If you utilize as I do the Google search engine, you’ll see a story or three a day about Anna Yocca, each more sympathetic than the previous one to a woman who is charged with attempted murder after using a coathanger to try to self-abort her 24-week-old unborn baby. We reported on the case Monday.
The pro-life blogger JivinJehoshaphat addressed some of the issues raised by Yocca’s despicable actions, using a column by the extremist pro-abortion columnist Jessica Valenti as the point of departure. The analysis is must reading, so let me just highlight a few of JivinJehoshaphat’s many keen insights.
Valenti’s entire column is an elaboration of one sentence.
In a just world, this news would provoke empathetic outrage – Yocca’s desperation and inability to obtain a safe abortion prove that we are shamefully failing women.
Notice the selective outrage. Not a syllable about the “fetus,” which in fact was a viable unborn baby, weighing 1.5 pounds when doctors miraculously saved his life, but who was left with grievous injuries. According to Murfreesboro Post’s Sam Stockard
Even though the baby survived the trauma, physicians said the boy’s quality of life “will be forever harmed.” He will need a medically-experienced foster parent, remain on oxygen and take medication daily because of problems with his eyes, lungs and heart stemming from damage caused by the coat hanger. Medical staff also said other physical problems will arise when the child grows older.
As you may recall, Newschannel 5 reported that Yocca allegedly filled a bathtub with a few inches of water, then used a coat hanger to attempt the abortion. “That’s when officials said the amount of blood alarmed her, and her boyfriend took her to the emergency room at St. Thomas Rutherford hospital.” “From there, she was transported to St. Thomas Mid-Town in Nashville where staff members saved ‘Baby Yocca.’”
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What about Yocca’s “inability to obtain a safe abortion”? The pro-abortion Think Progress reported “There is no abortion clinic in Yocca’s town of Murfreesboro, TN, so she would have had to drive the 45 minutes to Nashville for a legal procedure.”
45 minutes.
“Yocca had a job at Amazon fulfillment center,” JivinJehoshaphat observed. “She has a boyfriend. She’s 31. She’s not some scared teenager without any resources. She’s a grown adult.”
The pro-life blogger then quotes Valenti who’d gone after a local police officer.
In an interview with local media, police sergeant Kyle Evans – displaying an incredible amount of anti-abortion bias – said that Yocca “wanted to kill the child” and that she “made very incriminating statements … regarding wanting to end the child’s life”. (Apparently wanting an abortion is criminal.)
To which JivinJehoshaphat responds
Well, yes in this case (as the Washington Post explains) attempting a self-abortion and injuring the unborn child is against the law in Tennessee. How is it anti-abortion bias to point out the obvious (Yocca ‘wanted to kill the child’)? Is it because he used the word ‘child’? Is the 1.5 pound baby boy not a child because Yocca tried to kill him?
There is much more that could be said, including about the kind of person who would repeatedly stab her own unborn child with a coathanger, or pro-abortion scribes so committed to abortion at any time for any reason or no reason that they would turn Yocca into a victim/heroine. Let me end with this catch that I had missed when I first quickly skimmed Valenti’s column.
Valenti originally claimed thousands of women were dying “every year” before Roe. The Guardian newspaper “corrected” the mistake to say that thousands had died prior to Roe v. Wade from illegal abortion, which is still not remotely true.
As JivinJehoshaphat notes, Valenti has been writing about abortion for more than a decade. Which is worse? That she is that sloppy or that her error was borderline intentional?
Let us hope and pray that Baby Yocca finds a family that will use coathangers to hang up his shirts and pants, not attempt to take his life.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
