The Daily Brief

It was a matter for discussion at the last ChicagoBoyz Zoom meet-up this last weekend; how the development and widespread use of ultrasound technology likely has reframed the debate about abortion, over the last two decades. Trent T. affirmed how some of his contemporaries had named their children early on in utero, already knowing the sex of the child, and were sometimes devastated with grief when the mother naturally miscarried; as devastated as they would have been if the baby died at birth, or as an infant. The baby – their child – was real to them. They had pictures in indistinct black and white; proof that their child was already a child, not just a clump of cells. The existence of the embryo, the child – becomes even clearer, later in development.
The 3-D ultrasound of Wee Jamie in utero at seven or eight months was a stunningly accurate visualization of how he would look upon delivery some weeks later – strongly-marked eyebrows, amazing-long eyelashes, curving lips that carried out the family resemblance to my daughter and myself, and affinity towards showing his feet to the observer. The only question remaining to us was what color his hair and eyes would be, once he was delivered. (The hair is light brown, the eyes at this point an indeterminant hazel. God only knows what it will say when it comes to the identifiers on his drivers’ license.) My daughter treasured those prints of the ultrasound sessions – as she remarked now and again, if something happened to savage her pregnancy, they would be the only souvenir and proof she had that her son ever existed.

This technology wasn’t available to me, pregnant in 1979 – but the first time that I heard my daughter’s heartbeat (I thought at the time that the baby was a ‘he’) – a kind of washing-machine sounding whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, heard through the OB nurses’ headphones – that was the day that I came to grips with the individual identity of that developing child, existing inside of me as a separate, discrete human being. The heartbeat was real. The image of an infant, in blurry black and white – wiggling, turning, showing off his/her feet, sucking his/her thumb; this is what ultrasound does. It enforces the reality of a baby. The baby is real.

I agree that this bit of medical technology, has probably had more to do with increasing a distaste for abortion than practically anything else could ever do, save among those deranged pro-abortion fanatics. (And the enthusiasm for that process is deranged – warped, savage and inhuman.) Ultrasound imagery shows a real, squirming, wiggling, live human being, floating in amniotic fluid – not a disposable clump of inanimate cells. This is the argument that pregnancy support centers have been making, as this one story suggests. The teenage pregnant mom had every intention of aborting her pregnancy, went to a pregnancy support center because they had an ultrasound capability. When she saw that she was carrying twins, she decided to carry on with the pregnancy, with the somewhat erratic support of her boyfriend, their two families, and the center itself. No, it wouldn’t have been all that easy for her and the boyfriend, falling into parental responsibilities when they were so spectacularly unprepared for them – although, inter alia, they must have had knowledge of and access to birth control, such being the widespread knowledge of such things, these days. Turning up pregnant as a side result of energetic sexual relations between a healthy young male and female surely cannot have been that unforeseen a result. That ultrasound is so effective an argument for life, and carrying children to term, even under less than optimal circumstances, no wonder that pro-abortion sympathizers like Elizabeth Warren issue frantic demands to shut them down.

I guess Elizabeth Warren and her friends hate the thought of all those baby parts not being available for sale by Planned Parenthood. Think of all those fetal cells tragically going to waste, when a live infant is delivered! Comment as you wish.

Depending on the version of the Ten Commandments, the eighth or ninth is “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” – in simpler terms, you shouldn’t tell lies, especially a lie intended to falsely accuse another person. I was reminded again, of the damage done by malicious accusations, upon reading this horrifying story, linked through Insty – because there was such a malicious person in the neighborhood where my family lived for more than a decade – a person given to making random and spurious accusations about his neighbors. When I wrote about my family, I called this residence Hilltop House – a post-war bungalow perched on the knee of a range of hills, surrounded by similar and rather modest houses on half-acre or quarter-acre lots, spread out along a rambling tangle of narrow roads above Sunland-Tujunga. A good block away from Hilltop house was a cul d sac of about half a dozen houses; one of the residents in the cul d sac was an older couple … and the man, who I will call Felix S. began to go nuts. Like bankruptcy, it happened slowly and then all at once. He became convinced that his neighbors were all part of a vast conspiracy to manufacture drugs and that there were tunnels and pipelines running the drugs between all the houses around him, and that odors from the drug manufacturing were poisoning the air around his house. Eventually, he put up all kinds of industrial fans around his yard, intended to blow the fumes away, and became notorious as the “Fan Man.” But that came later.

He spied on neighbors, haunted the roads outside their houses, lurked in the hedges, taking down license plate numbers, walked around with a box in his hands which he insisted was detecting the drug fumes … and called the police incessantly, sharing his delusions with them. Of course, the LAPD pretty soon realized that Mr. S. was a total nutcase. When Mr. S. realized that they were blowing him off, he escalated to calling other law enforcement bodies – the county sheriff’s office, other municipal, state, and possibly even national law enforcement; for all I know, everyone short of the Secret Service. At one point, he began insisting that his next-door neighbor, an elderly woman who was dying of MS – was a serious drug abuser and that was what was killing her. I know there was at least one unsuccessful court case for unrelenting harassment brought against him by the nearest neighbors, but nothing legal could be done at first, as Mr. S. kept the derangement on the down-low in the courtroom, and came off as a respectable, reasonable citizen. My mother was convinced that Mr. S. had an undiagnosed brain tumor, which would account for the delusions of strange odors. In any case, when my sister Pip was married, we had the reception afterwards at Hilltop House … and there was Mr. S. lurking in the oleander shrubs outside the gate, writing down the license-plate numbers of our guests’ cars! Otherwise, we were spared the worst of Mr. S., although because of a house full of teenagers and a yard full of vintage cars, he apparently assumed that we were in the distribution end of the business and not the manufacture. Eventually, the ongoing annoying presence of Mr. S. in the neighborhood had to be included in the listing of any house for sale in the neighborhood within a certain distance, as if he were a kind of human toxic waste dump.

But that was not the worst, which is what Mom told me about, on what may have been the last time that I was on home leave when they were still living at Hilltop House. It seemed that a young couple with two small children bought a house nearby Mr. S.’s house, a distance by road and address, but on the hill below, and he could see into their back yard. You guessed it – he called the child protection agency and reported that they were abusing their children. This was a new agency, relative to Mr. S.’s mania – and they took his accusation seriously. It took the young couple six months to get their children returned to their custody, or so Mom said.
I was honestly glad when Mom and Dad moved away after Dad retired – Mr. S.’s malicious mania was verging on the dangerous. A good few years ago, I did find a local news story about neighbors bringing successful lawsuits against him, but nothing on him turns up now – I suppose his malicious antics in the old neighborhood are a matter of ancient history at this point. It’s been at least three decades, and there must have been a lot of turnover among residents, what with the real estate market in the outer LA suburbs being what it is. But I was reminded of how damaging bearing false witness can be – right up there with murder, adultery, covetousness and worshipping false gods.
Bearing false witness is like faking a hate crime, or accusing people of various ‘isms, creating a fake dossier/ fake documents for the purposes of smearing a political opponent, ‘swatting’ a person with a fake call to the police, or an anonymous accusation to Child Protective Services. In a more perfect world than this, bearing false witness out to be penalized with the punishment administered to the victim, if the accusation had been true. Discuss as you wish.