As then-state Senator Bill Morrow (R-San Juan Capistrano) met with about 40 teen attendees of Operation Rescue's summer Survivors Camp in August 1999, a girl walked up to hand the past Pro-Life PAC of Orange County “Legislator of the Year” a jar with a fetus floating inside. Like her compadres, the teen was wary of how strong an anti-abortion advocate Morrow really was, and she figured the pickled unborn would remind the legislator to do what the kids believed was the right thing.
No matter where he stood on abortion, Morrow had to be asking himself, “Where the hell did she get the fetus?” Amelia Thomson-Deveaux was wondering the same thing while looking at a display of photos on her college campus the other day.
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Placed outside the highly trafficked student center as part of anti-abortion students' “Respect Week,” uh, celebration, the photos showed fetuses at different stages of development. Thomson-Deveaux writes thoughtfully about the ethics of using those photos here.
One thing she does not address, but which came to mind while reading her piece, was this: if the fetuses blown up for everyone to see or contained inside jars as gifts to politicians are American human beings protected by the U.S. Constitution, shouldn't their permission be required before showing/distributing them?
We don't know where exactly the fetuses mentioned in this post came from because anti-abortion activists tend to be tight-lipped about how they come across such things (wanting to corner the market on the unborn/their images and all). But some have said in the past they simply get them from waste containers outside medical facilities.
To take their logic a step further, the fetuses are then patients who have a right to privacy. Did anyone ask them if their medical records are to be shared with the world? Of course not, that would be silly. Okay, then, how about the mother?
Seems kind of the opposite of Respect Week, doesn't it?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.