Jeremiah Keenan | The unwanted fetus

Keen on the Truth | United States abortion laws are inhumane and inconsistent

By Jeremiah Keenan 09/23/14 9:59pm

A bout 11 years ago, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was signed into law. Pro-life propagandists pushed the law through largely by publicizing the “gory story” of intact dilation and extraction , emphasizing the fetus’ soft little body wriggling in the doctor’s hands outside the womb. The campaign was so effective that many who are pro-choice would now call partial-birth abortion infanticide.

Other methods of third-trimester abortion, however, are perfectly legal, and states like New Jersey still implement them . It’s just that, today, doctors may not kill a fetus by sliding metzenbaum scissors into her brain while holding her body in the open air. Older, slower methods must be used — greatly increasing health risk to mothers and pain experienced by the dying fetus. But the important goal is achieved: The fetus dies by an unfamiliar method that doesn’t involve the unsavory images of piercing flesh or sucking brains associated with IDX.

Thus, in the United States , a third-trimester fetus is not inherently considered human. Its life is respected in an animal sense — it is illegal to kill it in certain ways, just as is the case for a dog — and this is significant. But the unborn child does not possess legal human rights to life, liberty, et cetera.

The life of a second-trimester fetus is generally not respected, even in an animal sense. This is remarkable, since the unborn child’s facial features are already defined, they have a capacity to feel pain and their bones are rapidly hardening. However, dilation and extraction is still common practice in Pennsylvania up to 24 weeks. This operation is significantly more gruesome than third trimester intact dilation and extraction , because the fetus is dismembered before it is actually killed. The sharp teeth of a Sopher clamp are used to grasp an arm or leg, which is then wrenched free from the unborn child’s torso. This process is repeated, followed by dismemberment of the child’s chest, stomach and finally his head.

First-trimester abortions are legal in almost every state. At this point, the fetal child generally does not have bones and is small enough to be sucked out through a tube. It becomes possible to think of the procedure as sort of cleaning-out of the uterus that — in the words of the Philadelphia Women’s Center — “removes the pregnancy.”

This definition of an unborn child as a pregnancy allows us to think of abortion as an issue of women’s health. It’s just one more procedure or pill that relieves a woman of the cramps, the emotional anxiety and the pounding headaches that accompany pregnancy.

But the question remains: When does the pregnancy become a human being? Biologically, this happens within 90 minutes of fertilization — when the fetus’s DNA synthesis is complete and growth begins. At this point, the child is clinically alive in his own right. But legally, this life is initially unrecognized, and finally recognized only in an animal sense.

The difficulty with this legal approach is that it fails to provide any point at which our unborn biological selves take on humanity. Viability — the law in Pennsylvania — is absurd because it makes humanity a function of medical technology. By this definition, at 26 weeks a fetus in a third-world country is an animal while his western counterpart is a human being.

The only point at which we may consistently declare the fetus a human being is when it becomes biologically a human being. Any other definition — and many have been tried — leads to the mass of moral contradiction which constitutes our current abortion laws. I attained the legal right to be protected and nourished by all the best medical technology of 1995 within hours of fertilization. This was because my mother wanted me. Gianna Jessen attained her legal right under much more trying circumstances. She survived 18 hours in a saline solution that was supposed to kill her — and made it out of the womb alive. But she has cerebral palsy as a reminder that there was a time when her body wasn’t legally human.

Can we reasonably say that Gianna’s body wasn’t morally human? That the doctor who meant to kill her was innocent? Only if we take a very tortuous view of humanity, in deed.

Jeremiah Keenan is a College sophomore from China studying math. His email address is jkeenan@sas.upenn.edu. “Keen on the Truth” appears every Wednesday.

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