Word: fetus
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...search for data is being steadily pushed back from childhood to earliest infancy and even before birth. One French obstetrician, for example, inserted a hydrophone into the uterus of a woman about to give birth and tape-recorded what the fetus could hear: the mother's loudly thumping heartbeat, a variety of whooshing sounds, the muffled but distinguishable voices of the mother and her male doctor, and, from a distance, the clearly identifiable strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...
...Akron law, like those in 15 states, also established detailed requirements for informing a woman of the physical development of the fetus and the potential medical and emotional factors that might affect her if she has an abortion. The court ruled that requiring this type of "informed consent" is unconstitutional. "Much of the information required is designed not to inform the woman's consent but rather to persuade her to withhold it altogether...
...rulings was solidly based on the foundation set down ten years ago. "The court repeatedly and consistently has accepted and applied the basic principle that a woman has the fundamental right to make the highly personal choice whether or not to terminate her pregnancy," he wrote. Only when the fetus could be viable outside the womb, generally not until the third trimester, can the state seek to protect the life of the unborn child...
...state's interest in protecting potential human life exists in all stages of the pregnancy. She wrote: "In Roe, the court held that although the state had an important and legitimate interest in protecting potential life, that interest could not become compelling until the point at which the fetus was viable. The difficulty with this analysis is clear: potential life is no less potential in the first weeks of a pregnancy than it is at viability or afterward." (In a footnote, Powell rebukes this reasoning as a disguised attempt to overturn the 1973 decision. "The dissent stops short...
...classic spoof shots from Death pacing the beach to the omnipresent British boys' schoolroom. And it enables crazed animator Terry Gilliam to create some of the wackiest sequences he has ever penned, galaxies swoop in and out of file cabinets and the sun rapidly mitotes into a fetus while, for background music, a typical Python "French" accent promises to "explain it all for you tonight." So broad are the cinemographic possibilities that the movie's structure, crisp at first, ends up as a loose collection of scattershot satires...