I don’t doubt Bush is able to lie to himself as easily as to everyone else, and maybe even believe himself.

“I do believe the fetus in the jar was shown, of course.”

I think you’re giving him too much credit.  Unless there’s proof Babs Bush was waving around a fetus in a jar back in the day, I’d say his comment has about as much validity as Ronnie Raygun believing he fought on the beaches of Normandy.

Smells like a Big Lie to me, told in a (very weak) effort to reclaim the family name he so thoroughly trashed.  (Prep for a little brother Jebby POTUS run in 2012?...)

I’d actually be surprised if Bush was able to understand what you are talking about. To him, the fetus is potential, so it is, indeed, as smart as him. For people who believe in chances, not choices - and therefore, little, if any, progress, even the possibility of life is life. They are blissfully unaware of any realities, basically.

I can’t imagine Barbara Bush keeping a miscarried fetus in a jar.

I’m not convinced Barbara Bush ever showed W. a fetus in a jar. Why? Because she and Bush, Sr. are incredibly uptight and conventional. They were never big on disclosure in that family. I mean, when Bush’s sister Robin got leukemia, they didn’t even tell tween W. that his sister was gravely ill. They just whisked her off to get treatment in New York, without explaining where they were going. She never came back. They only told W. after she died.

Why does everyone think Barbara Bush was waving around and keeping a fetus in a jar?

The story shared in the article states that Barbara had the miscarriage, put the fetus in a jar to take to the hospital (which doctors recommend), and the teenage George drove her to the hospital and saw the fetus then.

I’m not a Bush fan, but that doesn’t seem too implausible to me. I’ve heard that Bush’s father was absent a lo, so George being the man of the house and having to perform such duties was supposedly routine.

Anyways, I think there are a lot more things to bash the Bushes for than not believing that the fetus story actually happened.

The Salon article was ambiguous about how Barbara Bush came to have a fetus in a jar. If she was taking it to the hospital, then it makes a little more sense. Even so, I can’t picture her holding the jar up to her teenage son and saying “Here’s the fetus.” I can’t readily imagine most mothers doing that, let alone a very proper lady of Barbara Bush’s generation.

Now that I understand the backstory, I readily believe that GW might have seen the jar, or been aware of the existence of the jar. I but I think the alleged “big reveal” by his mother is probably evangelical embroidering. Why would she think it was important to do show-and-tell en route the the hospital? It wasn’t an anti-choice object lesson for her.

I don’t honestly hold a lot of skepticism when it comes to weird things people do when they’re in a panic or grief-stricken state.  People do weird shit.  I can see how a fetus could be in a jar in front of young George Bush.  What I don’t believe is that it would have that kind of impact, particularly on a man whose reaction to the horror of Katrina was “heckuva job” and to 9/11 was to start asking how to use this get a war with Iraq.  Or a man who was rumored, with substantial reason to believe it, to have paid for an abortion after this all happened. 

Barbara Bush doesn’t strike me as a particularly sentimental person, but anyone in that situation might make erratic choices.  What I do know is that people who get direct exposure to that sort of thing are more, not less likely to move towards being pro-choice.  Doctors deal with this kind of thing on a regular basis, and are more pro-choice than the population at large.

And we should believe this longtime pathological liar why?

Assuming that any of this happened at all, I would very much doubt even from GWB’s version that there was anything like a reveal. If she was being driven to the hospital after a miscarriage, it would likely be as a result of fears of additional bleeding and so forth, and if the doctors had told her to save the fetus it would be in her—relatively quickly gathered—hand luggage for the hospital, which she would be in unlikely condition to carry herself. So whoever was driving her would have seen a middling jar of something extremely messy and asked “WTF is that and why are you taking it to the hospital?”

I think Amanda is giving GWB way too much credit as a believer. This seems to me (especially now, when it doesn’t mean anything to anyone except another 15 minutes) like the kind of story someone desperate for attention would dredge up/fabricate, with all of the significance slathered on long after the fact.

I do believe the fetus in the jar was shown, of course.

Alternatively, it’s possible he was shown some blood clots and bits of POCs. While I’m no Bill Frist and can’t just read an article and diagnose the EGA, I do know that the majority of spontaneous abortions happen early during the 1st trimester and most of the specimens either contain no identifiable embryonic/fetal parts or, if an embryo is present, it’s damaged/fragmented. [A complete abortion is also a possibility but it’s unlikely. Mrs. Bush was barely able to walk and she was kept in the hospital overnight.]

