tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-248007342024-03-13T04:55:49.575-04:00BIG BLUE WAVEUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger8000125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-34811668912179807932018-06-11T12:34:00.004-04:002018-06-11T12:34:52.329-04:00The Status of the Unborn in 18th Century France<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfvQ9VW419PYTK7UmMgN278Fxq3Mbzj7RN6GE3_08nFA_wx1RMIatXqmhCxsIevt2SKgLyNraMMaQcsXEaOeOUiTqMd40xQhut3nhFEUokRIpAdep141z-36PLMedmOutJeyY/s1600/I-E-2-09a.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="583" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfvQ9VW419PYTK7UmMgN278Fxq3Mbzj7RN6GE3_08nFA_wx1RMIatXqmhCxsIevt2SKgLyNraMMaQcsXEaOeOUiTqMd40xQhut3nhFEUokRIpAdep141z-36PLMedmOutJeyY/s400/I-E-2-09a.jpg" width="273" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Anatomie des parties de la génértion de l’homme <br />et de la femme</i> by Jacques Fabien Gautier D'Agoty</td></tr>
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<br />I am researching the evolution of attitudes towards the unborn in order to understand how changing attitudes towards them led to the loosening of abortion laws in France and other parts of the world. Catholic
France in the 18<sup>th</sup> century had much more to say about the unborn
than 18<sup>th</sup> century Protestant England. The French were not only
concerned with the unborn because of abortion; they were concerned about the
unborn because of the desire to baptize all babies, and because of issues of
succession. An unborn baby could inherit under specific circumstances, and the
mother stood to benefit from the child’s inheritance.</div>
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Before I delve into the nature moral status of the unborn,
it is important to clarify some issues regards what the people knew about
embryology. There was quite a bit of confusion on the matter. There were those
who believed that life began at conception, due to the philosophical
conclusions of 17<sup>th</sup> century writers. But there was no empirical proof
of this. And because there lacked empirical proof that human life began at
conception, there was some doubt about the timing of the animation of the
embryo. The timing of animation was considered when an embryo became a human being. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As cell theory was not developed
until the 1840’s, the 18<sup>th</sup> century scientist who researched
embryology considered the presence of functioning organs as proof of life. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
scientists knew that the conceptus existed before the development of these
organs. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many writers uncertain as to
whether this conceptus constituted a life or not. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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The three main theories of development were ovism, spermatism
and epigenetics. Epigenetics—not to be confused with modern field of
epigenetics—considers that the embryo is not pre-existent, that elements like
the sperm and the egg somehow make it possible for this new entity to acquire
human characteristics. Ovism and spermatism held that the embryo, or its germ,
pre-existed in either the egg or the sperm, respectively, and that the
fertilization process essentially allowed for the unfolding of an entity that
already existed. The fact that the embryo pre-existed did not mean that
scientists held that the embryo was animated. Ensoulment was proven by the
presence of human form. Thus, when researchers or theologians discussed “formed”
or “unformed” embryos, they were discussing whether the embryo was human or
non-human. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This presence of the human form was central to the French
idea of the unborn. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Legally, a</span>n embryo was
considered to be “formed” and thus animated at 40 days past conception [1] because<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> they had an organized body, that is, a head, torso, arms and legs. [2]</span><br />
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Although the unborn were considered to be human beings once they were formed, they were not considered juridical persons. Heavily influenced by
Roman Law, France considered that birth conferred rights [3]. That being said,
even though the unborn, of himself, did not possess rights, he was considered
to possess rights in anticipation of his birth when it was in his interest to have
them. [4]<o:p></o:p><br />
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And it was under this concept of anticipated rights that abortion was criminalized in France. But only those considered after 40 days of conception were considered true homicides;[5]. Those committed before that time were likened to homicide, but not considered a genuine murder. For abortions after formation, both the mother and the
abortionist could be subject to the death penalty. [6]</div>
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France had a peculiar way of prosecuting abortion (not to
say infanticide.) According to an edict of 1556, a woman who was pregnant out
of wedlock was obliged to report her pregnancy to authorities; if she failed to
do so, and her offspring was found dead, she was automatically assumed to be guilty
of child murder, whether the child was viable or not. This assumption of guilt was to compensate
for the difficulty in prosecuting abortion cases. It was assumed that since a
single woman who intended abortion or infanticide would hide her pregnancy, the
remedy was to make sure that she did not hide her pregnancy, in which case she
would be far less likely to abort her children. If she did not declare her
pregnancy, nothing would happen to her if her child were born alive; but if the
child were born dead, she would have to prove her innocence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Laws about abortion were no the only ways in which French
society showed its concern for the unborn. There was a great degree of anxiety
among pious Catholics about making sure all children were baptized, including
miscarried babies and those being birthed who were in danger of death. Great
pains were taken to ensure that these children received the sacrament. For
instance, babies who were in danger of death during labour were baptized by the
midwife or obstetrician; if the head could not be reached, they used a syringe
or sponge to apply the water in the womb. If the mother died in labour, the child was to be extracted, either
naturally or through c-section. If the baby was miscarried, baptism was supposed
to be performed, either absolutely or conditionally.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But these values were held by an informed elite and were not
necessarily shared by the masses. For instance, it was not uncommon for miscarried
babies to be thrown into the privy, unexamined and unbaptized after miscarriage
[7]. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Considering that several guides had
to be written encouraging the baptism of these children, it suggests that the
practice was not commonplace [8]; if it had to be repeatedly said by many
writers that baptism was necessary, it is because the populace was ignorant.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So what we see then is that institutionally, French society was pro-life: the law upheld the humanity of the unborn and criminalized
abortion, but did not consider fetuses to be persons. Medical personnel and the Church promoted the baptism of the unborn and miscarried; but the general population were
not necessarily aware of these points of view. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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NOTES</div>
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[1] Daniel Jousse, <i>Traité de la justice criminelle de France,</i> Volume 4, Paris: 1771, P. 20; Pierre Jean J.G. Guyot, Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence civile, criminelle, canonique et bénéficiale, Volume 4, Paris: 1776, p. 147 in footnote.</div>
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[2] M. La Fosse, "<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=OmBEAAAAcAAJ&dq=avortement&pg=PA718#v=onepage&q&f=false">Avortement</a>," Supplément À L'Encyclopédie Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences, Des Arts Et Des Métiers, Volume 1, Paris, 1776, p. 718.</div>
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[3] Massuet, Pierre. <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=zA5CAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA10#v=onepage&q&f=false"><i>La Science Des Personnes De Cour, D'Epée Et De Robe</i>. </a> Amsterdam: 1752, p. 10. </div>
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[4] D'Aguesseau, "Essai sur l'État des Personnes," Oeuvres, Vol. 5 p. 443. Massuet, p. 10</div>
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[5] D'Aguesseau, p. 447.</div>
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[6] D'Aguesseau, p. 455, 461.</div>
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[7] Jean-Martin Moye, <i><a href="http://moye.chez-alice.fr/bapteme.htm">Du Soin extrême qu'on doit avoir du baptême des enfants dans le cas d'une fausse-couche ou de la mort d'une femme enceinte.</a> </i>Metz<i>, 1764. </i><a href="http://sfessays.blogspot.com/p/since-it-is-article-of-thefaith-that-we.html">Translation in English here.</a></div>
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[8] Jerome Florentini wrote the first major work on this topic in 1658: <i>On Doubtful Men, or On the Baptism of Abortuses;</i> then Francesco Cangiamila wrote his opus <i>Sacred Embryology</i> in 1751 which was <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=NYjsyCTMPk8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">translated into French</a> by Abbé Dinouart in 1762. Bl. Jean-Martin Moye, inspired by this work, wrote his own pamphlet in 1764. Midwives and accoucheurs had to be reminded to baptize the unborn and the miscarried; See for example: Marguerite de la Marche,. I<i><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=T_U2AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">nstruction familiere et utile aux sages-femmes pour bien pratiquer les accouchemens</a></i>. 1710, p.101ff; François-Ange Deleurye, <i><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=p9gxuV1yJe0C&dq=avortement&pg=PA298#v=onepage&q=bapt%C3%AAme&f=false">Traité des accouchemens, en faveur des eleves,</a></i> Paris: 1777, p. 719; Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray, <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=M_zgy6f4pvUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Abbregé de l'art des acchouchemens</a>, Saintes: 1779, page vii and page 89.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-43774114586552602462018-04-13T14:33:00.004-04:002018-04-26T13:42:09.797-04:00The Medicalization of Abortion in 19th Century France<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-im_agf7xsfDdNz9c0uIWuAEg5tg4thb6e-sMYZvcQeh8MY3Dp1s2gw6OKpbQDdWrvzmN7EtE1uRF54WksXyuLzefgv3TKUs12MNBqeUeMVA5dn76hyphenhyphengSmOvk2jlCPDHObbI/s1600/maxresdefault.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1066" data-original-width="1600" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-im_agf7xsfDdNz9c0uIWuAEg5tg4thb6e-sMYZvcQeh8MY3Dp1s2gw6OKpbQDdWrvzmN7EtE1uRF54WksXyuLzefgv3TKUs12MNBqeUeMVA5dn76hyphenhyphengSmOvk2jlCPDHObbI/s640/maxresdefault.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>[For the purposes of this blogpost, I am using a medical definition of “abortion” as the expulsion of a non-viable fetus, as opposed to the Catholic definition (“an attack on the fetus”). This is for the sake of brevity and clarity, and also because this is how 19th century physicians would have defined it.]</i></div>
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In the first half of the 19th century, France was a very conservative country when it came to the unborn. Although abortions were performed for emergency situations, especially to save the mother’s life, these abortions were not officially sanctioned by the Academy of Medicine, the French national medical association.</div>
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This all changed in 1852. At that time, an obstetrician by the name of Lenoir submitted a report to the Academy of Medicine regarding a premature expulsion of a non-viable fetus on a woman whose pelvic diameter was only 5 centimetres, which was too narrow to allow for natural childbirth at term. (I blogged about this case here. http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2016/12/the-launch-of-abortion-debate-in-france.html#more) He wanted the Academy members to discuss his paper at the society’s weekly meetings with the goal of officially legitimizing this procedure so that other physicians would have no hesitation in performing the same operation when faced with the same dilemma.</div>
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This represented the first time that any major medical body in France was willing to confront the abortion issue. It had been talked about here and there in the medical press, but not really debated. Abortion up until that time had been treated as either a sin or a crime. Now what the Academy of Medicine was being asked was to legitimize abortion as a medical operation.</div>
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The Academy of Medicine appointed a committee to study Lenoir’s paper and come back with findings and arguments. The committee’s rapporteur or spokesperson was an obstetrician by the name of Paulin Cazeaux. He and another member had also performed a premature delivery on the same patient. So, they were rather favorable to its acceptance. But in reporting in findings, he knew that he had to confront the religious arguments on abortion.</div>
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On the religious front, Cazeaux took an anti-clerical tone and said that the Bible essentially validated killing in many instances, so the commandment against killing was not meant to be universal. He also dismissed the objection that no harm should be done to bring about good. Again, in his anti-clerical tone, he said that since the Church had conducted the Crusades and had approved of them, it was perfectly okay to do harm to bring out good. Of course, his reasoning was fallacious, but it did not encounter a lot of resistance.</div>
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The most interesting part to me about his presentation was how he justified abortion in a situation where the mother’s life is at stake. To an activist such as myself, who has read many, many justifications for abortion, this was rather novel to me. He began by asserting the intrinsic value of the unborn, stating that there was no difference between a child of two months and a newborn. And he freely admitted that abortion is killing. But he said, a woman who is in a life-threatening pregnancy where both she and her child cannot be saved is facing an aggressor: the unborn may be a non-culpable aggressor, but he threatens the mother nonetheless. The mother would be justified in killing this child on that basis; and since the mother would be justified in killing him, it follows that the physician would be justified in killing him, too.</div>
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But then why save the mother and not the child? A C-section could theoretically save the baby at the expense of the mother (although it was a really horrible operation in the 19th century). And the answer is the interesting twist in his argumentation. Although the unborn and the woman possess both equal intrinsic value, they do not possess equal social value. Unborn children who are saved are a drain on society; they require sacrifices from those around them, and half of them don’t live to age thirty, the age at which Cazeaux assumes adults begin to repay society for the sacrifices made on their behalf. Whereas the mother is already an adult, and her contributions to society are immediate. So, for the greater good of society, the mother had to be saved and the child sacrificed.</div>
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Once Cazeaux had made his moral argument, he could then proceed to show that it produced a superior medical outcome. Abortions had been practiced in medical settings and shown to be relatively free of complication-- although the evidence was anecdotal—no statistics existed at that time. There were statistics on the survival rate of women undergoing C-sections and they were fairly bleak: only 30 per cent of women survived the procedure. Embryotomies—where one dismembers the baby at term—could be done with pelvic diameters of 6 or 7 cm, but not 5 because the passage was too small to extract the tissue and if any bone fragments were left in the uterus, it could cause the woman a fatal infection. (Note, embryotomies were <i>ideally </i>performed after the baby died in utero because of prolonged labour, but it wasn’t <i>necessarily </i>the case.) Premature expulsion seemed to offer the safest course for women. </div>
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Now most pro-lifers of today would not condemn nineteenth century physicians for opting for premature expulsion for a life-threatening situation. But we have the benefit of hindsight. There was no attempt to apply the theory of double effect in the nineteenth century. Many faithful Catholics of that time objected to this acceptance of abortion in that context. The one man who raised his voice against abortion in this debate—an obstetrician named Bégin-- thought that expectant management should be applied and try to look for opportunities to deliver the child, perhaps hoping that the pelvic bones expand enough to allow a baby to be born prematurely but alive. But to his audience, he seemed to be grasping at straws. He did not appear to have a good medical argument against premature expulsion.</div>
