National Right to Life posted a wonderful, poignant, and likable defense of life today, and you can breathe a sigh of relief: it works, beautifully. Not only is it relevant and lighthearted while delivering an important message, it does so without trying too hard.
And — they did it in the heart of where the Internet lives these days: BuzzFeed.
The list of 16 milestones in an unborn baby’s life begins with the miracle of life and ends with birth, using as its messengers a lineup of Hollywood, reality t.v., cartoon, and other “cultural icons” (Honey BooBoo?).
The list includes:
1. At the moment of conception, you had a unique set of DNA that never previously existed in the history of the world. YOLO.
2. Your hair and eye color and facial features were also determined.
3. By 22 days after conception, your heart was already beating and for some, with a different blood type than their mother.
4. At 6 weeks after conception, you had detectable brain waves.
5. By 7 weeks, you were swimming.
6. By 8 weeks, every major organ was in place.
7. By 10 weeks, you could hiccup.
No, seriously.
8. By 12 weeks, you could suck your thumb.
9. And you looked like this.
10. By 15 weeks, you developed taste buds.
For real. You had developed adult taste buds.
11. By 17 weeks, you could experience REM sleep.
12. By 20 weeks, you could feel pain.
13. Over the next few weeks, your mother felt an increase in your movements.
14. If born premature at this stage, you could survive.
15. In months 7-9, you could open and close your eyes.
16. Then at 9 months, you were born. (Obvs)
Happy Birthday!
They didn’t post the “meme” in the heart of friendly territory, they went to heart of the battle. BuzzFeed’s pages often teem with pop culture fluff and the ever-popular cat videos, but their captive audience is one we cannot cede. Through the “BuzzFeed Community,” anyone who signs up to be a contributor can post content.
…Which didn’t exactly sit well with a certain writer at The Guardian, who penned a now much-ridiculed piece detailing her shock that BuzzFeed would allow such content in its “community” section — a section created specifically to allow members of the community to post what interests them.
The Guardian’s Fruzsina Eordogh wrote of her consternation over today’s piece and an earlier one posted about Planned Parenthood, fuming that BuzzFeed “won’t even admit any wrongdoing” and hadn’t offered an “apology for offending and confusing its current readership.” It’s quite entertaining to read Eordogh’s encounter with a viewpoint other than her own, I recommend it. A commenter on Eordogh’s post summed it up:
So the internet’s biggest procrastination tool should apologise because it runs an open platform where someone published something you don’t agree with? Not inciting violence, or promoting racist groups, not terrorist-linked, just “not what I think”.
The anti-family planning brigade are ridiculous, but so is the premise that “someone on the internet is wrong and so someone must apologise to me”.
As for the National Right to Life’s post, already people like Jonah Goldberg are noticing, applauding the “pro-life insurgency” on his twitter account.
RTL hit it out of the park. Reactions like Eordogh’s show how unprepared they are for any challenge to their way of thinking.
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Comments
At 1,352 weeks you are still living at home with mom and dad.
lol
You are a piece o’ work, son. Keep it up.
Not clear about this post. Does displaying #1 of this list means Legal Insurrection takes its lead from the catholic church’s scripturally unsupported stance on contraception?
Last I checked, the Bible doesn’t talk about DNA.
Last I checked, The Bible was written before Watson and Crick discovered the DNA structure.
Although to be perfectly fair to the Bible, it does talk about the Curve taken from Adam, which many translate as a rib, but could very well be the curve of a DNA helix!
“21 So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs[g] and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 ”
Genesis 2:21
The Bible is not written in English. The word “Tzela” can also be translated as “side”. In fact, the two major rabbinical opinions are that it was a tail (some people are still born with one), or that Adam was originally male and female (as indicated in Gen 5) and was split in two.
So basically Eve was cloned. God certainly knew about DNA; he created it. 🙂
not sure how quoting something written by someone else and posted elsewhere became a what does LI support item.
What a loaded comment! As a former embryo, I’m glad to see #1 leading the list.
Go dmacleo!
Jeremiah wrote that God knew him before he knit him together in his mother’s womb. Written thousands of years ago the inspired writer pointed to the dignity, intimacy and charity that should be accorded each human life.
Project your nihilism much, Aucturian?
Apparently you need to take some remedial science classes.
