C
cattyfan
Guest
A Baby By Any Other Name
Less than a week before Christmas this past year, the world was horrified by news out of Skidmore, Missouri. The details of the murder of young, pregnant, newlywed Bobbie Jo Stinnett were gruesome with the most shocking piece of the story being that the perpetrator had viciously cut Stinnett’s near full-term child from her body. From the moment the reports began I was riveted, wondering if the child would be recovered alive and contemplating who would commit such a cold, calculated, and cruel crime.
As with most kidnapping cases, it was difficult for the police, but this case had an added complication. The sheriff initially could not issue an Amber Alert (the national report of a missing child) for the baby because no one was able to give a physical description of her since the murderer was the only one who had actually seen the newborn. Nodaway County Sheriff, Ben Espey, was quoted in local reports as saying, “I'm a little disappointed that it happened like it did. All of us standing here feel like this is a baby, even though it was taken a month premature, we had a live baby. I feel like that should justify an Amber Alert.” Espey stated it took more than nine hours after the initial discovery of Stinnett’s homicide and her missing infant to convince the authorities involved that this child deserved to be recognized and to get the Amber Alert released across the country.
As coverage continued, I became distracted as I noticed that a strange evolution of terminology had taken place. When the sheriff conducted his first press conference, he was definite and adamant in referring to the missing “baby.” He stated they were searching for an “infant.” But when the media in St. Louis began broadcasting their reports and the story was fed to the national news outlets, it wasn’t a child who had been ripped from her mother…it was a “fetus.” I compared the headlines from Skidmore’s area newspaper, The St. Joseph News-Press, to those of AP, CNN, and UPI. Within Nodaway County the articles were titled “Baby Taken, Slain Mother Found,” “Woman Slain, Unborn Baby Taken,” and, “Amber Alert Issued, Infant Alive, Cut From Slain Mother’s Womb.” Nationally the stories read “Woman Charged in Grisly Theft of Fetus,” “Amber Alert Issued After Fetus Taken from Slain Woman's Body,” “Site of Fetus-Snatching has Seen Trouble Before” (from AP,) “Amber Alert for 8-month Fetus” (from UPI,) and “U.S. Alert for Stolen Fetus” (from CNN.) I watched the network news and observed Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and the rest of the anchors intone how a mother had been killed and her “fetus” stolen.
I considered this change in wording and wondered how it had come about. “Fetus” is an accurate word, the literal translation being “little one.” The child certainly qualified, but the word “fetus” carries with it a more clinical and detached sound as most Americans don’t normally converse in Latin and you aren’t likely to hear of a pregnant woman’s family and friends throwing her a “fetus shower.” By using a medical term, the media had effectively distanced the country ever so slightly from the emotions involved in witnessing the terrible act of slicing an infant from her mother’s body. That seemed an odd choice: to make the child for whom authorities were frantically searching less human…less real…just plain less.
Checking the international news I discovered something startling. The rest of the world was referring to her as a “baby.” Their headlines said “Missouri Woman Kills Pregnant Woman, Steals Baby out of Womb” (from Japan News Today,) “Woman Charged over Child Cut from Womb Horror” (from Scotland News,) “Horror in American Heartland - Baby Torn From Womb: Woman Confesses to Killing ( Nigeria, Africa & World News,) and “Woman Charged in Case of Infant Torn from Slain Mother's Womb” (from Turkish Press.) The foreign reporters would have received their initial leads and details from American national media and those would have used the term “fetus.” Yet the over-seas press changed the word to the more compassionate “baby” or “infant,” reflecting the more caring and careful wording as the original “rural” newspaper coverage of the St. Joseph News-Press.
I began wondering why there was such a difference in the reporting, and being who I am, I asked a newsperson with whom I correspond on-line what her theory was. She replied it was “because the fetus hadn’t been born.” Pardon me? I argued the child most certainly was born, albeit not naturally. In essence the murderer had delivered the baby via a crude caesarean section, and if that didn’t qualify as “born,” then thousands of individuals in the world who were brought forth in a similar fashion were going to be very surprised that they weren’t classified as full-fledged people. She had no response for this and opted not to discuss it further.
By Sunday all media outlets were reporting the “baby” had been returned to her father and was doing well. Somehow, miraculously, this child who “hadn’t really been born” had transitioned to being a person. No explanation was given as to how this amazing change from “fetus” had taken place.
Part of the reason for the change may be connected to the charges made against the woman, Lisa Montgomery, who was arrested for this hideous crime: “kidnapping resulting in murder.” Examine the progression of the reports. When the story had originally been reported, CBS News had distinctly used the word “stolen,” a term normally applied to simple property. Now that the “fetus” had been returned to her loving family and the wording universally changed to “baby,” “stolen” had to be switched to “kidnapped.” It’s still troubling that when the national media began their coverage the infant had been objectified as though she were inanimate. Imagine the outcry of the public, however, if the justice system had followed suit and leveled charges commensurate to only having taken a thing, not a person. Regardless of what the reporters may want to believe, in this country and (as shown by the headlines) around the world, most people agree the perpetrator had taken an infant.
This is not the only recent example of the media diminishing the importance of life. Further disturbing is a new article published in the February 2005 Consumer Reports. Varying types of birth control are discussed, and included, as though it’s no different from any other method, is abortion as described by Planned Parenthood. “Women having an abortion in the U.S. can choose one of two methods: the so-called abortion pill or a surgical procedure," After a discussion of the abortion drug RU-486, the piece goes on to describe methods of surgical abortions. "Vacuum aspiration, also known as suction curettage, is the standard surgical abortion method in the U.S. for pregnancies in the first trimester, when 88 percent of legal abortions take place," the report states. "The cervix is enlarged to a diameter of about a half-inch, either by use of dilating rods or the drug misoprostol. The uterine contents are sucked out using a manual or electrical pump while the woman is under local anesthesia.”
Uterine contents? Not fetus…not even embryo, zygote, or the former favorite Planned Parenthood “description,” blob of cells. The baby has now been reduced to “uterine contents.” It’s alarming that a magazine which has been relied on for its non-biased perspective in reviewing available goods and services willingly publishes and, in doing so, supports the idea that before birth, children are “uterine contents.” Equally disgusting is the idea that abortion is viewed by some as “just another form of birth control,” instead of a medical process or invasive surgical procedure carrying significant risks to the mother and ending the life of the child.
One wonders how much further the terminology for “baby” will degenerate, as the words used to refer to humans in the womb become increasingly distanced from humanity and become less and less recognizable as describing even a remote form of life.
“The word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.’” (Jeremiah 1:5 NIV)
I’m fairly certain God wasn’t referring to mere “uterine contents.”
--Berta Collins Eddy
copyright Almost Normal Publications 2005
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