Thinking About Roe v. Wade

Recently I attended a delivery for an infant weighing under a pound whose gestational age was under 24 weeks.  After stabilization in the delivery room the infant was transported to the NICU where he remains stable on substantial but not extreme support.  That infant has a greater than 50% chance of going home with his mother and becoming, with his cooperation, the person that God intended him to be.

If, after his birth, I had taken steps to end his life or if I had just turned and walked out of the room and compelled those on my team not to intervene it is highly probable that today I would be facing a number of problems from both a civil and a criminal viewpoint.  Certainly I would be liable for a breach of duty, perhaps for wanton disregard for life.  I could even have been accused of premeditated murder since my plan to not support the baby would have precluded others with the necessary skills from being present. At the very least my medical license (and my law license) would be in jeopardy.

If the mother walks into the NICU and attacks and kills her baby, she will almost certainly be arrested and charged with voluntary manslaughter or even murder.

If a nurse makes an egregious error--a wrong dose of a medication or a mistake in the management of the ventilator--and the infant dies as a result of that breach of her duty of care, she and the hospital would face the civil consequences of a law suit and the possibility of actions against the nurse's license.

Yet today much of America, along with our President, is celebrating the anniversary of Roe v. Wade (again).  Under Roe v. Wade, had this mother decided the day before her delivery to go to an abortion clinic and had she conspired with the staff at that clinic to end her fetus' life, she would be a free person, as would the entire staff of people who participated in that baby's death.  No one's civil liberties would be put at risk except the fetus who had been murdered.  No one would face a suit for civil breach of duty.  No one's license to practice nursing or medicine would have been put at risk.  According to the current thinking of our President and many of like mind, all the actions taken would have been praiseworthy because the rights of the mother to "reproductive control" had been preserved.

If someone shoots and kills you, do you think where you are standing at the moment really matters:  is indoors more acceptable than outdoors; would the fact you were ventilator dependent and in a hospital mean that the action of that person was legally acceptable?  Even if you were terminally ill, would a family member or a total stranger ending your life because you were an inconvenience to them or to "prevent you from suffering a miserable life" be considered an acceptable action, without legal consequences?  Of course not.

So, why does the location of the fetus whose birth I attended recently have implications about when I could legally have ended his life?  How are the uterus and the placenta functionally different from a bed and a ventilator? Both settings provide protected rest, nutrition, and life support until the individual can regain (or gain) the capability of independent function.  (Statistically, the fetus, left unharmed, has a substantially better chance of survival than an adult on life support, and meta analyses have shown that the predicted number of productive years of unborn fetuses far exceeds that of a population of adults on life support--so a utilitarian, faced with an either/or choice, would let the adult die and keep the fetus alive.)

On the day before that delivery, ending that little boy's life would have been "exercising a woman's right to privacy" with the full support and praise of most of our media, our politicians, and a very large minority of our population. At the moment the fetus moved out of the uterus, even before the cord was cut, ending the same child's life would have exposed the killer to severe civil, criminal, and career consequences, along with a firestorm of media criticism and almost certainly a comment by our President about the need to protect our children from senseless violence.

Abortion is legalized, senseless murder based on an arbitrary, totally manmade legal construct of when protected life begins.  If our politicians and courts decide, as some radical philosophers have suggested, that meaningful, protected life only begins when one is able to care for oneself, are we going to let parents decide that their six month old is too much trouble and take him to a euthanasia center to be rid of him?  Or if Grandma and Grandpa are bed ridden and can no longer care for themselve, do we condemn them to the same fate?

Ridiculous you say--that could never happen; we would never allow it!  But hundreds of years of slave trade happened; and Nazi Germany really is not a myth; a million people died in Rwanda 20 years ago this April; legally assisted suicide is a reality in this country.  Been to Amsterdam lately?  Be sure to be in good health if you go--especially if you are over 60.

The unthinkable is only impossible until our consciouses are so seared and insensitive that we no longer care enough to fight for what we know is right.