| WASHINGTON--The voices of compassion have again been raised in alarm
against the Bush administration. Its offense this time is a desire to
increase the access that low-income pregnant women have to prenatal care.
The problem began when the Department of Health and Human Services
sent a letter to health officials of the states, notifying them of ``a new
opportunity to provide health care coverage to low-income children through
the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).'' The letter said
the administration would propose that ``an unborn child may be considered a
'targeted low-income child.'''
``Pro-choice'' forces are alarmed by this attempt to expand medical
choices. Those forces know that the logic of their agenda--unlimited
abortion on demand--requires them to consider the term ``unborn child'' a
provocation, even an oxymoron. Laurie Rubiner, vice president of the
National Partnership for Women and Families, a pro-abortion lobby, said the
administration's ``real goal is to establish a legal precedent for granting
personhood to fetuses.''
But the real problem for pro-abortion forces is that medical advances
are neither dependent on, nor waiting for, the law to recognize the new
facts that science is creating. The fetus is, in many and multiplying ways,
a patient. That is wonderful news for everyone--except pro-abortion forces,
who cling with increasing tenacity and decreasing plausibility to their
dogma that the fetus must never be considered a person.
Prenatal medicine is a rapidly expanding facet of today's astonishing
advances in diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities. Obstetricians
increasingly speak of there being two patients in every pregnancy. An
expanding range of acquired distresses or genetic disabilities of ``the
patient within'' can be treated by a growing array of pharmacological and
surgical measures. For more than 700 pages about this, consult ``The Unborn
Patient: The Art and Science of Fetal Therapy,'' which had its genesis at
the University of California's Fetal Treatment Center in San Francisco.
This summer's argument about embryonic stem cell research has been,
inevitably, recondite regarding the science involved. But it is directly
related to the more familiar abortion debate because both force decisions
about how to think about life at early stages. And the fundamental fact
about abortion is not at all complex or uncertain. It is that abortion
kills.
How we should describe--which means how we should regard--what
abortion kills is the vexing question that the Supreme Court improvidently
thrust into the center of American politics 28 years ago. But it is an
indisputable scientific fact, not a theological or philosophical opinion or
speculation, that abortion kills (BEG ITAL)something, just as
unambiguously as insecticides kill insects and herbicides kill weeds.
Pro-abortion forces flinch from this, as when Kate Michelman of the
National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League famously said that
during a partial- birth abortion the baby ``undergoes demise.'' And in 1973
the embryologists on the Supreme Court said in Roe vs. Wade that a fetus is
``potential life.''
Oh? Potential life with fingers, eyes and a beating heart in the first
trimester? Not that trimesters have any medical or moral significance: One
wonders what the Supreme Court, which invested with constitutional
significance the fact that nine is divisible by three, would have
manufactured in the way of constitutional law regarding abortion if the
number of months involved in the gestation of a human infant were a prime
number--say, 11.
Never mind. As novelist and physician Walker Percy once said, ``How
much more convenient if we lived in the 13th century, when no one knew
anything about microbiology and arguments about the onset of life were
legitimate.'' A new inconvenience--an annoyance, probably--for pro-abortion
forces is ``volumic sonography,'' which is three-dimensional ultrasound
technology that provides ``a window into the womb.'' Although this
technology is still evolving, it already provides pictures of living beings
that look remarkably like babies. Imagine that. And this technology, which
makes visible such deformities as spina bifida and cleft lip and palate,
will speed the development of medical interventions for
fetuses--patients--in distress.
It is estimated that at least half the women who currently discover
they are carrying a child with spina bifida--caused by a failure of the
spine to close during development--choose abortion. That choice will become
less compelling and more morally problematic as new technologies make the
reality of the baby more visible, and as new medical techniques make
therapeutic interventions in utero more successful.
Which will please everyone, except, perhaps, pro-abortion forces. |