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So, what did this medicalization mean for us? Although it was legitimate to attempt to deal with the serious problem of a very narrow pelvis, the acceptance of abortion as a default medical strategy had important repercussions on the status of the unborn. Abortion after 1852 was no longer ONLY a sin or a crime. It was now a legitimate medical procedure in France. And as a medical procedure, its widespread legalization was made plausible. Does that mean that they should not have accepted premature expulsion in extreme cases? No. It appears that premature expulsion in this situation does meet with the criteria of the theory of double effect. But once it was accepted in that case, it began to be eyed for other causes. And of course, seeing as it was now an official medical operation, it could be invoked for other reasons, for the greater good of course. For instance, during World War I, there were mass rapes of French women by German soldiers. It was decided that the law on abortion would not be enforced so that French women would not have to give birth to German "bastards."</div>
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But I think as abortion became an acceptable procedure to solve medical issues (and I’m speculating here as I have not done the research) I think it was only inevitable that the moral status of the unborn would diminish. It was too convenient to do so. France continued to criminalize abortion for many decades, but its preoccupations were more demographic than moral. Once those concerns abated after the Baby Boom, there did not seem like a good reason to continue to criminalize it. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-67405453177754692732017-12-14T14:02:00.002-05:002017-12-14T14:03:51.825-05:00Blessed Jean-Martin Moye: Advocate for the Unborn<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Moye"><br /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Moye">Blessed Jean-Martin Moye</a> (1730-1793) is remembered by the Church as the founder of the Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence. As a missionary in China, he organized the first group of Chinese religious sisters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">But this figure also had a stint as an advocate of the unborn. In 1764, while he was a priest in Metz, France, he published a pamphlet entitled<a href="http://sfessays.blogspot.ca/p/since-it-is-article-of-thefaith-that-we.html"> <i>On the Extreme Care That We Must Have For the Baptism of Children in the Case of Miscarriage or in the Death of a Pregnant Woman.</i></a><i> </i>(I translated it-- please read it!) He was mostly likely inspired by Francisca Cangiamila’s book <i>Sacred Embryology</i>, which addresses this very topic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">As the title suggests, Moye was trying to encourage people to baptize the babies of dead, pregnant women, as well as miscarried babies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">Regarding when the body is animated with the soul, he cites a number of possibilities: 40 days, 30 days, and even conception (which is a belief that can be traced back to the 17<sup>th</sup> century.) But he says that the most competent physicians state that animation begins at 20 days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">He does not explain why they think animation happens at 20 days. But I have a theory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">Before the age of cell theory, life was defined, biologically, according to whether an entity had functioning organs. It only makes sense: <i>organisms</i> have <i>organs</i>. The heart is the first organ to develop. In humans, it starts working at about three weeks or 21 days. The presence of a functioning heart would indicate the presence of a human soul. This is perhaps why physicians believe animation occurred at 20 days.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">Even though this pamphlet corresponds to Catholic teaching, Father Moye <a href="http://nouvl.evangelisation.free.fr/jean_martin_moye.htm">was demoted by his bishop for publishing</a> it. His enemies complained to his bishop about unfair comments about midwives and clergy in the pamphlet. For this, and other “transgressions”, he was appointed vicar of Dieuze, a fairly isolated village, away from the action in Metz. He was, in effect, penalized for his zeal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.12px;">What I find interesting about this person is that he is an example of a saint who took seriously the idea that the unborn are human beings before their birth. Institutionally, this was of course the Church’s official stance. But judging from the need to write about this topic, it does not seem that, on the ground, priests routinely baptized the miscarried, or encouraged the faithful to do so. If they had done that, there would be no need to write a pamphlet encouraging the practice.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-79434313539103272982017-11-30T22:51:00.001-05:002022-08-30T00:44:26.154-04:00An 18th Century Poem On Miscarriage<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD7AAV7F6AyEmhS22Mr-2bHz-6uupz5w3LyjcC8_F7JegqmLkv7sW2Qai_URa_f2tGrhHh8LFuBjybzCXRK0YGEVqkHbekKoDAMFdb1OCSFiBBkIzqWN_Pb4F44Zfr-C5_-jk/s1600/angel-2899333_640.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD7AAV7F6AyEmhS22Mr-2bHz-6uupz5w3LyjcC8_F7JegqmLkv7sW2Qai_URa_f2tGrhHh8LFuBjybzCXRK0YGEVqkHbekKoDAMFdb1OCSFiBBkIzqWN_Pb4F44Zfr-C5_-jk/s400/angel-2899333_640.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
I will follow up the<a href="http://www.bigbluewave.ca/2017/11/18th-century-poem-expresses-abortion.html"> blogpost on the 18th century poem on abortion</a> with the 18th century poem on miscarriage. It was published in the November 1787 issue of <i><a href="https://books.googleusercontent.com/books/content?req=AKW5QaeQHmKYKOAlPoSNm-v51REYKbBYOtBQgyWhcdebtCkxu8NCHWwMq7p4EeobxaxHSzly-MjtlhD2CQv2MCUONDqB_tFiT6U3RYGR1shDsPqkLmzw3F2hydtHmBXwSgQNUXDGAIdtSLXpeuB_HDHL4g1tIZVGxYYL0t-dLEfsewYpQeiy2mQ3PaX81N4Qe6HrupDDiYuHdbiSGOd8Bn3Eg6MpRV9jyijlkF1q4OhmZa8PmTKsqytzHC-03f0vPcwoScZH83Mqurnvo_pid7OaZ2VZLxJXlw">The Gentleman's Magazine</a></i> in London. No author was listed.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><a href="https://books.googleusercontent.com/books/content?req=AKW5QaeQHmKYKOAlPoSNm-v51REYKbBYOtBQgyWhcdebtCkxu8NCHWwMq7p4EeobxaxHSzly-MjtlhD2CQv2MCUONDqB_tFiT6U3RYGR1shDsPqkLmzw3F2hydtHmBXwSgQNUXDGAIdtSLXpeuB_HDHL4g1tIZVGxYYL0t-dLEfsewYpQeiy2mQ3PaX81N4Qe6HrupDDiYuHdbiSGOd8Bn3Eg6MpRV9jyijlkF1q4OhmZa8PmTKsqytzHC-03f0vPcwoScZH83Mqurnvo_pid7OaZ2VZLxJXlw">Lines by a Gentleman, Addressed to his Wife on, her Miscarriage;the Foetus being in Spirits.</a></i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Untimely sever'd
from its mother's womb, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Behold a
foetus in its liquid tomb. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Let those
who beauty, valour, wisdom prize, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
See from
whence beauty, valour, wisdom arise; <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The little
embryo of a future king <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Must grow to
power from so small a thing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Whether to
float in spirits, or to reign, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Depends at
last but on a mother's strain;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Nor does the
wreck of life more beauteous shew, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Dissect a
belle, anatomise a beaux, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The rattling
bones, beside the foetus plac'd, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Those
rattling bones, which erst a ball-room grac'd, -<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The sad
remains of what was call'd divine, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Perhaps descended
from a royal line; <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
If free in
choice, which hadst thou rather been, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This still-born
foetus, or that wretched queen, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To live in
pain, with anxious cares oppress'd <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
By turns
exulting, and by turns distress’d;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The sport of
fortune, or the but of fate,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A slave to folly or a tool of state?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Or say, when
all the ills of life you view, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My dearest
partner, now I turn to you, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Dost thou
not envy this embryo's state, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Deriving pleasure
from his certain fate? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It broke a
fibre from thy womb to part, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But had it
liv'd, it might have broke thy heart. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Let us this
maxim in our minds instil, <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Whatever
Heaven does, cannot be ill.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<a name='more'></a><br /><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
This is an
unusual poem in that it’s written about miscarriage, a taboo topic for the time, possibly more so than abortion. <a href="http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791231/obo-9780199791231-0104.xml">The historiography for miscarriage before the 20th century is rather thin.</a> This is probably because there was a lot of self-censorship in regards to this phenomenon. Women would even refrain from telling their
husbands about their miscarriage, fearing the disappointment and wanting to
keep the pain to themselves. (Obviously the husband would not have even been aware of the pregnancy. It was not unusual for them to be unaware of the pregnancy state for several months.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
The narrator of this poem is male. This makes
the poem even more unusual. Men didn’t really deal with this topic. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
The poem
starts off with the mention of the fetus in “spirits.” The fetus was preserved
in a jar in a liquid but I don’t know they used in the 18<sup>th</sup> century.
This situation would have been unusual but not implausible. Sometimes anatomists
preserved miscarried babies in a jar. The jar is probably in a lab as “rattling
bones” are placed next the jar. They are
supposed to be the bones of a queen. The narrator asks his wife: whom would you
have rather be, this miscarried embryo, or this dead queen? This queen would
have been at times happy and at times distressed, and possibly a “tool of the
state”, i.e. as a pawn of geopolitics she would have had to submit to the logic
of politics.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
The poem ends
with a statement to the effect that this miscarriage might have been all for
the best, if the child had lived he might have broken the mother’s heart, and
what Heaven decrees is best. Thus the
mother is asked to resign herself to the wisdom of Providence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
I don’t
think this poem would actually be very comforting to the mother. It doesn’t seem
to offer any empathy at a woman’s pain for losing her child; the narrator
appeals to the abstract if of submitting oneself to God’s will rather than pine
for what was lost. Of course, there’s no actual proof that the baby would have made
the mother unhappy, so the point is rather moot.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
The poem
does not really speak to the moral status of the unborn. It is recognized that he
died, and that the woman who bore him is his mother. But there’s nothing here
that can really enlighten us on the moral status of the embryo. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-59313365122096482192017-11-27T23:14:00.000-05:002017-11-27T23:19:30.385-05:0018th Century Poem Expresses Abortion Regret<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGxVv8q1ynnCWAZIS3PiXCOxrA-OvAYj4r8p4-xInIZUaDWYPsJqSHpkKWM5mN9O6uhEpNyD8NEiUQfsfst79GO60OJJvJ3vIyMHv0PlL7DLI3FeNjm5HnTgNkyxDxxkIOPm4/s1600/melancholy-paintings-legrenee-w636-h600-high.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="636" height="313" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGxVv8q1ynnCWAZIS3PiXCOxrA-OvAYj4r8p4-xInIZUaDWYPsJqSHpkKWM5mN9O6uhEpNyD8NEiUQfsfst79GO60OJJvJ3vIyMHv0PlL7DLI3FeNjm5HnTgNkyxDxxkIOPm4/s400/melancholy-paintings-legrenee-w636-h600-high.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
The following poem was published in the <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=qUxGAAAAcAAJ&dq=embryo&pg=PA32#v=onepage&q&f=false">January 1740 issue of <i>The Gentleman's Magazine</i></a> in London. No author is listed.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=qUxGAAAAcAAJ&dq=embryo&pg=PA32#v=onepage&q&f=false">E P I T A P H <o:p></o:p></a></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
* <i>On a Child killed by procured Abortion, in order to hide
the Mother's Shame who had been debauched. Supposed to be spoken by the Mother. </i><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Thou! whose eyes were clos'd in death's pale night,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Ere fate reveal’d thee to my aching fight; <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Ambiguous something, by no standard fix’d, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Frail span! of nought, and of existence
mix’d; <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Embryo, imperfect as my tort’ring thought, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Sad outcast of existence and of nought; <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Thou, who to guilty love first ow'st thy frame, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Whom guilty honour kills to hide its shame, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Dire offspring! form'd by love's
too pleasing pow'r! <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Honour's dire victim in a luckless hour!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Soften the pangs that still
revenge thy doom: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Nor, from the dark abyss of nature's womb, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Where back I cast thee, let revolving time <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Call up past scenes to aggravate my crime. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Two adverse tyrants rul’d thy wayward fate, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Thyself a helpless victim to their hate;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Love, in spite of honour's dictates, gave thee breath;<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Honour, in spite of love, pronounc'd thy death.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I have never come across an abortion-related poem written prior to the 20<sup>th</sup>
century. What is doubly amazing is that is expresses abortion regret. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
The first thing that I noticed about this poem is that it is
addressed <i>to a child killed by procured abortion.</i> This suggests that at least some of the people outside of medical, legal and scientific circles knew that abortion killed a human being. That
being said, the status of the embryo is quite ambiguous. Although a poem is
dedicated to this child, he is said to be an “ambiguous something, by no standard fix’d,”
a frail span “of nought and existence mix’d” , an imperfect being who is a sad outcast out of “existence and of
nought.” And yet, in spite of the ambiguous character of the embryo, the mother
pleads to her child “to soften the pangs that still revenge thy doom.” Those
pangs “call up past scenes to aggravate my crime.” I sense a certain gothic sensibility. This
mother is essentially asking for her dead child’s intercession in easing her
pain. It’s vaguely Catholic and what is vaguely Catholic is often vaguely
gothic. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
So what we see here is a mix of recognition of personhood of the fetus and of his nothingness, which to me sums up the embryo’s moral status in this present
age, and I suspect it was much like this in the 1740’s. And what is also noteworthy is that the mother is portrayed as something of a victim.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
And note the biological inconsistency in the poem. The embryo
is definitely considered alive, although imperfect, but he is said to have <i>breath</i>. As you can imagine, the average person did not
have a good grasp of fetal development.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Note that according to Joseph Dellapenna, in his <i>Dispelling the Myth of Abortion History,</i>
abortion before the 19<sup>th</sup> century was rare. It was thought to be so dangerous that attempting it was tantamount to suicide. There were probably women who managed to terminate their pregnancy and live, but these women were not very numerous. Considering that cases of successful abortion were
relatively rare in the 18<sup>th</sup> century, and that it was not a subject discussed
in polite society, I don’t think this poem is primarily a critique of abortion
(although <i>it is that</i>.) This poem
seems to be a critique of 18<sup>th</sup> century ideas about love and honor.
Forbidden love first created the embryo with its “too pleasing pow’r”. (So
unfair!) But then shame forced her to have an abortion in the name of honour. Love
and honour together are “two tyrants” and the embryo is a victim of their hate.
