Slate Magazine is known for it’s pretzel twist liberal logic stories. Stories that leave your mouth open and your brain asking if you have lost your ever loving soul. An article published February 7 by Margot Finn doesn’t break that string of stories. Finn wants us Pro-Life Types to know that neither we nor President Trump have the right to call her a murderer just because she killed her baby. Yeah, it’s in the article.

The title of her spleen venting is: “I Had a Late-Term Abortion. President Trump and Pro-Lifers Have No Right to Call Me a Murderer.” The subtitle is: “What it’s like to have the most devastating event of your life become a misrepresented political talking point.” Nothing about this article tells me why I don’t have the right to call her a murderer or shows any misrepresentation. Read along with me:

The only thing I could imagine that would have been worse than my daughter dying is my daughter living. Before Dr. Hern gave me the shot that would stop my baby’s heart, he explained that it would work gradually over a period of several hours and that I might continue to feel kicks and movement during that time. Late that night, long after I knew she had to be dead, I felt a kick. It was near the injection site, so I knew almost instantly that it was probably just some kind of cramp or nerve twitch. But for half a breath, I thought maybe the shot hadn’t worked, and every fiber of my being screamed with the desire for that to be true, for her to be alive. Rationally, I knew that even if she had somehow survived, that would just mean they’d have to try again the next day. But of course I didn’t want her to be dead. She was my baby.

Did you get that “…Dr. Hern gave me the shot that would stop my baby’s heart, he explained that it would work gradually over a period of several hours and that I might continue to feel kicks and movement during that time. Late that night, long after I knew she had to be dead, I felt a kick. It was near the injection site, so I knew almost instantly that it was probably just some kind of cramp or nerve twitch.” Yeah, the baby’s death twitch. Paging Dr. Mengele. The name of the potassium chloride drug that stops the baby’s heart is feticide. Death row inmates who have murdered someone else and been adjudicated by a jury and given numerous federal reviews get more concern over their death cocktail.

Why did Miss Finn choose to murder her baby? More from the article:

In December 2014, I had an abortion at 29 weeks, after my first baby was diagnosed with a brain abnormality called lissencephaly. The early diagnosis—lissencephaly is sometimes not diagnosed until after birth—meant her case was severe and her prognosis was grim: We could expect her to live for two to six years while suffering from frequent respiratory infections and intermittently choking on her own saliva. Her cognitive development would be arrested or even reversed by painful seizures. She might have been able to smile socially and/or track motion with her eyes, but maybe not. Eventually, one of the bouts of pneumonia or choking episodes or complications from one of the surgeries needed to sustain basic life functions would have killed her.

Rhianna in this video, though, is 18 years old.

Lissencephaly is also known as smooth brain disease. Children can live for two to ten years with choking episodes and convulsions. For more information on breakthroughs, click here. I cannot imagine receiving a devastating diagnosis of any kind while pregnant. It happens every day, though and people make different choices. What gets my Irish up, besides the fact that she killed her baby, she denigrates the choice of everyone who makes a different choice.

I believe torturing babies in the service of what my friend Grace Ombry calls “cosmic self-improvement projects” is wrong. I believe torturing babies for any reason is wrong. Kate Carson, another friend whose words are so embedded in the way I think about baby loss and grief that I don’t even know when I’m quoting her anymore, says she was presented with the option of giving her baby only one of two precious gifts: peace and life. Like her, and like many parents faced with this impossible binary, I chose peace.

So, injecting feticide into a baby and killing said baby is super keen, cool and groovy, but giving birth and enjoying the gifts of that imperfect baby is torture. You can give birth to a perfectly healthy, beautiful baby and, in one case I know of, Tay-Sachs is diagnosed. Should the parents have called in Dr. Mengele and the feticide rather than watching their beautiful baby deteriorate and trying to savor every precious moment. I don’t think they see this as a “cosmic self-improvement project”, you self-righteous cow. Oh, sorry. It’s the Irish in me. Or how about infantile glioblastoma? Feticide too?

We have no right to call her a killer, according to Miss Finn? Wrong-o chinquapin. The First Amendment gives President Donald Trump, Pro-lifers and the guy at the corner of the bar all the right to call you a killer. And, you wrote that you killed your baby:

Sometime during the week I spent in Boulder, Colorado, having my first baby killed, somewhere in between getting the rental car jumped by one of the earnest teenagers working at the hotel’s front desk after I accidentally left the headlights on overnight and musing with my husband about what our waiter must think of an obviously pregnant woman ordering (and then gulping down) a glass of wine with dinner, I Googled something like “what kind of mother has an abortion at seven months?”

Alrighty, okay. Miss Finn used a passive term “having my first baby killed”. Killer or murderer. The First Amendment protects our right to call Miss Finn those terms and to judge her action. Murder is murder.

Liberal logic is a contradiction in terms. My soul is screaming for a cleansing with a good Scotch or Irish Whiskey. For now an Irish blessing for all babies:

May strong arms hold you
Caring hearts tend you
And may love await you at every step.

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com/Waldryano/Pixabay License