I don’t believe much of what W says, but I have less regard for Babs than I do him. Any decent person would have tossed the dead fetus out and told George to get in the jar.

I can imagine that in W’s wittle brain when asked what first inspired him to become anti-choice he couldn’t say the first thing that came to his mind (convenience) and since we know how much the anti’s love graphic images he knew better than to talk about the birth of his daughters, which would’ve been boring and not icky enough so he racked his brain for the most graphic image he could and this was it. Anti’s love fetuses outside the womb, that way they can put it on poster board and shove it in your face (regardless of whether it was an abortion or not). The fact that it has nothing to do with abortion doesn’t matter because that’s not the point.

What I don’t believe is that it would have that kind of impact, particularly on a man whose reaction to the horror of Katrina was “heckuva job” and to 9/11 was to start asking how to use this get a war with Iraq.

...or who mocked a woman on death row who was pleading for him to commute her sentence.

Men aren’t supposed to show empathy, and G.W. excels at not showing empathy, which is why a lot of people loved and respected him, because he could make “tough decisions” like deciding to kill a bunch of Iraqis or torture a bunch of detainees without getting sentimental about it or even thinking about it much.  It’s strange, then, that someone like G.W. is then permitted to turn around and make a flamboyant show of empathy for a fetus in a jar.  I think it boils down to the fact that the prime directive of American manhood is to not be a woman, and one way that, through the ages, American men have demonstrated they are not women is to demean women by, for example:

(1) Assigning more importance to a fetus in a jar than to the thoughts and feelings of actual, living, women.

(2) Implying that a woman who decides to have an abortion can’t possibly be qualified to make that decision because, unlike G.W., she does not know what a fetus looks like.

(3) In general, treating women’s bodies like community property by making any argument in favor of forced pregnancy, even one that involves empathy.

Getting upset about a dead fetus, in this case, is just another way of demonstrating lack of empathy for women, the same way that fast food commercials always have men choosing burgers over their own girlfriends.

Babs’ beautiful mind is too good for fetuses in a damn jar.

The story shared in the article states that Barbara had the miscarriage, put the fetus in a jar to take to the hospital (which doctors recommend), and the teenage George drove her to the hospital and saw the fetus then.

Anything earlier than a late-term fetus isn’t going to look remotely human.  I’m no doctor, but wouldn’t a late-stage miscarriage be debilitating?  How would Barbara have the wherewithal to do anything other than scream for an ambulance?

@keshmeshi,

You’re assuming it did look human. He probably just saw bloody stuff in a jar and made up all the bullshit later, like Amanda said.

And my mom had a late miscarriage. Her fetus came out in the bathroom (I was too young to see it and don’t know if she threw it in a jar), but she was able to go to the hospital in a private car, not an ambulance.

I mean, when Bush’s sister Robin got leukemia, they didn’t even tell tween W. that his sister was gravely ill. They just whisked her off to get treatment in New York, without explaining where they were going. She never came back. They only told W. after she died.

This is why I don’t believe that Bush realized abortion was terrible at the time of the jar.  If the death of a (potential) family member would have a huge impact on what he believed was just and we give him the benefit of the doubt that he is really is dumb enough to think that abstinence-only would stop abortions (I actually have a harder time convincing myself that he should know better given who he is), then you’d think his administration would have worked a lot harder to save actual living siblings of children in America.  They didn’t.

I’m no doctor, but wouldn’t a late-stage miscarriage be debilitating? How would Barbara have the wherewithal to do anything other than scream for an ambulance?

A miscarriage can’t be more physically debilitating than having a baby (emotionally - that’s a different story, but physically, it’s the same process) - and women in labor don’t get ambulances to take them to the hospital unless there are unusual circumstances involved. (And many of them don’t even scream and retain plenty of wherewithal.)

I can believe she had it in a jar because I think it’s pretty common to be told to bring in whatever you lost. I can believe he saw it, though I find it a little hard to believe she chose to show it to him. And I can even believe such a thing would prompt contemplation about what might have been - that if she hadn’t miscarried, what was in the jar would eventually have become a brother or a sister.

I find it improbable it was the light-bulb moment of conversion for him on this issue, but I don’t find the basic outline of the story improbable.

What if it were true? It’s not like it would change anything.

And we should believe this longtime pathological liar why?

Because he totally knows where the fetus-in-a-jar is - it’s in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

There are a number of people who make a living giving speeches where they claim they “survived” abortion and were born anyway, a claim that’s even more farcical than the Satan-worshiping crap but just as firmly believed.

