Respect it, perhaps, for that never-to-be-achieved potential, and create, study and use it as necessary, not at whim...but it is not nor will ever be human.
TS, I have long thought that, as technology advances, it would become clearer and clearer that a little packet of cells was in no way an entity deserving of rights. Today, I came upon this column saying the exact opposite.
Having reflected on the matter for a full five minutes, at least, I'm thinking now that advancing technology gives greater legitimacy to the claims of the fetus and less legitimacy to the claims of the blastocyst. But, from this column, I can see that everyone won't look at it that way.
azstarnet.com
Tucson, Arizona Wednesday, 25 July 2001
Technology overtaking abortion proponents
By George F. Will
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." 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 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.
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.
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 something, just as unambiguously as insecticides kill insects and herbicides kill weeds. Pro-abortion forces flinch from this.
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. 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.
* George F. Will is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group. |
