{"id":7599,"date":"2004-03-30T10:47:29","date_gmt":"2004-03-30T10:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/face_the_fetus.html"},"modified":"2004-03-30T10:47:29","modified_gmt":"2004-03-30T10:47:29","slug":"face_the_fetus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/face_the_fetus.html","title":{"rendered":"Face the Fetus"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Slate, Will Saletan says that abortion-rights advocates need to face reality<\/a><\/p>\n

Each time pro-lifers have tried in recent years to treat the embryo or fetus as a person in one context or another, pro-choicers have responded by treating the fetus as a nonentity. When pro-lifers sought to ban human cloning, pro-choicers offered a counterproposal that would require the destruction of every cloned embryo\u2014which they referred to only as “an unfertilized blastocyst” and “the product of nuclear transplantation”\u2014within two weeks of its creation. When pro-lifers sought to make fetuses eligible for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, pro-choicers offered a counterproposal to expand the program’s eligibility guidelines “as if any reference to targeted low-income children were a reference to targeted low-income pregnant women.” The pro-choice alternative made no reference to the gestated entity until it was “born.”<\/p>\n

It’s a strategy of denial. And this week, it ran into too much reality.<\/p>\n

On the Senate floor, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, displayed a devastating series of pictures of murdered women accompanied by the viable fetuses who died with them. “The question is simple,” Brownback told his colleagues. “Do we have one victim or two involved in violent crimes such as these?” In one case, Brownback pleaded, “Look at this photo again of Christina and Ashley in the coffin. Is there one victim? Or are there two?” In another case, Brownback noted that the woman survived, but the fetus died. “Any congressman who votes for the ‘one-victim’ amendment is really saying that nobody died that night,” said Brownback, referring to the Feinstein alternative. “And that is a lie.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Slate, Will Saletan says that abortion-rights advocates need to face reality Each time pro-lifers have tried in recent years to treat the embryo or fetus as a person in one context or another, pro-choicers have responded by treating the fetus as a nonentity. When pro-lifers sought to ban human cloning, pro-choicers offered a counterproposal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFace the Fetus - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/face_the_fetus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Face the Fetus - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In Slate, Will Saletan says that abortion-rights advocates need to face reality Each time pro-lifers have tried in recent years to treat the embryo or fetus as a person in one context or another, pro-choicers have responded by treating the fetus as a nonentity. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}