Last Wednesday, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study on the viability of premature babies. It found that hospitals that make the effort have effectively reduced the term of fetal viability.
There was once a time when babies born prematurely at 23 weeks of pregancy were considered dead on arrival. But with ever-improving medical techniques, they can sometimes now be saved at 22 weeks with the right sort of intervention, and may not even suffer health problems later. Some doctors are calling this a new potential point of viability.
Medicine will improve as time passes, and in turn survival rates will improve as the viability of ever-younger babies is established. This has consequences not only for doctors, but also for lawmakers. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that there exists a constitutional right to abort a fetus until it has become viable, which the court back in those days interpreted as occurring as late as 28 weeks. Today, in deference to the science behind early viability and the ability of babies to feel pain in the womb, many states have begun restricting abortion to 20 weeks. Congress is set to consider such a measure this week.
Science is awesome. But even as science and neonatology establish ever-earlier dates for the viability of babies in the womb, the abortion-rights movement is pulling its legislative allies harder in the opposite direction. This appears to be a late, fanatical effort to save the ideology of abortion from prevailing trends in both science and public opinion.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate took up a bill on human trafficking that directs the money collected in fines from human traffickers to help their victims. Because the bill disbursed money, it contained the standard prohibition on federal funding of abortion. Abortion activists demanded that Democrats object to this standard prohibition, and as a result, Democrats delayed the bill’s passage for months, until Republicans gave them a face-saving way out.
This is not the only legislative manifestation of the problem, nor by any means the most absurd.
In March, Colorado prosecutors were unable to bring murder charges against a defendant who had cut open a seven-months pregnant woman and removed her child. The reason was that the baby (who died) could not be proven to have lived after she was extracted, and Colorado had no murder statute that applied to unborn children.
When state lawmakers set out to correct this legal defect, Colorado’s chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League responded with a full-scale lobbying effort against them. Even though the bill exempted legal abortions, the state abortion lobby treated this bill as the camel’s nose under the tent for their issue. They denounced it as an effort to undermine abortion rights, and just last week killed the bill in a state House committee along party lines. As a result, it’s still open season on pregnant women in the Centennial State. Happy Mother’s Day.
The abortion movement is increasingly staking out a break-don’t-bend position on the issue, based on its deep ideological commitment to unrestricted and even government-funded abortion. But at some point, the activists and campaigners will have to reckon with science and curb their fanaticism. Otherwise, they will most likely break.