Likeabiity is crucial. I have a friend who is all upset about the Texas law that got passed recently, after a filibuster. She’s thinking that all of these clinics have stopped, just because a law got passed. She’s a non-lawyer, so she’s fallen for whatever the hell NPR has been saying about its immediate, draconian effects, a result that could only be explained if the people at NPR believe that nobody knows how to file for an injunction pending appeal.
Oh, and the right-wing nutbars are as bad as the Taliban, because they are engaging in social engineering. My comment that such a statement is slander, and not likely to persuade people who see themselves as saving the lives of real children, was not well received.
The thing is, this is a woman who fought like a tiger to get treatment for her own son, who was born with neuroblastoma, both to save him and then to pull the plug because the treatments didn’t work.
My friend and I agree that certain crucial family decisions must be placed with the person who has the responsibility, not the state or US government.
People who support National Right To Life sometimes forget that life itself sometimes forces horrible decisions on innocent and loving people, and that our laws, if they are to be just, must not make things worse. However, as far as I am concerned, NRTL is welcome to use persuasion.
The decision should remain with the individual but those who disagree must be forced to pay for that decision with confiscatory taxes? IOW, it’s my decision, but you have to pay for it?
Interesting point of view.
Last I checked, he who has the gold makes the rules. If you want someone else to pay for your decisions, you must live with the consequences of the terms they place on that decision.
“Crucial family decisions?” In some societies, a man may douse his daughter with gasoline and torch her. In America, we hire a Gosnell to jar the kid before she can scream. Live and let die.
It’s nice to see NRTL having an effect.
You don’t have to go to Islam. The Romans (see Tacitus, “On the Jews”) though the Jews were nuts for “considering it a crime to kill a child”.
I’m pretty sure it’d be most helpful to center this discussion around current practices, not ancient history.
Groningen protocol anybody? Or how about infanticide advocacy with “post birth abortion” in a scientific journal? All the old evils are coming back. It’s like fashion.
Your friend is remarking on an exceptional (i.e. rare) case. Surely she does not support normalizing elective abortion of a developing human life based on this premise. That’s equivalent to supporting the principle of guilty until proven innocent, or labeling and exploiting all people of a certain class as prejudiced or racist.
As for NRTL, their post describes the evolution of a human life from conception to birth. It does not remark on the abortion/choice and life issue. Although, it does, apparently, reveal a previously unknown or poorly understood process which causes some people discomfort. Where is the controversy?
So you believe, like the Romans, that people have the right to murder their children? Arguably (depending on what “pulling the plug” technically means) this is what your friend did, or rather forced some poor medical technician to do so.
So when your kids get tired of looking after you, because you’re old and crusty and generally inconvenient, they should be able to order you killed?
The leftist baby-killers reveal their guilt through their response to the illustration of the 16 milestones. The vignette says nothing about abortion, yet the baby-killers jump right to a defensive mode because these milestones illustrate that they are wrong about an unborn just being a wad of inert tissue and their support of killing them is a haunting spectre of the inherent evil of abortion.
This post is about the evolution of a human life from conception to birth. It is not about abortion or choice. Why does discussion of the biological development of a human life trigger convulsions? This information is neither controversial nor novel.
A human life, “Obama”, evolves from conception to death. I wonder how many people support the right to murder “Obama” without cause or due process, especially before he/she acquires a voice to protest, and arms to challenge, their premature termination.
The anti-family planning brigade are ridiculous
Wow. Is that the perception some people have of human life. That it is disposable for purposes of planning, including: money, career, and convenience? Do they concede they are incapable of self-moderating, responsible behavior, and voluntarily relinquish their liberty? It must be disconcerting to lose control of your primitive urges.
Anti-family planning brigade was used for two purposes, first it’s a nice euphemism for murder, makes it sound so responsible, and second, it makes it sound like everyone who is pro-life is anti all birth control options, and therefore a nutcase. He was called out for it in later comments.
I have become very familiar with their semantic games, euphemisms, emotional appeals, and the rest. It is challenging to confront impromptu, but the veil of selective nonsense can be pierced.
To me, “family planning” means “the right to choose when (or if) to have a family”. Not “the right to kill inconvenient family members once they’re already in existence”.
[…] Someone on Buzzfeed does speak truth to the power and the Guardian’s Fruzsina Eordogh won’t have any of that nonsense. Legal Insurrection is on it like a hobo on a ham sandwich. […]
Whatever your view of the issue, the assertion by the pro-abortion side that the issue is “a woman’s right to do with her body as she wants,” begs the question, and yes, I know what “begs the question” means.
