One side to every story

YOU ARE VISITING THE OLD MALKIN(S)WATCH. THAT'S FANTASTIC. PLEASE VISIT THE NEW MALKIN(S)WATCH WHEN YOU GET A CHANCE.

One of the Malkins (coin flip says: Michelle) reports on an Illinois bill which would require doctors' orders before an ultrasound is performed on a pregnant woman. Through selective quoting, Malkin manages to make it seem as though the only explanation for this bill is Planned Parenthood's efforts to enact a Final Solution:

Why would Planned Parenthood, an industry leader that aborts children and makes millions doing it, care a bit about the safety of children in the womb? Simple. It's hard to see an ultrasound and remain pro-choice. Once you see that your potentially aborted wad of tissues has fingers, toes, eyes and a nose and all the rest it becomes a person in your mind, and that makes you less likely to become one of Margaret Sanger's company's customers.

Why doesn't she explain that bolded sentence (emphasis mine)? Because it offers an alternative, Occam's Razor-approved explanation for the bill, which is also supported by the Illinois State Medical Society. From the story Michelle linked to:

Mulligan said that Planned Parenthood and the Illinois State Medical Society encouraged her to sponsor the legislation because there was a concern about long exposure of fetuses to ultrasound waves.

"There's a new little industry that does ultrasound videos on babies before they're born for entertainment purposes," the Cook County legislator told her colleagues. "There is concern about the neurological development with long exposure."

I'm not very impressed by Planned Parenthood's case here. But considering that Malkin has repeatedly blogged about her worries about the safety and efficacy of vaccinations, I would think she'd want to err on the side of caution. At least one paper published in Lancet recommended:

Repeated prenatal ultrasound imaging and Doppler flow examinations should be restricted to those women to whom the information is likely to be of clinical benefit.

But is the other contention - that "It's hard to see an ultrasound and remain pro-choice" - even accurate?

Well, one study says otherwise.

Ultrasound may be better at picking up abnormalities in foetuses than previously thought, but its results could also be misleading, causing parents to abort healthy babies...

Another 174 foetuses had signs suggesting abnormality, but went on to be normal at birth. They are known as "false positives"...

In two cases, parents of these babies opted for an abortion because they feared their children would be born with deformities - against doctors' advice.

And those are just the false positives. Thousands of abortions are performed every year as a result of the discovery of birth defects by ultrasounds. If Planned Parenthood is really interested in selling as many abortions as possible, why aren't they working to mandate ultrasounds for all pregnancies?