Womb With a View

James Taranto admits he is ambivalent about outlawing abortion, but the man behind the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" is certainly no fan of the procedure--and no fan of the word games that abortion advocates use ignore the fact that we're dealing with unwanted children, not unwanted tissue, when we talk about abortion.

He turned his attention to this subject again in his post for Wednesday November 22. See the last item, entitled, "Womb With A View."

London's Daily Mail offers proof that human beings are not animals:

"An unborn elephant, tiny but perfect in every way. A dolphin swimming in the womb, just as it will have to swim in the ocean the moment it is born. An unborn dog panting. Each one amazing and now, thanks to these remarkable pictures, they can be seen for the first time. Using an array of technology, the images reveal what until now has been a secret--exactly how animals develop in the womb."

The unborn elephant, shown at the link, is quite something to see. By contrast, as we all know from reading the newspapers, there is no such thing as an unborn human being. We develop by a little-understood process in which a clump of cells, similar to a tumor or a fingernail, miraculously becomes a baby at the moment the entire clump is exposed to air.

Of course, Taranto is using one of his most effective weapons--sarcasm--to get his point across: too many abortion advocates ignore the obvious reality that abortion is an action done to a human being--and too many journalists simply pass along this duplicity in their coverage of the issue.