Abortion 'science' hides Da Vinci's brilliance

Drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci (1510-1512) Royal Collection U.K.

All the world celebrates Leonardo Da Vinci and his joyous ingenuity – proto helicopters, solar power, poetry and so much more. Fewer know of his years hacking up and sketching cadavers, gifts to medicine from the dead. But almost no one has paid much attention to one of his most remarkable contributions, as the world's original gestational scientist.

Da Vinci's studies of the embryonic child and expectant mother (1509-1512) were hard won and the first drawings of a child in the womb as far as we know. With help from a surgeon he pioneered dissection and medical illustration as we know them now. Sort of.

Da Vinci's notes and observations of embryology were meticulously detailed and illustrated. His revelation on some aspects of fetal development were so highly advanced, it's taken 500 years and the advent of CT and MRI scans for them to be verified. A sense of the beauty and mystery of life pervade his work, although it is done to advance sciences. This is something we have almost lost in a time of famished spirituality.

Most of Da Vinci's sketches reside in private collection of the Royal Familym, who recently lent them to exhibits. Last year in Edinburgh "The Mechanics of Man" compared modern, fetal 3-D imaging to Da Vinci's red-chalked revelations – side by side. Although imperfect, the similarities were astonishing considering the master's only tools were blades, hands and eyes.

Little more than a century after Da Vinci made the drawings, Charles I (1600-1649) had the great good sense to acquire the works for England. His were also the glory days of modern scientific thought with a gilding of Christianity. Johannes Kepler, described by Carl Sagan as "the first astrophysicist and last scientific astrologer," would have preferred to be a pastor. Biblical principles were cited in works by Sir Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal and Galileo. Foundational chemist Robert Boyle felt science proved the glory of God.

Scientists didn't catch up with the reverent and observant artist for almost five centuries, and in some ways they haven't still. Their undoing is the stranglehold of the secular mindset, firm after Darwin but now paralyzing.

Viewer comments and reviews of the Da Vinci exhibit were ecstatic and appreciative of the collection. Great angst was made of missed opportunities for science – if only they had paid a little attention to this grand, illustrated dissection! But that wasn't the only detoured subject by far.

Conspicuously missing are discussions of personhood and what 16th century Milanese considered the exalted human form. After all, the child and mother are clearly dead and split to pieces here.

Renaissance religious beliefs and ideas about the soul are ignored for a good reason. Someone may ask about abortion. That would lead to a ugly fray, because the act of abortion is ugly and its proponents are often … aggressive.

Photo of 10 week fetus by Lunar Caustic (flickr), left, and objectionably "cute" Wikipedia entry illustration, right

Proof that not only science but also culture has darkened considerably is everywhere. This archived Wikipedia argument over the term "fetus" demonstrates it as well as anything. In spite of 3-D ultrasounds, MRIs and reams of scientific advances on the developing child, no images and few words are tolerated in cyberspace without walking through a leftist firewall.

First come the word-warriors bitterly debating and barring synonyms for baby or infant. "Embryo" is also a little too cuddly for them, so they insist on the vaguely mammalian "fetus" as far as possible.

An obvious non-scientist took it upon himself to delete this: "The first measurable signs of EEG activity occur in the 12th week," although various studies and research finds brain activity by as soon as the 10th week.

Other laughable Orwellian constructs are the exchange by a Wiki "editor" of the term "beating heart" for "contracting" because the "image of a beating heart is overly reminiscent of a developed beating heart, with associated emotional factors." Associated emotional factors don't change scientific facts, but they apparently dictate the anti-life forces of censorship on all platforms and media.

References and illustration inferring a discreet embryonic life are banned across the liberal Internet galaxy. Every attempt at visualizing a "fetus" in secular space is debated fiercely by the "pro-choice" movement.

An example: "These images, though pretty (and only loosely accurate in their anatomy), help reinforce one set of politics," an endless debater at Wiki complains.

He refers to a rather bizarre illustration of a 10-week embryo. The debate could be ended with a few photographs, but the show must go on. Politics are indeed the god of the leftist pro-choicer who won't brook scientific, spiritual or artistic revelations to disturb her cause.

Dear old Da Vinci didn't have to put up with any of this. Without elections, democracy or a Bill of Rights, he worked unrestrained and did what he liked. Credit that to the absence of progressives in Milan circa 1511. No leftist to hover in the background, muttering over unnecessary attractiveness of his fetal illustrations and what they may portend for the next election. Even the charge that church officials had forbidden human dissection isn't true, although they did have rules about respecting a corpse.

Political merit tests for science and art are daily activities of Marxists and associated eugenicists. It's so much easier to control the ill-informed.

Da Vinci's sketches and notes were kept under lock and key in Windsor Castle until the end of the 19th century, and his works were never reproduced until then. Judging by anatomical art even centuries later, gestational science appeared to regress for a time. Because of lost art alone? It's hard to say, but a woodcut 150 years later looks like pregnancy in a dream or Moral's fable.

Girolamo Mercurio "La commare o raccoglitrice" (1642), Cambridge University Library, left, and Soemmerring's "Icones embryonum humanorum" (1779), right

Girolamo Mercurio's 1642 manual about pregnancy and childbirth is highly stylized and dramatic. The corpse of an expectant mother modestly hides her breast and exposes her lost child to our view. The baby appears to be in a room or stage complete with curtains; he could even be taking bow.

By the late 18th century William Hunter's "Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus" became a standard for medical students as well as Thomas Soemmerring's "Illustrations of the stages of embryonic growth." Their work is meticulous and elegant with anatomical knowledge to the time.

Cambridge University launched an elegant little online art exhibit in 2008, "Visible Embryos." They addressed the scarcity of fetal images through history and at one point, effects of Darwinism on science illustration.

Although they don't come to this conclusion, I do: Zealots of Darwinism (secularism) were the first troops of political correctness, and they remain entrenched everywhere, regardless of facts.

Haeckel's science-fiction embryonic chart in defense of evolution

Curators Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood allude to budding wars over abortion rights and how public illustrations and images affect that. They reveal the fraudulent embryonic charts produced by Ernst Haekel, which incidentally are still used in some places today – at least they were more than 30 years ago when I personally heard a Planned Parenthood employee claim human embryos are identical to a pig or a calf and evolving in the womb. Although ignorant of embryonic science myself at the time, I was astounded.

Haeckel was the greatest early systematizer and propagandist of Darwinism, according to the Cambridge exhibit notes. Beyond that, he started a movement when he "ambitiously sought to place biology at the centre of a cosmic synthesis of science, religion and art," the curators claim.

Looking through any public school curriculum proves their next point, that though "Haeckel still shapes our view of the world," he was still a proven fraud. His ridiculous evolutionary/embryonic charts and "highly conjectural evolutionary trees" were rejected years ago, but they forgot to tell the schools and curriculum writers.

Unfortunately our culture seems to prefer the delusionary and ponderously ugly "art" inspired by Ernst Haeckel's charts and all they imply. With enough scientific data, will we embrace the beautiful mystery of conception and life found in the art of Leonardo Da Vinci?

SOURCES: Royal Collection Trust / "Making Visible Embryos," Cambridge University online exhibit / The Embryo Project Encyclopedia – Hilary Gilson / Leonado Da Vinci's Notebook Project – Irving Valley College / "Leonardo and Embryos," John H. Lienhard / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fetus/Archive_3