Posted on 03/09/2003 4:26:55 PM PST by MadIvan
Foetuses may develop consciousness long before the legal age limit for abortions, one of Britain's leading brain scientists has said.
Baroness Greenfield, a professor of neurology at Oxford University and the director of the Royal Institution, said there was evidence to suggest the conscious mind could develop before 24 weeks, the upper age where terminations are permitted.
Although she fell short of calling for changes in the abortion laws, she urged doctors and society to be cautious when assuming unborn babies lacked consciousness. "Is the foetus conscious? The answer is yes, but up to a point," she said.
"Given that we can't prove consciousness or not, we should be very cautious about being too gung ho and assuming something is not conscious. We should err on the side of caution."
Last year, a Daily Telegraph straw poll found many neurologists were concerned that foetuses could feel pain in the womb before 24 weeks after conception.
Many believed foetuses should be given anaesthetics during a late abortion, after 20 weeks. Some also believe pain relief should be given for keyhole surgery in the womb.
Abortions are allowed up to 24 weeks in Britain, but are rarely given so late. Around 90 per cent of the 175,000 planned terminations that take place each year in England and Wales are in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Around 1.5 per cent - or 2,600 - take place after the 20th week.
Terminations after 24 weeks are only allowed in exceptional circumstances if, for instance, the mother's life is threatened.
Lady Greenfield is sceptical of philosophers and doctors who argue that consciousness is "switched on" at some point during the brain's development.
She believes instead that there is a sliding scale of consciousness and that it develops gradually as neurons, or brain cells, make more and more connections with each other.
She told the British Fertility Society in London last week that she had serious concerns about foetal consciousness.
"The Home Office has legislation that applies to a mammal and they have now extended it to the octopus, a mollusc, because it can learn," she said. "If a mollusc can be attributed with being sentient, and now has Home Office protection, then my own view is that we should be very cautious after making assumptions."
In 2001 a Medical Research Council expert group said unborn babies might feel pain as early as 20 weeks and almost certainly by 24. They called for more sensitive treatment of very premature babies, who often had to undergo painful procedures like heel pricks and injections.
Good question, MHGinTn, but perhaps you should spend some time pondering the difference between procreation and creation.
Your out-of-hand rejection of the link between contraception and abortion is uncharacteristic. FR is not the appropriate forum for this discussion, so I will only say that a great writer on this subject is Donald DeMarco. Yes, he's Catholic, but try to keep an open mind.
Words have meaning and since conscious actions have never been verified independent of a brain, I am forced to assume that consciousness is a function of the brain.
Conscious is usually defined using the word thought. Care to comment on that?
I agree, my point is that there are other points that could be – and fact are – seen as delineation points in a pregnancy. Human life is the question. More specifically, when does it begin? I can see how some could argue that it is at a different point than fertilization, at one point I had some sympathy with that view – I no longer do. (I do make an exception for the life of the mother, but, as I understand it, the actual cases where there is a choice between the life of the mother and the life of the fetus is rare).
My point is my friends who want abortion to be legal (and some would allow – or desire – more restrictions than others), all become very uncomfortable when I refer to a fetus as a small person.
I said, "There are only two credible points." Yes, there are a lot of points but only two of them will stand up to scrutiny. As someone else pointed out, implantation and viability are, in ways, credible points, as well, but they address the mother's relationship with and responsiblity for the child, not the personhood of the child (unless you feel that arguments that personhood can be granted or denied based on a status of dependency on another).
I'm sorry if I sound rather extreme and picky but abortion is a complex issue that requires precise language if you want to get anywhere with the opposition and the fence sitters. Abortion arguments often go nowhere because neither side really communicates to the other side.
Human life is the question. More specifically, when does it begin?