Ultimately then, it was these two tyrants
who murdered the baby-- the overly strict code of morality and the code of honour.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<o:p>
</o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
I find it fascinating how this poem was written in 1740, yet
its themes are very contemporary. The unborn child is both person and nothing,
the mother is a victim, and social conservatism is essentially blamed for this
outcome. This poem tends to show that profound
abortion regret is not the invention of our heavily politicized abortion
debate, but has its roots in the recognition of the humanity of the unborn.<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-5779801728351470462017-11-01T21:05:00.000-04:002017-11-01T21:05:04.943-04:00Early 20th Century: The Fetus was Unknown Because Pregnancy was Censored...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN5iiUqq_KKv5Pv8WtZgnyZz8L4ACgR468la9e9NMVv4A4GgK8L7bG4ds4ap88nd3-AoJAe925AVoXEswrwVWgzjm3fZMAhyphenhyphen3efCBN-pBN8ezCo81KCg5CWBUJj5LWvzbKu4s/s1600/LIFE+Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="929" data-original-width="702" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN5iiUqq_KKv5Pv8WtZgnyZz8L4ACgR468la9e9NMVv4A4GgK8L7bG4ds4ap88nd3-AoJAe925AVoXEswrwVWgzjm3fZMAhyphenhyphen3efCBN-pBN8ezCo81KCg5CWBUJj5LWvzbKu4s/s400/LIFE+Cover.jpg" width="301" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
So I have been busy doing some historical research. I just got back<a href="http://sfessays.blogspot.ca/p/takingon-life-of-its-own-thebirth-of.html"> a paper I wrote on fetal imagery</a>—specifically <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=UVMEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Lennart Nilsson’s photoessay</a> in an April 1965 issue of <i>Life </i>magazine. One thing that I learned that was very surprising to me was the degree to which pregnancy—and by extension the unborn—had little visual presence in the first half of the twentieth century. I was very surprised when I realized the degree to which all things having to do with pregnancy was shrouded in secrecy. Two examples to illustrate:</div>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
1. Maternal clothing catalogues from the 1920s to the 1960s featured models who never looked pregnant, and the clothes were designed to hide the pregnancy. It just was not considered polite to shed light on the result of sexual activity.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
2. In 1938, Life magazine published <a href="https://iconicphotos.org/2010/12/01/the-birth-of-a-baby/">a photo essay featuring a baby being born and cleaned up</a>. The mother’s nudity was completely covered up, but the issue was still banned in 32 cities, and the publisher, Roy Larsen, had to stand trial for this indecency. He was acquitted, and public opinion was generally against such censorship, but it goes to show what a more conservative stream of opinion thought of this, and that it had some legal clout to enforce this point of view.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I can’t imagine that in such a visual and mediatic culture, the unborn were properly known and visualized. I suspect that, for most Americans, they were effectively abstract entities and reified. I think this might explain, to some degree, why Lennart Nilsson’s photos were so popular. They made the unborn seem like living beings.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
If this is the reaction of the general public to the unborn,
then it’s not really surprising that pro-lifers had a hard time selling the
public on their humanity. If the unborn had been conceptualized as equal human
beings with rights, a photo essay about them would probably have been less
sensational. People don't get excited about a photo essay about born humans
because they are familiar and their moral status is not contested. But people
did get excited about a photo essay about the unborn, because they were
unfamiliar, and Nilsson’s photos dispelled a number of myths: (e.g.,that they
were blobs of tissue, part of a woman’s body, that they were inert, indistinct
or amorphous beings until quickening) and that taboo-breaking quality is what
sold the readers on the issue. But it’s precisely because it was taboo-breaking
that it points to how far off the American public was from genuinely
recognizing the humanity of the unborn.<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-68921847349705693492017-09-30T18:43:00.000-04:002017-09-30T18:43:40.337-04:00China to Give Property Rights to Fetuses<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://china.taylorwessing.com/en/book-one-of-the-chinese-civil-code-china-s-general-provisions-of-civil-law-promulgated">A new Civil Code goes into effect October 1, 2017 in China. </a><br />
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In this new civil code, the unborn will, for legal purposes, be counted as born for purposes of succession and gifts. However, there's a catch: they must not be born dead. Still, the Chinese code is a step above the Canadian system.<br />
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In Canada, the unborn must be born first before they can legally recognized for events that occurred before their birth. This is known as the "born-alive rule." This is not the case in China. In China an unborn baby may inherit and would be considered the legal heir throughout the pregnancy, so long as he does not die. If he dies before birth, he loses his legal rights. I suppose this was done to protect the legality of abortion.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-63609484241652384372017-06-28T18:18:00.000-04:002017-06-28T18:18:55.294-04:00VIDEO: Davenport Hooker's Fetal Experiments<div style="text-align: left;">
In the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's anatomist Davenport Hooker filmed a number of fetuses produced from induced and spontaneous abortions to document fetal behaviour. They were aged between 8.5 and 14 weeks (LMP). It represents the first time in history that the unborn were seen on film. They were dying of course, but they were not quite dead when Hooker had them poked and prodded for science. The explanations in the video are little bit tedious, but the images are well worth waiting for (they start at about the three minute mark.) I would not put too much stock in the menstrual age-- it can be unreliable. I was especially struck by the older children, and how bothered they seemed to be by the needle.</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-11906801322672268232017-06-12T12:21:00.001-04:002017-06-12T12:25:04.988-04:00Paolo Zacchia on Abortion and the Unborn in 17th Century Italy<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Paola Zacchia (1584-1659) was a well-respected Roman medical expert. Three times he was named Proto-physician – 1638, 1658 and 1659. He was effectively the “Surgeon-General” of the Holy See, supervising all things medical in the papal states. Between 1621 and 1650 he published his most famous work <i>Quaestiones Medico-Legales</i>, a compendium of medical-legal knowledge, covering a vast array of subjects. It was published in three tomes that in total contained nine books. It as a mammoth work of reference, and as soon as the first book was published in 1621, it was an international best-seller—translated into a number of languages and re-printed in several editions right into the eighteenth century. It has earned him the title of Father of Forensic Medicine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This background information is important to know, because his words would be highly influential on a host of subjects, including abortion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was able to get a copy of a contemporary French translation of Book 6:<i> Questions medico-légales: Des fautes médicales sanctionnées par la loi </i>(2006, edited by Laurent Lauger.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">His views on abortion and the unborn can provide a window into how people thought about abortion and the unborn, especially in an institutional setting. (This should not be taken to represent the thoughts of the general population on these topics.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Under Question 7, he in relation to doctors who prescribe abortive medicine “Nobody is ignorant of how serious that sin is.” He says that Aristotle favored abortion to eliminate excess male children, and Hippocrates performed an abortion on a servant. However, both human and divine laws now prohibited it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nevertheless, he says, there persists a doubt as to whether it is permissible to expel a fetus with medicine to treat a disease, especially a lethal one. As is his wont, he cites the various opinions on this point from numerous writers. One opinion that he addresses at length, is the argument that it is permissible to abort either very early in the pregnancy when the fetus is not animated, or late in the pregnancy when there is a chance for the fetus to survive. He suggests that he would be favorable for an early termination of a pregnancy of a viable fetus, except that the drugs given for abortion are so powerful that they violently act on both mother and child. There is little guarantee it would save the mother. And the later the pregnancy, the stronger the dose required, and the abortion would consequently even more violent. As far as the early fetus is concerned, nothing can really be known about him, and in any case it is thought that he is conceived three days after conception.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For the correct answer on the larger issue of treating a pregnant woman with a serious health issue, he cites the Constitutions of Pope Sixtus V: it is never acceptable to directly provoke abortion, even if the mother is in danger. However it is acceptable to indirectly provoke abortion if it is independent of the physician's will. It is acceptable to provide the medication she needs to treat a disease even if it is known that the treatment could provoke an abortion. The use of dilation, clysters and blood-letting are acceptable. However, these treatments should be administered in such a fashion as to try to save the fetus if possible. In sum, Pope Sixtus V agrees with the theory of double effect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In Question 12, Zacchia enumerates all the types of errors committed by midwives<i>, including errors against the fetus.</i> It is interesting to note that in Zacchia, a baby is called a fetus even when he is born. For instance, in paragraph 7 he says sometimes fetuses who are born are not wanted by their parents, and that midwives sometimes ask the parents if they want their fetuses strangled with their umbilical cord. He says that sometimes women wish to give birth secretly and midwives kill the fetuses at the “entry or the exit (?)” of the uterus. <span lang="FR-CA">(“à l’entrée ou à la sortie” de l’utérus.) These are crimes that must be punished.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The midwife is also said to err against the fetus when they use magic or amulets to speed up delivery. She is also said to sin against the fetus as well as the mother when she does not try to obtain a speedy delivery. The midwife is also guilty is if she is ignorant of true baptism, as the dying fetus risks being excluded from heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">He also says that midwives should be required to swear never to counsel abortion and to provide emergency baptism when necessary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What is interesting about these passages is how the unborn are naturally treated as <i>persons </i>. Killing them is a homicide. Baptism must be provided. Midwives <i>commit errors against them</i> by using magic to speed up delivery. The distinction between fetus and newborn is not made. They are effectively the same thing.<span lang="FR-CA"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I think that Zacchia’s book reinforced the tendency among institutions to view the unborn as human beings. I say “institutions” because the belief that the unborn were not animated until 40 days after conception or until quickening—was still widespread among the populace. The notion that the unborn were animated from the third day (or conception) was only developed in the 1620’s and Zacchiawas a major propagator of this idea. But the latest research did not necessarily reach the people as they mostly lived in an oral culture; and even the literate did not read anything so academic as a medical text.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-59862917715766107452017-06-09T18:21:00.000-04:002017-06-10T13:22:56.633-04:00Pro-Life Victory! Ontario Court Strikes Down Law That Mandates Abortion Stats Censorship<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://run-with-life.blogspot.ca/2017/06/charter-challenge-we-won-cant-hide.html">Way to go Pat Maloney and ARPA Canada for their hard work! </a><br />
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An Ontario Court has struck down the statute that prohibited the public from obtaining abortion stats by access to information requests.<br />
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It's only been two hours since I have received the news, and I have no information as to whether the government will appeal. Indeed, the media has not reported on it yet. I would somewhat surprised if there was nothing about this in the media.<br />
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If this ruling is not appealed, it will allow all Ontarians-- both those for and against abortion to be able to obtain useful information for public discussion.<br />
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Everybody should support this court ruling.<br />
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This opens the door to more detailed access to information requests. Indeed, I think the statute was written in response to Pat's requests. The government wants to keep the situation on abortion a secret.<br />
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Gestational ages, the birth outcomes of late-term abortion victims, i.e. whether they lived or died, these are all salient features about abortion that the public has the right to know.<br />
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I would encourage activists in all provinces and territories to make their own requests. This has been a viable avenue of activism.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-8575763696813522992017-06-01T12:22:00.001-04:002018-03-06T16:39:04.541-05:00Dear Rebel Media: Just Say No to White SupremacyLast night I was really shocked to catch this video on one of my social media feeds:<br />
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[EDITED March 6, 2018-- VIDEO REMOVED BY THE REBEL]<br />
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White <i>genocide</i>???<br />
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I was so shocked when I saw the post, I thought it was a parody. I went to check Faith Goldy's Twitter account. And yep. There it was.<br />
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I watched the video and there were some pretty racist implications there, the main one being that the only good Canadians are white Canadians.<br />
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Yes it's true that immigration creates enclaves. Yes it may be true that whites may become a minority in the future.<br />
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But does that mean there aren't millions of wholesome, decent Canadians of immigrant stock with brown skin? <br />
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Well duh. <br />
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Who cares if Canada isn't going to be "white" in the future? I don't. I don't care about skin colour. The people of darker hue will, in the future, largely assimilate into the mainstream. They will share similar values and lifestyles. So the whole "white genocide" thing is non-sense. Our culture is not going to be "taken" over by immigrants. It will be the same culture-- evolved of course, but the same-- and it will be inhabited by people who just happen to have more melatonin.<br />
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I was really shocked that The Rebel allowed this to be posted. It's one thing to be for free speech. Quite another to spread racism. I don't want to go back to a world where people are judged by the colour of their skin. Content of character is what matters.<br />
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I have three words of advice for The Rebel Media: Don't go there. Just do not go down that rabbit hole.<br />
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Racism is just wrong in itself. And Racism stains everything. It will be the ruin of the causes of free speech, free markets-- and freedom in general. Because racists will always abuse freedom to make their point.<br />
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And it's their right to do so. But we don't have to help them.<br />
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If you are as angry as I am about this video, I would encourage you to email them at <a href="mailto:info@therebel.media">info@therebel.media</a> and tell them what you think. <br />
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And one last word about the racial issue. Considering how whites virtually invented abortion as we know it today, made it state policy, exported it, and at times censored opposition to it, it serves us right that we are being "genocided". Brown people decided to have kids and their children may very well inherit our land. Well good! Blaming immigrants and immigration policy for a situation that is essentially<i> our own fault</i> is really rich.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-76199151739317297202017-05-28T01:28:00.000-04:002017-05-28T01:28:47.497-04:00Pro-Lifers: Don't Get TOO Excited Over an Andrew Scheer Win<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The victory of Andrew Scheer in the Conservative Party Leadership is about the best outcome that pro-lifers could have expected.</div>
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It's not just that he won. But we won with the second- and third-place votes of people like Pierre Lemieux and Brad Trost-- whom I was shocked to see go eleven rounds. (And I was rooting for him!)</div>
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He proved that social conservatives are still an important force in the party.</div>
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We can pat ourselves on the back for our effort to mobilize the vote.</div>
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That being said, there are two realities we must bear in mind about an Andrew Scheer victory.</div>
