Lies make the baby Jesus cry

Blurring the line between abortion and infanticide doesn’t seem to upset him, however. Or some serious infant weeping might break out over this story on the Pomegranate Apple blog:

Gianna Gessen: A Story About a Birth
“To everyone’s great shock and surprise, I didn’t arrive dead but alive on April the sixth 1977 in a Los Angelos county abortion clinic”
“What’s fantastic about this, about the perfect timing of my arrival, is that the abortionist was not on duty yet. So he wasn’t even given the opportunity to continue on for his plan for my life which was death.”
“So a nurse called an ambulance and had me transferred to a hospital which is absolutely miraculous. Generally the practice at the time….and up until 2002 was to end the life of an abortion survivor by strangulation, suffocation, leaving the baby to die, or throwing the baby away.”

There’s even a video to support these “extraordinary claims.”

Hmm. How unconvinced am I that a full-term or close-to-full-term baby was minutes away from abortion? Quite unconvinced, to put it mildly.

(I could put this more forcefully, of course, but any sane readers will be able to judge the validity of this tale for themselves.)

How unconvinced am I that it was standard practice to murder babies that somehow sprang fully-viable from a botched abortion? Yet again, I have to report that this information seems so unrelated to “truth” that it may be from a different species.

(I am also pretty dumbstruck by her characterising an abortion doctor as someone with a “plan for my life which was death.” )

I find myself almost weeping on behalf of an absent baby Jesus at the sheer dishonest effrontery of this tale.

Don’t make me keep saying this

Another of those polls that make you worry about the quality of some teachers and wonder what all the endless inspections they have to undergo are supposed to have achieved. A MORI poll found that

More than a quarter of science teachers in state schools believe that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science lessons, according to a national poll of primary and secondary teachers. (From James Randerson in the Guardian)

This is pretty much what the Teachers TV poll suggested in November. Maybe it’s the same poll and the Guardian’s confusing breaking news with news that Randerson already wrote about months ago. I can only hope so.

Steve Jones and Dawkins responded, using phrases like “very depressing” and ” a national disgrace.” Quite.