Nebraska cares so much more about unborn children than it does about walking, talking, living, breathing women that it made Danielle Deaver of Grand Island carry her baby to term, even after she found out the baby would die right after birth.
she was about 22 weeks when she learned that she wouldn’t be able to carry the pregnancy to term and that her child would die soon after birth.
Deaver said her doctors told her she’d have to go into labor naturally because they couldn’t medically induce her because of state law.
Deaver gave birth Dec. 8 to a baby girl that died 15 minutes later.
Brutal.
seems consistent to me: the unborn are sacred, but once they’re born, fuck em.
That is one of the most heart-breaking things I’ve ever read. The comments on the original article are just brutal, too.
This would have happened to me, too, but fortunately I live in WA and was able to terminate that pregnancy and get on with my life (and with lower risks to my future fertility, too).
I’ve seen evil, and it’s Christian.
The line of reasoning goes something like this: better to die natural than be hacked into pieces and vacuumed out (or something like that), along with a heaping helping of “what if there’s a miracle?”
It doesn’t make sense to me either. I’m just telling you how they think. I remember being given a cartoon book about the ways babies are aborted. Suprisingly enough, it wasn’t gory, just sort of wacky in that ’60’s kind of way of doing illustrations. I wish I still had it, as it was as pure a piece of camp as you are ever going to find.
It’s not that they love babies, it’s that they hate women and want them to suffer. A women is pregnant? That means she has had sex and should be punished. Thats the line of thinking for the anti-abortion crowd as far as I can tell.
Both this and the original article don’t make mention of how the baby struggled to breathe for those 15 minutes of ” life”. Lovely. So much compassion from those so-called christians.
Try this link for more of the story:
http://nebraska.statepaper.com/vnews/dis…
or watch the video:
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article…
But putting both the baby and the parents through hell is better. I get it. Glad I’m not a “christian”.
You know, Mr. Hecht, I’ve noticed that when you post after 8pm it’s most often to reveal something quite heartwrenchingly awful. I’m just saying.
This is painful to read. In 100 years, this is the kind of bullshit that will make us look as if we are mired in the dark ages now. Hopefully, this will be a shocking story of history even 20 years from now. I’d be devastated if either of my daughters were ever faced with this. That said, they don’t live in Nebraska and their father and I would make damned sure they got out of a hell-hole backwater shitzone like this if ever necessary. So sad that many people don’t have the means to do the same.
Just heartbreaking. And, no, not surprising.
we should criminalize THIS shit ..
This is just wrong. Agreed #4.
@12 Nobody cares if you live or die, either.
@ 4 / 13: “I’ve seen evil, and it’s Christian.”
Well that’s just lazy. As thoroughly fucked as this story is, are you really going to claim that Christianity has sole proprietary rights to inhumanity? You can put any words you want into Jesus’s mouth: for Liberation Theologists like Ignacio Ellacuría Christ was a socialist – for Quakers he was an abolitionist.
The problem isn’t Christianity. It isn’t even religion – after all how many of the 20th century’s greatest calamities were actively caused by religion – WWI, the Soviet Blood Purges? Evil is human.
@15
Blanket statements, while feeling nice, aren’t very productive. So while I agree w/ you about #4’s attitude, divorcing WWI (or WWII ftm) from any kind of religious overtones is just as simplistic.
The thing to recognize here is the basic Christian ethic where humans are “born into sin.” Christians tend not to agree on much, but even those who don’t stress that concept still accept it as a basic assumption. The issue w/ abortion, for the Christian, is that the only humans that are truly “innocent” are the unborn. This is why they are able to divest their compassion from others, because anyone who is alive, by definition, is a sinner.
So it’s no surprise to see that Christians value the unborn far more than the truly alive. This is a product of the very basic tenets of their religion.
@16: I’m not saying these conflicts lacked religious overtones – but it is equally simplistic to confuse religious rhetoric with actual historical causation. e.g. just because some Mujaheddin claim to be fighting a holy war against the Infidel doesn’t mean their conflict isn’t rooted in geopolitical and economic hegemony.
It is interesting that you bring up the doctrine of original sin. This seemingly “basic Christian ethic” created almost from whole cloth by Augustine of Hippo in the late 4th century. The idea actually served a shrewd institutional purpose for the newly Christianized Roman empire – since humanity was irredeemably tainted by Adam’s fall, clearly repressive institutions were necessary on the part of the state as well as Church to enforce moral community where the ego failed. Even the doctrinal precepts of religious expression are inseparable from their economic and political context.
And technically speaking, Augustine defined the seminal fluids as the actual transmitter of man’s fallen nature: procreation is only possible due to lust – unwanted boners are proof par excellence that our sinful appetites exist beyond any possible attempt at self-moderation. Thus, according to Augustine sin actually begins upon conception, not birth.
I was raised Methodist and Original Sin was never mentioned in all my years of church services, sunday school, “Vacation Bible School”, and church camp. I think that may be a more orthodox/catholic thing.
@12 – Maybe she could have gone to another state for the procedure if people in other states weren’t busy shooting the few doctors that were able and willing to do it.
