CUA Cover Winter 2004 final (Page 2) - Columbus School of Law

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M Y T A K Ethe tragedy and perhaps horror thataccompanies the recognition of whatabortion truly is. Many pro-choice advocatesare now opting for one version oranother of the latter vantage point — anhonest recognition of what an abortiontruly involves.It is recently, and principally in thecontext of the national debate over partial-birthabortion, that even worldlysensitivity is being recognized on thepro-life side of the ledger. Partial-birthabortions are not only horrible to contemplate,we are beginning to sense thatthey are very likely horribly painful tothe all-but-completely-born child. Researchpublished in the prestigiousBritish medical journal, The Lancet,in 1994, concluded that at some timeduring the second trimester humanfetuses exhibit all the physiological indicationsthat would justify a finding ofpain in a newborn baby. The articleended with a humane but somewhatstartling suggestion:Just as physicians now provideneonates with adequate analgesia,our findings suggest that thosedealing with the fetus should considermaking similar modificationsto their practice. This applies notjust to diagnostic and therapeuticprocedures on the fetus, but possiblyalso to termination of pregnancy,especially by surgical techniquesinvolving dismemberment.The technical language of sciencesometimes masks the horror of a reality:Fetal children in the womb feel pain(surely one must be alive in order to feelpain), and physicians should consideranaesthetizing them whenever they dismemberthem — alive — in the womb.According to the British MedicalJournal, the neuro-anatomical structuresthat are needed in order to “feel” pain,i.e., the thalamus and the motor nervesthat send a message to the base of thebrain, are present in the fetus by theeighth week of pregnancy. Some physicians,however, say that the fetus, at theeighth week, would not be capable ofThousands of anti-abortion demonstratorsprotest outside the Capitol on thethird anniversary of the Supreme Court's1973 decision liberalizing accessto legal abortion.experiencing what adult human beingsperceive as pain, because the nerve connectionsbetween the thalamus and thecerebral cortex are not developedenough until the twenty-sixth week ofpregnancy. Other physicians disagree,and some would place the onset of thepain experience as early as that eighthweek, arguing that the cortex is notinvolved in the experience of pain.It should be clear by now that the“honest-doubt” principle ought to applyto the issue of fetal pain. Even if there isonly an honest doubt as to whether a child inthe womb feels pain (and The Lancet’s findingscertainly place the issue in at leastthe area of honest doubt), any trulyhumane and civilized society would andshould resolve that doubt in favor of the thesisthat fetuses do feel pain.It is sometimes argued, however,that anesthesia administered to themother during the abortion procedurealso anesthetizes the baby. This argumentcame up prominently during theearly debates over the federal proposalto ban partial-birth abortions, and wasjust as prominently refuted. Dr. Jean A.Wright, Associate Professor of Pediatricsand Anesthesia at EmoryUniversity’s School of Medicine, testifiedthat “local anesthetics rarely haveany effect on the fetus,” and went on toexplain:The administration of intravenoussedation/anesthesia has minimaleffects on the unborn due to twomechanisms: 1) The mother’s liverclears much of the drug, and 2) thedrug must cross from the mother’sblood stream into the placentabefore reaching the fetus.It is difficult to argue that the abortiontechniques currently in use do notinvolve pain — unspeakable pain if thechild indeed feels it. Even pro-abortionadvocates seem to be recognizing it,albeit grudgingly. Pro-choice activistNaomi Wolf wrote in an issue of TheNew Republic several years ago, thatfeminism at its best is based onwhat is simply true.…Whileimages of violent fetal death workmagnificently for pro-lifers aspolitical polemic, the pictures arenot polemical in themselves: theyare biological facts. We knowthis.…To insist that the truth is inpoor taste is the very height ofhypocrisy.A self-proclaimed pro-choice physicianin Great Britain, Professor VivetteGlover of the Queen Charlotte andChelsea Hospital in London, saidrecently:Between seventeen and twenty-six[weeks] it is increasingly possiblethat [the fetus] starts to feel somethingand that abortions done inthat period ought to use anesthesia.Back in 1984, after PresidentReagan had made the statement publiclythat fetuses often feel pain during abortionprocedures, the reaction from thepro-choice community was, predictably,derisively dismissive. In response to thatderisively dismissive reaction, twenty-sixprofessors and practitioners of obstetrics,gynecology, fetal medicine, and30CUALAWYER /Winter 2004
