Biological facts upheld in court. Also, more on Unnatural Selection.

It's been a big day so far for pro-life news. For one thing, a federal judge upheld an Indiana law requiring that patients for an abortion be informed of the basic biological fact that a fetus is a member of the species Homo Sapiens:

The court also disagreed with Planned Parenthood’s argument that the statement is “misleading.”

“Here, the mandated statement states only a biological fact relating to the development of the living organism; therefore, it may be reasonably read to provide accurate, non-misleading information to the patient,” the court wrote. “Under Indiana law, a physician must disclose the facts and risks of a treatment which a reasonably prudent physician would be expected to disclose under like circumstances, and which a reasonable person would want to know.”

In other news, Ross Douthat has a review of Unnatural Selection, which I mentioned recently. The review highlights Western culpability in the moral perversions of population control.

From the 1950s onward, Asian countries that legalized and then promoted abortion did so with vocal, deep-pocketed American support. Digging into the archives of groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Hvistendahl depicts an unlikely alliance between Republican cold warriors worried that population growth would fuel the spread of Communism and left-wing scientists and activists who believed that abortion was necessary for both “the needs of women” and “the future prosperity — or maybe survival — of mankind,” as the Planned Parenthood federation’s medical director put it in 1976.

I can't say I'm surprised by this ironic alliance, but it is disgusting, all the same.

Douthat finds one thing lacking in Hvistendahl's book. Although he praises her for the "sense of moral urgency" with which the book is written, he points out the gaping hole in the basic moral argument: what enormous crime has been committed, exactly? Hvistendahl herself remains "agnostic" about when life begins. What then is the moral outrage? Douthat answers his own question:

Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.

The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.