Photo credit: M.O. Stevens. Creative Commons license.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.

Trigger warning: This post details our experience of going to a museum exhibit that featured preserved bodies of actual miscarried unborn children. None of them were aborted. Their bodies are whole and carefully preserved. Depending on your sensibilities/past experiences, the descriptions and/or pictures of the exhibit that I’ve included may be a trigger for you.

Last year during my first speaking trip in Portland somebody told me that I couldn’t leave without seeing the Prenatal Exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, or OMSI. Due to scheduling reasons I couldn’t pull it off, but I called the museum a few weeks ago to ask whether the exhibit was still there. Upon finding out that it’s there until May 6, I made sure that my staff and I had time to visit the exhibit during our recent trip to Portland where we trained the student club from Portland Community College with a seminar followed by a two-day outreach on their campus.

The exhibit was created by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the person behind the controversial “Body Worlds” exhibit. He uses a plastination technique to preserve animal and human bodies and sets up exhibits in an effort to educate people about anatomy in a way that books can’t. The exhibit is controversial because in the case of the human bodies, these were real people who arguably should have been buried. My staff and I have unresolved concerns about that aspect of it.

In the case of the prenatal development exhibit at OMSI, they only have babies who were miscarried and then preserved, presumably with the parents permission. (This exhibit isn’t to be confused with “Bodies: The Exhibition,” which is similar but whose bodies all came from China, adding to the controversy.)

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.

A woman in Indianapolis was jailed this week for feticide. This is the story of a pro-choice redditor who looked into the details of the conviction and discovered that many media stories about this case are withholding crucial details.

Wikipedia describes reddit as “an entertainment, social networking and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links.” I can’t personally recommend it to anybody due to some of the content that you can find there, but I’ve subscribed to several of the news sub-groups (or “subreddits”) and the small pro-life subreddit has been very supportive of my work.

News stories related to the abortion debate rarely show up on the front page of reddit, a website whose average user has very liberal views on abortion. This week’s story about the Indianapolis woman jailed for feticide was an exception though. I’ll summarize that story and then tell you of the pro-choice redditors who modeled honest reasoning and exposed WNCN’s treatment of the story that leaves out critical facts.

You can read how WNCN handled the story in a piece that was shared 68,000 times on Facebook, but the gist is that a 33-year-old woman named Purvi Patel has been sentenced to 26-years in prison on charges of neglect of a dependent and feticide. In states with feticide laws, it is illegal to kill an unborn fetus without the assistance of an abortionist. In other words, for nearly all intents and purposes an unborn child is treated like a person under the law, but an exception is carved out for abortion.

Patel is accused of taking abortion-inducing drugs illegally, causing her 23-25 week fetus to die. There is contradicting evidence on whether the child was dead before birth or shortly after birth. Patel threw the child’s body into a dumpster afterwards, but eventually went to the hospital due to severe bleeding. She was eventually arrested after she admitted to lying to hospital staff and there was enough evidence that an investigation was called for.

Photo credit: St. Joseph’s County, Indiana, Police Department