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First of all, we have to win the 2019 election. And that's no mean feat. I realize that people who are involved in politics tend to think of Trudeau as an intellectual featherweight. He is. He really is.</div>
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But there's a whole swath of the public who vote and don't care that he's featherweight. They voted for him because of his dad, his looks and his pledge to legalize marijuana. Hey, his featherweight status <i>may even be a plus</i>.</div>
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And if he doesn't screw up big time in the next two years-- like if he's not caught murdering kittens-- he may well be elected again. </div>
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I don't wish to downplay Andrew's good qualities. His aw-shucks persona and his great sense of comeback have a lot of appeal. But Canadians tend not to vote in governments until they are thoroughly fed up with the last one. It doesn't matter what party is in power.</div>
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So Conservatives have that steep hill to climb.</div>
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And the second thing to remember about Andrew Scheer is that he won't re-open the abortion debate. He's not going there. I know that there are pro-lifers with high hopes for Andrew Scheer. Their hopes remind me of their hopes for Stephen Harper when he got elected. <i>Stephen Harper isn't really pro-choice</i>, they said to themselves. <i>He's pro-life</i>. They had a lot of hope for the cause of the unborn.</div>
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It was all wishful thinking.</div>
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Andrew Scheer will probably not squelch social conservatives, but he is not going to go out of his way to make them happy either. Just like he did during this race. It's interesting that during the March for Life, he sent a message to be read to the crowd. <i>He didn't even bother showing up!</i> There were 15 000 people there, many of them CPC voters, whom he could have courted, many of whom were following the CLC line of not voting Andrew Scheer. He could have easily wooed them, <i>and he didn't! </i></div>
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I'm not saying he's going to turn into Patrick Brown. He is probably very aware that if he betrays his base the way Patrick Brown, he will get his butt kicked. </div>
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But should he be elected Prime Minister, he is not going out of his way to make us happy. Yes, he will eliminate funding to universities that squelch free speech, he might uphold conscience legislation, and yes, he may even allow a pro-life private members' bill to come to the floor.</div>
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But he, himself, will not initiate pro-life measures.</div>
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I'm not saying pro-lifers shouldn't have voted for him.</div>
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I'm saying: keep your expectations low. Expecting an Andrew Scheer government to pass abortion restrictions is somewhat pre-mature. He is a step in the right direction. But he's not the Pro-Life Messiah that you might expect from a practicing Catholic who's the son of deacon. We need to be realistic about what is achievable. We also need to push aside wishful thinking.</div>
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In light of that, I hope that so-cons remember to hold Andrew's feet to the fire. We shouldn't expect miracles from him, but we shouldn't settle for nothing either, just for the warm feeling of knowing that a pro-lifer is in charge. He will be under all kinds of pressure while in office. He needs to know that we will not reward idleness on so-con issues, and we will punish if he fails to honour the values of those who helped get him elected.</div>
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Social conservatives have been dealt a relatively good hand. We must neither get cocky and over-play our hand, or become inert in the face of overwhelming odds. Hard-headed realism that is neither too over-confident or too despairing is the only way forward.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-64066795570949145932017-01-25T12:20:00.000-05:002017-01-25T12:26:22.822-05:00Another Feminist Distortion on the History of the Ultrasound... <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I interrupt my blogging hiatus to comment on this article in The Atlantic entitled: </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/01/ultrasound-woman-pregnancy/514109/#BottomAnchor" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How Ultrasound Became Political.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (According to my facebook feed, the original title seems to have been </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How the Ultrasound Pushed the Idea that a Fetus is a Person.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I will limit my comments to historical aspects of the article, otherwise I will have to write a lengthy essay.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Moira Weigel is a PhD candidate Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies. She is not a historian. In my experience, literature and arts students are notorious for making historical claims that are not backed up by the facts.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">First, let’s address the title: How Ultrasound Became Political. In fairness, it may not even be her title. Ultrasound has been political for a very long time. Ian Donald, the inventor of the ultrasound, used it to campaign against abortion in the 1970s.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I find this whole article historically tone deaf as regards the issue of fetal history. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For instance she writes:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What is a fetal heartbeat? And why does it matter?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The idea would have been unthinkable before the advent of a technology developed in 1976: real-time ultrasound.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Well no. Auscultation of the fetal heartbeat dates from 1819. It was one of the first method developed to confirm a pregnancy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A two second Google search would reveal that the </span><a href="http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/history2.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A-Scan fetal ultrasound had been used to detect the fetal heartbeat since the early 1960s.</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet, the current debate shows how effectively politicians have used visual technology to redefine what counts as “life.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No, actually, it is the abortion debate that has re-defined what “life” is. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was no debate about the fetus or embryo being alive before the advent of the abortion debate. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Until the question of abortion was at stake, nobody denied that the human organism began at conception. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And I found this passage particularly politically driven and misleading:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The origins of fetal ultrasound lie in stealth warfare. Ultrasound technology was first developed to scan vast spaces, rather than telescope in on infinitesimal cell masses. In the 1880s, the French scientists Pierre and Jacques Curie discovered that they could produce sound waves with frequencies of millions of cycles per second by applying electricity to quartz crystals. Following the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, several scientists and mathematicians experimented with these “ultrasound” signals to determine the presence of icebergs underwater.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However, the real push came during World War I, when German submarines blockaded the Atlantic. The French, British, and American navies rushed to develop devices that could surveil U-Boats. The first known sinking of a submarine detected by hydrophone took place in the Atlantic in April 1916. During World War II, the Allied forces continued to dump resources into improving sonar capabilities.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After the war, army trained scientists and army funded laboratories demobilized the technology, turning away from the ocean, toward women’s bodies. In the early 1960s, doctors in Europe, Japan, and in the United States simultaneously developed and promoted the widespread use of ultrasound in clinical settings. The First International Conference on Diagnostic Ultrasound took place in Pittsburgh in 1965. That same year, fetal images began to spread across popular culture.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Note how she uses the origin of ultrasound in warfare to make it seem like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a sinister technology</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It is true that ultrasound has its origins in sonar technology, but she blithely skips over the actual story of the development of the ultrasound to make her politically driven point. Ultrasound was developed in 1956 by Dr. Ian Donald, a Scottish obstetrician who, during the war, worked with radar. He applied that same technology as an obstetrician to help women and their pregnancies. There was no sinister attempt to dominate women. It was a humanitarian attempt to help women deal with problems in pregnancy. Ultrasound was then applied to a number of medical problems. But those important details complicate her politically-driven, ahistorical narrative.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here is another screamer of a statement:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Before ultrasound, medical care received by pregnant women had depended on their testimony, or how they described their own sensations. Ultrasound made it possible for the male doctor to evaluate the fetus without female interference.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Those sensations are often wrong, and can tell us nothing about what is going on in the womb. Most women who have ever been pregnant and cared about their child in the womb are grateful for the ability to have ultrasounds, regardless of their stance on abortion.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But here is the real kicker: doctors rarely have operated the ultrasound alone. In fact, ultrasound technology has long been the domain of women. In the early days of ultrasound, many of the people who did the ultrasounds were “secretaries and file clerks”. (Janelle S. Taylor, </span><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=17oxLmzervYC&lpg=PA26&pg=PA26#v=onepage&q=file%20clerks&f=false" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption, and the Politics of Reproduction, p. 33.</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Thousands of women today are employed as sonographers. There is plenty of “female interference.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Real-time ultrasound became a standard part of prenatal treatment in the early 1980s. Almost as soon as it did, opponents of abortion enlisted it in their cause. It became an article of faith that women would respond to seeing ultrasound images by “recognizing” that the fetus gestating inside them was a “baby”—and, by extension, that abortion would be murder</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps because most people call their unborn children babies. This is not a “pro-life`invention. Calling a fetus “a baby” has only been controversial in the context of abortion, never in any other context.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The passage makes it sound like ultrasound was only begun to be used in the 1980s. As I said, this is not the case. Ian Donald, the inventor of the ultrasound, used it before then. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have often found that many historically-based narratives on the history of the ultrasound, the fetus or the abortion debate often neglect many salient facts to make political points. It’s one thing to have an opinion. It’s quite another to manipulate history to make one’s point.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I would also like to take this opportunity to encourage pro-lifers to research these pro-life issues. Many times, feminists make historical claims about the past that do not stand up to scrutiny. Pro-lifers have to be ready to answer those claims.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">NOTE: A lot has happened since I decided to blog about this article. A number of articles have appeared on my facebook noting how this article has been cleaned up. Somehow I doubt the above facts will be put forward. I mean this is relatively specialized knowledge. But it shouldn't be! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://freebeacon.com/issues/magazine-retracts-claim-fetal-heartbeats-are-imaginary/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=57cbd2fb1e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-57cbd2fb1e-46005301">Magazine Retracts Claim That Fetal Heartbeats Are ‘Imaginary’</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Apparently the original article was even worse than what I commented on, but even the newer version is problematic. Like I said, the idea that the fetal heartbeat is "unthinkable" does not correspond to the historical record. We have been recording the fetal heartbeat since the 19th century.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">ANOTHER UPDATE: Just noticed she quotes <a href="https://fetus.ucsf.edu/our-team/michael-r-harrison-md-full-story">Michael Harrison,</a> and calls him "pro-life." While Michael Harrison is a very important figure in the history of the unborn, as the father of fetal surgery, he is not pro-life. In fact, he works at UCSF, which is notorious among pro-lifers for late-term abortions.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-37520401315442650602017-01-03T23:51:00.002-05:002018-04-27T14:06:55.095-04:00BOOK REVIEW: Sacred Embryology by Francesco Cangiamila <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbJ_OGQjOBVf4cNQI3csRFYhml_h0nBdM3o7LMujOSezDhsx2c6IzF98OeZruJrQzJDrpu_BGl_ajKz8u4zfSO8IEwvLjRhqesQTaM1sZDcAHKKWUTbg6UT-8fmF00-oE5erA/s1600/02Monsignor+Francesco+E+Cangiamila.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbJ_OGQjOBVf4cNQI3csRFYhml_h0nBdM3o7LMujOSezDhsx2c6IzF98OeZruJrQzJDrpu_BGl_ajKz8u4zfSO8IEwvLjRhqesQTaM1sZDcAHKKWUTbg6UT-8fmF00-oE5erA/s1600/02Monsignor+Francesco+E+Cangiamila.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Francesco Cangiamila</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Translated into French by Abbé Joseph Dinouart, 1766. Second French Edition.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Originally published in Sicilian in 1745 and in Latin in 1758.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In this day and age, the most salient issue for pro-lifers is abortion. No other issue concerning the unborn comes in at a close second. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In the 18th century, things were different. Pro-lifers-- those preoccupied with the fate of the unborn-- had a completely different issue. Their main concern was making sure that every child received baptism, including those babies whose mothers died in labour, and who risked being unbirthed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hence: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sacred Embryology</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">; subtitled: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or a Treaty on the Duties of Priests, Physicians, Surgeons Midwives Towards Children in the Womb of their Mothers. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was originally written in Italian by Francesco Cangiamila of Palermo, Sicily, where he worked as the Archdiocesan inquisitor.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">The gist of the book was that if a woman should die in labour, a c-section should be performed on her to extract the baby so that he could at least be baptized. If the surgeon or the midwife was unavailable to perform the operation, then it was up to the priest to conduct it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Father Cangiamila goes to extraordinary lengths to defend his position and to explain, in detail, when babies must be extracted for baptism and how to do the procedure.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A brief synopsis of each Book:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Book One deals with embryology and the care that priests and doctors should have for the unborn, even the unborn in the earliest days of pregnancy. By the eighteenth century, the educated were well aware that Aristotle’s model of embryology-- which distinguished between animated and unanimated fetuses-- was rather obsolete. But it still held sway among the people.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Book Two gets to the heart of the topic: the performance of caesarean sections on dead mothers to extract babies from the womb so they at least receive baptism. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Book Three covers the topic of when to perform a c-section, and answers theological objections to baptizing unborn babies (because sometimes the babies were baptized conditionally while still inside the womb to save time.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Book Four covers the subject of how God loves the unborn, and the duties of parents, sovereigns, pastors and especially midwives and bishops in regards to the unborn. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Book Five is a collection of royal legislation, medical and episcopal ordonnances affecting the unborn. Then there is Dinouart’s additions: research on c-sections, and sundry other official documents, including a blessing of pregnant women created by St. Charles Borromeo.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Rituale Romanum</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of 1614 instructed pastors to extract the babies of mothers who died in labour in order to administer emergency baptism.</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> However, there was no guidance on how to do it. You would think that it would be a simple matter to pull a baby out of a womb, but it was often more complicated than that. First of all, there were many reasons for obstructed labour: narrow pelvises, tumours in the birth canal, uterine rupture, etc.If the mother died suddenly from an accident, the mother would not be dilated, and it was impossible to pull the baby out. The c-section had to be performed no matter how young the unborn child. If it wasn’t, the baby would be buried with the mother, and die unbaptized, consigned to limbo. This was considered a tragedy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The wider society did not share the Church’s concern for the unborn. And Cangiamila’s prescriptions were considered somewhat controversial. He does not elaborate on all these reasons, having done some research on the issue of post-mortem caesareans, I can offer some clues as to why.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Aristotelian model was still predominant. Many people considered that a fetus below a certain age was inanimate and thus couldn’t be baptized. </span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There was also the matter that the relatives sometimes objected to the operation. The father, overwhelmed at the loss of his wife, burdened with caring for young children, would not necessarily want another mouth to feed; he would not want the child to be saved.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If the child were illegitimate, the family would not want the disgrace of raising a child born of an illicit sexual union.</span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was also the cultural taboo of mutilating a corpse, which was considered as a kind of sacrilege.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> This belief was also combined with the widespread belief that babies soon died after their mothers to produce a negative reaction. The feeling was: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this woman has suffered enough, why can’t you leave her in peace</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? </span></span></div>
