Fetus dolls create a stir for parade

[Algorem]

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1151051462314270.xml&coll=2

Friday, June 23, 2006
V. David Sartin
Plain Dealer Reporter

Parma- There's no place for fetus dolls in the July 4 parade, organizers say.

The Parma Jaycees want to stop the Ohio Right to Life Society from walking along the parade route to give children a doll resembling a 12-week fetus.

The Jaycees' action follows complaints about people distributing the dolls to parade watchers at Christmas in Parma and Memorial Day in Seven Hills.

"We don't have any kind of political stance on abortion," said Neil Lozar, a Jaycees vice president and parade committee chairman. "We just want our event to go off without a hitch and be enjoyable to everyone."...


Article published Thursday, June 22, 2006

The abortion strategy

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060622/OPINION02/606220336


...the depths the General Assembly sank to recently for political mileage is shameful.

The House Health Committee held a hearing on a bill to ban abortion in Ohio under virtually all circumstances. The purpose was not so much to debate its merits but to put on a spectacle for the public on a subject that motivates single-issue voters who lean Republican.

The goal was to raise the temperature of abortion opponents and coax conservative clerics to rally for redemption in the political arena. It was a rousing success...

But it was all for show in an election year when voter turnout is critical, especially for the party struggling to maintain control...



Death Before Dishonor
Is Ohio's Proposed Abortion Ban About Life, Or Sex?

http://www.freetimes.com/story/331

By Frank Lewis

Merck knew there could be trouble when the FDA approved Gardisil, its new vaccine targeting the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer. According to the Dallas Morning News, the drug maker worked quietly for months to placate conservatives who appeared to be gearing up to fight the approval, on the grounds that inoculating adolescents against a sexually transmitted virus could send the wrong message and inspire fits of lust and wanton premarital relations.

By the time the vaccine was approved last week, most conservative groups had opted not to fight it, focusing instead on insisting that vaccination not be mandatory for school enrollment. Apparently they'd calculated the fallout vs. the odds of success of waging a "virginity or death" campaign, and fell back to a more defensible position: risking only their own children's lives. For now, anyway. As the Morning News article noted: "Many public health experts believe deliberation over the vaccine is a kind of dress rehearsal for any future immunization against another sexually transmitted virus — HIV, the cause of AIDS."

Dr. Hal Wallis of the conservative Physicians Consortium, summed it up neatly: "Why is so difficult? It's because it's about sexuality."

Not life. Sexuality...

[BOSSHOG]

1. The pro-life warmongers could fall back on

displaying decapitated bodies of blood soaked Soldiers; and other body parts of our troops that they so truly support. That would be just incredibly and conservatively patriotic.

[sinkingfeeling]

2. Those would be a health hazard for children...they could swallow them

since a 12-week embryo is only from 3.0 to 5.0 mm. To see, what a correctly looking 'doll' would look like go here: http://www.visembryo.com/baby/stage12.html

[Warpy]

4. Right, they never show the reality

especially the reality of the 3-6 week fetus that is within the usual range for a surgical or pharmaceutical abortion. Those don't look human at all, and the 12 week fetus barely does, if you really stretch things a lot and have found the Virgin Mary in the mildew on your shower curtain.

What they're showing are 3 month old infants, sentimentalizing a "life" that is incapable of pain, let alone thought, into a fully formed human infant outside the womb.

But then, these Christians have never shrunk from lying to try to put women back into the hands of butchers, have they?

[HockeyMom]

8. I saw my sonogram of my 5 week old ectopic pregnancy

after it had ruptured. I saw no EMBRYO. As a couple of "good, christian(?)" doctors joked, it took them 20 minutes to find my bladder in all the mess.

Get a HS Biology book and compare the size of a embryo to an adult bladder.

By the way, it doesn't become a fetus until the 8th week. I think these Fundies purposely call all early stages of pregnancy a fetus to conjure up images of a fully formed full term baby. You are right in that in the very early stages you cannot tell a human embryo from a chicken embryo from a pig embryo. Of course, they don't want anybody to know that, do they?

[Warpy]

9. The fundies I know call a fertilized, unimplanted ovum a BABY

That's how totally nuts and ignorant of the whole process they are.

It would be sad and funny if they weren't so damned dangerous.

[Nobody]

10. Have some fried chicken

"But...but...but... This is egg drop soup!"

If an ovum is a baby, then egg drop soup is fried chicken.

[xchrom]

3. dr hal wallis wants control of your genitals.

your genitals present a threat to him and his world -- which is everything in his mind.

people who have joy in their bodies and express it are one of the most frightening aspects this man can imagine.

[sinkingfeeling]

5. Look, I found a picture of one of these things....

http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/2001_2/11_29/news_upfront3.html

[fasttense]

6. The clothes I guess aren't on real fetuses.

Hmm, when my children were born, they didn't have hats and diapers on. I guess they got reabsorbed in the womb. :sarcasm:

We should hand out dolls of starving and abandoned children.

[Kerrytravelers]

7. How biologically incorrect.

Fetus' in utero wear diapers and a hot/ And why is the umbilical cord going toward it's face and not where it's belly button should one day be?

And I suppose the mother is in perfect health and has no reason to have an abortion. I suppose the mother has made her own choice regarding her reproductive health.

:crazy:

[ForeverWinter]

11. Body Worlds 2

I had to attend this exhibit for school, but I didn't enjoy it much. I liked the increased knowledge of anatomy it help me acheive, but felt that the use of human remains for purely artistic purposes was a bit gratuitous at times.
BUT, if I were unfortunate enough to have any "pro-life" friends these days, I'd pay for every single one of them to attend, because after looking at a week-by-week progress of development of REAL embyros/fetuses, from an unbiased source, nobody could countinue the delusion that in the early to middle stages these are "babies" we're talking about. They're white and have tails and no room for a brain and are the size of small insects. It's a strong, informative dose of reality.