I don’t know specifically why she didn’t go to Kansas or wherever. Maybe she couldn’t travel because she was stuck on bed rest. Maybe she couldn’t afford to go. Maybe she didn’t know it was an option. Maybe she was afraid of being attacked by anti-choice crazies if she went.
Legal question – if she had, could she have been prosecuted under Nebraska law for leaving the state to commit a crime, or something like that? I’m hoping no, but I don’t know.
@12,
Like all conservatives, you fall victim to The Fundamental Attribution Error.
You probably also think rape victims were “asking for it,” right?
Actually, you can get a late term abortion in Omaha, if you can make your way through the neverending freakshow in the parking lot.
Then why does it say Nebraska state law prevented her?
Isn’t there like, uh, 49 other states?
Hey, if any of you guys can’t take any more crazy shit like that, there’s a Canadian man here in Toronto (me) that would marry you and bequeath peace, order, good government AND universal healthcare on you! ptroyer@gmail.com
You know, I might have spoken too soon. I know that there *used* to be a provider in Bellevue, Nebraska (right by the air force base, naturally) and one in midtown Omaha, plus I think the U of N medical center did them, but it’s been a while since I’ve heard anything. (I have a ridiculous cousin who went all Baptist on us for a man, and used to protest outside them. I haven’t seen her in ages)
The Bellevue doctor was a good friend of Dr. Tiller, and is apparently trying to move his still active practice to the Iowa side of the river, but was having a hard time finding real estate.
That’s fucking barbaric. Think of all the happy moments of pregnancy….decorating a nursery, planning a baby shower, choosing a name, talking about who the baby will look like. Think about all the strangers who come up to you and say “Can I touch your belly? When are you due? Do you know what you’re having? Is it your first?”
Now, think of this poor woman who couldn’t have those experiences, and had to endure all those questions time after time, all the while knowing her child would never live.
Fucking ASSHOLES.
@17
Modern Christianity was invented in the 4th C. Everything in the NT is a result of editing, not of gathering. There was a lot more out there until the religion was legalized and made into official Roman policy. Churches around the world, Lutheran, Methodist, etc., still invoke the Nicean creed, w/o even knowing where it came from. So, no, original sin is not just some crazy idea that was slipped into the religion as a footnote, which is what you seem to imply (and @18, please read my post again to see where I addressed your response.
I’m just on the opposite side, I’m not going to ignore the deep religious feelings from major geopolitical/economic events simply because it is convenient to do so. And if you’re going to invoke the 20th C. Communist Atrocities in Eurasia, these were driven by ideology far more than practical, economic concerns. The fanatical following of those ideologies isn’t too far from religious fervor. They both begin w/ the assumption that there are easy answers to living in this world, and that if everyone lived according to a certain code, “everything will be all right.”
This is, to me, the greatest source of depravity in humans. A single human like Gary Ridgway might murder a lot of people, rarely more than a hundred, but a group of humans, following a single ideal can destroy nations, murder millions of humans, and maintain an industrial level of torture and depravity for decades, if not centuries. Most (but not all) of those ideals have come from religious thought. And of those religions, the main source is a sky god from the deserts of the middle east.
@27: You wouldn’t know anything about trolling if it bit you on the ass.
Trolling is a art, and you’re ruining it.
In any event, you have to consider how small towns are, especially small towns in Nebraska (Grand Island only has about 50,000 residents): If the news got out that the fetus was not developing correctly, and she left town and came back not pregnant, it could be a very dicey situation for her. I suppose she could say she was going to Omaha or Denver or KC for prenatal care, and miscarried, but you’d still have a lot of Nosy Parkers speculating that she got an abortion. The only “honorable” thing to do in their eyes is to carry the pregnancy to term or have a tragic “accident” that causes her to miscarry.
And people wonder why small towns are dying…..
That is sick. That is forced mental trauma for the entire time she found out and asked for the procedure until the birth & death of baby occurred…
Charlie Sheen would say we are LOSING!!!
@ 28: I wasn’t intending to imply that the doctrine of original sin was some madcap idea that managed to slip into Catholic doctrine, but that the idea was radically new relative to the theological arguments of the earlier Church fathers (St. Justine / Clement, etc.)
Moreover, it contravened some three centuries of theological precedent, which held that while man may be born into sin, baptism into the Christian community still offers a sort of tabula rasa for the soul. The fact that Augustine’s doctrine succeeded to become dogma is because it served an institutional purpose: it helped transform Christianity from a religion founded in conflict with the state, to one which embodied the state.
Again – I’m not saying that ideological concerns can be ignored, contrary to the beliefs of the agents themselves, or that religion should be considered subservient to economic and political necessity: it’s that these two inseparable.
Most of the ideological justifications for depravity and violence against “others” have been couched in religious terms simply because religion is the oldest form of human social cohesion. The only reason the Abrahamic sky-father seems to have dominated in the justification of institutional violence is because Christian and Islamic empires have been the dominant geopolitical forces for the last 1400 years.