Sunday, April 26, 2009

The Preemie as Former Fetus

When Theresa was born, though she was not quite through the second trimester, she already had her own distinct personality, and we quickly came to know her likes and dislikes. She would get angry if she couldn't see us from her position in the incubator, her anger being registered not by audible cries — which she could not make due to the ventilator tube in her nose and throat — but by a jump in her heart rate measured by the monitor above her. She quite evidently hated this tube and repeatedly tried to pull it out, finally succeeding in her fourth week, when she proved able to breathe safely on her own.

Most extraordinary of all, Theresa smiled virtually from the beginning. I had always assumed that smiling was a skill acquired only a month or two after a full-term birth. But our experience with Theresa indicated that this is not so.

(...)

In short, our daughter was not simply a mass of tissue but was obviously a person in her own right, capable of knowing frustration, fear, and happiness.



Many people oppose abortion laws for late-term fetuses on the grounds that very few happen anyway.

As if statistics make such a procedure any less fatal to the individual.

Look at that baby. Born at 26 weeks. There are abortions that late in Canada.

All the criteria for killing line up, so, no problem with late-term abortion. It's not a human being: check. It's inside the woman's body: check. It's a woman's decision: check.

Somehow an umbilical cord and a placenta connected to the mother's body is supposed to make killing a baby like that okay. Like it's all an abstraction. No painful contractions, no needle inside the baby's heart, no consideration of the individual's worth: it's the complete banalization of human life. Nothing special: just a bunch of DNA.

My "favourite" justification is: there is no such thing as an unborn child.

Look at that face. Does that look like a child to you?

Add a placenta, an umbilical cord, some amniotic liquid and place her inside a woman's body.

Would that baby be any less of a "child"?

As if the placenta, the umbilical cord, and his location really changes who that baby is.

The sophistries we use to justify the dehumanization of these babies!

Feminists will point to the suffering and deaths of women to justify killing these little ones.

Here's the major difference between women and babies.

Women have power. Babies do not.

Women have the ability not to abort. They have the ability to solve their problems without killing their baby.

They just don't want to. Or doctors or other "authorities" tell them they can't, that they have no other choice, or that birth is not the compassionate solution.

Killing the baby is the seemingly easier solution.

Critics will reply that at this stage of pregnancy, an abortion is far more likely to be performed for genetic anomalies or malformations.

How does that make it any better? That baby gets killed in a cruel fashion, no matter what the justification.

What legal abortion boils down to is this: The woman's body is more important than the unborn baby's body.

That is feminist supremacy. The power of the woman is the justification to kill the powerless baby. And if the woman is not allowed to do so, she is deemed "powerless", as if stopping her from killing a baby like that were some kind of oppressive act, while killing that baby isn't.