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<li dir="ltr" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; list-style-type: disc; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, priests were reluctant to conduct the operation. It offended the delicate sense of modesty that many had in the 18th century, and there was a fear that dealing with a woman in such an intimate matter might render them canonically irregular.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The biggest obstacle against the practice of post-mortem cesareans was that the c-section had a very poor reputation. It inspired horror and dread. This was the age of surgery without anesthetic or infection control. Women did not relish the prospect of being cut up and dying of an infection. The vast majority of women who underwent it died, and it didn’t have a good track record of saving babies, either (although it was adequate to extract a live baby to administer baptism.) To minimize these problems, Cangiamila goes through a lot of trouble to emphasize the c-section on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dead </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">women, and gives tips on how to make sure that a woman is truly deceased and not just unconscious. (The issue of how to tell if someone is dead was a matter of some dispute during the 18th century.) Although he says, citing Aquinas, that a woman is morally required to undergo a c-section before death if it was the only way to guarantee that her baby would be baptized and go to heaven.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a lot of medical detail in this book about the scenarios in which it would be appropriate to be use the c-section, on how to perform it, and its track record and survival rates. Although it was recognized that few women survived c-sections, he brought up examples of women who did, in order to bolster support for this operation.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He also gives many details on how to revive unconscious children. Babies who are extracted from the womb in these conditions are often unconscious, but he tells his readers not to rely on appearances and not presume that they are dead.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> His first suggestion is mouth to mouth resuscitation using a tube to blow air into the lungs.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> He also recommends a method practice by Sicilian midwives which is to take live chicken and have them peck their beaks into the baby’s rectum.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> And if that doesn’t work, one can take a tube, insert it in the baby’s butt and blow tobacco smoke into the intestines.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> These were supposedly effective methods of revival. If nothing these methods provide a little levity in a subject that could be a little heavy to wade through.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The section on the theological debate surrounding baptism of the unborn was also quite interesting. The main argument against it was the belief that in order to receive the Holy Spirit, one had to be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">born </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">again. The word </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">born </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">suggests that birth was a prerequisite to going to heaven. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Cangiamila shows that the Greek word used for “born” could also mean “formed”, so that it wasn’t a matter of birth but generation, as the unborn were generated, they would be re-generated.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The last section consisted of appendices. There were a couple that really attracted my attention. One was the royal decree of King Charles of Sicily, effectively implementing the book’s goals. It prohibited the burial of any woman suspected of being pregnant before a c-section was performed on her.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The other addition that caught my attention were the reports that clergy were to write to their bishops, explaining how many babies were saved through c-sections etc. There were only a few reports, but it was very edifying to read how the legislation had saved all those babies.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In short, this book is a pro-life goldmine. It’s wonderful to see a literary work so unconsciously pro-life, so devoted to the welfare of the unborn. To Fr. Cangiamila, there is absolutely no distinction to be made between the born and the unborn. All are human beings, all are deserving of consideration. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Works Cited:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 14.6667px; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Cangiamila, Francesco. Embryologie <i><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=uSQJ2XuuUbAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Sacrée. Abregé de l'embryologie sacrée ou Traite des devoirs des prêtres, des médecins, des chirugiens & des sages-femmes envers les enfans qui sont dans le sein de leurs mères.</a></i> Trans. Abbé Joseph Dinouart. 2nd. Ed. Paris: Nyon, 1766.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-52884165242442376242016-12-11T22:19:00.002-05:002016-12-11T22:19:59.071-05:00The Launch of the Abortion Debate in France in the Nineteenth Century<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi39AsDnffHH9fjiJiFv-rXSTeGWZ8Wuck2VXRMHgokwNk9ButQUT9bh4NY77matjqE9heRmb82m7CZ5zZ2JTAAMWBtunBPVc8Om2AZn-njwU5nqDk8L6Op2KDmD7nCeZqgxcg/s1600/rymsdyk_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi39AsDnffHH9fjiJiFv-rXSTeGWZ8Wuck2VXRMHgokwNk9ButQUT9bh4NY77matjqE9heRmb82m7CZ5zZ2JTAAMWBtunBPVc8Om2AZn-njwU5nqDk8L6Op2KDmD7nCeZqgxcg/s400/rymsdyk_1.jpg" width="369" /></a></div>
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Anglosphere conceives of the abortion debate as something that primarily takes place in the twentieth century. There was virtually no debate that abortion was ever acceptable. If abortions did take place, doctors just did what they thought they had to do, and kept quiet about it.</div>
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In France, the situation was quite different.</div>
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The abortion debate in France was sparked by the case of Julie Gros. In 1846, 1847 and 1851, Julie Gros was pregnant and had an abortion due to the fact that her pelvis was too small to deliver a baby. The doctors who performed her abortions were eminent French doctors-- Pierre Cazeaux, Paul Dubois and Adolphe Lenoir. They induced a miscarriage early enough in the pregnancy so that the baby could pass through her pelvis, but he was not viable. The passage for which the baby had to pass through was only 5 centimetres (2 inches) in diameter.</div>
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C-sections were not commonly performed in those days, and their survival rate was rather low. And even if there was a chance at survival, there was no good anesthetic, making the operation rather dreaded. Some argued that the reason survival rates were low was that it was used at the very last resort, after the patient was completely depleted, so she had no resistance to the trauma. Suffice it to say, the c-section had not proven itself as a means of saving mother and baby.</div>
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In 1851, Dr. Lenoir presented a report to the Academy of Medicine. It was debated in six gatherings in 1852. The purpose of the debate was to get the Academy to recognize the procedure and its justification so that other members would feel free to perform it, and to give the weight of medical approval in the face of potential legal prosecution, as abortion was absolutely illegal in France. The only condition for which abortion was under consideration was a narrow pelvis-- a situation in which there was other perceptible solution.</div>
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The debate was framed in terms of whose rights "prevailed"-- the right to life of the mother, or the right of the baby to be baptized? Of course, the pro-life mentality is to try to save both, that neither party deserves to die or deserves to be killed. But the pro-abortion doctors argued that the rights of the mother prevailed, and this approach would strongly colour the future of abortion debates in France. In contrast, the status of the unborn began to diminish, as his worth as a human being was questioned. The eminent obstetrician Velpeau wondered how a mother could be "sacrificed" in these cases for a fetus who was barely a human being, and of no use to society.<br />
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Dr. Bégin, who spoke out against abortion, did not want to condemn Lenoir for his abortion in the case of Julie Gros, but he predicted that once the door was opened to abortion, its use would be extended to the point that there would no longer be any distinction between medical and criminal abortion. His words were prophetic. The Academy of Medicine agreed that Dr. Lenoir was authorized to act as he did, under the circumstances. While the Academy of Medicine did not judge the larger issues of when or whether abortion was acceptable, in voting in this way, it effectively left to the judgement of doctors whether it should be practiced. And indeed it use was extended to other cases in the 19th century, such as cancer, tuberculosis and even eugenic cases where patients with syphilis underwent abortion in order not to produce "defective" offspring.</div>
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Therapeutic abortion was never <i>widely </i>accepted in the nineteenth century, but vote by the Academy of Medicine gave it a certain legitimacy that made it easier to to advance its legalization at the turn of the century. By the turn of the century, when neo-malthusians decided to push for abortion, they were arguing for the extension of an accepted<i> medical procedure</i>.</div>
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Source: <i>Histoire de l'avortement XIXe-XXe siècle</i>, Jean-Yves Le Naour, Catherine Valenti. Éditions du Seuil, 2003.<br />
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Also, <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=lg9FAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=Lenoir+obst%C3%A9tricien+1852&source=bl&ots=8tZribAxsQ&sig=pTjBw3JNZHe8HHI8nyQzJLvBr8s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwix_Yudxu3QAhUY62MKHfi5C4EQ6AEINzAE#v=onepage&q=Lenoir%20obst%C3%A9tricien%201852&f=false">these</a> <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=YUwjAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA240&lpg=PA240&dq=Lenoir+Julie+Gros+obst%C3%A9tricien&source=bl&ots=jufRDrYM1w&sig=D915LyzA-n1tGXy_LnfxY9jf0LA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwik3uavxe3QAhUJ3WMKHRFJBUAQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Lenoir%20Julie%20Gros%20obst%C3%A9tricien&f=false">two</a> medical journal articles.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-22951097310063932062016-12-05T17:51:00.002-05:002016-12-05T17:51:50.143-05:00How Did We Get to Roe v. Wade Anyway?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Xg6LvrUlSPUssxZ0Pr3gam1Kll-nstaEEvL1HztA-pounHz2lr2htIx4mr90pJ61u6b-OdNDS36XTh2CXkkfc4nCrBy1qDyF4HAbUob2yFXkJwj9r5coOjEZLoX8Y7owhNM/s1600/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Xg6LvrUlSPUssxZ0Pr3gam1Kll-nstaEEvL1HztA-pounHz2lr2htIx4mr90pJ61u6b-OdNDS36XTh2CXkkfc4nCrBy1qDyF4HAbUob2yFXkJwj9r5coOjEZLoX8Y7owhNM/s320/download.jpg" width="229" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Glanville Williams</td></tr>
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How did we start down the road to Roe v. Wade anyway?</div>
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In the 1940's and 1950's, abortion was generally opposed, and there wasn't a lot of outspoken support for it. There were abortions being done in hospitals for medical reasons, but not the abortion on demand that we know today. Women sought abortions for social reasons, but there was a a lot of social stigma for doing so, and you had to know someone to be able to find an abortionist. Opposition to abortion was based on affirming human life but also on not enabling loose sexual mores. </div>
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And on top of that, the only regimes that legalized abortion were communist regimes (and Japan). That stigmatized abortion, too.</div>
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The man who broke the ice on abortion in the United States was an eminent legal scholar by the name of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glanville_Williams">Glanville Williams</a> who taught at Cambridge University in English . He was a Welsh-born humanist who had written a famous book called <i>The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law.</i> In it, he criticized Catholic opposition to sterilization, contraception, euthanasia and-- of course-- abortion. It was seen as the basis for the criminalization of all these procedures. In 1956, Glanville Williams gave a presentation during Carpenter lecture at Columbia University, in which he called for the reform of abortion law. He said, among other things, that the unborn were not persons until the 28th week of pregnancy, because they had no EEG activity. He would, of course, be proven wrong. But this lecture got the ball rolling in legal circles in the United States. It led to the <a href="https://www.ali.org/about-ali/">American Law Institute's</a> adoption of a resolution to call for abortion law reform in the United States in 1959.</div>
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This resolution called for an easing of restrictions of abortion laws, to allow them for medical reasons or rape. This was not a call for abortion on demand. In effect, they wanted to legalize what was already happening in American hospitals behind the scenes. </div>
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Throughout the 1960's, a number of attempts were made in State legislatures to remove restrictions to abortion, notably in Minnesota and California. In the early 1960's, the pro-life response was spearheaded by Catholic bishops and pro-life doctors and lawyers (who were mostly Catholic). The doctors and lawyers would make presentations in legislative committees, while bishops would raise the spectre of the Catholics voting out the legislators.</div>
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This method worked for the first half of the 1960's. Then Vatican II happened.</div>
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In the wake of Vatican II, the media created the sense that Catholics were no longer obliged to pay heed to Catholic teaching, and in fact a number of Catholic clergy reinforced that impression. Concurrently to all this, abortion activists were pushing for legalization in the media and among the medical profession. Catholics softened their opposition while mainstream opinion-- Protestant or secular-- developed a certain support for lifting restrictions.</div>
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California, Colorado and South Carolina became among the first states to pass abortion law reform in the 1960's. </div>
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Pro-lifers saw that their old approach based on bishops, lawyers and doctors, could not hold up, so they launch a new approach, based on grassroots efforts. The National Right to Life Committee was founded to co-ordinate state-level efforts in 1968. Pro-life groups were founded across the country to begin a pushback.</div>
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Pro-lifers were somewhat successful in turning the tide. They won an abortion referenda in Michigan and North Dakota in 1972. Nevertheless, thirteen states had lifted some or most restrictions on abortion by 1973.</div>
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The United States Supreme Court legalized abortion in January 22, 1973. And one of the major reason why this happened is that Glanville Williams had galvanized the legal community into doing this. Yes, there was a lot of a cultural support for legalized abortion; the belief that human life begins at conception was fairly soft at the time, and the appreciation for human equality in the womb was not solidified. Abortion was legalized because lawyers were convinced that it was the right thing to do; fetal rights will be established when lawyers are convinced it's the right thing to do. While educating the general public is important to prevent abortions in the immediate, to establish human rights, it is important to reach out to those in the legal community. We have to touch the consciences of those whose job it is to defend human rights if we ever hope to establish legal recognition for the unborn.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-44607790078657538912016-11-27T17:34:00.001-05:002016-11-27T17:34:33.755-05:00Francesco-Emmanuele Cangiamila: Obscure But Important Figure in ProLife History<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In researching my<a href="http://www.bigbluewave.ca/p/a-timeline-of-pro-life-history.html"> Timeline of Pro-Life History,</a> I came across a number of people whom nobody has ever heard of, but whose influence on the welfare of the unborn was monumental.</div>