If the sex is consensual then the woman has made a choice as to what to do with her body. The question is then what the consequences of that free choice should be.
This observation does not dictate one position or another on the issue, but I think it clarifies what the issue actually is. This is, by the way, one reason I disagree with the absolutist anti-abortion side, although I respect their position. In cases of rape or incest the woman has not made a free choice and her right to control her body then is worth considering.
By the way, folks, if you’d like to see a textbook example of “discombobulation,” where if you do it face to face you can almost see the “Does Not Compute!” light go on behind the eyes, tell a progressive, especially a feminist, the following: “Public opinion polls show consistently that a large majority of American women do *not* support abortion on demand.”
It happens to be true.I spent an evening looking at this and I found one poll that showed about a quarter of women supporting abortion on demand. All the other polls show smaller support numbers for third trimester abortion; I doubt that eighth month support would be any higher.
This doesn’t ipso facto mean that the “on demand” people are right or wrong. But they claim moral authority because they represent women generally, and they don’t.
And you can recite this to as many progressives and feminists and I can predict no one will will respond, “I’ve checked your assertion and its true. You’re right.” They won’t because they can’t; contradictory information simply isn’t considered.
You have to be careful with this reasoning, specifically involuntary and superior exploitation. It is this argument which permitted them to specify an arbitrary moment of viability. The premise is that if a woman deems the developing human life to be inconvenient, for effectively any reason, that she may terminate it. Their reasoning, ostensibly, is that once a human life can exist outside its mother’s womb, that it can be extracted and survive with minimal intervention. This of course denies the nature of the developing life and its wholly innocent status.
If your argument is principle based, then every exception leaves you vulnerable to criticism.
I like what National Right to Life has done. The visceral response to a description of human evolution from conception to birth that they have evoked serves to expose the unprincipled motives of their opponents. Their opponents do not value human life equally, before or after birth. They do not recognize an intrinsic value, but a commodity (i.e. earned) value of human life. They need to make better choices. They do not have the right to devalue human life.
Do you support releasing man from child support obligations if he was tricked into having a baby?
No. Last I checked, condoms are the cheapest method of birth control out there. I do feel bad for the kid. Having an idiot for a father can make life difficult.
Tricked? How? Last I heard, it takes two to tango. And then there’s that old saying – Never Assume!
Oooh, I hate it when women tell men “no, this isn’t my vagina” but it really is. That’s just SNEAKY, and taking advantage of men’s intrinsic gullibility.
There’s another way to read that sequence of events and it’s completely godless..
And so what? Atheists are pro-murder?
Excellent. I went over and clicked the ‘Win’ button. This kind of efforts needs to be seriously highlighted. A sense of humor – so much better for persuasion! We over do the outrage.
Effective use of this kind of stuff is like riding a bike – a bit more effort than walking, but once you get good at it, so much faster at getting you to your destination.
The hard thinking about first principles, carefully reasoned analysis, etc., isn’t replaced by this, and vice-versa.
Both are needed to persuade!
#3 mentions the possibility of a different blood type, but could have noted that the gender is different from the mother’s about half the time. Both facts go to the point of whether it’s a question of a woman’s control over HER body, or someone else’s.
I like the NRL article in Buzzfeed. We certainly need more of this type of media invasion.
Knowing the article’s truth, there are thousands in this country who abort (kill) the unborn with chemical weapons every day. What about the unborn’s human rights?
Knowing this, ironically, now the U.S. wants to intervene (bomb) Syria over Assad’s use of chemical weapons to kill his own people? This is messed up.
I am still cringing over a statement made by a co-worker when we were discussing abortion. Knowing she had a little boy, I asked, “What if ______ had been aborted?” Her answer? “I would never have known him, non-issue.” I walked away, speechless.
National Right to Life gets a grand slam for this one. Have people in favor of ending the life of an unborn child ever compared the child to the slave living in this country till Lincoln fought to allow them to be recognized as a free human beings? We need all of our unborn to be free of the executioner. At 6 weeks after conception, they have detectable brain waves. Can they dream? Do they have a dream? I´m sure they do! If the “Mother” wanted a choice she passed it up when the sperm and the egg got together inside her. Yes, it was a miracle, the start of a new human life. The miracle was not how the sperm and egg got together. Unfortunately too many honeymoons are happening daily before the wedding, if there is one. Why do animals take more time selecting a mate than many human beings. Makes me wonder if they may have the upper-hand even though we should know better…