Weekend links: fetal pain, New Wave Feminists, a pro-life conversion

A few links for your weekend reading pleasure:

An interview with New Wave Feminists (blog.secularprolife.org)

“If [New Wave Feminists] NWF got a $1,000,000 grant, what would you want to do with it?”
“…If NWF got a $1,000 grant, my answer would probably be the same thing – college outreach. The sidewalks are the last line of defense when it comes to changing hearts and minds, but the colleges are just one step behind that….We have to be on campuses proclaiming LOUDLY that women’s rights are human rights, and human rights should start the moment a person first exists.” Read the full post here.

AMA dismisses evidence of fetal pain (dailysignal.com)

“The American Medical Association is sticking by its influential report asserting that unborn babies cannot feel pain at 20 weeks, despite subsequent studies finding otherwise. Three of the report’s five authors had or later would have ties to the abortion industry.” [emphasis added] Read the full post here, including links to the medical papers cited on fetal pain.

An Ivy League student describes her journey to becoming pro-life (browndailyherald.com)

“Slavery and genocide, for example, are both driven by the idea that a select group of human beings are unworthy of the dignity intrinsic to personhood and could therefore be subjugated by a stronger class of humans. When people in positions of power and privilege use this language to deny someone their basic human rights, they do it to justify acts that would otherwise be unconscionable to enact on other people. Labeling these humans as nonpersons or fractions of a person is the first step in allowing them to suffer inhumane violence and at times extinction at the hands of their oppressors.” Read the full post here.

Hippocrates has left the building

A bit of an online war has erupted among people I consider Pro-Life Friendlies in Texas over a pending bill there. Details of the bill don’t concern me here. Medical ethics are involved, however, and that brings up something that drives me nuts: references to the Hippocratic Oath. As in, doctors take the Oath and therefore shouldn’t be involved in euthanasia or abortion.

Of course they shouldn’t. The Hippocratic Oath isn’t the reason, though. Many medical schools no longer use that oath, and I must believe that one reason is that this line just doesn’t square with medical politics: “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy.”

How positively pre-1973.

Fear not, however. The American Medical Association is on the case. From the AMA’s Principles of Medical Ethics: “The Principles of Medical Ethics of the AMA do not prohibit a physician from performing an abortion in accordance with good medical practice and under circumstances that do not violate the law.”

That doesn’t even address ethics for nurses, medical assistants, and other people (some of whom do not have medical training; see Abby Johnson’s Unplanned) who assist with abortions. For doctors, Hippocrates is in the rearview mirror. For other abortion practitioners, he was never in sight.

Challenging abortion practitioners on the basis of that Oath assumes a context that simply doesn’t exist. There are stronger, more persuasive arguments to be made, starting with biology and embryology.