John Paul submitted a thorough and perceptive comment on the recent post about Massachusetts adopting a law permitting abortion right up until birth.
I was reminded that my Nobel Prize-winning biology professor when I was a Freshman in college, George Wald (perhaps the best teacher I have ever had, and I’ve had some great ones), said, “To me, the question of when an unborn person acquires the status of a human being appropriately protected by law, morality and ethics comes down to two choices: at birth, or at conception. Any other dividing line is arbitrary. Given those choices, I have to conclude that it must be birth.”
Here is John Paul’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Abortion On Demand Up To Birth”:
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“How can you honestly and sincerely defend the new Massachusetts abortion law? If you can, how do you look yourself in the mirror or sleep at night?”
Going to play (a little bit) devil’s advocate here, because I was genuinely curious. I too am horrified that such a law could be passed. I wanted to know what reason could even come close to anyone think this is a good idea. How could anyone look at this, say, “that seems good,” and sleep at night without having the fires of hell consume their dreams?
Desperate, I searched the internet, and this is what I came up with.
1. The language of the law does not permit women to abort babies after 24 weeks. It allows physicians and doctors to rely on professional judgment without fear of prosecution.
2. Abortion is so broadly defined that it includes miscarriages and stillbirths.
3. A patient’s mental heath might change after the 24th week.
4. Late term discovery of fatal fetal abnormalities discovered.
5. Late term severe (but non-fatal) abnormalities discovered.
6. Mothers having to travel out of state for abortion services.
7. Keeping the decision between doctor and mother.
8. The belief that viability is not a adequate legal dividing line.
9. The belief that the government should have no say in abortion at all, and this is the only way to guarantee it.
10. Political/ideological commitment to abortion.
11. Life of the mother.
There might be more. Most of what I have seen falls into one of these categories. If anyone has any to share, feel free to add to the list. However, just because it is a reason doesn’t mean it’s even a good reason or a well-thought-out reason.
Ethics Alarms 
through my decades of medical practice, miscarraiges that neccesitteed surgical intervention (i.E A D& C) were classified as sponatanoeus abortions,a correct medical term. What this law, and the current mindset, is unethuically advocating is elective abortions for a myraid of reasons or no reaon except inconvenience at the moment.
The medical community (the AMA) develops and charges (a lot) for the insurance codes for procedures. The AMA has decided that a D&C is the same as an abortion for insurance coding. This is why the ‘there are no hospitals in area x or states y that perform abortions’ argument is mostly garbage. In the paperwork, you can’t tell a D&C from an abortion. In states or areas that restrict abortion, hospitals can just use the code an no one can tell that an abortion was performed.
Now the opposite can also be true. After my wife’s miscarriage, her insurance paperwork from Blue Cross informed her that she had had an abortion! My wife took the miscarriage very hard and this paperwork was devastating. Blue Cross informed us that they had recently decided to describe all procedures with that code as abortions.
Now, the next time she conceived, they pushed us to abort the baby because of bad test results. We refused and it turned out that the bad test results were because of bad tests. For 6 months, they had been urging women to abort perfectly healthy babies. For some of those women, statistically, it would be their last chance at motherhood. We only found out about 6 months after our son was born because she was telling a woman who worked in the lab about it and she went white when my wife said the OB/GYN urged an abortion.
I repeat … ghouls.
I have made this exact point about the dividing line being arbitrary, especially when referring to things like the number of weeks involved. We came to very different conclusions though… I’m not convinced that birth isn’t equally arbitrary. What’s the distinction? Sure, the kid is now outside their mother, but there’s been no material biological change. In the case of a healthy birth, they could have been induced two weeks earlier and they almost certainly have been born two weeks earlier without complications, and so would have had rights two weeks earlier? People’s rights tend to not depend on the actions of third parties. Conception seems like a much more obvious dividing line… The moment where the gametes zipper together the first line of genetic code, where something that didn’t exist the moment before does now, in a measurable way.
All that aside – I think “arbitrary” gets a bad rap. Sure. Something is arbitrary. Now what? A lot of what we deem arbitrary is still necessary. Speed limits are arbitrary. School zones are arbitrary. The age of majority is arbitrary. And so what do we do? We try to negotiate an arbitrary position that has some level of justification, because if we don’t people will reject the rules.
I agree and there are cases where premature babies have lived and thrived outside the womb way earlier than term. A quick search said one baby born at 21 weeks survived. Astounding. Soon we will have artificial wombs, if they don’t exist already, and that opens an entirely new set of ethical issues of we are clearly not ready for.