Great post… when I first heard about Dubya’s bizarre claims about seeing his mother’s miscarried dead fetus in a jar all I could think was WTF?!?  It was really creepy and bizarre… and smelled entirely like bullshit.

I have a question about a particular individual who has publicly made the “I survived an abortion” claim before a Congress, a 33 year old woman named Gianna Jessen. I’m only familiar with her because a particularly obnoxious anti-choice wingnut in my family mentioned her to me in a heated debate, and I later Googled her. There doesn’t seem to be any publicly available information corroborating her claim of having survived a saline abortion at 7.5 months, so I’m inclined to call BS, but her story was covered in 2005 by BBC News when she testified before the House of Commons, and the article seemed to present her claim as factual. As far as I know, BBC News doesn’t have a vested interest in either side of the reproductive choice debate, so I don’t know how to interpret their coverage of Jessen’s story.

Does anyone know if there is any info available debunking Jessen’s claim to have survived an abortion in 1977… I will likely bump into this relative again sometime during the holidays, and would like to be able to call bullshit on the story. I’m genuinely not trying to concern troll, I’ve just not been able to find a firm debunking of Jessen’s claim.

Yeah, I agree his claim is true, as far as his mother showing him the fetus.  First of all, kinda hard to make that up, and secondly, this family is so effed up they didn’t tell him his sister was dead.  I mean, ole W didn’t just get born the way he is you know.

Nope, there’s good reason for it alright.  Not that hard to create a monster if you get started real early.

The world would have been a better place had specifically Barbara Bush, never been born.

That is one fucked woman.  A monster who creates monsters, though in fairness, I have no doubt someone created her as well.  And the beat goes on.

Why would anyone think you were concern trolling Murrow?  You’ve posted here long enough not to be accused of that.

I never heard the story, but I bet someone here will know something about it.

Wow, reading some of these comments, way too much slack is gven to Barbara bush.

The woman is a monster.  The time she said that the lucky ducky Katrina victims were enjoying the shit out of themselves in the Superdome because you know, that’s like a big vacation to blackie, is reflective of what she is.  The time she said that she doesn’t give a shit about the young people her son was getting blown to smithereens in Iraq because she wasn’t going to mar her beautiful mind with thoughts of others, was reflective of her.

She’s a fucking monster, and just because she’s a woman, doesn’t make her less of a monster.  It’s not like, ohhh, she must have been distraught when she had the miscarriage and that’s why she allowed her son to see the fetus, and it can’t be true that as he said, she showed it to him.

Fuck that.  She’s earned no benefit of any doubt from me.

Also, it’s important to remember that sociopathic personalities like W don’t get born.

They are created.

“Does anyone know if there is any info available debunking Jessen’s claim to have survived an abortion in 1977…”

Why would there be?  I mean, this is one of those situations where you’d be trying to prove a negative, which is difficult, and most if not all of the debunking information would be in the hands of either Jessen or Jessen’s mother.  It’s like the Trebow claim that all Mrs. Trebow’s doctors told her to have an abortion, but she wouldn’t and now just look how God has rewarded her.  Or practically any of the high-profile antichoice whackjobs’ big gotcha personal horror stories about abortion.  To a person who’s not invested neck-deep in the mythology and in-group politics, they don’t make a whole lot of sense from a factual or psychological perspective.  To someone who is, it’s all just further evidence that doctors are evil and miracles happen every day.  You could show them a sworn, notarized affidavit from Jessen swearing that she made the whole thing up to bolster her political claims; the response would likely be that she was paid off or threatened by the “abortion industry.” These are the sort of people who insist that Becky Bell didn’t really die of complications from a back-alley abortion.

Calling bullshit on your relative’s story will probably be as productive as calling bullshit on the people who think that fluoridated water is a communist mind-control plot.  They’ll just move the goalposts or change the subject or tell you they’ll pray at you.

There’s a very simple reason why W cares about his mother’s miscarried fetus more than the people killed in his wars or the victims of natural disasters.  Most of those people are Other People, and the fetus was a potential white male, and even a Bush on top of that.  He’s not worried about people or babies or fetuses dying; he’s worried about white royalty fetuses dying.

All this talk about “fetus in a jar” is reminding me of “dick in a box.” Go for it SNL!

I think if you have never had to worry about anything that really matters, like how you were going to make a mortgage payment, or even how you were going to get a job, you can spend all your time focusing on petty stuff, like a ral or imagined fetus in a jar; or what the great sky fairy has in store for you in the next life.  W is just the ultimate expression of this.

