Comments

1
It's the Operation Rescue rationale for opposing abortion: It looks icky when you photograph it.

They've got a point. It's why I'm opposed to surgery of all kinds -- it's just so gross when it's captured on film.
2
MIscarried fetish in a jar? Looks like an autocorrect error to me...or is it?
3
Damn, she took care of the wrong one.
4
Far be it from me to rain on the Bush-bashing parade, but this article is from 1992. Why is Dan bringing it up now?

And I kind of like the idea of a miscarried fetish in a jar. It sounds like something you'd once have ordered from the back of magazine.
5
Wish she would have gave up after that first time.
6
I don't see how it's parTICularly puzzling, given the gender, age, experience and parent-child gulfs between them among other things, but I hope that doesn't mean I'm a weirdogasmer.
7
And he rolled out the red carpet for all those dumbfucks like the ones in Utah that'd establish the protocol for a criminal investigation for people like his own mother.
8

If Republicans would concentrate on two things -- taxes and spending -- and drop all the Social Conservative Baggage (anti-gay; anti-abortion), we'd rule the world.
9
I find it odd, but we all mourn in different ways. It's funny how the left will mock this when they always tell the pro-life men that they dont understand the emotional trauma pregnancy can wreak on a woman.
10
@8: good luck with that...
11
I wonder what thing in a jar he was shown that made him pro-torture.
12
Bush 41 was pro choice until he became Reagan's VP
13
There is an absolutely insane amount of shit in this world that you'd really rather not see.

After 32 years on the police force, I can honestly say that fetuses in jars would be about the least repulsive thing I've ever seen.
14
Love the update, Dan: I also recall that display from Chicago school field trips of the mid-70s, but I don't think it was at the Field, it was at the Museum of Science and Industry. I was too busy geeking out at the Foucault pendulum in the stairwell to pay it much mind, though.
15
Barbara Bush is like the worst person ever.
16
@8 If Republicans weren't so busy spending, it wouldn't be such a lie every time they called themselves conservative. Seriously. For the past 30 years, the Republicans have been deficit spenders in reality and budget hawks in their rhetoric. I can't believe we're stupid enough as a country to still believe this bullshit.

Anyway. I think this is Bush's way of trying to seem folksy. I mean the guy has lied constantly for the last ten years. Why start believing him now? He's just having a ghost writer write nonsensical pablum for the Jesustards.

He's probably pro-choice, and would only care one way or the other only if corporate profits were at stake.
17
EWWWW BRB VOMITING
18
I wonder, though - if those jars at the museum were all fetuses my own mother asked me to drive her to the hospital after miscarrying? And I were a none-too-bright teenage boy with a drinking problem and a tendency to oversimplify, whose mom never bothered to sit down and give me a talking to about what a grown woman's life is like?

Yeah, there'd be an unpredictable bounce off that one too, I'd imagine.
19
For gods' sake, can't we please stop dignifying the Mandatory Pregnancy Movement with the label "Pro-Life"? These MPM bastards aren't "Pro" anything!
20
"...her miscarried fetish in a jar..."

Is that a typo?
21
While she didn't keep it in a jar, I have a Mormon aunt who had a miscarriage probably close to a decade ago now, and insists on speaking about it at every possible opportunity. Remembering it during pre-meal prayers at family gatherings, discussing the ages of her 8 other children ("...and so-and-so is only 3, I had her a year after the miscarriage..."), interviews for the local paper about how all of her kids play soccer*...

Hardly anybody in the family talks to her any more as a result, just because it's so awkward to deal with. And yes, I understand that a miscarriage is a traumatic event. But hell, my own mother had a miscarriage once in the years between my birth and that of my brother, and it's been discussed exactly twice in my presence (the first time, I was in high school).

*-- No, really. The paper once interviewed her about how all of her eight kids were part of the youth soccer league at school, and she went out of her way to tell them about her miscarriage.
22

I saw a lion
He was standing alone
With a fetus in a jar.
23
Now I've got the Mitford sisters on the brain, and I'm thinking that would have been fully believable in Daughters and Rebels, "Debo, darling, put this in the cold room for mother, chop chop!" Oy...people who wear pearls are so *odd*...

And if you like odd, you can't do better than the Mutter Museum, which I decided would earn me "worst mother of the year award" if I took my then 8 year old to see it after the Tutankhamun show (I did buy the book, though):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCtter…
24
Actually, Dan, your field trip was to the Museum of Science and Industry, where the jarred fetuses have resided since 1943.

--A former MSI employee
25
Umm, thanks for the confirmation, @24.
26
I have a friend who's wish is to spend a couple years constantly pregnant. Every three months she'd abort the fetus but keep it in a jar. She figures after about 24 months, she'd have enough to line an entire shelf of her home.


Later in life she actually wants to have a kid. The point is, every time the kid is bad she'd sit it in front of the fetus shelf to remind the bastard how easily he or she could have been aborted.


Pretty sure she got the idea from the Internet.


Yes, I have fucked up friends.

27
I just... I... just... WHUT? I don't even.

And the right say *we* have no ethics, no morality, no sense of decency....

I'm going to go rinse my brains out now. UGH.
28
@21,

People who won't let go of grief are seriously fucked up. Those who are legitimately hurting need professional help. The rest are milking it for all it's worth, and that's beyond fucked up.

Your aunt sounds like the latter category, frankly.
29
WWPS?

"... But you never looked hard
at a fetus in a jar
you never saw your mama change."

30
@22, you should have signed that "Col. Kurtz."

Think I'll go put "The End" on now.
31
Did you know that they got rid of the giant heart that you could walk through last year? It was plaster, and they had to break it up to get it out, so there's nothing left. Apparently it was not engaging enough for today's youth.
32

"I never expected to see the remains of the fetus, which she had saved in a jar to bring to the hospital," ...