M Y T A K Epediatrics, including two past presidentsof the American Academy of Obstetrics,wrote an open letter to the President,advising him, with appropriate citationsto medical developments in ultrasonography,fetoscopy, and the study of fetalEKGs and EEGs, that “in drawingattention to the capability of the humanfetus to feel pain, you stand on firmlyestablished ground.”The point in all this is not that thefetus definitely feels pain at the eighthweek, or the seventeenth week, or thetwenty-sixth week. The point is thatthere is an honest doubt, and the oddlyinexplicable thing about the influence ofthe pro-choice movement on our society’sapproach to the question of fetalpain has been that our society hasresolved that honest doubt against theconclusion that fetuses can feel pain atany point in the pregnancy, up to andincluding the nearly full-term partialbirthabortions, and has therebyconsigned millions of mid- and lateterminfants to the very real possibilityof unimaginable pain.Abortion methods may be distastefulto our sensibilities, but they are biologicalfacts, and they must be examinedif the morally important questions offetal pain and fetal personhood are to beProtesters take part in the annual March forLife, marking the 30th Anniversary of the1973 Supreme Court Decision Roe v. Wadethat legalized abortion in the United States.looked into seriously and not polemically.(1) The suction-aspiration or vacuumcurettagetechnique commonly used inearly pregnancies, and most often at orafter the eighth week, involves the violenttearing and dismemberment of thefetus by a powerful suction tube withcutting edges. (2) The dilation-and-curettagemethod (D & C), also used during thefirst trimester, and again most often at orafter the eighth week, involves cuttingthe baby’s body into pieces with a loopshapedsteel knife, and scraping the bodyparts into a basin. (3) The RU 486method, also used during the firsttrimester, involves the ingestion of twosynthetic hormones which blockthe action of the natural hormone thatprovides nutrients to the lining of theuterus, thus starving the fetus, andthen the induction of labor and theexpulsion of the fetus from two to fivedays later. (4) The Methrotrexate procedureis similar to the RU 486 method,except that the synthetic hormones areinjected intramuscularly instead of takenin pill form.(5) The dilation-and-evacuation method(D & E), commonly used after twelveweeks and up to twenty-four weeks,involves twisting and tearing the baby’sbody parts off with forceps with sharpmetal jaws, snapping the baby’s spine,and crushing her skull for easier evacuation.The fetus dies in the same way thatan adult human being would die, bleedingto death while being torn limb fromlimb. (6) The saline-injection method, orsaline amniocentesis, commonly used aftersixteen weeks and through the thirdtrimester involves the insertion into thebaby’s sac of a poisonous, burning solutionand is accompanied by violent fetalkicks and jerks as the baby is burnedalive. (7) The urea and prostaglandinchemical methods, used in the secondand third trimesters, essentially involvethe premature inducement of labor andthe delivery and subsequent neglect offetal babies. These methods are in somedisfavor because not infrequently thebaby survives.(8) The partial-birth abortion technique,known medically as dilation andextraction or D & X, is used in late-termabortions (beyond the fifteenth weekand all the way up to the point of fulltermbirth) and involves (i) the deliveryinto the open, in the breech position, ofthe legs, arms, and torso of the baby (allbut the head), (ii) the stabbing of thepoints of surgical scissors into the base ofthe skull of the all-but-delivered baby,(iii) the insertion of a suction device intothe stab hole, (iv) the suction removal ofthe baby’s brain, (v) the crushing of theemptied skull, and then (vi) the completionof the delivery of the corpse of thebaby. If the baby herself cannot cry out,this business of aborting fetal childrenitself cries out to any sane society formoral review and analysis.Mother Teresa of Calcutta oncesaid, with obvious reference to theUnited States (she made the remark at aPresidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington,D.C.):Any country that accepts abortionis not teaching its people to love,but to use any violence to getwhat they want. This is why thegreatest destroyer of love andpeace is abortion.The then Surgeon General of theUnited States, Joycelyn Elders, verbalizedone of the pro-choice movement’sresponses to Mother Teresa:We would like for the right-to-lifeand anti-choice groups to reallyget over their love affair with thefetus.It is perhaps the single greatestmoral judgment on our society that weseem to have adopted Joycelyn Elders’sensitivity in the abortion debate, ratherthan Mother Teresa’s.Winter 2004 / C UALAWYER 31
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