Biddy Martin there is blood on your hands.

5th months in—WOW! That’s sick.

First off, I would like to commend the Board on their decision and their commitment to public health for women and their families.
That said, I find it strange that your article could be so even-handed and represent both sides of the issue, while your headline and huge photo are so blatantly polemic.
"Late-term abortion" is neither accurate in a medical or legal sense.  Roe v. Wade specifically delineates three separate trimesters, and the proposal was to offer second-trimester abortions.  Your article rightly refers to the procedure as "second-trimester," while the headline refers to "late-term abortion" over a giant picture of protestors. Did separate people write the article and the headline? 
 The article tacks on this sentence: "A modest protest organized by anti-abortion activists outside the building was peaceful."  This presentation rightly puts the protestors in their proper place; "modest" and insignificant, especially given the outcome.  Then why are they given the giant photo under the headline?  
  Why am I harping over semantics?  Because the anti-choice movement has consistently had control of the frame by which this issue is discussed.  "Partial-birth abortion" is not the name of a medical procedure, nor it a term recognized by the medical community, yet it still finds its way into legislation.  "Late-term abortion" is not a medically accurate term, though it still is in this headline.  Slanting the terminology from "second-trimester" to "late-term" suggests that these abortions are being performed towards the end of the pregnancy (as in, the third trimester), misrepresenting the purpose of this proposal, and attempting to cast the pro-choice side as "baby killers" or "murderers" or whatever nonsense the anti-choice side invents. The media's willingness to unquestioningly swallow anti-choice rhetoric perpetuates this problem.  Furthermore, it biases the discussion against the pro-choice side.  Perhaps the headline was specifically chosen to be inflammatory.  
In any case, you should be careful to use terminology that is medically and legally accurate (like the body of the article), not inaccurate, biased, and provocative rhetoric.
      Cheers,
          Chris

“Biddy Martin … will be forever remembered as the woman who caused the university to do something that no other clinic in central Wisconsin would do … and that is kill a baby five months [after] conception,” Grothman said.

At least Biddy Martin WILL be remembered. Glenn Grothman will be remembered as another useless panderer, if history bothers to remember him at all.

terrible.

i agree. terrible.

this article, that is.

Mr. Holoyda - “late term” abortion or “partial birth” abortion…dead is dead guillotine or hanging… dead is dead shot to death or stabbed to death… dead is dead brains sucked out or chopped in the womb… dead is dead You’re tripping over semantics, while children are dying… I pray God will open your eyes to the value of life and the horror of killing children. -Maria

Science has confirmed that early in the second trimester (weeks 13-27) the baby moves his hands to shield his eyes from bright light coming in through his mother’s body. The fetus also responds to sounds in frequencies so high or low that they cannot be heard by the human adult ear. He hears loud music and covers his ears at loud noises from the outside world. At seventeen weeks, the child experiences Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, indicating both sleep and dreaming. To understand what this procedure entails see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late-termabortion#Proceduresusedinlater_term

Chris, oftentimes editors are the ones to create headlines and choose photos. Don’t blame the author for those mistakes.

“the idea that Southcentral Wisconsin could not survive without [second-term abortions] is absurd.”—

You know what is ironic about that argument? The fact that they say that Southcentral Wisconsin couldn’t “survive.” Let’s save this portion of the state by killing those that should be growing up here. Nice. Very nice.

Why does it matter how Biddy voted? Even if she voted against it it wouldn’t have mattered.

Just what will be our Chancellor’s legacy?

Second trimester, late term abortion, Obama-like parsing of terms! If a baby can survive outside the womb and you proceed to dismember and kill it, the ‘procedure’ is accurately called murder.

On July 20, 2006, a live baby was born at an abortion clinic in Florida. The mother had been medically prepared to abort her second trimester in-utero child but the doctor didn’t arrive in time. A live child was born. The living, breathing 23 week gestation baby was placed in a plastic bag and thrown into the trash where it died. http://www.buffalonews.com/260/story/570428.html

As this true story and many other documented cases of premature birth children surviving illustrate, second trimester abortion crosses the ethical and moral line between reluctantly defensible first trimester abortion and unabsolvable murder.

No amount of word parsing or claims of “it’s my body” can change that fact.

i don’t get why we need this on campus…can’t it stay at meriter and honestly what’s so wrong with getting an early abortion??

