The biggest myth from opponents of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act is that it outlaws an emergency procedure necessary for saving a mother's life. This simply isn't the case. Prior to the Act, according to U.S. Senate Hearing Report 104-260 the majority of partial-birth abortions in the U.S. were reported to have been performed exclusively for elective, not health-based, reasons. And in the minority cases, the bill explicitly allows for abortions medically determined to be vital to the mother's life.
Furthermore, "partial-birth abortion" itself is a terrible procedure and barely what one would call an "abortion" at all. It consists of the dilation and extraction method, developed because most surgeons found it difficult to dismember the fetal body at 20-plus weeks due to the toughness of fetal tissues. In this method, the killing is no longer happening inside a mother's body. Instead, the abortionist pulls the baby out of the cervix legs first, up to the neck. It is only her head that has not yet been delivered. Scissors are then inserted into the back of the baby's skull and opened to enlarge the puncture. The baby is not only still alive when the abortionist inserts a suction tube into her head and sucks out the brain, but she is also only inches away from being fully outside her mother's body and having a medical and legal live birth. A few more inches out and the baby would acquire legal status as a person, rendering the entire process infanticide and thus murder.
Moreover, partial-birth abortion has become more controversial since the Congressional "factual findings [that] the child will fully experience the pain associated with piercing his or her skull and sucking his or her brain." If the fetus can feel the pain just like we would if our brains were sucked out, why shouldn't the fetus have the same rights that protect us from such suffering? Furthermore, how can a mere two or three inches of submersion keep a fetus from having the right to life?
I imagine that pro-choice advocates would say that rights are a concept applicable only to individual, actual human beings-not merely potential ones. Indeed, the pro-choice position cannot stand unless there really is a difference between potential rights and actual rights, between a "potential" human being and an "actual" human being. According to this position, a "potential" human being is not yet an individual: It is a part of the mother's body, her property. I can choose to donate my kidney, to have liposuction, or even to amputate my arm and throw it away. Therefore I, during pregnancy, can also choose to end the life of the fetus inside of me-or so they say. For many of those who are pro-choice, there is no difference between one of my tissues and the fetus inside me.
But the glaring difference between a tissue and a fetus is that the tissue will never become a person itself, while the fetus, if we leave her alone, will most definitely be someone like us. She will become someone having the same rights, experiences, enjoyments and most importantly, the same desire to live as we do. What makes killing us immoral is the fact that it deprives us of our futures, not just whether or not we're present, mentally, at our deaths. Killing an unconscious person is undisputedly impermissible, despite the person's ignorance of her death. It does not matter that the child is not yet a "productive" member of society; many of the severely handicapped also are not "productive" in the sense implied. Killing such persons cannot be condoned. And partial-birth abortion is the worst case of such killing.
Where does this lead us?
The current law admits that dilation and extraction is too close to infanticide to be permissible. It is de facto murder. But then where is the dividing line between murder and the termination of a "meaningless life?" When does killing the fetus escape the immorality of denying someone her rightful future? Some say that the child may not have a future, or that the mother loses her future by having the child, but the possibility of sending the child to an adoption agency, or the social handicap of having a child out of wedlock, is entirely different from having no future at all. The only exception to this immorality would be in those exceptionally rare medical cases when we have to choose between the future of the life of a mother and a child. At other times, the "right to choose" is no different from a "right to murder." If Congress' Act is a first step, it is a step in the right direction.
Song can be reached at msong08@amherst.edu