The term "human life" is really too vague to be useful. A white blood cell may be both "human" and "alive" but that doesn't tell you anything. At the most basic level, this is a trick question. Life doesn't "being" anywhere except with other life (at this day and age). It's like trying to say that this is a question of where a circle begins. The cells involved are always alive and always human. This is why the unborn being a "human life" is seen as an obvious truism by many on the pro-life side. But the pro-abortion side is really talking about "personhood". For them, "human" means "sentient" and "life" means "independent being". Talk about whether the unborn is a "person" or not -- that is, an entity entitled to having it's life protected. At that point, it becomes possible to discuss why the unborn might or might not be persons.
I can see how some could argue that it is at a different point than fertilization, at one point I had some sympathy with that view - I no longer do.
A lot of people do this. But the arguments aren't credible, which is my point. In many cases, people pick a point where they "feel comfortable" with the idea of abortion (often based on how long they think it is reasonable for a woman to decide to abort if she makes a mistake) and then justify that point with some pseudo-science red herring.
(I do make an exception for the life of the mother, but, as I understand it, the actual cases where there is a choice between the life of the mother and the life of the fetus is rare).
I make the same exception as a simple matter of self defense. Even if I personally believed that it would be better for the mother to die than the child (though in some cases, such as ectopic pregnancies, if the baby isn't aborted, both will die), I don't think we can compel one person to die for another.
That said, this is yet another area where lack of precision provides a wedge for the pro-abortion crowd. Every pregnancy caries a statistical risk to the life of the mother and some pro-aborts have argued that abortion is safer than bringing a pregnancy to term and therefore can always be justified on statistical risk grounds. This is semantic sleight of hand which is akin to saying that you have a right to kill random young black men who pose a statistical threat to you in order to save your own life. The risk must be real, present, or identifiable and not simply theoretical or statistical to be a sound justification for abortion. This is why I always qualify "threat to the life of the mother" with "real", "present", "identified", or some other qualifier making it clear that a statistical risk is not sufficient justification.
My point is my friends who want abortion to be legal (and some would allow - or desire - more restrictions than others), all become very uncomfortable when I refer to a fetus as a small person.
As they should. Those who support abortion are helped by keeping it hidden and pretending that it is safe, clean, and harmless. This is why they oppose informed consent laws and don't show women the ultrasounds. The problem for the pro-life crowd is that abortion is a horrible, messy, and gruesome thing that isn't easy to talk about in polite conversation. Conservatives often suffer because they are more polite and honorable than the left. On other other hand, bloody abortion pictures often are so horrible that they turn people against those who hold the picture and not those who caused what is depicted by the picture.
Instead of parsing everything each of us has to say, how about offering your definitive definitions.
No, but unless you accept gum flapping as argument, logic must be used to win minds. The argument is simply this, if something then something else. People should then realize that does not imply if not something then not something else.
You may choose whatever argument you wish to convince someone else of your position, but that does not require anyone else to listen to your opposition to another logically held argument especially when that opposition is illogical. In any case, there is clear evidence that a fetus is more than an unresponsive blob of flesh. The strongest arguments against abortion involve a clearly evident human.
I wouldn't shy away from facts, even if they are misapplied by those who think that what makes us human as a species applies to individuals.
The film The Silent Scream, is named such because you can clearly see the person screaming in agony and pain. This is of a first trimester baby.
By the end of the first trimester the unborn person most certainly feels pain. So here we are not only dealing with murder, we are dealing with torture as a form of murder. In criminal law this increases the circumstances of the crime and the penalties (any legal folks are invited to help!) Death by dismemberment and crushing is an excruciating way to be killed, especially for an innocent child.
Please go to http://www.priestsforlife.org/resources/abortionimages/index.htm and see the horrible reality of each and every abortion via color photographs.
Abortion is MURDER, from conception—period! If you are pro-life and a sincere Christian, please study the facts.
An aside, miscarriage is a natural thing, abortion is a pre-meditated act of killing. They are completely different. Anyone who tries to compare/equate the two is either ignorant or attempting to cloud the truth.
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source: http://www.pitt.edu/~forlife/methods.htm
Dilatation and Curettage (D&C): Also known as 'sharp curettage,' this method is often used during the first trimester. A sharp, knifelike curette is inserted into the uterus and is used to scrape its walls. The baby is cut apart and its body parts are removed and checked for completeness.
