Judy Nicastro, left

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

If you are pro-life, as I am, you may want to have a sick-bag ready before you read this New York Times op-ed.  Taking a brief break from its hell-bent advocacy of the Schumer-Rubio Gang of Eight’s illegal-alien amnesty (might the bailout of the Times by Carlos Slim Helú, Mexico’s – and currently the world’s – richest man, have something to do with that?), the Times offers us a sweetly soothing velvet version of pro-abortion propaganda, as a mother who decided to abort – at 23 weeks – a son with serious medical problems tells us this:

The next day [after a pediatrician had told his parents that “termination is a reasonable option, and a reasonable option that I can support”], at a clinic near my home, I felt my son’s budding life end as a doctor inserted a needle through my belly into his tiny heart. She had trouble finding it because of its abnormal position. As horrible as that moment was — it will live with me forever — I am grateful. We made sure our son was not born only to suffer. He died in a warm and loving place, inside me. (emphasis added)

I hope you’re as touched by this mother’s tender solicitude as I was.  “I  felt my son’s budding life end…”: so much nicer than “I felt my son be killed.”  And she is “grateful” that her son is dead, effectively at her own hand.  Still, I give her credit at least for writing “my son,” and I’m surprised the Times‘s editors didn’t change that to “the fetus.”  But to describe one’s womb, after one has turned it into an execution chamber, as “a warm and loving place” surely is rhetorical overshoot and abysmal self-deception.

Of course, the Times being the Times, the op-ed seizes an opportunity to undercut Catholic moral teaching and imply once again that faithful Catholics are hypocrites.  The author describes her husband as a Catholic who is more conservative than she, and herself as an “old-school liberal” who is not religious.  Nevertheless, when told by the pediatrician that killing his son is a “reasonable option,” the supposedly conservative Catholic father is entirely willing to do just that.  So just how serious can the Catholics be about this stuff, anyway?  We knew all along it was really about keeping women in their place!

The author is Judy Nicastro, identified as a member of the Seattle city council from 2000 through 2003.  I don’t know if Nicastro is the author’s surname or her husband’s, but in exquisitely liberal Seattle there’s at least a 50% chance that Ms. Nicastro uses her maiden name.  If so, her insouciance about abortion probably reflects yet another failure of Catholic formation.  Will Cardinal Dolan leap into print to counter this propaganda in New York’s paper of record, or point out its many distortions from his bully pulpit in St. Patrick’s?  While I certainly hope so, I’m not betting on it.  He’s probably too busy using the USCCB to push that amnesty…

And if you were suffering any misgivings about the fate of the nameless dead boy, please don’t worry.  Everything has turned out for the best in this best of all possible worlds, both spiritually and materially:

Thankfully, Kaitlyn [the aborted son’s twin, whose parents suffered her to live] was born, healthy and beautiful, on March 2, 2011, and we love her to pieces. My little boy partially dissolved into me, and I like to think his soul is in his sister. (emphasis added)

What that last sentence says about Ms. Nicastro’s view of the nature of human beings, I cannot fathom.  But its implications are a trifle disturbing.  A New Age human-animism?  And given the fate of Kaitlyn’s brother, Ms. Nicastro’s claim to “love her to pieces” rings rather ominous.

While I have long known that The New York Times is a fount of societal poison, I scan it for its sheer breadth of coverage of world news, still unmatched by any American newspaper.  From time to time, though, something appears in its pages that forcefully reminds me just how pernicious the Times is.  Ms. Nicastro’s op-ed is one such occasion.  Please forgive my sharing it with you.

—- Comments —

Thirty Words writes:

I followed the link to the Times article. In reading comments I noticed that there was nary a one contradictory point of view represented. The comments are brought to the top by a recommendation system but I find it hard to believe that a well written comment objecting to the article’s content would not be voted up by many people. I can only conclude that differing points of view are deleted for being “hateful.” The Bible tells us not to condemn, but discern we must. This “judgment free” society we live in is truly shocking.

