Cheers follow jeers for the New York Times, which has given itself a well deserved public spanking for misreporting the 30-year sentence of an El Salvador woman as punishment for an abortion when in fact she had strangled her full-term newborn after its lungs had filled with air:
THE cover story on abortion in El Salvador in The New York Times
Magazine on April 9 contained prominent references to an
attention-grabbing fact. “A few” women, the first paragraph indicated,
were serving 30-year jail terms for having had abortions. That
reference included a young woman named Carmen Climaco. The article
concluded with a dramatic account of how Ms. Climaco received the
sentence after her pregnancy had been aborted after 18 weeks.
It turns out, however, that trial testimony convinced a court in 2002
that Ms. Climaco’s pregnancy had resulted in a full-term live birth,
and that she had strangled the “recently born.” . . .
The physician who had performed the autopsy on the “recently born”
testified that it represented a “full-term” birth, which he defined as
a pregnancy with a duration of “between 38 and 42 weeks,” the ruling
noted. In adopting those conclusions, the court said of another autopsy
finding: “Given that the lungs floated when submerged in water, also
indicating that the recently-born was breathing at birth, this confirms
that we are dealing with an independent life.” (Via Hot Air)
So we have a distinction between lungs that float and lungs that don't. Now, then, what's the difference?