@MAJeff

That’s funny.  I’ve been hearing “Fetus in a Jar, oh” sung by Metallica in my head since I first heard about it.

Jesus’s general explains the fetus jar really well:

I was also very moved by His recounting of His childhood encounter with the Bush family fetus jar. It was very vividly written. I can almost see Barbara Bush standing there in her blue gown, arms outstretched as she presents the fetus jar to young W. “Hold him, W,” she screeches, her pearls rattling angrily, “kiss your little dead fetus brother; kiss him now, you little mistake!”

Now that’s parenthood. It’s no wonder He became what He is today.

It does not matter if the story is true or not. No one cares that it’s more likely that Barbara caught young George drinking from the family fetus jar. The story works either way, because it’s about respect for life or the alcohol that preserves the traces of it. And that’s the key to understanding President Bush. He respects life so much, He eagerly takes it from those he deems undeserving.

As someone pointed out in the Jezebel thread earlier, he does realize that banning abortion will do absolutely NOTHING to stop the very common incidence of natural miscarriage, right?

@John Rove

I can almost see Barbara Bush standing there in her blue gown, arms outstretched as she presents the fetus jar to young W. “Hold him, W,” she screeches, her pearls rattling angrily, “kiss your little dead fetus brother; kiss him now, you little mistake!”

So, in other words, Barbara should have held out for her soulmate Rick Santorum?

Anything earlier than a late-term fetus isn’t going to look remotely human

Yeah, I remember some propaganda from when I was a teenager that showed an embryo as basically a tiny baby with the intent to show that it’s clearly a human.  I was very surprised during freshman biology in college when I saw a picture of an actual human embryo that was shown besides pictures of pig and mouse embryos.  Without the caption, it would be impossible for most people to tell which one was human.

This is one more reason that I think Bush is lying.  Whether or not he saw the miscarried fetus, I doubt that it converted him to be anti-choice.  If he did see it, he knows very well that it doesn’t look like a miniature human, but he knows that most anti-choicers think that way so he’s playing on their mistaken belief.

Unless they just happened to have some gallon jars at home, the miscarriage must have been no later than 4th or 5th month. At that point it’s possible to recognize a fetus as going-to-be-human, but I wouldn’t bet on it under the circumstances. (In fact, the very story suggests against it—if it had been recognizable he wouldn’t have had to ask, he would have been all horror-movie-ingenue.)

I agree with everything said above about Barbara Bush. But please know that doctors sometimes do ask patients to bring in whatever comes out after a miscarriage for scientific study. This helps them understand why it happened and helps them to try to prevent it in the future. So it is possible that Mrs. Bush was asked to bring in the fetal material by her doctor. That doesn’t make her any less of a monster who doesn’t give a shit about people who aren’t exactly like her.

Which brings us to her son, who is just like her. What I don’t get is why this guy isn’t being tried for war crimes? He wrote in his book that he authorized torture! Isn’t that enough evidence?!

There doesn’t seem to be any publicly available information corroborating her claim of having survived a saline abortion at 7.5 months, so I’m inclined to call BS

I don’t know the details of this story, but I do know that third-trimester abortions are extremely rare, and never elective.  Does this woman explain why her mother tried to have an abortion?  If her mother’s health or life were at risk, the most common thing to do is induce labor early and try to save the baby, and without further information I would assume that’s what happened here.  If her mom waited 7.5 months into the pregnancy, then it’s very likely that she wanted this child.  Most women aren’t so wishy-washy that they would wake up one day late into an unwanted pregnancy and remember “Oh yeah, I better get that taken care of today.”  The only other reason a woman might have an abortion that late in a pregnancy is because she discovered a serious health issue with the fetus; does this woman have anything like that?  I’m extremely doubtful about her story.  Either she’s making it up, or she is deliberately misunderstanding what happened.  Maybe her mother started to have a “spontaneous abortion” (miscarriage) and this woman didn’t understand what that term meant.

@catgirl

Maybe her mother started to have a “spontaneous abortion” (miscarriage) and this woman didn’t understand what that term meant.

While I haven’t actually read the thing, from summaries of her book it seems that is a comprehension failure that Sarah Palin shares.  (Although her little anecdote with the post-miscarriage medical bill and the white-out may also have been made-up.  If these people would stop lying so much, it would be easier for us to figure out when they are just being dumb.)

Although her little anecdote with the post-miscarriage medical bill and the white-out may also have been made-up

I never heard about this?  Is it exactly what I think it is?