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And one of these figures is Father<a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-Emmanuel_Cangiamila"> Francesco-Emmanuele Cangiamila</a> (1702-1763).</div>
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When Cangiamila makes his appearance in academic writing in English, it's almost always in passing or as a footnote. As far as I can tell, very little has been written about him in English.</div>
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Fr. Cangiamila was a major figure in the Sicilian Church. He was the Inquisitor of the Kingdom of Sicily, but his main claim to fame was his treatise <i>Sacred Embryology</i>, on the duties of priests to the unborn.</div>
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If ever a figure in the Church treated the unborn as persons, he did.</div>
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<i>Sacred Embryology</i> may seem like a strange title to our modern ears. But as he explains, he coined the word "embryology" to mean "discourse on the unborn." There was no word to categorize what he spoke about so he invented one.</div>
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Cangiamila wrote a book to describe in detail the duties of the priest towards the unborn. The number one duty is to make sure these babies are baptized. So he advocated for the baptism of the unborn during labour in utero if there was a danger of the baby dying during delivery; he advocated for the use of the cesarean if the mother died in labour, and gave details on how to perform one so that priests could do it in the event that no surgeon could be found. He even made a serious contribution to medical history in giving instructions on how to resuscitate a newborn baby. </div>
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His book contains a number of details about the science of the day regarding the unborn, and opines that the Church doesn't know the exact moment of animation (which is actually what the Church beleives today.) </div>
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His book, written in Italian, was a sensation and translated into a number of languages: Latin, modern Greek, <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Abr%C3%A9g%C3%A9_de_l_embryologie_sacr%C3%A9e_ou_Tra.html?id=IRxUTMoebuQC&redir_esc=y">French</a>, Spanish and so on. It ran into several editions. Unfortunately, it was never translated into English.</div>
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The idea of baptizing fetuses in danger of death, or performing a ceserean on a dead woman in labour was not new. For example, there was an instrument known as "Mauriceau's syringe" (in French a <a href="http://clystere.pagesperso-orange.fr/articles_pdf/dupre_clysteres_07_2016.pdf">"clystère de baptême"</a>) that was used to baptize a baby in utero who was in danger of death (once labour had begun.) The syringe had a long tube meant to fit into the birth canal so as to be able to reach the baby for baptism. Almost every obstretrics book in French contained information on how to perform c-sections.</div>
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But Cangiamila popularized the notion and brought it to priests. These ideas were not without controversy, however (<a href="http://www.persee.fr/doc/abpo_0399-0826_1979_num_86_2_2975">as per this article in French</a>). Getting a priest or a family member to baptize a baby in danger of death, or getting them to perform a cesarean (when no surgeon was around) offended some people's sense of modesty. Family members of the dead mother did not necessarily appreciate the prospect of seeing their relative sliced up-- she and the family had already suffered enough, they did not want to confront another ordeal. And the operation itself-- slicing a pregnant belly-- was not for the faint of heart. Even seasoned surgeons had trouble with it.The surgeon had to perform a large incision-- after making sure the woman was dead-- and not hurt the baby in the process.</div>
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Although Cangiamila's ideas had much institutional support in the 18th century (including praise by Pope Benedict XIV), support was not universal in the Church. One example of this was the case of <a href="http://moye.chez-alice.fr/vietavard.htm">Blessed Jean-Martin Moye</a> (1730-1793). He was a priest who published pamphlets based on Cangiamila's ideas, and a cabal formed against him and he was essentially demoted by being transferred to another parish. </div>
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As I said, there is very little of this in English, and I even had trouble finding information on Cangiamila and these fetal baptisms in French. Someday I hope we can remedy this situation and bring to the fore an important Church figure who genuinely held the cause of the unborn to heart.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-5703551292769884862016-11-25T23:44:00.003-05:002016-11-25T23:44:47.719-05:00How We Came to Believe That Life Begins at Conception<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The belief that life begins at conception is at the heart of the pro-life cause. But I'm amazed that virtually nobody has asked themselves how we came to believe in it. It's rather taken for granted.</div>
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Many people assume that the origin of the belief lies in the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Immaculate Conception. While these dogmas reinforced the belief in the value of pre-natal life, they were never reference points for natural philosophy or science.</div>
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In the Middle Ages, the dominant model of embryology was Aristotelian, and it was embraced by St. Thomas Aquinas. It was the best science of the day. It was believed that male semen mixes with female menstrual blood to form an embryo. At first the embryo has a vegetative soul, then an animal soul then a rational soul, i.e. become a human being. Animation-- that is, the infusion of a rational soul-- was to occur at approximately 40 days for a male and 80 days in a female. The reason for this had to do with the formation of genitals. If the embryo was a boy, his genitalia would be obvious at about 40 days, but if no male genitals showed by 80 days, then it was sure it was a female.</div>
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This model was virtually unquestioned by the educated classes. The only dissenting voice to this model would be Galen, who believed that because women had ovaries-- which were known as female testicles-- it was only natural to conclude that women contributed to the formation of an embryo: otherwise what were those organs for? The medically informed tended to agree with him. However, Aristotle's model was largely accepted, especially as regards the timing for animation, which was important for the assessment of the gravity of abortion. Killing an unanimated embryo was not considered as serious as killing an animated one.</div>
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In the Early Modern Period, natural philosophers-- what we would call scientists-- began to question the idea of accepting Aristotle's scientific conclusions at face value. They didn't reject Aristotle per se, but they developed the mental habit of investigating natural phenomena and accepting the empirical truth even when it contradicted Aristotle. The Reformation also contributed to the development of science because Protestant natural philosophers felt free to reject Aristotle whose system was intertwined with Catholic belief.</div>
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The questioning Aristotle and predominant Catholic belief led to a change in embryological thinking. According to <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=ATMAXdCVaS0C&lpg=PA118&ots=SiiHEoqdqB&dq=Johannes%20Happrecht%201603&pg=PA118#v=onepage&q=Johannes%20Happrecht%201603&f=false">Wolfgang Muller</a>, in 1603, Johannes Harpprecht, professor of law at the University of Tubingen, suggested that animation occurred at insemination. Harpprecht based himself on traducianism-- which was a heresy in the Catholic Faith. As a Lutheran he felt free to re-examine models which had previously been rejected before the Catholic Reformation. He believed that the immediate infusion of a human soul was the only logical explanation of human development. A vegetative soul and an animal soul could not lead to a human organism.</div>
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As far as I know, this is the earliest example of an affirmation of life beginning at a point close to conception. It wasn't exactly conception, but he affirmed that animation began at a point that stood at the very beginning of the biological process that created life.</div>
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Thomas Fienus, a Catholic Flemish physician who investigated embryological development, in a similar vein, affirmed in his book <i>De formatrice foetu liber </i>(1620) that animation occurred three days after insemination <i>at the latest</i>. He also believed that it would be simpler to assume that infusion occurred soon because if a human being was to organize itself, it would naturally need a human soul.</div>
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Danniel Sennert, a Lutheran doctor, writing in 1621, inspired by traducianism, effectively says that the soul exists in the semen (<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=YZzkaAevzAoC&lpg=PA84&ots=JgjcKqfcml&dq=daniel%20sennert%20embryo&pg=PA84#v=onepage&q=daniel%20sennert%20embryo&f=false">More info here.</a>) . His attitude towards Fienus seems to be: if only he weren't Catholic maybe he wouldn't be afraid to consider traducianism. </div>
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Throughout the 17th century, the thrust of embryological thought is a rejection of Aristotle's successive animation. There were also attempts at invoking atomism. For instance. in 1640's and 1650's Nathaniel Highmore and Kenelm Digby believed that various kinds of atoms throughout the body affect reproduction. Atomism could help explain why certain traits were passed on from one generation to another. Unfortunately, their views would not become popular.</div>
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The greatest discovery of the mid 17th century was William Harvey's conclusion that everything comes from an egg: <i>Ex ovo omnia</i>. The suggestion that mammals come from an egg was quite revolutionary and bona fide advance in embryological research.</div>
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Although the dissection of animals and human cadavres -- especially pregnant criminals and prostitutes-- helped research, the biggest advances in the 17th century came from the use of magnifying glasses and especially the microscope. Jan Swammerdam was an entomologist who proved that the four stages of insect existence-- egg, larva, pupa, adult-- were effectively the same species in 1669. As embryologists operated by applying analogies from one species to another, the idea that a less developed form was the same as a more developed form because well ensconced in science.</div>
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Swammerdam is also remembered as a founder of pre-formationism-- the belief that embryos exist pre-formed and are essentially activated by conception. He claimed to have seen adult structures in larval silkworms, suggesting that embryos pre-existed. Marcello Malpighi performed research on embryonic chicks in the 1670s, and using a microscope, he believed to have seen an embryo 12 hours after conception, contributing to the belief that embryos were pre-existing.</div>
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Adding to all this, is the findings of Theodor Kerckring, in 1672, who dissected a woman carrying an embryo he believed to be a few days old. He said that it was a well-formed embryo, and this reinforced the growing impression that embryos existed before conception.</div>
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Because microscopes were not powerful enough yet, there was no way to confirm these findings, but they were widely accepted to be true. These biological errors became the basis for ovist preformationism-- the idea that the embryo pre-existed in the ovum. For the next century, ovist preformationism became the dominant model of embryological development. </div>
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At the same time, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope in the 1670s and discovered spermatazoa that he called "animalcules". His discovery led to the theory of spermatist pre-formation-- that the embryo pre-existed in sperm. This model was less prevalent but still considered a serious contender. For the next several decades, scientists would debate which model was correct.</div>
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Meanwhile, the epigenetic model-- which did not completely die out in scientific circles-- was definitely considered rather <i>passé</i>.</div>
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These models raised problems. If embryos pre-existed, how does one account for the existence of malformations? How does one account for heredity? If spermatism is true, how can a man look like his mother? If ovism is true, how can a woman look like her father?</div>
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Fast forward to about 1759. Caspar Wolff writes a medical dissertation, one so controversial, that he can't get a job after graduation. He revives the epigenetic view of generation-- that both male and female material are involved in the creation of a new embryo. His research focuses on germ layers, focusing first on plants, then animals. He did not see pre-existing embryos, he saw undifferentiated biological material organizing itself into organisms. At first he had trouble being taken seriously, but eventually his ideas would prevail.</div>
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Preformationism was virtually eliminated as a serious scientific theory by about the early 19th century. The next big leap in the study of embryology was the discovery of cell theory by Matthew Schleiden and Theodor Schwann. They concluded that cells are the basic unity of life in 1839. In 1855, Rudolf Virchow further advanced cell theory by positing that all cells come from other cells, thus eliminating the need of a "life force" to explain the physical beginnings of human life.</div>
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It would be too simple to reduce the notion of "life begins at conception" to one specific event. It was gradually over the course of the 19th century, through numerous scientific discoveries that it was confirmed that biological development begins with fertilization. For example, in 1842, Theodor Bischoff posited that a chemical interaction between ovum and semen resulted in fertilization. He could described the effect of semen on an ovum, but he believed that semen was like a chemical agent on the ovum. There were numerous episodes like that one, where a scientist came closer to the truth, but significantly erred on some point.</div>
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As the idea of fertilization as the beginning of life was repeatedly confirmed through various experiments and discoveries, in reaction to these new fact, abortion laws were passed around the world, and no longer did they make the distinction between "formed" and "unformed" babies-- all human life was considered equivalent. In 1869, Pope Pius IX removed the distinction between animated an unanimated fetuses, as there was no scientific evidence for it. <i>It was always assumed that the beginning of biological life was the beginning of a human being. </i></div>
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In 1875, Oscar Hertwig observed the fusion of two sea urchin gametes, visually confirming what was already fairly certain in many minds. But focusing solely on Hertwig and this event obscures the gradual nature of the development of this knowledge.</div>
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This knowledge was somewhat common among the educated, but there were still plenty of ignorance as to the details of embryological development. The idea that embryos were "formed" and "unformed" was still quite widespread. Early abortions, which could be done by consuming herbs or other substances, were described as "bringing on one's period" and was not associated with murder in the minds of many people. But the later the pregnancy, the more people oppose abortion because they understood that there was a living being inside the womb. Some doctors felt the need to write books describing embryological development and denouncing abortion, because popular ignorance was so widespread.</div>
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Even as human life was understood to begin at conception, it did not mean that the unborn were conferred personhood, especially in the embryonic period. For example, a project dubbed "the egg hunt" conducted in 1938 by Doctors John Rock and Arthur Tremaine sought to obtain the earliest embryos possible involved encouraging patients scheduled for hysterectomies to have intercourse before the operation so that embryos could be extracted for their collection. It did not occur to devout Catholic John Rock that encouraging the creation of life that could not be brought to term was not ethical. Embryonic life may have been protected by law, but it was if the law was protecting the <i>principle </i>of life, and not actual <i>people</i>.</div>
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So in a nutshell, that is how we came to believe that human life begins at conception-- through a series of scientific development, which did not necessarily translate into an acceptance of personhood of the unborn. Human life was protected on principle by elites, but the masses were not always well informed as to the why's and wherefore of fetal development and the reason behind the criminalization of abortion. I believe that this explains to a large extent why it was relatively easy to legalize abortion: the consensus on the vaule of human life was weak, so that when Columbia law professor Glanville Williams suggested abortion law reform in famous lecture in 1959, his suggestion found a ready audience. It took less than 15 years to achieve his goal. There were also a lot of other factors that came in to play-- the growing relativism, the sexual revolution, etc. but without the widespread recognition of the unborn, it was doomed to fail, with or without those factors.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-33102648811556810102016-11-24T15:13:00.002-05:002016-11-24T15:13:50.213-05:00A Timeline of Pro-Life History: An Introduction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8etyqWcknGn2DHC1-LXfJeKl7mw2ZWOHfSzkckfYNFdnQzZ3Ih6sQj9hO1U5Rc4ew5D5iN1h34eXL3u34F3OwApYzjKOWWMWGhOOuaG4edmV0McHvy9HWg_ZzmB03z59Cu58/s1600/baby3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8etyqWcknGn2DHC1-LXfJeKl7mw2ZWOHfSzkckfYNFdnQzZ3Ih6sQj9hO1U5Rc4ew5D5iN1h34eXL3u34F3OwApYzjKOWWMWGhOOuaG4edmV0McHvy9HWg_ZzmB03z59Cu58/s1600/baby3.jpg" /></a></div>