Dilatation and Evacuation (D&E): This method is generally used during the first half of the second trimester (13 to 20 weeks). The baby is torn apart by special forceps, and the pieces are removed one by one. Larger babies must have their heads crushed so the pieces can pass through the cervix. This method involves the abortionist and staff manually crushing the baby -- requiring considerable effort at times -- and makes the abortion more 'real' to them, because upon assembling the parts of the poor little carcass, the staff can see for themselves what they have done. Many nurses have 'burned out' on this procedure and refuse to assist. Abortion-rights groups are enthusiastic about the D&E method because, unlike other second-trimester abortion methods such as saline and prostaglandin, there is absolutely no chance that the baby will survive.
Abortionist Warren Hern, author of the how-to book Abortion Practice , described the D&E method to the Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians in San Diego in 1978 during a presentation entitled "WHAT ABOUT US? Staff Reactions to the D&E Procedure;" "We have reached a point in this particular technology where there is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction on the part of the operator. It is before one's eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current."
In his book, Hern also describes some of the more grisly aspects of the D&E abortion; "The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because the fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember ... A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus."
Usually, the cervix must be dilated for one to three days before such a procedure. The most popular method of cervical dilatation involves the insertion of dried seaweed sticks called laminaria, which absorb fluids and swell, thereby expanding the cervical diameter. Abortionists may also dilate the cervix quickly with a series of stainless steel rods of increasing diameter. Abortion is a moneymaking business run by totally unscrupulous people. They do not want any of their 'clients' to change their minds once the laminaria are inserted. Therefore, many abortionists tell women that they will die if the laminaria are removed.
Sidewalk counselors routinely hear this typical illogical pro-abortion lie parroted by abortion mill clients who simply do not know any better. The reply is simple: the abortionist must remove the laminaria anyway before the abortion, and the woman won't die then -- so this means that the seaweed can be removed at any time before the abortion (by any emergency-room physician) without harm to the woman! If a woman does have laminaria removed and does not go through with the abortion, it is very important to have a doctor monitor the pregnancy closely for signs of damage to the baby or the bag of waters.
Dilation and Extraction (D&X, partial birth abortion): Abortionist Marvin Haskell has invented a new abortion procedure he named dilition and extraction (D&X), because "... most surgeons find dismemberment [i.e., D&E] at twenty weeks and beyond to be difficult due to the toughness of fetal tissues at this stage of development." Haskell, who boasted at a 1992 National Abortion Federation conference that he has committed more than 700 of these late second-trimester and third-trimester killings, describes his technique;
"At this point, the right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left hand along the back of the fetus and "hooks" the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down). Next he slides the tip of the middle finger along the spine towards the skill while applying traction to the shoulders and lower extremities. The middle finger lifts and pushes the anterior cervical lip out of the way.
"While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger. Reassessing proper placement of the closed scissors tip and safe elevation of the cervix, the surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull or into the foramen magnum. Having safely entered the skull, he spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening.
"The surgeon removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient." The foramen magnum is the large opening in the occipital bone between the cranial cavity and the spinal canal.
Haskell goes on to say that this ghastly abortion procedure can be used essentially all the way to birth; "The author is aware of one other surgeon [J. McMahon] who uses a conceptually similar technique ... Coupled with other refinements and a slower operating time, he performs these procedures up to 32 weeks or more."
Dry medical terminology cannot begin to lend a true cast of horror to the truly Satanic nature of this type of killing. In layman's terms, D&X means that the abortionist has a problem. He wants to do an abortion on a preborn baby of seven or eight months gestation, which has an 80 percent chance of being viable. Since the baby is probably viable, he is faced with the prospect of the "dreaded complication" -- a live, crying newborn baby. Therefore, he must make sure the baby dies before it is fully delivered.