From Jeanne Devon’s summary at The Mudflats:

Page 55
Pregnant again and had a miscarriage. Felt devastated. After the D&C;, they typed “abortion” on the form and refused to type up a new one, but only used a thin layer of whiteout and then wrote “miscarriage” on it which felt like “salt in the wound.”

I am sure that the story is more heartbreaking and incoherent in its original Mama Grizzly.

Well, since Murrow Fan asked, Jessen is footnoted as one of two live saline births in the Wikipedia [motto: citation needed] entry on saline abortion, and at seven months, it is possible.  However, she has cerebral palsy.  Medical issues for the fetus explain the late stage pregnancy, which, according to the BBC UK news story cited under UK law, allows for a late-term abortion. 

But that kind of abortion is supremely different from what most people think of when they picture “abortion” - in other words, the D&C;(dilation and curettage) method which surgically removes the (not reconizable as a) fetus.  Saline injection induces labor, which, in Jessen’s case, was probably because her mother’s doctor assumed the fetus would be dead.  Also, at 7-1/2 months, the tissue extraction could be performed by induced labor alone.

What Bush is lying about is what people who believe in “I survived an abortion!!!” stories think is what those people survived - a bloody mess and a miraculously surviving barely formed fetus (yet somehow also miraculously shaped like a tiny baby) that lives.  Not a prematurely induced baby, which is basically what Jessen was.

Jessen’s story has a couple of huge holes in it.  The biggest is that she claims to have an elaborate story of how she was born, except she doesn’t know her birth mother, since she’s adopted.  People don’t call bullshit because there’s no way to prove that she’s lying.  The possibilities are a) lying b) deluding herself c) repeating a story fed to her by anti-choice parents that she needs to believe and so ignores the holes or d) telling the truth.  I can see big time why the first three are tempting possibilities, but everyone politely pretends d) is what’s going on, because we can’t prove otherwise.  Suffice it to say, I’m skeptical.

Many whiffs of bullshit from Bush’s fetus story, but to me the best evidence against it is the belated nature of his memory.  I mean, dude wins several elections (or at least is successful in them), always opposing abortion (unlike his father in this respect), but he never thought to tell voters the tale of his Teen Come to Jesus insight?  It would have been perfect material.  Anti-abortion bottom line for the right wing, pseudo-compassionate for the center, and plays off Babs’ popularity.  Yet he didn’t use it.  Rrrright.

Good comment, PiaToR.

ryang @13: and let’s not forget the woman he was mocking sought clemency because, while in prison, she had become a born-again Christian. You know, kind of like W. did after a couple of decades of being a rich wastrel and deciding it was time to go into politics.

Pregnant again and had a miscarriage. Felt devastated. After the D&C;, they typed “abortion” on the form and refused to type up a new one, but only used a thin layer of whiteout and then wrote “miscarriage” on it which felt like “salt in the wound.”

Yes, this definitely happened…if she had the D&C;done at Staples maybe.

Ironic. I’ve commented on this before, but in this context it bears repeating. I had a colleague of a certain ethnicity who got a D & C abortion, but the medical bill called it a procedure for endometriosis or some such. Her ethnic group frowns on abortions, but her ethnic doctor knew what to do for the sake of discretion. How different from the Mama Grizzly.

I heard the Fetus-in-a-jar and my first thought was “Now why would a Buish be having an Econo-wife funeral?”

Doesn’t matter if it’s factual or not. It’s true in that it forms a base of operating and a (skewed) world-view.

Anything earlier than a late-term fetus isn’t going to look remotely human.

Wait what? I’m as pro-choice as they come but at 12 weeks along in my first pregnancy, I had an ultrasound and the fetus definitely looked “remotely human”. I watched it somersault around. Maybe there is a definition of “late stage” I’m missing that encompasses 12 weeks or maybe there’s a huge difference in the discernibility of a fetus’ features in the flesh post-miscarriage as opposed to via ultrasound—I wouldn’t know. Otherwise, that just seems like a really strange statement to me.

kristin, I think if you look at pictures of mamalian fetal development you’ll see that despite what you really want to see as “remotely human” the fetus is in fact very similar to other mamalian fetuses (fetii?) and less distinctly human than you may have believed*. iirc, the main difference at that stage of development is that the head is slightly larger than similar mamals (and possibly amphibians? those classes were a long time ago), but otherwise it’s suprising how long it takes a fetus to become very distinctly like it’s species.

*humans are, afterall, pattern recognizers. We tend to identify surface similarities even when few exist, so making the leap from what you’re seeing to what you know the thing is will feel instinctual when in fact it might rely far more heavily on pre-known information.