5:23, since you’re so saintly and quick to judge, you most definitely should have dropped everything going on in your life and flown to Buffalo to adopt this baby since you’re such an expert in every facet of other people’s lives. While you’re at it, you should probably give 1/10 of your salary to the church and feed the homeless and pray for world peace since it’s the “moral” thing to do. PUHLEEZE.

10:55pm The live baby was thrown in the trash where it died. There was no opportunity for anyone to adopt it.

As for your other ad homenim attacks: Unlike the Obamas, the Clintons, the Gores, and most of the liberal left, I DO contribute a significant proportion of my income to charity. I do this quietly and anonymously. I also pay my taxes, that “Fair Share” that Liberals are always expounding about but sooooooo many of Obama’s liberal appointees can’t seem to manage! That isn’t ‘being saintly’on my part. It’s just the RIGHT thing to do. And I didn’t come to these conclusions by ‘being quick to judge’. I came to them after careful consideration about what the RIGHT thing to do should be.

Wow. I actually can’t believe what 10:55 wrote. You can’t put the word moral in quotations like that when you are talking about throwing a live PERSON in the garbage after it was born. I don’t even understand how you could criticize someone for defending a life like that. Some people argue for abortion because they don’t believe life starts at conception. Fine. But to have a child that was born, actually born ALIVE, and then leave it to die is no different than those crimes you hear of child neglect by locking your kid in the basement until he/she is so emaciated and emotionally scarred that they will be screwed up their whole life. What is so frustrating is that women feel that they have the right to murder their children because they aren’t mature enough to make the right decisions. Yes, there is the rape argument. OK. But that doesn’t make up for the women, no, girls, and BOYS all over the country and now this university who spread disease and get pregnant because they are just “having a little fun.” Grow up and learn to take responsibility for your actions. Or at least let your child grow up to have a chance to do the same. If you’re emotionally old enough to have sex, you should be able to decipher the difference between life and death and you should be able to take the decisions you made and roll with them. Nobody has any accountability anymore.

Mr. Holoyda, I believe late-term is accurate considering it is more than half-way through the pregancy when some of these abortions are done. Just because it’s “only” the second trimester doesn’t mean that it’s early in the pregnancy, nor does it mean that the women didn’t have a chance during the first 5 months to have something done….think on that for a while.

10:55, you don’t have to be a perfect person to realize that putting a living child into a bag and throwing it away are bad things to do, in fact it’s murder. 5:23 made a damn good point with that article excerpt so don’t act like he or she is a judgemental person just because you don’t have an argument for that.

The wikipedia article posted about partial-birth abortions shows statistics from the CDC that only 1.4% of abortions were performed after the 20th week in the US, and it also cites the Journal of American Medical Association saying that no pregnancies are viable before the 21st week. It defines “late-term” abortion as happening after viability, which actually only happens close to the end of the second trimester. I think that it is important to offer this service because the amount of women it will be helping will probably far outweigh the number of viable fetuses that are lost. A woman may not even realize that she is pregnant until far into her first trimester and with all the other limitations in access to abortions, it may be difficult to obtain one before entering her second trimester, and without the Madison Surgery Center offering such a procedure, her options are even more limited. I think many pro-lifers support the life of the fetus but they don’t often continue their support for the life of the child. Pro-choice is not the best term to describe people on “our” side…sometimes, whether or not to have a child is not really a choice, there are many other factors that influence such a decision, including (but not limited to) financial resources and ability. It is easy to say you don’t want to kill a baby, it is harder to say that you are capable of raising one, let alone doing so without becoming impoverished and disadvantaging you and your child.

To the person who linked the buffalo article…HELLO the doctor LOST his license, clearly that is not a representative nor appropriate example. OH AND…the article says that the coroner determined the baby died from EXTREME PREMATURITY. I’m not saying that it’s totally cool that the baby was thrown away, I think that is a DISGUSTING and HORRIFIC way to handle the situation, but I just want to point out that the cause of death is not “thrown away in a plastic bag”, it’s the fact that it was too premature to survive outside the womb. Yes, there are many other examples of such premature babies surviving (this article just happened to be a particularly crappy way of getting that point accross), however, the majority of second trimester abortions (which is what these are, not “late term”), are performed before the point where a baby could potentially have a chance to survive.

Oh so you mean the MAJORITY of second trimester abortions are performed before the point where a baby could live? Gosh that sounds just like a nice old fashioned game of Russian Roulette. The baby could live or die. live or die. Oh hell lets just kill it.