Jewel writes:

One is sacrificed and torn to pieces, so the other, more wanted child can be “loved to pieces.” I’m falling to pieces. Our culture is insane. It is just insane. How do I even begin to pray for my nation anymore except to beg God to forgive us and judge us?

Laura writes:

Kaitlyn will have to grieve for her twin alone someday.

Laura continues:

By the way, I don’t think it was insanity. There was reasoning behind it. She thought she was sparing her son suffering even though according to her description of his medical problems they seemed manageable. “The thought of hearing him gasp for air and linger in pain was our nightmare.” And she wanted to spare herself this suffering.

She believed that there was no point to her son’s life unless he could have a “good quality of life.” What this means is that anyone who suffers — anyone who is sick, poor, demented, etc. — is leading a worthless existence. The implications of this view — and these implications do manifest themselves over time in society at large — are disastrous.

Behind this banal talk of a “good quality of life” is a woman who is seriously disturbed in a way that is quite common today, but not someone who is insane. She has undoubtedly always strategically managed and engineered her life, as have many successful women, and she dealt with her son’s illness with the same soulless efficiency.

Dnr writes:

All I could think of as I was reading this article was “ghoulish.” She might as well have said, “We ate his body parts, and now he is a part of all of us.” Is she expecting normal human beings to sympathize with her because “her son is still inside of her”?

I agree that one day Kaitlyn will grieve for her twin alone. But likely much sooner than that, she will be scarred heavily by a callous, self-serving mother and father whom, in reality, she can never fully trust not to dispose of her if she ever becomes inconvenient or has impaired health. I’d hate to live in that household.

Will G. writes:

About ten years ago a woman who was a friend of mine from high school was in town visiting her parents while her husband was rock climbing in south America. She was carrying her second child. She stopped by my work and we grabbed some lunch. She put her cell phone on the table and said she was waiting on a call from her doctor back in Denver to see if there were any problems with the baby. She had done testing right before she left. She casually told me that she and her husband had decided that they would terminate if the baby was unhealthy. I asked her “what if he had a cleft palate – is that a dealbreaker.?” It was an icy lunch and we haven’t spoken since. I was shocked that someone could be so callous or even speak of something like that while we ate our turkey sandwich.

 Laura writes:

Among the women I know, a lawyer, a psychologist and an executive have all matter-of-factly told me the same thing in the course of conversation, without the slightest sign of hesitation or doubt. They had all had the latest tests to determine whether their unborn children were healthy.

Kimberly writes:

At 21 weeks, baby’s begin to develop their sense of touch. Can you imagine being a little twin, reaching out and touching your brother and being touched back by him, bonding in this very unique way, and then suddenly finding that he’s not moving, and then that he’s being taken away? That is something that will most likely have traumatized her, even in the womb. I found a website called “The Abortion Survivors Network” and read their stories. One woman actually had recurring nightmares of a baby being viciously attacked in the womb. Only after her grandmother told her that she had survived an abortion did she realize that this baby was her. She actually remembered the horror enough to have nightmares over it.

Terry Morris writes:

I agree with you that this woman was not acting insanely, but rather her decision was cold, calculated and reasoned. Or, as you so aptly put it in your reply to Jewel, she acted with “soulless efficiency.” What this means to me is that the most important thing to her was how her son’s “defects” would negatively affect her if she allowed him to be born. I don’t buy her story of heartbrokenness for her son’s sake – I don’t buy that this was the determining factor for her, I mean. The final nail in her son’s coffin was that his life outside his mother’s womb promised to be more burden than she was willing to bear. She can’t say that, though, because to say so would be morally reprehensible and unjustifiable. Even she knows that.

I can only speculate, but I suspect that had she been truthful about her motives rather than concealing them in a cloud of deceit, the comments at The Times would have been much less favorable toward her. All of that said, Jewel was speaking of the “insanity” of the larger culture, I think, and I have to agree with her on that point.

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