He uses forceps to twist one of the baby's legs and pull it out through the birth canal, which tears muscles and breaks bones and must cause the baby unspeakable agony, since even pro-aborts acknowledge that seven-month and eight-month preborn babies definitely are capable of feeling pain. Then he punctures the back of the baby's head with sharp scissors and spreads the blades, tearing a massive hole in the soft part of the baby's skull. Finally, he vacuums out the baby's brains and then completes the delivery in just a few seconds.
If any pro-abortionist dares deny that third-trimester abortions actually occur, or if he tries to cover up the horrors of abortion, a pro-lifer should simply describe the D&X procedure in graphic detail. This description will shock and disgust any audience (no matter how 'pro-choice') and will put the pro-abortionist at a distinct disadvantage in any debate. How can anyone possibly defend naked butchery like this?
Note that the above description was taken from a paper presented at a National Abortion Federation conference. The author was recommending it to his richly-dressed and urbane audience, many of whom would presumably 'give it a try' when killing third-trimester babies.
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Another source: http://www.abortiontv.com/AbortionistQuotes.htm
"Every woman has these same two questions: First, "Is it a baby?" "No" the counselor assures her. "It is a product of conception (or a blood clot, or a piece of tissue). . .How many women would have an abortion, if they told them the truth?" -- "A Walk Through an Abortion Clinic" by Carol Everett ALL About Issues magazine Aug-Sept 1991, p 117 ------------------------------------------------------------------
"If a woman we were counseling expressed doubts about having an abortion, we would say whatever was necessary to persuade her to abort immediately." --Judy W., former office manager of the second largest abortion clinic in El Paso, Texas ------------------------------------------------------------------ "We tried to avoid the women seeing them [the fetuses] They always wanted to know the sex, but we lied and said it was too early to tell. It's better for the women to think of the fetus as an 'it.' --Abortion clinic worker Norma Eidelman quoted in Rachel Weeping p 34 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The counselor at our clinic would cry with the girls at the drop of a hat. She would find their weakness and work on it. The women were never given any alternatives. They were told how much trouble it is to have a baby." --former abortion worker Debra Harry, quoted in the film "Meet the Abortion Providers" 1989 ---------------------------------------------------------------- "When discussing the sonogram, you are supposed to tell the client that it is a measurement as far as the pregnancy is concerned, but not a measure of the fetal head or anything like that." --Rosemary Petruso, on her training to be an abortion counselor. Her story appeared in the St. Louis Review and was also quoted in "Women Exploited: The Other Victims of Abortion" Paula Ervin, editor. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1985 ------------------------------------------------------------------ "Sometimes we lied. A girl might ask what her baby was like at a certain point in the pregnancy: Was it a baby yet? Even as early as 12 weeks a baby is totally formed, he has fingerprints, turns his head, fans his toes, feels pain. But we would say 'It's not a baby yet. It's just tissue, like a clot.'" --Kathy Sparks told in "The Conversion of Kathy Sparks" by Gloria Williamson, Christian Herald Jan 1986 p 28 ---------------------------------------------------------------- "When I first started working there [at the clinic], I had to sit and listen to women answering the phone for at least a month before they would allow me to answer the phone. We had to know exactly what we were doing when we were talking to these women. We had to find out very quickly what their problem was, play on that and get them in the clinic for an abortion. We were very good salespeople." -Joy Davis --------------------------------------------------------------------- "In fact many women will come to me considering abortion, and I have been personally told that I am to turn the monitor away from her view so that seeing her baby jump around on the screen does not influence her choice." Shari Richards, quoted from the John Ankerburg Show on 3/7/90 --------------------------------------------------------------------- "When a girl called to make her appointment, we'd work her in as soon as possible. If she called on Tuesday, we'd have her in no later than Friday. We wanted to avoid a long waiting period where she'd have time to think about it. First she would fill out her forms, and then talk with a counselor. . . The counselors were trained in what areas to cover and which to avoid. They'd say, "I know this is a terrible situation you're in. What can we do to help make this better for you? Yeah, it doesn't sound like you're ready for a pregnancy right now." Their task was to keep the machinery moving - to get the woman into the procedure room as quickly as possible." ---clinic worker, name withheld "There was a public health center in a town not far from Denver and they sent a lot of girls to us. They told us they did all the counseling. We weren't allowed to counsel them or even ask them about birth control. We couldn't even tell them what could happen during the abortion. Nothing. If we tried to discuss alternatives, we would get in trouble with the doctor because then the health center would threaten to send their business elsewhere. All we did was find out how far along they were, tell them when they were going to be finished, get their money, do the abortion, and send them home."