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This <a href="http://www.bigbluewave.ca/p/a-timeline-of-pro-life-history.html">Timeline of Pro-Life History</a> is my humble attempt to document those events relevant to the rights, welfare and cause of the unborn.</div>
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Every other human group seems to have a history dedicated to it, it seems that it's about time for the unborn to have history written about them as well.</div>
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In this timeline, I focused on <i>events</i>. So it doesn't give the whole picture: not the trends, or statistics, or general practices. I simply wanted to give people an idea of what a history of the unborn could look like; what type of events, ideas and discoveries contributed to the situation of the unborn today. One might think that the history of the unborn would focus <i>solely </i>on abortion. I have found that to be untrue. There is a lot to write about the unborn, and a lot left to be studied and written.</div>
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Rather than write a book, I thought it was more useful and expedient to write an accessible and searchable survey of the history of the unborn. I started from the Christian era because when one writes a chronology, dating is very important, and dates can be very uncertain in the Ancient period. There is a lack of information for late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. I mostly focused on those periods for which I knew I could get information easily: The late Middle Ages, the Early Modern and Modern periods and especially contemporary history.</div>
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I scanned a number of academic (and non-academic) sources to cull these dates. But my most important source was the archives of LifeSiteNews.com. I scanned every headline page from 1998 to 2016 (up to the election of Donald Trump.) I tried to focus on the important events, the ones that have an impact on either the legal or cultural situation of the unborn.</div>
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If you like my Timeline, please share it. I also encourage you to blog about pro-life history. In the 1980's it was often said: <i>If abortion is murder, act like it!</i> Well, we can't stop abortion right now. I would simply like to rephrase that and say:<i> If the unborn are human, act like it! Write their history!</i> I promise you right now there is a historiographical effort to denigrate the unborn and their rights. If we can't have the unborn respected through politics or popular culture, we can do it through history.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-14767490682308977652016-10-10T20:56:00.000-04:002016-10-10T21:09:21.789-04:00Commentary on Anne Stensvold's History of Pregnancy in Christianity<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEismhL8i-HrqtfWOHgc0sVVvz6TYdICA1oRo7xaOcQQCKlmyoeUncPV6JARS-Uo1uluikD8TG2BwhC3JSrhB-EvZlkee44C4dUXRDf8jajYTLsHk_cr5pnCBEPdgl2-f9xwayo/s1600/vmary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEismhL8i-HrqtfWOHgc0sVVvz6TYdICA1oRo7xaOcQQCKlmyoeUncPV6JARS-Uo1uluikD8TG2BwhC3JSrhB-EvZlkee44C4dUXRDf8jajYTLsHk_cr5pnCBEPdgl2-f9xwayo/s640/vmary.jpg" width="488" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.88px;">Madonna del Parto Unknown Master, Italian (late 15th century in Valsesia)</span></td></tr>
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Rather than write a book review, which would require more time than I care to spend on this blogpost, I thought I'd comment on one aspect of the book.<br />
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<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=yjzeCQAAQBAJ&pg=PR4&lpg=PR4&dq=anne+Stensvold+History+of+Christianity&source=bl&ots=xqI9TiM6tR&sig=o24GxxJxCfaLlYsA42xo-dXxfOY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiUp4rLwNHPAhXD24MKHbBBCzgQ6AEIMDAD#v=onepage&q=anne%20Stensvold%20History%20of%20Christianity&f=false">The History of Pregnancy in Christianity</a> is an attempt to discuss the Christian conceptualization of pregnancy throughout the ages, viewed through a doctrinal lense.<br />
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Anne Stensvold is a feminist professor of religion, and the book is the exercise in Church-bashing that you would expect it to be. If I had the time, I would love to refute all her false statements (including some pretty serious errors-- Pope Benedict XIV was not pope in 1768...). But I have other projects.<br />
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The book is not all bad, but one of its most galling aspects is the way it does history by deduction. What do I mean by that? In history, when you make assertions about the past, you are expected to back it up. If I say "King Henry VIII rejected papal supremacy because he was a Protestant", then I would normally have to provide evidence of his Protestant leanings. I deliberately used an ambiguous example like King Henry VIII because he wasn't <i>exactly </i>Protestant-- at least not in the beginning. Sure, he rejected papal supremacy, but overall his religious beliefs were fairly conservative. A serious student of history would be expected to prove and elaborate on such statements as I just did. But, the deductive method of history I'm criticizing, it's assumed that because Henry VIII rejected papal supremacy, that effectively made him a Lutheran or a Calvinist. It operates on a non-existent dichotomy: if this, then that. <i> </i>No proof is required to bolster that claim.<br />
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Stensvold does this all the time in her book. I want to focus on an example that drove me nuts: her discussion of Pope Pius IX and his definition of the Immaculate Conception. In summary, she writes: During the 19th century, scientists were making important advances in learning about the beginning of life. Karl Ernst von Baer discovered the mammalian egg. Scheleiden and Schwann developped cell theory. The egg was becoming more important in embryology. So what does Pope Pius IX do? Define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. As she puts it, he did it to show his contempt of modern science. He believed in an Augustinian/Aristotelian view of biological development in which the life-force came from seed, and in order to preserve that patriarchal worldview on reproduction, he discarded Thomistic views of biological development (which were closer to the epigenetic views under development!)<br />
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What evidence does she provide for Pope Pius' thought process regarding the Immaculate Conception and its relation to embryology?<br />
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Absolutely none.<br />
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It's just assumed that Pope Pius' definition of the Immaculate Conception was in reaction to the recent developments in embryology. I <i>suppose </i>it <i>could </i>be true, but I doubt it. But it seems like every statement regarding Catholic doctrine is viewed through a conspiratorial lens: it was either done in contempt of science, or women, or to preserve its tenuous justification.<br />
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And by the way, Thomistic views of biological development were Aristotelian, so... she somewhat contradicts herself.<br />
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Another example of her history-by-assumption: Science discovered a greater role for the egg in reproduction. That means that Mary should have played more of role in the Incarnation. Instead, the Immaculate Conception made Mary more god-like (sigh, I know) and Jesus less human-- because his humanity was dependent on hers. Thus she was pushed out of the picture, made less important in the Incarnation<br />
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It drives me nuts. What direct textual evidence does she offer for this Catholic thought process? None.<br />
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You get the picture.<br />
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And by the way, the egg was already very important in reproductive science. Karl Ernst von Baer discovered the mammalian egg but the egg was thought to have already been discovered by Regnier de Graaf in 1672 (he only discovered the follicle around the egg). Ovism was the predominant theory of generation until the 19th century. So if the Church had wanted to act against the predominance of the egg in reproductive theory, it would have done so in the age of ovism. Which it didn't. Because it wasn't a threat in the least. In fact, its first propagator was Nicolas Malebranche, a priest, and a number of Catholic priest-scientists like Spallanzani adopted it.<br />
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And the fact that the egg was discovered to play a role in reproduction has no bearing on this doctrine. The whole point of a miracle like the Incarnation is that <i>it defies the laws of science. </i>Science <i>can </i>have an effect on theology, but it wouldn't have any effect on supernatural mysteries.<br />
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A book review would not have done justice to all the fallacious statements made in the book, which is why I just focused on a couple. I will credit her with understanding a number of theological concepts that most people don't get. The problem is that as a feminist, she studies social conservatives with contempt. And when you study with a view to contempt, you can't properly understand your subject. You study to react, to assign responsibility, to blame, not to understand.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-41809891132783218172016-09-03T00:34:00.001-04:002016-09-03T01:25:23.648-04:00Need Help Researching Paolo Zacchia -- The Father of Forensic Medicine-- Latin Readers Sought<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj65WFuE2WVgiCuodCTMMBloQC9-F0JOYjvxQeAHztFZ1_qNUoglNE1XRKOxkaq8e8k2nSNADtwhnjAz1XTxBacCgiWD3b9-YP0O3UoaOtcM6A8Two8AllDS-UOLpIX3fneGz4g/s1600/preg-14_1494400i.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj65WFuE2WVgiCuodCTMMBloQC9-F0JOYjvxQeAHztFZ1_qNUoglNE1XRKOxkaq8e8k2nSNADtwhnjAz1XTxBacCgiWD3b9-YP0O3UoaOtcM6A8Two8AllDS-UOLpIX3fneGz4g/s400/preg-14_1494400i.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I spent last night and today reading up about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Zacchias">Paolo Zacchia</a>, the Father of Forensic Medicine. He was the personal physician to Pope Innocent X and Pope Alexander VII and legal advsior to the Roman Rota-- what you might call the Catholic Church's Supreme Court.<br />
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In 1621, he published a book entitled Quaestionaes Medico-Légales, which expounds on medical knowledge as it pertains to Canon and Civil Law.<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=9W5DAAAAcAAJ&lpg=PA716&dq=%22Paolo%20Zacchia%22%20fetus&pg=PA441#v=onepage&q&f=false"> (This is Volume 2).</a><br />
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In a number of publications, he is said to a proponent of the belief that life begins at conception. (For example <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/library/PROLENC/ENCYC043.HTM">here</a>,<a href="http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1462870/finding_ethically_acceptable_solutions_for_therapeutic_human_stem_cell_research/"> here,</a> and <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=9krUAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA163&ots=NwV-8KHspf&dq=%221584%201659%22%20%22paolo%20Zacchia%22%20conception&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q=%221584%201659%22%20%22paolo%20Zacchia%22%20conception&f=false">here</a>.<br />
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On the other hand, <a href="http://past.oxfordjournals.org.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/content/223/1/41.full">this author</a> says<br />
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Even after formation, moreover, the foetus was something less than a full person in civil law. Jurists discussed the haziness of this boundary; the eminent Lombard jurist Giacomo Menochio (d. 1607) and the Roman forensics expert Zacchia both debated whether one should speak of a ‘child’ (Latin, infans) and ‘person’ (homo) from conception, from quickening or only from birth;<span style="background-color: yellow;"><b> Zacchia held to the last of the three,</b></span> even as he noted that ‘some physicians’ call it a child ‘once it is complete in the uterus, with all its members formed’.107</blockquote>
[UPDATE: A Commenter on my facebook page remarked that "homo" does not translate into "person" but "man" i.e. "human being."]<br />
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The problem with Paolo Zacchias <a href="http://www.cbmh.ca/index.php/cbmh/article/viewFile/1388/1355">according to medical historian Jaclyn Duffin </a>is that he is quite unknown in English speaking historiagraphy. He's referred to in scholarly works, often in a footnote, but practically no one has written anything about him, and there's scant biographical information about him.<br />
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His Quaestiones remains untranslated in English.<br />
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So if there's anyone out there among my readers who knows Latin well, I would appreciate knowing the <i>exact passage</i> (including Latin passage) in which Zacchia argues that life begins at conception, and, whether he considers an embryo a child, and in what contexts-- i.e. only legally or as regards baptism,etc. The section dealing with fetuses seems to begin around <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?lpg=PA716&dq=%22Paolo+Zacchia%22+fetus&pg=PA685&id=9W5DAAAAcAAJ#v=onepage&q=de%20foetus%20humani&f=false">page 685.</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-82289015518870751342016-09-01T11:24:00.003-04:002016-09-01T12:20:41.490-04:00Thomas Fienus and the Decline of Aristotelian Embryology <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm-LoiKWuLaxOXniIvzGtrtGI_6ryruosi6RMQqZT6sSgkV23sOyqpu2P78cAl1WIPlns9ybzC85xdiAf9pHxyMflvMngN4GNUK1HKrgpcJiwEfcpJixsok85xmbUajAH_P8M/s1600/bwk8bgettyimages.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm-LoiKWuLaxOXniIvzGtrtGI_6ryruosi6RMQqZT6sSgkV23sOyqpu2P78cAl1WIPlns9ybzC85xdiAf9pHxyMflvMngN4GNUK1HKrgpcJiwEfcpJixsok85xmbUajAH_P8M/s320/bwk8bgettyimages.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">During the Middle Ages, Aristotle's views on embryology were predominant, and shaped Christendom's approach to abortion. Although abortion was always regarded as a grave sin, regardless of stage of pregnancy, the abortion of inanimate fetuses (i.e. fetuses without souls) was not considered homicide, whereas the death of an ensouled fetus was considered murder. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Renaissance, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution all challenged Aristotelian views in many fields of knowledge, and embryology was no different. Thomas Fienus (1567-1631) was a natural philosopher (I hesitate to call him a scientist) who introduced innovative ideas to the question of the beginnings of human life. Fienus was a Professor of Medicine at Louvain and in 1620 he published <i>De formatrice foetus liber</i>, in which he rejected the delayed hominization in favour of the belief that ensoulment happened three days after insemination, at the latest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Not exactly "life begins at conception", but pretty close.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In Aristotle's vision, a newly formed fetus developed a vegetative soul, then an animal soul before finally receiving a human soul. Fienus said that this didn't make sense. In order for a fetus to self-organize as a human being, he needed a human soul to do that. (The modern way of saying that would be that organisms don't change species, but it would be a bit anachronistic to put it that way.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Fienus's approach was at once traditional and innovative. He was traditional in that his book was organized in the question-objection-answer format familiar to readers of Aquinas' Summa. He also placed some importance on experience as a source of knowledge; but whereas today we would expect a scientist to perform his own experiments, Fienus relied on the observations <i>of others</i>. In that sense, he was more of a commentator than a scientist. Nevertheless, he challenged the idea that Aristotle should be held as an authority for authority's sake, and pleaded for the freedom to question and verify his conclusions. This was a revolutionary thought in an period when the antiquity of an authority was thought to be a mark of credibility.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Some might wonder how talk of souls could be considered scientific. It's true that souls themselves are not the object of scientific study. However, the physical manifestation of a living being was believed to manifest the existence of a soul. Since the soul was the form of the body, the body would give clues as to the kind of soul it possessed. Vegetables had vegetative souls, animals had sensitive souls and humans had rational souls. So the question about souls led to the investigation about the origins of the human body.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Non-scientific ideas, even erroneous scientific ideas, have had an important influence on the conduct of scientific inquiry, and have often spurred fruitful investigations. Findings and discoveries don't lose their merit just because they were produced under doutbful influences. I'm not trying to knock metaphysics. I'm trying to tell people who don't believe in metaphysics that these inquiries were not all a waste of time just because they were spurred by religious and philosophical questions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Fienus was prolific writer, and like many natural philosophers wrote on a number of topics. He wrote about surgery, comets and the influence of the mother's imagination on the unborn child. Although dismissed today, that latter topic was huge in the Early Modern period. It was believed that if a mother had unpleasant thoughts or emotions at the time of conception or during pregnancy, it could adversely affect a child. Guidebooks were written to give women tips on how to make sure their emotional states produced optimal outcomes. This was serious stuff!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I did an extensive Google search on Thomas Fienus and there doesn't seem to be a lot of biographical information about him. I couldn't even find a portrait of him. It just seems a shame that someone who was instrumental in shaping our image of the unborn has basically been forgotten by the wider culture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Note: Thomas Fienus is also known as Thomas Feyens, Thoma Fieno and Tomasso Fieno.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">More information:</span><br />
