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Show Page 6 The Utah The Paper That Dares To Take Independent June 26, 1975 Continued from page 1 against their, victims. The Commission was pleased that the Court chose not to intervene on behalf of the unborn because (it claimed) ' government should remain aloof from the abortion controversy. Yet, throughout the Report, one finds the Commission urging or praising the use of federal pressures and interference which promote abortion. For ,, example, it wants the federal govern- ment to withhold funds from hospitals which refuse to perform abortions. It wants the Congressional ban on the funds to finance use of foreign-ai.abortion? overseas repealed, (because the curb on such use of our tax money by foreign governments would be an attempt to export forcibly sc n American views). It wants government to use tax money to finance fetal research. It wants tax- supported Legal Services lawyers to handle abortion-relate- d cases. It wants federal medical insurance" to finance abortions. In short, the one way the Commission does not want government to interfere in the abortion controversy is the one way the government should interfere to protect the innocent When unborn. it comes to taking these innocent lives, anything goes. The Report claims that no woman, medical professional, or any other person is required to participate in an abortion," yet elsewhere it elates over the fact that some people can be compelled, against their wishes, to participate in abortions. Reference is made to Supreme Court decisions which hold unconstitutional the refusal of public hospitals to perform abortions. The Report states: At least four Federal courts have ruled that public hospitals may not refuse to permit or perform elective abortions, even on the basis of . . . staff unwillingness." This pleases the Commission, despite the fact that such a policy violates the religious beliefs of unwilling hospital workers. The Commission claims that the Supreme Courts 1973 abortion decision was based, in part, on the established medical fact that, until the end of the first trimester, the mortality rate in normal childbirth is greater than that in abortion." Actually, the Court acknowledged no such fact. All it said was that d anti-abortio- k - , questionable. For example, it would be difficult to find a cause of death more likely to be statistically falsified than abortion and its complications. Who can tell how many women die from complications of legal (or illegal) abortions, when the incentive for relatives to arrange a coverup is so great? deaths are How many abortion-relate- d officially" attributed to causes not relatable to abortion? And how many doctors would refuse to bend the rules in order to protect the reputation of an already bereaved family? Gearly, statistics regarding deaths from abortion are of questionable validity. Yet, based on such statistics, the Commission asserts as fact, that abortion in the first trimester is less risky than carrying a fetus to term." The point it tried to make with this claim is that it should be permissible for a woman to have an abortion when the risk to her life is less from abortion than from eventual childbirth. Thus, e bans on abortion at any stage of pregnancy could be justified because medical technology was so primitive that abortion was highly dangerous at any stage. But now, it is claimed, medical advancements have made abortion during the first three months less risky than childbirth, and therefore acceptable. It becomes ironically obvious that, if we were to extend this argument, improved medical techniques represent a growing threat to human life. If medical technology has now made it safe for a woman to have an abortion during the first trimester, what happens when medical advancements make it safe during the second, or even third, trimesters? Its scary to contemplate .f The Supreme Court did not, in its 1973 decision, answer the question of when life begins. The Court apparently backed-of- f from this crucial question because it did not want to give the obvious answer: at conception. It is at conception that a genetically complete human organism comes into being and begins to grow. If permitted to remain alive, it will develop into a mature human organism. It can develop into nothing else. The Commissions argument against the conception" concept of lifes beginnings rests, in part, on the shaky ground that it is impossible to know exactly when conception occurs. It claims, Establishing a fundamental right at a point in time which no one could know until the time is past is vague, overbroad, and constitutionally unsound." Yet, elsewhere, it urges that viability (Le., when the baby can survive without the mother) be accepted as the reasonable" compromise answer to the question of when legal rights begin. This despite the fact that it is nearly as difficult to determine the exact moment of viability as to determine the exact moment of conception. The Commission asserts that viability is a stage that can be easily old-tim- It is not necessary to He in order to mislead in this manner. Reed Benson tells the story of a man, applying; for a job, who was asked to describe how his father died. The father had been hanged as a horse thief, but the man didnt want to admit it. So he wrote: My father was attending a public function when the platform on which he was stand- Mortality rates for women undergoing early abortions, where the procedure is legal, appear to be as low or lower than the rates for normal childbirth. Emphasis added . That appearance may well be false, for it is based on statistics which are very ing collapsed. fThe Washington Post for May 21, 197S, reported: A Washington gynecologist has extended by a month the time in which a woman can have the safest, least expensive form of abortion. The dispatch noted that this particular doctor claims to have done more than 2,000 abortions on women who were beyond the third month of pregnancy with no greater complications than are experienced with women who are less than three months pregnant." Stand Abortion Federal band during the first three months of marriage. For the Court to take a neutral" position, when the legitimate governmental function of protecting human life is at issue, is for the Court actually to side with the killers A of determined, but we have all heard babies being supposedly unviable to be subjected to abortion, only found capable of surviving. There were about days of conflicting