Every year, thousands of women have pregnancies which result in
terminally ill children being born, many of those children’s lives
doomed to last no more than a few hours - or minutes - at most. They
are faced with a series of brutal, terrible decisions, including whether
or not to have a late-term abortion to save the child an infinitesimally
short lifetime of suffering and horrible pain, or to have the child,
watch them suffer, and then make preparations to have a tiny coffin made
for a tiny funeral for a child they may not have named until after it
had already passed.

So, when Beccah Beushausen, blogging as “April’s Mom”, claimed to be
pregnant with a terminally ill fetus, she drew tons of attention from
anti-choicers.

Every night for the last two months, thousands of abortion
opponents across the nation logged on to a blog run by the suburban
Chicago woman who identified herself only as “B” or “April’s Mom.”

People said they prayed that God would save her pregnancy. They
e-mailed her photos of their children dressed in pink, bought campaign
T-shirts, shared tales of personal heartache and redemption, and sent
letters and gifts to an Oak Lawn P.O. box in support.

As more and more people were drawn to her compelling tale, eager
advertisers were lining up. And established parenting Web sites that
oppose abortion were promoting her blog—which included biblical quotes,
anti-abortion messages and a soundtrack of inspirational Christian pop
songs.

By Sunday night, when “April’s Mom” claimed to have given birth to
her “miracle baby”—blogging that April Rose had survived a home birth
only to die hours later—her Web site had nearly a million hits.

Of course, there was one small hitch in this story of a woman inspiring
thousands of people who’d like to see every woman in her situation
forced into making the same decision she did. She never made that
decision at all, because the whole thing was a lie.

There was only one problem with the unfolding tragedy: None of it
was true.

Not the pregnancy, and not the photos posted on the blog of the
supposed mother and Baby April Rose, swaddled in white blankets. The
baby was actually a lifelike doll, which immediately raised the
suspicion of loyal blog-followers.

“I have that exact doll in my house,” said Elizabeth Russell, a
dollmaker from Buffalo who had been following the blog. “As soon as I
saw that picture, I knew it was a scam.”

What Beushausen did was feed into the desire of anti-choicers to have a
cause célèbre to use to consign the women who were actually in her
situation to birthing dead or dying babies. They gladly bought into her
story because they wanted to, because she would provide a convenient
tool to use to batter other women into making the same decision she did.
It was a nice little symbiotic relationship that would have made life
even harder for women actually in Beushausen’s fabricated situation, a
figurehead standing up for the thousands of people who can’t control
every single woman’s pregnancy directly.

Of course, the
not-at-all-extremist-or-linked-in-any-way-to-the-murder-of-George-Tiller-even-rhetorically
right is struggling with this. Not like women actually struggle with a
potential child’s fatal birth defects, but even worse.

Rick Moran:

It is unfortunate that the victims of this hoax - the pro-life
community who sought validation for their cherished beliefs - should
have been played in such a shameful way.

Of course, if this asshole hadn’t been dumb enough to use a doll to
represent her fake dying baby, the “victims” of this hoax would have
been, you know, actual victims instead of just shameful idiots. A
doctor was just assassinated because he aided women in this same
situation, in large part because this entire movement is based on
declaring that women in this situation should have no choice but to have
their dead babies, and aspiring terrorists embrace this selfsame lie as
a rationale to hunt down and murder people providing legal medical
services. Women may not just have pregnancies which could result in the
fetus/baby dying, they have pregnancies which may result in their own
deaths as well.

None of this matters, though, because Moran, a “pro-choice
conservative”, wants to protect innocent anti-choicers from having their
precious widdle feelings toyed with. That’s moral clarity you can
believe in.

Of course, Ann Althouse takes the cake. She then subsequently shoves
the cake in your face at your birthday party, and as the crowd stands in
stunned silence, she drunkenly slurs at everyone, “Ih wuh a jooooooke!”

Why can’t we see the blogger — Beccah Beushausen — as a fiction writer?

She didn’t set out to trick or cheat thousands of readers. She got
people emotionally involved in a story that they believed was true, but
she didn’t solicit money from them — only sympathy and prayers — and she
didn’t cause them to panic in any sort of a “War of the Worlds” kind of
a way. She didn’t even rope in Oprah, in that “Million Little Pieces” way.

I say: leave Beccah alone.

Well, she sort of did set out to trick them, as I believe one of the
dictionary definitions of “trick” is “to fake a pregnancy to get love,
attention and gifts by crafting a fantasy that feeds into a radical
political movement’s overwhelming desire to see that fantasy come to
life, like those dreams you keep having about your World of Warcraft
avatar beating up your boss”. Her site was filled with ads, and, as
mentioned above, she got plenty of gifts from her readers.

Oh, and if she hadn’t put up a picture with a stupid ****ing doll, she
would have been a heated cultural touchpoint in a war to deny women the
right not to die while delivering a corpse, an incredibly useful tool to
use to justify demonizing the next woman who seeks to not punish her
baby with seven hours of excruciatingly painful “life”. Or die.

But hey, screw that. It’s conceptually intriguing.


http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/c... it_was_cute/


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The modern GOP is little more than an army of moral absolutists led by a
gang of moral nihilists.