Some idiot spammed me on YouTube last night with this P.O.S. chain mail:
A few years ago, two parents went out for dinner. A few hours later, the babysitter was calling to ask if she could cover up the clown statue in the kids’ room, the father said, “Take the kids and get out of the house. We’ll call the police, we don’t have a clown statue.”; The “clown statue”; is really a killer that escaped from jail. If you don’t post this letter on to 10 videos tonight, the clown will be in your bed at 3:00 am with a chainsaw in his hand (SORRY BOUT SPAM THIS REALLY FREAKS ME)
Now, there are two things that the ordinary citizen requires when faced with data like this;
1. Some good old-fashioned common sense.
2. The ability to use Google.
Here you go; look how simple it is to ascertain the truth if you’re having any difficulty with #1:
Now I should point out here that Nadine Dorries is no ordinary citizen; as MP for Mid Bedfordshire, she is the parliamentary representative for roughly 130,000 people… but for some reason she appears to spend the bulk of her time campaigning against abortion.
(Was this one of her campaign promises? Inquiring minds want to know.)
As part of this ongoing campaign, Nadine Dorries recently launched a totally unjustified attack against Dr Ben Goldacre that showed her complete ignorance of parliamentary procedure and – to avoid any feedback about that reaching her readers – she closed down the comments feature on her ‘blog’.
So Dr Goldacre is well within his rights to point and laugh now that Nadine has been caught peddling an urban myth as documented fact… again, as part of her ongoing efforts to convince us all that abortion is murder and a sin in the eyes of Almighty Lord God.
Nadine Dorries – The Hand Of Hope: This picture show a pregnant uterus laying on the exterior of the mother’s abdomen, having been lifted out of her abdominal cavity, via a c-section incision made in the abdominal wall. Dr Joseph Bruner performed this procedure in order to operate on the baby whilst still in utero before it was born. The baby had spina bifida and would not have survived if removed from his mother’s womb. When the operation was over, baby Samuel, at 21 weeks gestation, put his hand through the incision in the uterus and grabbed hold of the surgeon’s finger, a gesture which was apparently met with a huge amount of emotion in the operating theatre. Dr Bruner said that it was the most emotional moment of his life and that for a moment he was just frozen, totally immobile.
No, what Dr Joseph Bruner actually said was this…
“Depending on your political point of view, this is either Samuel Armas reaching out of the uterus and touching the finger of a fellow human, or it’s me pulling his hand out of the uterus … which is what I did.”
And this…
“It has become an urban legend… The baby did not reach out. The baby was anesthetized. The baby was not aware of what was going on.”
Now, look how easy if is to find this out for yourself if what might be the truth when confronted with a claim that a 21-week-old foetus is capable of recognising its surroundings, thrusting its little hand out of an incision, and grabbing the hand of the operating surgeon…
See? Easy peasy:
But Nadine Dorries did not do this small amount of research or provide her readers with the benefits of this small amount of research. Nor did she point out that the surgeon and the photographer have published vastly different accounts of this event.
Instead, she completely misrepresented the surgeon’s position on the matter.
Because she is a muppet.
Good people of Mid Bedfordshire, I urge you to recall this moment the next time Nadine Dorries asks for your vote as parliamentary representative. You might also want to have a word about how much time she wastes on her own personal crusades.
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Take a look at how Iain Dale handles this on his pseudo-blog:
Iain Dale – The Daley Dozen: Wednesday: Nadine tells of the Hand of Hope, is then slammed by Bad Science, who says it’s a hoax, but he is then contradicted by the photographer, Michael Clancy, who took the picture. You pays your money…
1. Note how Iain gives the impression that the photographer has posted his account in response to Dr Ben Goldacre’s bloggage, when this clearly isn’t the case.
It’s a pity it’s semi-anonymous, but this comment just published on Iain’s site covers the matter nicely:
When you say Ben Goldacre “is then contradicted by the photographer” that’s extremely misleading. Ben Goldacre LINKED to the photographer’s (old) story in his blog entry, that was part of Goldacre’s story.
If you believe an emotive story from the man who took the photo, instead of the description of what happened from the very surgeon who did the operation, and does the operation for a living, then that’s your affair. But to suggest that Goldacre has been responded to and shown to be wrong is as misleading as the original Nadine Dorries story.
2. The photographer, Michael Clancy, dedicates his entire website to telling his side of the story (and selling copies of the photo) and says himself; “I have become obsessed with proving to the world that I did capture the earliest interaction ever recorded.” Iain Dale, who loves to claim that anyone who presses him more than once for a straight answer is ‘obsessed’ (or perhaps even a ‘stalker’) chooses not to dismiss a self-confessed obsessive in this way.
3. Iain doesn’t like anyone doing the same to him, but like many political bloggers/writers, Iain will often point out affiliations and associations that might suggest that someone’s version of events is less than objective. But Iain does not mention that this image and account, used widely by religious groups campaigning against abortion, comes to us from a devout and evangelical born-again Christian.
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UPDATE – Ahahahahahahahaha! Please excuse me while I quickly address what passes for meat in Nadine’s rebuttal sandwich:
Nadine Dorries – Hand Of Truth: Two points from me: first is that if the experienced paediatrician operating on the 21 week old baby had anesthetised, then that fact endorses the Professor Anand position that a foetus can feel pain; otherwise why would this doctor, who operates on unborn babies all the time, bother? My second point is look at the tear in the uterus. See how jiggered it is just above the hand; and yet the rest of the surgically incised openings are controlled and neat.
1. By anaesthetising the mother you anaesthetise the foetus. The drug travels – via the mother’s bloodstream – through the placenta and into the foetus. Nadine’s not very good at this science thing, is she?
2. Is Nadine aware of the force required to tear even compromised human flesh this thick? Clearly, what we are dealing with here is some form of super-baby. The mother is lucky the little tyke didn’t try thrusting his arm out when a surgeon wasn’t on hand to wrestle him back into place.
I’m not even going to go near Nadine’s none-too-subtle suggestion that the surgeon changed his story because he feared he might be attacked by roaming gangs of ‘pro-abortionists’.