--Registered nurse Sam Griggs >From "Abortion Clinics: An Inside Look" published by Last Days Ministries. ------------------------------------------------------------------- "I have seen hundreds of patients in my office who have had abortions and were just lied to by the abortion counselor. Namely 'This is less painful than having a tooth removed. It is not a baby.' Afterwards, the woman sees Life magazine and breaks down and goes into a major depression." --Psychologist Vincent Rue quoted in "Abortion Inc" David Kupelian and Jo Ann Gasper, New Dimensions, October 1991 p 16 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Why is there so much fuss about abortion? Isn't what is removed only a mass of tissue? "But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see and elfin thorax, attentuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside." --Sallie Tisdale "We Do Abortions Here" -------------------------------------------------------------------- "I got to where I couldn't stand to look at the little bodies anymore" --Dr. Beverly McMillan, when asked why she stopped performing abortions. "I have been there, and I have seen these totally formed babies as early as ten weeks... with the leg missing, or with their head off. I have seen the little rib cages..." --Debra Harry "We all wish it were formless, but its not...and its painful. There is a lot of emotional pain." --abortion clinic worker Quoted in "The Ex Abortionists: They Have Confronted Reality" Washington Post April 1, 1988 p a 21 -------------------------------------------------------------------- "You have to become a bit schizophrenic. In one room, you encourage the patient that the slight irregularity in the fetal heart is not important, that she is going to have a fine, healthy baby. Then, in the next room you assure another woman, on whom you just did a saline abortion, that it is a good thing that the heartbeat is already irregular....she has nothing to worry about, she will NOT have a live baby...All of a sudden one noticed that at the time of the saline infusion there was a lot of activity in the uterus. That's not fluid currents. That's obviously the fetus being distressed by swallowing the concentrated salt solution and kicking violently and that's to all intents and purposes, the death trauma. ..somebody has to do it, and unfortunately we are the executioners in this instance..." --abortionist Dr.Szenes "And then to see, to be with somebody while they're having the injection when they're twenty or twenty-four weeks, and you see the baby moving around, kicking around, as this needle goes into the stomach, you know." --Susan Lindstrom, M.S.W. "I look inside the bucket in front of me. There is a small naked person in there, floating in a bloody liquid- plainly the tragic victim of a drowning accident. But hen perhaps this was no accident, because the body is purple with bruises and the face has the agonized tauntness of one forced to die too soon. I have seen this face before, on a Russian soldier lying on a frozen snow-covered hill, stiff with death, and cold." --Pro-choice doctor and author Magda Denes. "Performing Abortions" by Magda Denes, M.D. "Commentary" Oct. 26 1976 p 35-37 Also quoted Magda Denes, "[the doctor] pulls out something, which he slaps on the instrument table. "there," he says, "A leg." . . . I turn to Mr. Smith. . . He points to the instrument table, where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long. . . "There, I've got the head out now." ...There lies a head. It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person." ------------------------------------------------------------------- "If I see a case...after twenty weeks, where it frankly is a child to me, I really agonize over it because the potential is so imminently there...On the other hand, I have another position, which I think is superior in the hierarchy of questions, and that is "who owns this child?" It's got to be the mother." --Dr. James MacMahon, who performs D & X abortions, in Nat Hentoff "It's Just Too Late: Third Trimester abortions are an Outrage and an Insult to the Human Race" July 27, 1993 Pittsburg Post-Gazette ------------------------------------------------------------------- Describing an abortion that apparently did not prevent the child from being born alive, Dr. Haskell said this, "It came out very quickly after I put the scissors up in the cervical canal and pierced the skull and spread the scissors apart...in the previous two, I had used the suction to collapse the skull." --Dayton Daily News Sun Dec 10 1989 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The first time, I felt like a murderer, but I did it again and again and again, and now, 20 years later, I am facing what happened to me as a doctor and as a human being. Sure, I got hard. Sure, the money was important. And oh, it was an easy thing, once I had taken the step, to see the women as animals and the babies as just tissue." --abortionist quoted from a radio talk show by John Rice in "Abortion" Litt D. Murfreesboro, TN. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "I have never known a woman who, after her baby was born, was not overjoyed that I had not killed it." --Abortionist Aleck Bourne "A Doctor Speaks" London Express, Jan 25 ----------------------------------------------------------------- "We know that its killing, but the state permits killing under certain circumstances" --Dr. Neville Sender, abortionist "Even now I feel a little peculiar about it, because as a physician I was trained to conserve life, and here I am destroying it." --abortionist "There was not one [doctor] who at some point in the questioning did not say "This is murder."' --Magda Denes on her two years of research done for her book In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death Inside an Abortion Clinic. Also "I do think abortion is murder- of a very special and necessary sort. And no physician ever involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that." "You know there is something in there alive that you are killing" --another abortionist interviewed by Denes ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Clinic workers may say they support a woman's right to choose, but they will also say that they do not want to see tiny hands and tiny feet....there is a great difference between the intellectual support of a woman's right to choose and the actual participation in the carnage of abortion. Because seeing body parts bothers the workers." --Judith Fetrow, former clinic worker from San Francisco quoted in "Meet the Abortion Providers III" from a taped conference in Chicago 4/3/93 ------------------------------------------------------------------ ..the emotional turmoil that the procedure inevitably wreaks on the physicians and staff...There is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator...the sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current." --Abortionist quoted in "Meeting of American Association of Planned Parenthood Physicians" OBGYN News P 196 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Quoted in Melody Green and Sharon Bennett "The Crime of Being Alive: Abortion, Euthanasia, Infanticide" p 3 "Remember, there is a human being at the other end of the table taking that kid apart. We've had a couple of guys drinking too much, taking drugs, even a suicide or two." --Dr. Julius Butler, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Minnesota Medical School "Arms, legs, and chests come out of the forceps. It's not a sight for everybody" --Dr. William Benbow Thompson at the University of California at Irvine ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Abortion Practice" by Warren Hern, M.D., Boulder Colorado Abortionist published in 1984 by the J.B. Lippenott Company. Hern performs abortions up until the 4th month of pregnancy "The procedure changes significantly at 21 weeks because fetal tissues become much more cohesive and difficult to dismember" p 154 "A long curved Mayo scissors may be necessary to decapitate and dismember the fetus." - 154 "The aggregate fetal tissue is weighted, then the following fetal parts are measured, foot length, knee to heel length, and biparietal diameter" p 164 "Television interviews in particular should focus on the public issue involved (right to confidential and professional medical care, freedom of choice and so forth) and not on the specific details of the procedure." p 323 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "Nobody wants to perform abortions after ten weeks, because by then you see the features of the baby, hands, feet. It's really barbaric." --abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves by John Pekkanen p 93 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "I was for abortion, I thought it was a woman's right to terminate pregnancy she did not want. Now I'm not so sure. I am a student nurse nearing the end of my OB-GYN rotation at a major metropolitan hospital and teaching center. It wasn't until I saw what abortion really involves that I changed my mind. After the first week in the abortion clinic several people in my clinical group were shaky about their previously positive feelings about abortion. This new attitude resulted from our actually seeing a Prostaglandin abortion, one similar in nature to the widely used saline abortion. . . this method is being used for terminations of pregnancies of sixteen weeks and over. I used to find rationales. the fetus isn't real. Abdomens aren't really very swollen. It isn't 'alive.' No more excuses...I am a member of the health profession and members of my class are now ambivalent about abortion. I now know a great deal more about what is involved in the issue. Women should perceive fully what abortion is; how destructive an act it is both for themselves and their unborn child. Whatever psychological coping mechanisms are employed during the process, the sight of a fetus in a hospital bedpan remains the final statement." Quoted in "The Zero People: Essays on Life" by Jeff Lane Hensley, editor. Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1983 --------------------------------------------------------------------- "I found much distress in the clinic, but it involved not only the women. I saw the pain of the babies who were born burned from the saline solution used for late-term abortions. I saw the bits of feet, bits of hands, the mangled heads and bodies of the little people. I saw pain and felt pain." --One time clinic worker Paula Sutcliffe in "Precious in My Sight" "Pro-Life Feminism: Different Voices" Gail Garnier-Sweet, editor -------------------------------------------------------------------- >From "Rachel Weeping
I don't have a perfectly clean, black-and-white answer for when the embryo becomes a person deserving legal protection. To me, that issue is largely shrouded in mystery, and I can accept that I may never have the kind of clear-cut answer that I or many others would like. I'd rather admit some uncertainty than set black-and-white limits that are wrong.
On the early end of life, I don't doubt that a unique biological being is created at the moment of conception. The DNA of the embryo at that moment will define an individual unlike any other. However, as I discussed in post 101 on this thread, most fertilized eggs, or embryos if you prefer, do not implant securely in the womb and do not survive their first menstrual cycle. If I believed that an embryo became a person at the moment of conception, then I would have to believe that over half of all souls died at less than a month of life and without ever having developed a heartbeat. I find this notion to be unbelievable, so I don't believe that an embryo becomes a person at the moment of conception.
At three weeks after conception, the embryo has developed to the point of having a heartbeat. At 40 days, there are measurable brain waves. It is only after that first few weeks that women normally realize that they are pregnant. Most women probably know before the brain waves start, but I doubt most women know before a heartbeat has started. I can respect people who've looked at the evidence and concluded that a heartbeat and/or brainwaves aren't enough to say that a person with rights exists. However, when I err to the side of life, this is where I land.
As a practical matter, I don't think it changes my position significantly. I would allow the birth control pill although many in the pro-life movement would ban it because some pills interfere with implantation. I would probably allow a true day-after pill, but I wouldn't allow RU-486. I would not ban in-vitro fertilization even though it produces embryos that will likely never be allowed to develop. I do not support embrionic stem-cell research because I do not want to push that envelope any further.
Biological life begins at conception, but the law exists to protect people and not biology. Likewise, the law exists to punish true violations of what is right and not merely to force some people to live as others recommend.
The pro-life movement can retreat into its nice, neat, black-and-white definitions and refuse to listen to discuss anything that doesn't fit its little world. However, failure to recognize the questions that people have and address the substance of their concerns simply marginalizes us in their eyes. If they believe that we are incapable of answering their ideas with anything other than cookie-cutter rhetoric, they will not bother to consider our point of view any further.
Abortion is currently legal in this country. We aren't in a winning position that we must only defend. We can't go into a "prevent defense" and try to run out the clock. We must aggressively seek to understand what people believe and why they support keeping abortion legal. While a tiny majority may claim to think abortion is wrong in some polls, a simple belief that something is wrong doesn't necessarily translate into support for more laws. There are many things that I think are wrong but that I wouldn't necessarily punish through the criminal justice system. In order to pass effective laws banning most abortions, we must persuade many more people to move from a general belief that abortion is wrong to a willingness to support laws against abortion. I don't think we can accomplish this without discussing these kinds of early life distinctions.
I'm not advocating embrionic stem-cell research. We can still refuse to fund this kind of research because we have moral reservations about it. I can also support laws restricting this research because it violates standards that we have deliberately set to build a fence around the wrongful use of human beings as subjects of medical experiments.
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