Pro-life advocates have widely celebrated the new film, The Giver, a screen adaptation of the novel by Lois Lowry. An overview of the plot and more in-depth examination of the pro-life themes in the film can be found here. In the film, a turning point for the main character comes when he begins to understand that infanticide is regularly practiced within his community. At one point, he witnesses one of these killings, which certain care-giving members of the community had been trained to carry out. The book describes the scene as follows (and the film was true to this depiction):
To his surprise, his father began very carefully to direct the needle into the top of the new child’s forehead, puncturing the place where the fragile skin pulsed. The newborn squirmed, and wailed faintly. …
Still in the special voice, his father was saying, “I know, I know. It hurts, little guy. But I have to use a vein, and the veins in your arm are still too teeny-weeny.”
He pushed the plunger very slowly, injecting the liquid into the scalp vein until the syringe was empty.
“All done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Jonas heard his father say cheerfully.
A recent piece on Vox insisted that this infanticide is not the same as abortion. The trouble is, Planned Parenthood, abortionist Kermit Gosnell, and abortionist Douglas Karpen all seem to think that it is. Last year, Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Alisa LaPolt Snow had this to say about infanticide following a failed abortion:
We believe that any decision that’s made [about infanticide] should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.
Pro-abortion advocates have tried to downplay the overt pro-life messages gleaned from The Giver by “clarifying” that the infanticide issue tackled in the film was “not actually an abortion. ” Vox writer Brandon Ambrosino made the following statement in an article that juxtaposed the different treatments of abortion found in Obvious Child and The Giver, respectively:
To be clear, what happens in The Giver is not an abortion. The babies killed by Jonas’ father have already been born, and have lived outside of the womb for several months. What Father kills are not fetuses, and there isn’t any debate in his society about whether or not the babies are alive. There is debate, however, about whether the babies are fit to be alive, about whether they are viable — and therein lies the comparison for pro-lifers.
The babies killed by Karpen and Gosnell were already born when they snipped their spinal cords or twisted their heads off, and yet at the time they considered themselves to be completing unfinished abortions. The infanticide possibilities about which Planned Parenthood was questioned by US representatives also refer to babies who are already alive outside of and independently of their mothers. The fantasy world in which infanticide and abortion do not mutually coexist is just that: a fantasy.