As someone pointed out in the Jezebel thread earlier, he does realize that banning abortion will do absolutely NOTHING to stop the very common incidence of natural miscarriage, right?
Comment #30: Blitzgal

That’s where he loses me. I think he’s just conjuring dead fetus imagery for the antis. They do love their dead fetus imagery.

Maybe her mother started to have a “spontaneous abortion” (miscarriage) and this woman didn’t understand what that term meant.
Comment #35: catgirl

Before he was murdered, George Tiller had a step-by-step procedural description of late-term abortion on his website. It bore zero resemblance to the gory tales that anti-choicers peddle and too many people believe. Let alone the misogynist suspension of disbelief required for the cw that women go in for late-term abortions on their frivolous whims rather than medical necessity.
Before aspiration even starts, there’s an injection to stop the fetal heartbeat and fetal death is confirmed. There are no late-term abortions that whoops! come out as live babies. Besides if she was even eligible for a late-term abortion, she’d have much bigger health problems than CP, which I think is fairly common among people who are born prematurely. I think your theory is most likely, that somebody along the line, for some reason, referred to her premature birth as a “spontaneous abortion” that she survived and she latched on to the “abortion” part. That or she’s just cutting the story from whole cloth, which is equally feasible.

kristin, I think if you look at pictures of mamalian fetal development you’ll see that despite what you really want to see as “remotely human” the fetus is in fact very similar to other mamalian fetuses (fetii?) and less distinctly human than you may have believed

Sorry, just not buyin’ it—at 7, 8 or 9 weeks, yeah, there’s a blob that looks vaguely amigurumi-like and people go “oooohhhhh wittle baby” without realizing that pig or puppy fetuses look pretty much the same. Sure. But by 12 weeks if the photos I’ve seen are to believed, the arms and legs have elongated, there is a distinctly humanoid head, there are even often fingers forming. It looks pretty dang human. My memory of the ultrasound I referenced is of a big-headed homunculus with very human-like legs and arms—like a funny little doll.

I mean, it makes no difference in the big picture. I cooed over the little homunculus (now my 11-year-old) because I wanted it, but I firmly believe I would have had the moral right to stop carrying it if I had wanted that. It’s just that, as infuriating as hearing anti-choicers go “IT’S A PERSON JUST LIKE YOU” is, it’s still irritating (not infuriating but irritating) to hear the pro-choice side go “IT’S JUST A LUMP”. Yeah, often it is, but not for the entire first trimester. Reality is on our side, we don’t need to resort to inaccuracy.

Antigone@150 your links for elephant and dog are broken. (Why is it so hard to find fetus pictures that will link well? Human or non-human, apparently?)

These are some of the pictures I was referencing for human fetuses: http://tinyurl.com/22ttraa http://tinyurl.com/yhv2j4w

This is the most “human-looking” puppy embryo I could find: http://tinyurl.com/294jd6o Resembles a human embryo, but a much earlier stage than a 12-week fetus.

Horse fetus: http://tinyurl.com/2f5hrdu

Cat fetus: http://tinyurl.com/28nrlm6

Seems to me like it’s true that we all look pretty alike as embryos, not so much as fetuses.

@kristin

That picture of the puppy embryo was the one that Antigone posted (the links work fine for me) and it is certainly not at a much earlier stage than a 12 week fetus unless you had a pregnancy that lasted closer to 24 weeks than 9 months.

Also, according to this, the image you linked is actually of a dog fetus and not an embryo.

OK, I wasn’t sure (given the differing gestation periods) whether some of those were embryos or fetuses. If I try to click Antigone’s animal fetus links I get a Bad Control graphic, not a pic.

and it is certainly not at a much earlier stage than a 12 week fetus

I meant, if you were going to say it resembles a human during gestation, what it would resemble would definitely be a human at a much earlier stage of gestation than 12 weeks.

So anyway, the original question I had was whether a human fetus looks “remotely human” before “late term” and it seems the answer is yes, it does, because it starts looking recognizably human (in ways that other mammalian fetuses of similar development do not, so it’s not just finding human features in a generic lump) around week 12, which I think would be a real stretch to refer to as “late term”. Although Wikipedia does tell me that some sources refer to a past-12-week abortion as “late term”. It also says that most sources define “late term” as 20 weeks or later.

@kristin

I wasn’t sure either (it had never even crossed my mind that the terminology would be changed at all for “unborn animals” vs. humans) and I looked it up and discovered it probably doesn’t cross anybody else’s either (the link I included was one of the few that said anything other than “when it looks like a dog”). 

