The Abortion Continuum
Anything to conceal the life in the womb
This article from The New Yorker is quite a stomach-turning read, but it is sometimes worthwhile to know what the other side of a debate is saying. Warren Hern, an abortionist of fifty years, discusses his career between the rise and fall of Roe. He cannot see abortion as anything other than caring for his patients – "Who knows when the fertilization occurs?" he asks – and believes that pro-life arguments are only made to wield political power. Moreover, trying to deliver a baby that is sick or disabled is cruel: “It may have been necessary two hundred years ago, but it is not necessary now…The fetus was not going to be able to survive, and if it did it would not have a life.”
The reason I steeled myself and read this one is because one of the battlegrounds for pro-lifers currently is late-term abortions. The Democrats have made it clear that they will push to legalize abortion at any stage of pregnancy should they have the opportunity. Generally speaking, the American public are a little squeamish about green-lighting abortion of babies in the last three months of pregnancy. But the pro-aborts are doing their best to sell abortion as an all-or-nothing proposition.
One of the lines of argument that pro-aborts are using against restrictions on late-term abortions is that it ties doctor’s hands when it comes to ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages; that women will suffer because physicians will be too wary of helping for fear of breaking the law. There is no pro-life law which makes it illegal to help women in those situations, so it is a beat up.
But Dr. Hern’s way of thinking is likely going to provide a plausible-sounding landing place for those who argue for late-term abortions. When asked about the differences between “a late abortion, a late miscarriage, a stillbirth, a spontaneous early delivery that ends in a baby who dies an hour after birth”, Hern responds that “these are not separate events. It is a spectrum. It is a continuum. There are elements of each of these events in all of the others, which is why it’s incredibly stupid for politicians to try to regulate them.”
He cites the incident of a patient whose baby had had a stroke in the womb, late in pregnancy. "I did the injection [that stops the heart of the fetus in utero]. Her fetus was delivered in her hospital with her doctor and her husband present. Do you want to call that an abortion? I don’t call that an abortion. It was an interruption of a pregnancy that was hopelessly complicated.” Perhaps the outcome of interventions by a pro-life doctor would have come to the same sad end for that little life, but whether you deliberately kill the baby or deliberately try to save both lives makes the world of difference.
So, we need to get our heads clear, because these arguments will be laid out to convince anyone wavering that the most brutal of brutalities is humane. We start with prayer, we fight with truth and we work to care for the weak and vulnerable.