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The Cove is a haunting movie about dolphins.

Dolphins appeal to everyone with their gracefulness, intelligence, ability to communicate, and apparent sense of family and community. It also seems that they have a natural desire to please, an instinctive trust and, it would seem from the stories that are told, a desire to protect.

Thus it is, in return, that we trust, and want to protect. This is good. There seems to be a natural affinity for our mammalian aquatic creatures.

How tragic it is then when that trust is betrayed.

The Cove tells the story of the slaughter of dolphins at Taiji in Japan.

Gary Adshead wrote of this in his article “The Killing Cove” (West Weekend Magazine, 6 December 2008). Between September and April each year, as part of a 400-year old tradition, 2300 dolphins are herded into a bay and a barrier is raised across the entrance. The word pictures are enough to convey the gruesome detail:

From our eyrie, we could clearly hear the dolphin’s piercing screams. The green sea turned crimson red… the thrashing tails quietened as the mammals lost their fight for life.

The Japanese go to great lengths to hide the slaughter from prying eyes as this article and the movie shows. But it may be that once again, despite deceit and opposition, the truth will win out with visual images, as it did with the “napalm girl“.

Yes, there are risks in securing the story and pictures, and sometimes risks of retribution. There are also risks of misplaced censorship – not just in the country that is trying to protect its traditional industry and its autonomy – but also in the country that does not want to offend its neighbour or trading partner, and sometimes news censorship because the facts and pictures are considered too gruesome.

So the drama is played out: broken trust; intrigue; deceit; anything but the truth; danger and condemnation for its revealing; opposition from industry; the risk of being misunderstood and dividing friends and family and community. At least here we survived the whaling ban. It seems like a bad memory now. It is true that one generation’s original thought or change in attitude becomes the next generation’s truism. Even attitudes to smoking have changed. Education. Let’s tell the truth.

Except for abortion that is.

How can it be that telling the truth about abortion is considered by many to be a greater felony than the actual killing? Killing by powerful suction or dismemberment or in-utero murder by lethal injection of potassium or puncturing the skull and sucking out the brain. No anaesthetic is provided even in late pregnancy. We can go into greater detail but we take the risk of alienating our friends and dividing the community as in Taiji. But this detail is nothing compared with some of the actual photos of dismemberment.

How can it be that we defend this in the name of autonomy and choice? Not just 2,300 times annually but 80-100,000 times? How can it be that Emily’s List* gloated after the Abortion bill was passed in Victoria last year that women in all areas of Victoria will be “able to access safe, legal terminations free from persecution; and medical practitioners provide vital reproductive health services to women free from harassment”?

How can it be that we betray the most helpless of humans? Our animal activist friends get really upset when they see a dolphin or whale fetus cut from its mother, and rightly so. Yet these are frequently intact and have not been shredded or pulled apart. How can it be that our society is so schizophrenic that we get upset about dolphin slaughter, yet rabidly defend our right to kill our unborn babies? How can this be?

How can it be that 10 years later in 2019 we are still, incomprehensibly, in denial that the unborn baby is truly human, that it has an observable beating heart at 6 weeks gestation, and can feel pain from 16 weeks gestation as his or hers limbs are grasped with forceps and pulled off, then – excruciating to even think about (which is the reason why we won’t) – bit by bit pulled apart and then reassembled outside the safe-house womb to make sure all the bits are present. How can this be?

And if we are to justify the killing of this baby because the rights of the mother to not have this baby for this reason or another outweigh the baby’s right to life – to at least be born and then taken care of by another more than willing want-to-be mother – then surely, at least, we should anaesthetise the baby before it is shredded?

It may be that this battle too may be won with word pictures and visual images, and a new generation will thank us and wonder why the truth was withheld for so long.

We get upset about dolphins. We get upset about kittens. See “Kitten Outrage“, and “Kitten Act“.

Wake up, Australia! Wake up, Members of Parliament! Show courage! Speak up. If you are going to defend shredding babies – at least from when they become pain conscious – at least have the courage to recognise this and say so, and act upon it.

Let us show images of unborn babies. Moving ultrasound images on TV of babies sucking their thumbs, yawning, moving, real miracles of creation, with predetermined smiles.

The napalm girl haunted us. May we be haunted by the mental image of an 18-week unborn baby on the rack in what should be its safe-house, being pulled apart. Please imagine that just for a moment… then get angry.

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*the link from Emily’s List no longer works, but I have a pdf copy of Emily’s Notes Dec 2008 which includes the above quote.

Cf. Martyn Iles’ excellent piece, “The Truth of It“.
The Shedding of Innocent Blood 2007
Combined Churches Statement on Abortion 1998