A Sonogram Is Worth A Thousand Words by Doug Wrenn

A Sonogram Is Worth A Thousand Words

By Doug Wrenn

March 27, 2007

South Carolina is seceding again, not from the Union, but this time from the corrosive, contagious, permeating and pervasive culture of death.

A currently debated bill in the South Carolina state legislature proposes mandating that women considering having an abortion first be shown a sonogram of their baby on "death row."

South Carolina's House of Representatives has approved the bill, and it is now heading for a committee in the state Senate. Gov. Mark Sanford said he would sign the bill into law if it makes it to his desk.

Currently, seven states have similar laws and ten more are considering them.

A spokesman for Focus On The Family told the ABC news program, "Nightline" that in 88% of cases in which women considering abortions are shown sonograms of their babies, they change their minds and instead give birth. That's 88 good reasons why this bill should become law.

As the total number of babies murdered since Roe vs. Wade is climbing and ever closer to reaching and passing the 50 million mark, a sonogram is clearly worth a thousand words.

Once, a very long time ago in my youth, I dabbled in sales for a very short period of time. I soon learned that this type of work, while very lucrative for some, was not at all my cup of tea. One tidbit of wisdom I recall from that experience was my sales trainer telling me that the product value determines the scope of the market. For example, most people will not wish to travel any farther than a half an hour to pick up a pizza they ordered, but people will think nothing of driving a hundred miles to compare prices at an auto dealership when seeking to buy a new car.

This sonogram issue reminds of sales in a similar way. Before leaving the house after calling in that order for a pizza, we take it on faith that the pizza will be made to order and look pretty much what we expect it to look like. For ten bucks, how much can we rightfully expect?

But would we buy a new, $30,000.00 dollar car, "sight unseen"? For that matter, not only would we look at the car but we would study it, repeatedly walking around it in circles, closely examining the interior and exterior, kicking the tires, definitely looking for scratches and paint blemishes, and maybe, as a friend of mine always does, even smelling the oil from the dipstick. (Just to freak out and bewilder the salesmen to keep them guessing and reluctant to cheat him!) Last but not least, we would probably insist on test-driving the car.

Likewise, we go in and out of stores all the time, knowingly purchasing prepackaged goods and taking it on faith that these minor purchases meet our minimal expectations. But when buying furniture, we must see it and even sit on it. We try to draw a mental picture of how it will look in our house. When buying a house, our inspection is only the beginning. Smart homebuyers hire home inspectors and some lending institutions even require a favorable home inspection report before cutting a check. So besides us being willing to travel farther for larger purchases, the significance of the purchase also determines whether we make the purchase "sight unseen" or if we start kicking the tires and smelling the oil. And all that is just to decide whether or not to spend some money.

Why would any woman even consider aborting her baby, a precious human life, worth indescribably more than any sum of money, "sight unseen"? Of course, I would rather ask why any woman could even want to abort her baby in the first place, but sadly, almost 50 million women have already answered that question.

I seldom, if ever, use the euphemism, "choice." I'm sick of hearing about "women's rights" in this issue. My litmus test is the phrase, "Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose." Yes, the woman does have a choice, but the baby does not. How is that "pro-choice"? And yes, I also said "baby," not "fetus." Sonograms have proven to us that growing, developing human life, not a glob of tissue, grows in the womb. That life even feels pain within a few weeks after conception. More and more of these "fetuses," born prematurely, now survive and live healthy lives, thanks to modern medical technology. It's a baby, an infant, and abortion is infanticide, like it or not.

My fist/nose litmus test aside, women now have a synthetically and falsely created "right" to abort their children in the womb, thanks to the Roe vs. Wade decision, which legal experts from both sides of the debate have called "bad law." For those women so inclined to have an abortion, isn't that "right" enough? Is a sonogram really that intrusive, especially if it saves a life? Something is grossly imbalanced in any so-called civilized society in which we slaughter 50 million of our young with impunity while many desperate, heartbroken infertile couples would love to be parents and give a child a good, loving home wait years in line, sometimes to no avail. Is looking at a picture really that heinous as compared to barbarically murdering an infant in the womb, which we now know in many cases, can fee pain during the abortion procedure?

Have you ever met someone whom you previously had spoken with on the telephone several times, and either you or that person commented, "It's nice to put a face to a voice," or maybe you have heard much about them from someone else, and upon finally meeting them, you say, "It's nice to put a face to a name." Sonograms now are fairly clear. When my wife and I were expecting our son, an ultrasound technician inadvertently let it slip to us that from the images he saw, our baby was a boy. (We didn't want to know the baby's sex until his birth.) That's pretty precision technology. The baby's head in a sonogram picture is especially very discernable. Isn't it nice to put a head to that "glob of tissue"?

A friend of ours, a practicing Catholic, is a labor and delivery nurse in the maternity ward of large, urban hospital. She once told us that she favors abortion. Shocked, I asked her why. This mother of three children claimed it's because of everything she has seen in her career over the years. I asked her, "But don't you believe that abortion kills human life?" She replied, "I can't let myself think about that." That's clearly denial, and not the Egyptian river. Besides denial, I cannot fathom any sound reason why any woman would not want to see a sonogram of the living life within her, a totally innocent and totally vulnerable life within her. If that woman is contemplating the premeditated murder of that life within her, denial just isn't a good enough reason to refuse a quick peak at a picture of the intended victim.

We allow more appeals to convicted murderers facing a death sentence than an innocent and vulnerable baby in the womb. For that matter, we are also often more concerned about protecting the young of animal life in various endangered species as we cavalierly, hypocritically, and increasingly endanger our own species.

If such a viewing of a sonogram really is so allegedly cruel to the "mother," for lack of a better term, perhaps we should instead show these women pictures of their children after being aborted. How many parents, in scolding a child, have said, "Look at what you've done!" Considering that women having abortion are adults in most cases and are exempt from being shown such grisly photos of their chosen and dastardly deed and being reminded, "Look at what you've' done," clearly, the idea of showing them the "before" pictures instead of the "after" pictures is very much "the lesser of two evils" for both mother and child.

As for whatever emotions the woman contemplating having an abortion may feel from seeing the sonogram images, the preservation of life significantly trumps the protection of anyone's feelings. Too often we bend over backwards to protect and even stifle people's feelings nowadays. Negative feelings in the right setting are not only normal, but also very necessary in a functioning society. Such feelings are called "a moral compass," and our trendy and incessant obsession to impede that compass explains why we are so utterly lost as a society today.

If having an abortion is so righteous, why are its proponents so secretive about it? Why can't women contemplating abortion be shown sonograms of their children? Why don't many abortion facilities explain to their clients the potentially very serious negative physical and emotional impacts abortion can later have on them? Why is it that adult men who impregnate underage girls are protected by these same facilities? Why is it that the same people who would probably never allow a school nurse to administer an aspirin to his or her child advocate for underage girls to have abortions and even cross state lines to do so, without the knowledge and consent of their parents? OK, so what about protecting women and "their rights"?

At about the time that South Carolina seceded from the union, someone famously quipped, "South Carolina is too small to be its own country and too big to be an insane asylum." South Carolina is still probably too small to be its own country, but as for being both an oasis and a leader of courage, common sense and common decency in a vast nation of lost direction and morality, as Goldilocks aptly observed, "It's just right."

Smile, kids. Y'all are on a candid camera. Hopefully, Mommy's watching.