Birmingham, Alabama, is home to a world-renowned teaching and research institution. Discoveries in cancer research, endocrinology, transplant medicine, surgery, and literally dozens of other specialties have significant impact across the globe. Twenty miles south in Pelham, Alabama state Representative Mary Sue McClurkin is stupid as a bucket of hair and thinks a baby is a bodily organ.
McClurkin, sponsor of HB 57, claims that abortion clinics should be subject to — among other rules, requiring that physicians have admitting privileges at local hospitals and making it a felony for a non-physician to dispense abortion-inducing medications — because they perform major surgery that removes the largest organ in a woman’s body. Which is to say, a baby.
“When a physician removes a child from a woman, that is the largest organ in the body,” McClurkin told the Montgomery Advertiser on Thursday. “That’s a big thing. That’s a big surgery. You don’t have any other organs in your body that are bigger than that.”
As 88 percent of abortions occur within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, the “largest organ in the body” that’s being removed is usually about yea big:
Eighty-eight percent of abortions take place within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, when the fetus is about the size of this two-inch-long smelt.
“Oh, my God, that’s enormous!” said every bodily organ between the gall bladder and the skin. Added the liver, “Hold on, a baby is an organ?”