I could see it. Amazing, really, the magnificent design of a child, even one who weighs only 8 ounces.

That is why I get so fired up, so angry, so sickened when I think of partial-birth abortion because it is typically done between 18 and 26 weeks, right around my precious baby’s tender age. In a Congressional statute, it was even found that partial-birth abortion is a “gruesome and inhumane procedure that is never medically necessary.” Though it is against the law right now, there is a presidential candidate who is vowing to make it legal again. And that brings a churning, uneasy feeling to the pit of my stomach.

You all know that because of my convictions of who Jesus Christ is… and how every life is precious to him, I am opposed to abortion in any respect, as I am opposed to the suffering of any innocent, helpless person who is oppressed by the self-serving heartless minds of those who parade inhumanity as natural and evil as what is right. Though I stand firmly confident that we will all be judged before Holy God himself when we die, it still makes me angry when innocents are abused, mistreated, and murdered for no reason other than the fact that their very lives are an unwanted embarrassment or an untimely inconvenience to those around them.

We are supposed to protect the widows, the innocent, the weak, and the downtrodden. Instead, we legislate their lives and give their impossible futures over to the workings of evil intent. Chivalry has been lost in the annals of fictitious books. Goodness and righteousness have become mere words we relegate to Webster’s largest bound dictionary. Love is butchered, languishing inside illicit sex outside the holy and sacred bound of marriage, stickered to a home we can't afford but we can’t seem to live without, or propped up on an egotistical holiday of candied hearts and roses. Our twisted polluted view of Love in no way compares to Christ's sacrifice of his own life or God's sacrifice of his own son to atone for our sins, to pay that penalty that had to be paid.

Has our human race really come so far in the last 6,000 years, that sin and serving our own self-interests is normal? I am afraid so.

Do you even know what partial-birth abortion entails? I actually almost don’t want to write the words. It’s as if my writing them down actually makes them true. Like many, I’d almost rather ignore the truth of what they do because it’s painful, ugly, and shocking.

It is defined in the Partial-Birth Abortion Act as the following:

“An abortion in which the person performing the abortion, deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus; and performs the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus. (18 U.S. Code 1531)”

Let me explain this in Audrea-terms. Whomever performs this act, induces labor of the baby, usually in the 2nd or even 3rd trimester. The point is to get the baby down to the opening of the cervix (the hole where he comes out). The baby is purposefully turned breech (so the feet come out first), and then a rod or some long instrument is inserted into the back of the baby’s head, punctures it, and sucks its brains out, leaving a shell of what was once a precious, growing, thriving child. The baby, now dead, can then be pulled out, whole, from the mother with no complications to her.

It makes me nauseous even to write those words.

According to the American Medical Association, this process of partial-birth abortion is called an IDX procedure (intact dilation and extraction):

“First, the cervix is dilated. Second, the fetus is positioned for a footling breech. Third, the fetus is partially pulled out, starting with the feet, as far as the neck. Fourth, the brain and material inside the skull is evacuated, so that a dead but otherwise intact fetus can be delivered via the vagina.”

After reading this, is there anybody who can honestly tell me that it doesn’t make them heartsick and slightly queasy… and they believe it’s okay… AND that they want to vote for a presidential candidate who is vowing to bring this atrocity back? This act is no different than the mass genocides we read about. It is unthinkable and it is abominable.

I could go on and on about it. It's just, when I think of Senator Obama and how he votes, what he's vying for, versus who my Holy God is, there is no comparison, no similarities between the two. Every other issue (and there are many that I care about) pales in comparison to that which is immoral and brutally inhumane.

I'm not trying to say here that McCain is the best choice, but at least I know how he's voted in the past and I know he won't take my tax dollars (or mostly, Jeff's) to pay for these horrific procedures. What about you? Do you want your hard-earned money going to pay for them?