American Conservatives (Still) Don't Get It

I love Dakota Voice. Rather like Christian Voice, it claims to represent family values and so on but when it comes to the crunch it's a small band of ultra-conservative buffoons led by a bloke with far too much time on his hands.

Leading from a story in the Telegraph, and letting a few facts slip by, DV's Bob Ellis almost recites scripture in gleefully informing us of how us pro-choicers are wrong to give women the chance to decide what happens to their unborn children. Of course, he doesn't say that in so many words, what he says is this:

"Better to leave life and death up to the Author of Life, and not take death into our own hands by killing innocent children.

Which is clichéd and highly emotive rhetoric: and he knows it.

The problem with Bob is he just won't accept the simple fact that there probably is no god. Even an idiot should be able to see that nature is the author of life. Pro-choicers would no more go around "killing innocent children" than he would. If you believe in a god, you might accept that a superior being kicked life off, but there's no evidence at all - none - that we're controlled on a daily basis.

Bob and his followers (and there are many like him, mostly descended from Catholic tradition) believe that life begins at conception. Technically it does but that life does not become remotely sentient until many weeks and probably months later; moreover, that life is not capable of sustaining itself even aided current medicine comparatively late in the pregnancy. Even after birth, this child has to be provided for every hour of the day. It relies on its mother for everything: from heat and shelter to food and emotional warmth.

The Bob variety of pro-lifers are a pretty trenchant lot. Abortion is never an option. Not if the mother was a child who had been raped; or if the foetus was horribly deformed and already in great suffering; not even if the mother's life was at risk. We get the same line in entrenched bullshit from Alaska Governor, Palin - which is why she was so popular with right-wing America in the 2008 election - despite being a complete ignoramus who abused her power. The more informed, pro-choice America breathed a heavy sigh of relief when Obama defeated this creationist freak show, but the war isn't over yet.

The Telegraph article Bob alludes to goes into rather more detail that the Conservatives at DV would like, so I'll summarise some of it here.

First of the headlines:

Telegraph: "Mother has healthy baby boy despite abortion warning by doctor"

Dakota Voice: "Healthy Son Despite Doctors Advice to Abort"

Wait did I miss something here? From the headlines, things look pretty clear cut - they aren't.

The Telegraph doesn't have an axe to grind like DV, and continuess with the hint all is now what it ought to be:

"A mother who was twice advised to have an abortion by doctors has gone on to have a 'perfectly' healthy son."

Note how they've cautiously placed perfectly into single quotes? Wonder why - and I wonder why Mssrs. Ellis and co. missed that? Might this have something to do with it? This from the Telegraph:

"Further tests conducted a few days later on New Year's Eve suggested the baby could also have Edwards Syndrome - the presence of an 18th chromosome - with a life expectancy of only up to four months if birth is survived."

Words like "could", "might" and "may" are the sort no prospective parent wants to hear. Rather like life, medicine isn't black and white (oh, if it only were). The worst was to come as the Telegraph reports, contradicting its own headline:

"Kai was born six weeks premature on March 5 at Scunthorpe General Hospital weighing just 2lb 6oz and immediately admitted to intensive care, but was discharged within six weeks.
One side of his heart was slightly bigger than the other which may need an operation to correct in the future, but regular tests have been showing the condition is constantly improving."

Kai Purdy pictured with his mother, Gaynor. Photo: ROSS PARRY AGENCY

So in truth, little Kai Purdy was anything but a normal healthy baby boy.

Dakota Voice effectively lied by omitting these facts and the Telegraph wasn't entirely honest either.

It appears that he does have Edwards Syndrome (aka Trisomy 18) and his heart was abnormal. The little fella is a fighter though and everyone at Abusing the News wishes him well. This is a great story of survival against the odds and one where the right choice was made.

However, consider this sobering evidence from Wikipedia (backed up from other sources):

"The survival rate of Edwards Syndrome is very low. About 95% die in utero. Of liveborn infants, only 50% live to 2 months, and only 5–10% will survive their first year of life. Major causes of death include apnea and heart abnormalities. It is impossible to predict the exact prognosis of an Edwards Syndrome child during pregnancy or the neonatal period. Because major medical interventions are routinely withheld from these children, it is difficult to determine what the survival rate or prognosis would be with aggressive medical treatment. The median life span is five to fifteen days. One percent of children born with this syndrome live to age ten, typically in cases of the less severe mosaic Edwards syndrome."

Of course, this won't rain on Pro-Life's parade. They'll just happy that Kai was born.

Had things been different, and the evidence is strongly in favour of that being the case, this child would have died before being born or very shortly afterwards.

The medical advice given to the Mr and Mrs Purdy was, statistically and rationally, entirely correct. Kai isn't a miracle (because that suggests supernatural intervention) he's just 1 in a 100. The other 99 children born with this condition will either be dead already or suffer agonising deaths during their very short lives.

They made an informed decision and it paid off.

This is the nature of choice that Conservative America, the Catholic church and all the pro-lifers around the world don't get.

Pro choice doesn't mean "abort every faulty foetus" it simply means give women the right to make a informed decision about what happens to their children. No one held a gun to Mrs Purdy's head, they just gave her the evidence and she made the decision. The right one.

Regarding the other 99 other times the Telegraph won't report will be a rather different story.