“Pro-life” advocates have sarcastically cheered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its recent tweet about unborn babies.
SO WHAT
This could be perceived as a major gaffe for the CDC, considering the organization’s turn toward wokeness in recent years.
WHAT HAPPENED
“Wait, what’s inside a pregnant woman’s womb is a baby???” Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry quipped on Monday in response to the CDC’s statement that “after receiving a Tdap vaccine during pregnancy, your body creates protective antibodies and passes some of them to your baby before birth.”
The CDC’s message came as part of a campaign encouraging pregnant women to get the Tdap vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus.
- But Gobry and other pro-life advocates focused on the public health agency’s seeming admission that pregnant women are carrying human beings.
- “The clump of cells suddenly becomes a baby when it can receive the latest social sacrament in-utero,” wrote one commenter.
- Amid the pandemic many Americans have come to view public health institutions and experts, like the CDC and Anthony Fauci, as agents of establishment liberalism.
“A CLUMP OF CELLS”
Pro-life advocates accuse their ideological opponents of lacking consistency when it comes to defining what constitutes a human being.
Earlier this year, critics resurfaced a 2012 medical journal article that presented a thorny ethical dilemma for “pro-choicers.”
- In the article, which was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in February of 2012, philosophers Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva made the case for so-called after birth abortion.
- Giubilini and Minerva argued there’s no moral distinction between a newborn and a fetus, and so, “when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.”
- “The case for ‘after-birth abortion’ draws a logical path from common pro-choice assumptions to infanticide. It challenges us, implicitly and explicitly, to explain why, if abortion is permissible, infanticide isn’t,”Slate contributor Saletan wrote in March 2012.