<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=bX71AQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA118&dq=%22daniel%20sennert%22%20fetus&pg=PA118#v=snippet&q=feyens&f=false"><span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></a>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=bX71AQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA118&dq=%22daniel%20sennert%22%20fetus&pg=PA118#v=snippet&q=feyens&f=false">The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy</a>, p. 118 ff <span dir="ltr" style="line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start;">Ohad Nachtomy</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start;">,</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start;"> </span><span dir="ltr" style="line-height: 19.2px; text-align: start;">Justin E. H. Smith</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span dir="ltr">Oxford University Press</span>, 2014 - <a class="secondary" href="https://www.google.ca/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=subject:%22Philosophy%22&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0" style="text-decoration: none;"><span dir="ltr">Philosophy</span></a> - <span dir="ltr">256 pages</span></span></div>
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<span dir="ltr" style="line-height: 19.2px;"><a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=ATMAXdCVaS0C&lpg=PA120&ots=SihJJwxaoB&dq=%22thomas%20fienus%22&pg=PA120#v=onepage&q=%22thomas%20fienus%22&f=false">The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law</a>, p. 120ff , </span>Wolfgang Müller, Cornell University Press, Jun 1, 2012 - History - 278 pages</div>
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"The Attitude Toward Aristotelian Biological Thought in the Louvain Medical Treatises During the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century: The Case of Embryology" by Jan Papy in <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=-xspjPBBAjQC&lpg=PA322&dq=Thomas%20Fienus&pg=PA322#v=onepage&q=Thomas%20Fienus&f=false">Aristotle's Animals in the Middle Ages and Renaissance</a>, p. 322ff Carlos G. Steel, Guy Guldentops, Pieter Beullens, Leuven University Press, 1999 - Literary Criticism - 408 pages</div>
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<a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Fienus"><br /></a>
<a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Fienus">Thomas Fienus </a>Wikipedia page in French.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-64598072363665443872016-08-31T11:02:00.001-04:002016-08-31T11:02:35.069-04:00Combat Creeping Censorship of Social Conservatism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXuLIaVxSGHM4E9KexOLRuVMg8tR0VTV_aOtqikCCljP197ZYn-EHRJOPM6-ZbMdJcGt61AsGDuLwUC-4PP1XnOqUUagkvktCuPA5XSQg5wUBalKbCAhuWdjbfwvKZR2i4AUo/s1600/notprotectme.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXuLIaVxSGHM4E9KexOLRuVMg8tR0VTV_aOtqikCCljP197ZYn-EHRJOPM6-ZbMdJcGt61AsGDuLwUC-4PP1XnOqUUagkvktCuPA5XSQg5wUBalKbCAhuWdjbfwvKZR2i4AUo/s400/notprotectme.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">From CHP leader <a href="https://www.chp.ca/commentary/silencing-the-opposition-the-harbinger-of-tyranny#.V8bWZUlugh8.twitter">Rod Taylor:</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fbfbfb;">A couple of recent examples come to mind. In Whitby, Ontario, Liberal </span><b style="background-color: yellow;">MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes is sponsoring an e-petition calling on Parliament to ban images of the victims of abortion. </b><span style="background-color: #fbfbfb;">The images, of course, are terrible to look at. They show what abortion really does. This makes Planned Parenthood look bad. Ms. Cesar-Chavannes and other defenders of abortion-on-demand don’t want people thinking about the suffering of the pre-born or the tragedy of their being killed. <b>They want people to think happy thoughts about “choice” and “empowerment.”</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent;"><b> </b></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b style="background-color: yellow;">In Ontario and BC, provincial governments have drawn the curtain on statistics relating to abortion procedures.</b><span style="background-color: #fbfbfb;"> Taxpaying citizens are not permitted access to the numbers of abortions, the statistical causes, the negative health outcomes, or the cost to provincial coffers. It is censorship and that of the worst kind. <b>They do not censor pornography or lewd displays during the so-called “pride” parades. They only censor important health statistics relevant to their favourite cause: abortion-on-demand.</b></span><span style="background-color: transparent;"><b> </b></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fbfbfb;">Another example is the recent action by the City of Hamilton to remove three bus shelter ads sponsored by CHP Hamilton Mountain. These ads show a man entering a door marked “Ladies Showers” and pose the question, “Competing Human Rights—Where’s the Justice?” </span><b style="background-color: yellow;">It appears that some at the City do not want people questioning public policy, which is public information and thus subject to public scrutiny. There is something very wrong when any public policy is sheltered from public scrutiny.</b></span></blockquote>
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If we're going to ban abortion imagery, then ban <i>all</i> violent imagery. If children shouldn't be subjected to pictures of abortion, then they shouldn't be subjected to any violent imagery. No more public pictures of abused animals, casualties of war, decapitated hostages, drunk driving victims or the like. All of it, banned! For the children.... Let's shield the images of dead children to protect children.<br />
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Meanwhile, lewd pictures in the public square are A-OK!<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-25346194875028496752016-08-30T00:29:00.000-04:002016-09-17T13:00:44.504-04:00Science and Logic are Not Enough: What Pro-Lifers Are Up Against<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRDK23n4KhF-sd2O-aC8FErKcHUmFKlrQjBInrS4UZnP6TERHtWyjfxuJ2B78yCFJCu-Mj1t1WxDOyN4uCOdfad3_qDkfeZu8SW-WEiGyYsHO3AJz2nLhvTiQFZYxkSkUn5aA/s1600/Embryo%252C_8_cells.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRDK23n4KhF-sd2O-aC8FErKcHUmFKlrQjBInrS4UZnP6TERHtWyjfxuJ2B78yCFJCu-Mj1t1WxDOyN4uCOdfad3_qDkfeZu8SW-WEiGyYsHO3AJz2nLhvTiQFZYxkSkUn5aA/s400/Embryo%252C_8_cells.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Once upon a time, it was widely believed among pro-lifers (and still is) that if we educate the public about prenatal life, we could convince them that life begins at conception and they would in turn recognize the humanity (and by extension) equality of the unborn child.</div>
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Seasoned pro-life activists who have come across educated abortion supporters know that this isn't true. There are many well-educated people in the world who can be persuaded to say that human life begins at conception, but that life does not amount to an equal human being.</div>
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I think the pro-life argument is based on air-tight logic. </div>
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But here is what I have learned in debating abortion: <b>There is more to knowledge than facts and logic.</b></div>
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<b>Facts and logic operate at a cultural level. </b>And if your facts and logic are not "true" on that cultural level, it doesn't matter. It won't convince. It's irrelevant.</div>
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We have to pay attention to the anthropological angle of the right-to-life argument.</div>
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This blogpost is inspired by an article published by science historian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Maienschein">Jane Maienschein</a>, entitled <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848616000212"> Embryos, microscopes, and society</a> (published March 2016.)</div>
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Maienschein has extensively studied the history of embryology. She knows all about embryos, more than 99.9% of pro-lifers out there. She is very well-versed in the bioethics debates surrounding embryos (although I find in this article she makes many claims about what pro-lifers believe about embryos without corresponding documentation.) Nevertheless, I have read some of her work in an attempt to inform myself of the history of the unborn. And in spite of her knowledge, when she sees a pre-implantation embryo she sees <i>a blob of cells.</i></div>
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When we were arguing about abortion 20 years ago, the average abortion took place at about 7-8 weeks. Now it's closer to 5-6, if not earlier. The seven-and-eight week embryo is clearly, not a blob of tissue. Even the 5-6 week embryo is not a blob.</div>
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The pre-implantation embryo <i>looks like</i> a ball of cells. In fact, it's developmental name at the 16-cell stage-- morula-- comes from a latin word for "mulberry" because that's what an embryo looks like. Now I understand that most intentionally induced abortions don't take place at that stage. However, regardless of when an abortion takes place, we believe that human beings exist from fertilization, regardless if the issue at hand is abortion, stem cell research or IVF.</div>
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Pro-lifers sometimes argue from visuals, and those visuals have their place. But with abortions taking place earlier and earlier, and with threats to human life coming at the earliest stages, visuals are not enough. We cannot solely rely on the visual resemblance between a 9-week fetus and an infant to say that abortion kills a human being. </div>
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Why?</div>
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Because educated people will retort: well at 1,2,3 or 4 weeks <i>it's only a blob of cells.</i></div>
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I understand that facts and logic say otherwise. But again, facts and logic operate in a cultural context. Our culture says that that early embryo is not one of us. It's an "other". It's biomedical material, it's a thing, it's mass of interacting biochemicals. <i>It's anything but a human being</i>.</div>
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Our culture has a certain idea of what a human being is, and an early embryo doesn't correspond to that. Maybe a six-week or eight-week unborn child could pass for a human being, but as far as our culture is concerned, a human being is not a shapeless entity made up of several dozen cells. That does not compute.</div>
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So what then is the solution? More facts and logic about pre-natal development? More visuals?</div>
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I'm afraid more of the same will not do.</div>
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One of the reasons why it is so difficult to convince people of the humanity of the unborn is that the only context in which it is brought up is during the Culture War debates.</div>
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The definition of human being hinges on these culture wars. If the only time the culture's definition of "human being" is challenged is during an abortion debate, where most people like the idea of being able to escape the consequences of sex and assert female autonomy, <b>we are setting ourselves up for failure.</b></div>
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Sure, a GAP exhibition might convince some people that a bloodied 8-week fetus is a human being. But it doesn't necessarily do much for the pre-implantation embryo, does it?</div>
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<b>So the solution is that we have to make the unborn and object of study.</b></div>
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I had mentioned that I was reading up on the history of embryology-- and by extension, the history of the unborn. </div>
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We need a history of the unborn. And a psychology of the unborn. And a sociology of the unborn (i.e. how people respond to the unborn.) And an anthropology of the unborn. And a theology of the unborn.</div>
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The unborn simply can't be something we write about ONLY in the context of the culture war.</div>
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Now you may say to yourself: well how is an anthropology of the unborn going to convince teeny boppers or middle-aged working class people that they are human beings.</div>
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It doesn't.</div>
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And that's not the target audience.</div>
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The target audience is college-educated people and especially influencers-- the academics whom "nobody reads" but have a disproportionate influence on our culture because of whom they influence: other academics, thinkers, pundits, politicians and the like. Remember: only a very small number of people read great thinkers, but those small numbers are important.</div>
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The goal is that by creating a new cultural context for the unborn, the general public will begin to see them in a new light. If the unborn are treated like humans on paper, they are far more likely to be treated like humans in real life.</div>
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Another advantage is that such academic debates will force pro-aborts to confront who the unborn really are. Imagine a history of late-term abortion in the twentieth century. Imagine that report uses testimony from women who have had saline abortions and have felt their <i>conscious babies</i> squirm around the womb. </div>
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If abortion supporters want to contest such narratives, they will have to admit to a number of facts, facts that so many of them would rather not have to address, and they don't, because of the way our public abortion debate is mediated by pro-abort broadcasters and journalists.</div>
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That's just an example of one advantage among many.</div>
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When such academic material is available to the public, and it feeds decades of cultural change, in the future, it won't seem like such a stretch for a secular Supreme Court justice to say that an embryo is a human being, because he has already been repeatedly exposed to this notion.</div>
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We really have to take the fight for the unborn to the next level. We need to flood the internet with writings about the unborn the way we have flooded the internet with fetal imagery and pro-life apologetics. We have done a good job of swaying minds at a popular level, now we have to do it at institutional levels by reaching out to people who will one day run these institutions.</div>
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It's not about saying: <i>Abortion is murder</i>! It's about saying: here are unborn human beings and this is their story.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24800734.post-13503485815124627892016-08-29T22:46:00.003-04:002016-08-29T22:56:00.218-04:00An update<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirNAiUkTk6LDGtGS-boncjvPjZbs953Mt8XvIS_7a9rS-pFShtouI3lB8SAI3s5dg2r6LUabqdHTStVkdfi9tB6_LkLPuz9HXk-GBkHqfCty9ii61xt0faWwFyl65y2rcvYIA/s1600/computer-338968_640.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirNAiUkTk6LDGtGS-boncjvPjZbs953Mt8XvIS_7a9rS-pFShtouI3lB8SAI3s5dg2r6LUabqdHTStVkdfi9tB6_LkLPuz9HXk-GBkHqfCty9ii61xt0faWwFyl65y2rcvYIA/s400/computer-338968_640.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I know I haven't been blogging much lately.<br />
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I wanted to get away from the model of commenting on a news article everyday. It got to the point that I felt I had to "feed the blog" every day, and that unconsciously I was asking myself "so what do I want to be mad at today?"<br />
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I don't have the time to do that kind of blogging any more. I have four kids. They are still on summer break, and there's a kitchen reno going on in my house. I have other things going on in my life.<br />
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But I still have things to say about pro-life issues, and I still want to express them in a format that's longer than a tweet or facebook status.<br />
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I noticed that when I used to write these personal entries, my blog stats would go down, so I didn't write them a lot.<br />
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But now that my blog stats are almost completely zero, I suppose that point is moot. I will be posting material for the handful of people who really want to read what I think. This may not be the blog fodder of the days of yore. That's perfectly fine with me. I don't have the time or the energy these days to keep up with the blogosphere.<br />
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I had wanted to write more formal pieces that focused on pro-life themes in history. That still interests me, but it's tough to do when the kids are home. I hope to get back to it in the coming weeks.<br />
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For now, I will just share my thoughts as they come, regardless of the day's news.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com