testimony viability in the Edelin case, proving that the moment of viability is simply not determinable if the fetus is slain. has Commission the Clearly, erected false and misleading standards in its attempt to rule out the fact that life begins at conception. As Dr. Medford Evans has noted, the Declaration of Independence affirms that all men are created equal, which also means that they are equal when they are created. And the only reasonable anof when they are swer to the question created is, again: at conception. Crucial to the abortion controversy is this question of when someone becomes a person. The Commission admits that . if a baby is a person at case colconception, the lapses. So it sets out to imply that a baby doesnt actually become a person until it is bom. . Again citing the Supreme Courts 1973 decision, it notes that the Court concluded that person, as used in the Constitution, does not apply to the unborn. But so what? The word person is used in the Constitution simply to specify who is not eligible to hold certain offices, or to define various immunities. There is no use of the term in the Constitution which has any relevance to the question of whether an unborn child is a person" when abortion is the issue. Dr. Medford Evans (who earned his pro-aborti- on FhJ). in English from Yale, and is splendidly precise with the language) illustrates the point this way: The AmendFourteenth ment . . begins with the statement All persons bom or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens. Born and naturalized are both restrictive modifiers, and do not mean that aliens not naturalized, or children not bom, are not persons -simply that they are not citizens. But the Constitution nowhere provides that noncitizens may be freely deprived of life, f Professor Evans notes that the primary meaning of the word person in English is a human being , as distinguished from an animal, plant, or thing. He further notes that Webster's Third New International Dictionary child" as (unabridged) defines 1 a. an unborn or recently bom human being: FETUS, INFANT, BABY and that Websters Seventh New Collegiate defines child as 1 a: an unborn or recently bom . . . . person. So, according to dictionary definition, the unborn are not only human beings," but also persons. And a fetus is a child is a baby. The Constitution was ordained and established to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity Emphasis added Does this not imply that the unborn have Constitutional rights, which become operative as soon as the unborn can be identified? True, such a newly formed child . cannot exercise civil liberties, yet the courts have held that it has some property rights (for example, to its inheritance). And one thing is for sure: the newly developing child has life, - A yet another example of the Commissions hysteria over this issue, consider its assertion that "if personhood is constitutionally established at the moment of con- ception, a reasonably prudent person must assume that every, woman is pregnant . . . . One can only wince at such reasoning. fAbout Killing The Unborn," by Medford Evans, The Review Of The News, February 14, 1973. and can be deprived of it by other persons, which means such a child has a very special relationship with those other persons. It is their relationship which helps make it not only a human being but also a person. As Dr. ji vans notes: If the unborn child were not in society, his mother and her physician could not remove him from society. Fetal death is not possible without fetal life; but if the fetus has life he has a right to it. The Commission contends that, under the Constitution, only purely secular agreements may be used to determine the constitutionality of abortion legislation). It is (or of claimed that the issue cannot be decided to any degree on moral grounds which are related to religious beliefs, for such would violate the First Amendment. Yet it is difficult to think of any feature of the Constitution itself that is totally devoid of religious influence. The Commission would do well to reread The Federalist Papers. The Commission on Civil Rights claims that the decision to abort babies during the v first trimester is strictly a secular. decision, as it is based on the worldly determination that the lives of mothers are threatened less during that period by abortion than later by childbirth. Yet how, on that worldly basis, can one reach the basic determination that the mothers lives are even worth saving and preserving? Such a conclusion necessarily involves a moral determination rooted in the religions of our culture. g use The Commissions of the terms secular, moral, and religious" appears to be a contrived attempt to permit all legislative measures to be accepted as legissecular, while all lation is banned as religious. It is a corruption of the language. Throughout its Report, the Commission cites various legal precedents indicating acceptance of abortion here and there during recent centuries. Rather than establishing an argument for continued abortion, such a review simply documents the barbarity with which some seemingly civilized people have treated the unborn. (A similar collection, just as convincing," could be made of the historical precedents for slavery.) The Commission also raises the spectre of a legal briar patch sprouting from any legislation establishing the unborn as persons. For instance, it speculates that someone might sue mothers on behalf of their unborn children if the mothers should drink, . smoke, take drugs, and otherwise behave in a manner which could harm the developing baby. An interesting point. Why shouldnt we begin developing a body of civil protections against serious child abuse before birth as well as after? It is n that mothers-to-b- e who are drug addicts often give birth to babies who are afflicted with the addiction. Why should steps not be taken to protect those innocents? The Commission waxes so absurd on this point as to wonder if municipal codes regarding building occupancy would have to be rewritten to either count or exclude fetuses. Another of the Commissions ridiculous speculations was the possibility that serious legal problems could arise anti-aborti- on self-servin- pro-aborti- anti-aborti- on on well-know- One observer notes, not entirely in jest, that some governments may have been reluctant to ban abortion simply because so many government officials needed access to the procedure as a way of preserving their reputations. |