I think a lot of might be that “human-looking” is rather subjective.  I actually think that the 30 day along puppy embryo looks a lot more human (other than the neck) than the human embryo (which looks like the fetus for the alien overlords in This Island Earth or Mars Attacks).  The former I might cuddle, the latter (unless it was my creepy little alien) I wouldn’t.

What gives?

Well, maybe doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is better than doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons?  Oh, no.  That would be sensible.  Flip-flopping is bad.  If you are a serial killer, you’d damn well better stay that way because changing in any way, shape or form is the problem.

On the other hand, Pandagon is the only site on the internet.  So, if Pandagon said nothing about Jesse Jackson’s position change, then no one has has ever said anything bad about it ever.  If only there were some sort of way of determining if that were in fact the case.  I suppose, that if those anti-choice organizations challenging Jackson existed and were not calling out Bush that that would be racism pure and simple too?

There is no such thing as racism against white people.

(I love how much that fact pisses them off.)

@snobographer

I love how they claim things that are not only obviously untrue, but the untrueness of the claim is demonstrated in the way it is made itself.  Take our current troll: if Jesse Jackson’s change wasn’t challenged then he wouldn’t know about it in order to claim that it wasn’t challenged.

Bush had a very odd childhood. The “fetus jar” wasn’t the first time he saw a dead sibling. It doesn’t justify what he did to the country, but maybe helps us understand his twisted loyalties better.

When he was seven, Bush’s younger sister, Robin, died of leukemia and several independent witnesses say he was very upset by this loss. Barbara claims its effect was exaggerated but nobody could accuse her of overreacting: the day after the funeral, she and her husband were on the golf course.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/sep/02/lifeandhealth.usa

A 12-week-old fetus looks pretty humanoid to me. Still, at this point, it is only about 2.5” long and weighs less than half an ounce: http://bit.ly/afaxVT

What you can see on the ultra-sound is a magnified image produced by a machine that’s designed to render images as clearly as possible. A miscarried 12-wk fetus is going to look a lot different in the flesh. It’ll be small and bloody, and possibly not whole. I doubt it would look very human.

Lindsay, that was one of the things I wondered about, whether seeing a post-miscarriage fetus in the flesh is substantially different from the ultrasound image (since I’ve been lucky not to have had any miscarriages that weren’t very early, genuinely “tiny unidentifiable lump of tissue” early).

I still think “not remotely human” is overstating it, b/c it seems pretty apparent to me that a human fetus as opposed to an embryo is recognizably human (unless you count “human sized” as a vital part of “recognizably human” and incidentally, 2.5” is right around how big the ultrasound image I saw was—it would have fit in the palm of my hand if it had been tangible). I don’t think the features of a 12-week human fetus are something that can be explained away by the same kind of pattern recognition that makes us biologically respond to puppies, kittens, and crocheted Cthulhus as cute and babylike.

But then it’s a pretty subjective assessment, I guess, and mostly gestational and semantic geekery as opposed to something that really matters for abortion. *shrug*

@kristin

I don’t think the features of a 12-week human fetus are something that can be explained away by the same kind of pattern recognition that makes us biologically respond to puppies, kittens, and crocheted Cthulhus as cute and babylike.

No, I think it can be explained away by our basic science educations.

I didn’t mean that advanced science educations would mean we thought differently, just that learning what human features are and how they grow into what we see everyday is learned pretty early.

Hilarious #11!

I think he could have seen the jar but what would he have seen since theres nothing thats really discernable to the eye? He’s just elaborating to pander to nut jobs!

#19 Yeah I heard about that as well. She was born after Roe v Wade and the only way you can have a third trimester abortion is in cases of health or death circumstances so her mother must’ve been doing it for one of those two reasons. I looked up saline abortion on wikipedia and the term instillation abortion came up and it says it is usually used within the second trimester, not the third. Saline abortions are rarely used in the U.S. and says that under saline that live births have actually happened (though it only referenced Gianna Jessen). Apparently if you look up gianna jessen on wikipedia there’s another that was supposedly born after a late term abortion as well named the oldenburg baby. The method of abortion for the oldenburg baby wasnt given though I wonder if it wasnt saline?

.....I also dont know why gianna jessen would be an activist since most abortions are 1st trimester and early trimester to boot! What, is she against women being able to save their own lives or health through the use of abortion? The only thing I can see is the method of abortion used wasnt sufficient enough and since saline abortions are rare it further boggles what the hell she’s talking about!Is she for better forms of abortion that have more success?