Ok, folks, when a pregnant woman experiences heavy bleeding, it's hard to know if the fetus miscarried or not. I've heard it advised to save the miscarried material in a jar and take it to the hospital, both to confirm that a miscarriage occured and verify that all the fetal material is out. Showing your teenage son seems more than a bit off, but who knows what state of mind she was in. Point is she saved it to take with her to the hospital. Likely it looked like a jar of blood- not an identifiable fetus- since most miscarriages occur in the first three months. She wasn't keeping it on a shelf in the closet. Can't you guys find any actual issues to debate? Or are you just going to keep puking up other peoples' articles you didn't bother to read?

33
Republicans are really morbid. Remember Santorum and the dead baby? The one they bought home for the kids to see?

As for the Bushes and their kids.... Poor George. No wonder he's such a sociopath: his sister dies and the parents go play golf instead of going to the funeral, and his mother shows off her miscarried fetus. What a dreadful family.
34
@24: Yeah. I grew up on the North Side, and my mom almost never took me and my sisters to MSI because the feti freaked her out.

@13: After 6 months on /b/, I can honestly say that fetuses in jars would be about the least repulsive thing I've ever seen.
35
@8 believing in things just because you see it is so totally a conservative things, the taxes are lower, that means things are better because I'm not giving the government any money, better for us all to be in debt than for me to have to wait a few more days to buy that video game.
36
@32
Good thing they didn't confuse it with that jar of Prego Sauce she had in her bag for the church's spaghetti dinner.
37
There's only one way to know if a fetus is a person or not: when the Zombie Aocalypse comes, do the unborn rise?
38
@28-- Yeah, I'm pretty sure she's just milking it, too, because she's all too happy to talk about it and doesn't heap on the histrionics. She's always been more about seeking attention than sympathy -- she's one of those crazed soccer moms, too.

That doesn't mean she doesn't have a screw loose, though; the rest of the family has major issues with her husband, although that's a little beyond the scope of this comments thread.
39
First of all, I hope @26 is a joke, because that kind of is like murder. It's an anti-abortionist's dream come true, as a story, of course.

@38 I think you're condemning her a bit too strongly. She probably has unresolved issues about it. One of my friends' moms in elementary school would very openly tell him that he was the reincarnation of his older, miscarried brother. "You tried to come into the world once, and it didn't work, so you tried again, and here you are!" To a 9-yr-old, the explanation was remarkably easy to understand.

It turned out that she had actually been forced to have an abortion by her (now ex-)husband and had felt guilt for killing a child she really wanted.

I'm not saying there aren't people who milk things, but it's better to find out the whole story before dismissing someone as unworthy of your understanding or compassion.
40
I'm with @32. She was bringing the jar TO THE FU#@$# HOSPITAL people!!!! I am anti-Bush with the rest of them but seriously, leave this alone. You have no idea the trauma of miscarriage (I do, twice.) It's not like she was leaving the jar around the house for crissakes. Move on people.
41
...What the fuck possesses someone to put their miscarried fetus in a jar in the first place? Egads.

Though now I'm kind of wishing I'd put my appendix in a jar. Would that have turned people against appendectomies?
42
Silver lining time, folks. There's one less Bush in the world.
43
Huh. That's odd on several levels. Of course, Barbra's pro-choice standpoint makes sense, given her miscarriage: only about 1 fertilized egg in 4 implants and is carried to term (in cases without medical intervention), which makes God the biggest abortionist of all. Obviously Yahweh has no problem killing "unborn children", so why should we? He IS, after all, the moral authority. :-P

I've also never understood why CREATING a fetus through human action (penis-in-vagina intercourse) is ALWAYS "part of God's Plan", while destroying a fetus through human action (medical abortion) is NEVER "part of God's Plan".

@8: Naw, no-regulation, or extremely-limited-regulation, capitalism is too broken to be a long-term economic system. You'll wind up with something like corporate serfdom eventually, which would make you a Feudalist and not a Republican. Plus, if you dropped the Christian values social policy, you wouldn't be Republicans short-term either, you'd be Libertarians or Centrist Democrats, depending on the sanity of your fiscal proposals.
44
And that little miscarried fetus was kept alive in an incubator, and given to another family, and grew up to be Karl Rove. And now you know the Rest Of The Story...
45
@4 Dan's bringing it up NOW because Bush just brought it up in his NEW BOOK.
46
Follow the link, and find a Washington Post story with a different version of
Barbara Bush's Miscarriage Adventure!!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/pol…
47
@39 -- Perhaps. But she's got issues about a lot of things. The constant discussion of her miscarriage (which was over a decade ago) is just one of many. It's just the one she whips out at every opportunity.

Just for the record, when I say "the family doesn't speak to her," I don't mean that as "I just got trapped on one side of that dividing line when I was younger and went with it." Whenever I think of her, one of the first things that comes to mind is the time we all got together to celebrate the high school graduation of one of my older cousins, and her little "thank you all for being here" speech before dinner included a little sidebar about it. Not exactly appetizing dinner conversation.

(The second thing that comes to mind is when my dad was in the hospital and she tried to have Mormon missionaries sneak into his room when my stepmom's back was turned so they could pray over him despite his explicit request to be left alone.)
48
Just a reminder: There is the Pro-Choice movement and the Anti-Choice, or Anti-Abortion movement. Both sides are pro-life (everyone is pro-life, for goodness sakes). Just because the conservatives (quite wisely) tied themselves to the "pro-life" moniker early on doesn't mean that reasoned, rational people have to call them PRO-anything. So call them what they are: Anti-Choice or Anti-Abortion.

The language we use is important in dispelling propaganda.
49
I REALLY don't think it's a "miscarried fetish".

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