This Is Not An Elephant!

Baby_elephant

And this is not a dolphin!

Baby_dolphin

Why not?

Because they’re both still in their mothers’ wombs. These are in utero pictures.

Yet if the "Out of sight, you don’t count" logic of pro-aborts were applied to animals the way it is to humans, these wouldn’t count as an elephant and a dolphin. They’re just "blobs of cells" or "tissue."

GET THE STORY.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

31 thoughts on “This Is Not An Elephant!”

  1. Lead sentence of the story: “An unborn elephant, tiny but perfect in every way.”
    Challenge to the journalistic community: I double-dog dare you to lead an article on in-utero photographs of humans with the sentence “An unborn human, tiny but perfect in every way.”
    You hypocrites, you brood of vipers.

  4. The Pro-life campaign should have an Ad that shows Jimmy’s post above (unless they have already) in the same manner it was introduced!
    That would make an even striking commercial!

  5. Witty post, Mr. Akin. Of all the rhetoric of the pro-abortionists, the idea that an embryo or a foetus is just a “blobs of cells” or “tissue” — and therefore is not truly “human” — is especially nonsensical; the last time I checked, every organism on the face of the Earth could be accurately described as a “blob of cells” or “tissue”, including human infants, children and adults — and embryos, too.

  6. Just a rhetorical thought for those who are in favor of allowing abortion:
    “Suppose your mother had been pregnant with twins but felt that she only had the resources to care for one child. As a result, she had your twin aborted so that you would be able to live a full and happy life. How do you feel about that?”

  7. “Suppose your mother had been pregnant with twins but felt that she only had the resources to care for one child. As a result, she had your twin aborted so that you would be able to live a full and happy life. How do you feel about that?”
    They’ll find ways to justify just about anything, unfortunately.
    I mean, if they could convince people already that “Pro-choice is not pro-abortion” and, consequently, that “Pro-choice is not pro-murder”, and some people out there already believe it; they can make anything up and justify it, and people out there will actually accept it.

  8. Thank you, Jimmy! The newspapers do this constantly! The last time it caught my attention was when one major paper did this with “unborn baby pandas,” but I didn’t think of as clever an illustration of their illogic as your post, which I am going to link to.

  9. Hokie: Thinking of many of the pro-murder people I work with, they’d just point out how many babies are natrually aborted when women miscarry (which happens quite frequently) and contrast an aborted twin with that.

  10. Except that it’s not a miscarriage – it’s an abortion. One is spontaneous, unintentional – the other is murder.
    I saw a great billboard today on my way out of work. It had a picture of a baby and it said “An embryo is a baby.”
    Nuff said.

  11. DJ:
    …they’d just point out how many babies are natrually aborted when women miscarry (which happens quite frequently)
    That’s just it — that was a natural occurence.
    For example, there’s a difference between the death of someone who dies of a stroke — that’s a natural death!
    and a person that dies because someone shoots or stabs them — of course, that person has the obvious choice to stab or shoot the other person, right? But, that doesn’t mean it was right!

  14. Whenever I hear the “it’s just a blob of tissue” comment, I sometimes reply, “And you’re an ugly bag of mostly water. But we still keep you around!”
    Beautiful pictures.

  16. Wheelock – according to the ever-reliable Google, it means “offspring” so yes, a baby/child. That being said, I do think it’s a useful differentiation, if nothing else because “five-month fetus” and “five-month baby” imply children at very different stages of development who need different types of care.
    And yes, that miscarriage/abortion parallel is really, really tired.
    The baby elephant and panda are gorgeous, incidentally! I wonder what stage of development they’re at – somehow I expected them to be slightly more cramped in the womb than they are :).

  17. I think we are through the looking glass on this one now anyway.
    What do I mean by that?
    When you have a professor at an Ivy League school calling for the euthanizing of disabled infants… and Terri Schiavo gets starved to death (remember, a machine wasn’t forcing her heart to pump or her lungs to breath – she was simply starved to death!) well, America has gotten comfortable with killing people. Very comfortable.
    I think you could convince every soul in America a fetus is alive and human and NOT just a lump… but a sizeable minority of people are too dependant on a cultural reliance on sex without consequence and killing the unborn. In other words you would hear “Yea, its alive, but I don’t want it and I won’t be forced to let it live in me!”

  21. RE: “The definition of a planet,” I would add to the proposed definition ie. size of the “planet” must be large enough to have a gravity to cause it to be rouind and small enough to not be a star, that it must also be in primary orbit around a star. This would seem to eliminate the confusion regarding our moon being a planet.

  22. Beautiful photos – and yes, the miscarriage/abortion argument is old and tired. I like Fr Pavone’s approach – if people were actually shown picutes of an abortion and the horrific results of dead dismembered babies as often as they’re shown breast implants on “Dr 90210” on cable TV, abortion would be outlawed very very quickly.

  23. LarryD, continuing your thought process a bit furthur, can you imagine the venom that would spew out of NARAL, PETA, and other pro-aborts if, in the background of these beautiful photos a uterine curette and a suction device appeared?

  27. )68.1 million Americans call themselves “Catholic” in the USA. If only we would vote Catholic, it would change everything. Except that we dont know our faith because it has not been taught since 1962,and also we dont have any idea about what is happening in the world – thats why we vote for the abortion party, year after year. We are coming up on 50 million dead unbaptised babies this new year.Happy New Year (after having abortion LEGAL for only 34 years catholics (?) still havent a clue that there is an abortion party, and a sodomy party. This includes eucharistic ministers too after I explained it to her.

  28. Is this amazing? The Roman Catholic Church in America with the fullness of faith coming right down from the apostles still has a majority of its parishoners praying to end abortion on sunday, and then voting for the ABORTION PARTY ON TUESDAY. What scandal!!!!!!!!! WHERE ARE THE BISHOPS!!!!!! THOSE HIRED HANDS – THOSE ANTI-APOSTLES – My deepest personalapologies to Cardinal Chaput, Bishop Bruscowitz,Bishop Burke and a few others.(retired Bishop Daily), you are faithful sons of the church. You have taught the faith and defended it.I kiss your ring in submission and gratitude. You must be lonely, but your reward will be great.I am so tired and frustrated. What would ST. John Fisher do…

  29. TV NOTE: The TODAY SHOW will be showing Babies Playing in the Womb this morning — from the Intro, it appears that these clips may have come from the National Geographic Channel. More evidence for LIFE in the Womb!

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