.....I also found (though it was an anti link) that says she hasnt actually confirmed nor met with her birth mother. The only thing she has is a typed sheet from MediCal on State of California stationary that said, “an infant born at 10 weeks premature, the product of an attempted saline abortion.” 

http://joseromia.tripod.com/gianna.html

It’s an anti-link but it’s what I found. Theres nothing else that supports her claim such as maternity tests to parent or an explanation of why it was carried out (there had to be some medical reason if it’s true). The beginning of the story from the link sounds like BS. Personally I think it’s BS.

#32 catgirl,
Yeah, the anti propganda is delusional. They make it sound like a fully formed infant falls out just in smaller form. I heard that a fruit fly (which apparently we share 70% of our human DNA with) has more human dna in it than a homo sapien embryo. Has anyone heard of that? I got that from an atheist on a blog(who often seems informed on biology) but I cant seem to find anything that supports that. Does anyone else know?

#35 apparently she has cerebral palsy (though she said she got this from the abortion) and her mother was reported to be 17. I linked to an article I read about it (though it’s an anti one) but I agree that wouldnt have been legal unless it was for something serious. Wouldnt she also have some sort of burn on her from the saline - does saline even cause burns?

#56 how the F did you do that? That was a nice (also funny)link!

@BeanS

It’s “Let Me Google That for You” at http://lmgtfy.com/ and all you do is enter the search terms in the box provided, click “Google Search,” and copy the resulting web address.  I love it, but don’t have too much opportunity to use it.  Thank the FSM for trolls!

I didn’t mean that advanced science educations would mean we thought differently, just that learning what human features are and how they grow into what we see everyday is learned pretty early.

Could be, but I’m not sure. I bet if you had 100 people look at a very early embryo from the back side—or maybe even at a random blob of uterine tissue—something like 70 of those people would find wee adorable wittle eyes and a wee adorable wittle mouf. Whereas by fetus stage, the back of a head is pretty obviously the back of a head, and the butt is pretty obviously the butt and so on.

Super cool comparative vertebrate embryo illustration! http://bit.ly/dyQ2Fo Supports the idea that at the stage when most abortions are performed, it’s true that most people couldn’t even pick a human embryo out of a lineup.

@kristin

Whereas by fetus stage, the back of a head is pretty obviously the back of a head, and the butt is pretty obviously the butt and so on.

I agree completely, but it is knowing that the back of the dog fetus’ head is not the back of a human fetus’ head and that the human fetus’ eyes are not the elephant fetus’ eyes that I think is learned.  Thus, “human looking” has a lot to do with what a person is expecting to see in both the embryo and fetus cases, but in the fetus cases they are more likely to be right because what they have been taught to look for is what is actually there. 

I mean, I know the human fetus is a human fetus and the dog fetus is definitely not, but that’s because I know what both look like, not because I know what people and dogs look like.  I was taught that a human fetus has a strangely large head compared to a human infant or adult.  If I hadn’t been taught that, then I would probably think that the human fetus was actually the fetus of another mammal with a much larger head than humans have.

The “not remotely human” is probably overstating it, but only because many features that humans have are there to be seen.  They aren’t really human-specific features or arrangements though, which means that if you didn’t know any better, you might not be able to tell.

“I heard that a fruit fly (which apparently we share 70% of our human DNA with) has more human dna in it than a homo sapien embryo. Has anyone heard of that?”

...that’s ridiculous on the face of it.  I mean, what’s the other 31-whatever% of a human embryo’s DNA supposed to be?  Groundhog?

@preying mantis

That’s just silly.  The space is filled by the same thing that holds atoms together: Jesus.  Any other explanation is just a made-up dream, a desperate theory to explain away truth.

“The space is filled by the same thing that holds atoms together: Jesus.”

Ah, Jack Chick.  Still crazy as a shithouse rat after all these years.

Holy shit!  Jesus is the strong force!

#74 Well where I got that from was the links below (and a few others). I was surprised to learn it. This is where I found it:

“Seventy percent of the genes found in the flies are also present in humans”

http://articles.cnn.com/2000-03-23/nature/fruit.fly.genome_1_drosophila-genes-genome?_s=PM:NATURE

“About 61% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genetic code of fruit flies”

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/03feb_fruitfly/

and also #74 lol! With types like Palin I’d have to say the amoeba.
Actually I think it’s that fruit flys share 70% of their DNA with humans but not necessarily that 70% of human dna is shared with fruit fly. Again, I dont know so I was hoping someone with some biology credits could opine on that.