Is partial-birth abortion gruesome?

Media Matters (a joke of an organization if there ever was one) is mad that a Newsweek reporter is using "gruesome" to describe partial birth abortions in this article. They call using the word "gruesome" to describe the gruesome killing of children as "Republican terminology."

They think that Newsweek should use the term "intact dilation and extraction" or "so-called partial birth abortion." For one, not a large percentage of the population knows that "intact dilation and extraction" is partial birth abortion. You ask someone on the street what intact dilation and extraction is and you'll get a funny look and a wrong answer but if you ask them if they know what partial-birth abortion is you'll get probably get an affirmative response. Second, how can it be "so-called" partial birth abortion. Aren't we talking about an abortion procedure where the child is partially born? Is that description somehow inaccurate?

Interestingly, abortion "rights" supporters have used similar words to describe this gruesome procedure. Frances Kissling, longtime president of Catholics for a Free Choice says that "all methods of abortion along this continuum (after 15 weeks) are grim, as frankly are all late-term abortion procedures" here. She continues by saying, "there is nothing aesthetically attractive about the abortion of fully formed, relatively well-developed fetuses" and "gruesome nature of late term abortion procedures."

This web site provides quotes from other pro-choice sources that mimic Kissling like, " "You're looking between the woman's legs; you're seeing, you know, what the doctor's doing. And it's what a lot of people would call kind of, I guess, gruesome- that's not really the word because- it's identifiable. I mean, when he...takes the forceps and pulls out a foot, you can see the foot, and my reaction- because I feel so strongly that women who want to have a twenty week abortion should be able to have that- but I mean when I look and was just like, you know, my first reaction was, you know, I was pretty horrified."

Or Atul Gawande in Slate saying "If partial-birth abortion is too gruesome to allow, however, it is hard to see how other late abortions, especially D and Es, are any different."

Late-term abortions are gruesome. Using the word "gruesome" to describe an obviously gruesome procedure is not bias, it is accurate reporting.

Read the Newsweek article - it includes this quote, "When Ellen Malcolm, president of the pro-choice political network EMILY's List, asked about the future direction of the party, Kerry tackled one of the Democrats' core tenets: abortion rights. He told the group they needed new ways to make people understand they didn't like abortion. Democrats also needed to welcome more pro-life candidates into the party, he said. "There was a gasp in the room," says Nancy Keenan, the new president of NARAL Pro-Choice America."

Kerry has more guts than I thought. Can you imagine the "I could just kill you eyes" of Malcolm, Keenan, and any other leader of a pro-abortion organization in the room?



Gives me the chills. Ehh.