Word: fetus
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...extremely delicate procedure, which had been successfully carried out only once before, in Sweden in 1978, was performed a year ago by a team led by Dr. Thomas Kerenyi at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Medical Center. The attempt was made in the 20th week of pregnancy, when the fetus weighs about 10 oz. and is about 10 in. long. A series of pictures taken during the earlier ultrasound scanning helped locate the abnormal twin, though not with certainty; Kerenyi put his chances at "much better than 50-50." Doctors then used sound waves to pinpoint the tiny beating heart...
...pregnancy continued uneventfully. "The mother looked forward to the birth as a delightful event, and the other aspect didn't bother her," Kerenyi said. Fortnightly ultrasound scans showed the aborted fetus withering away while the live twin grew. Twenty weeks after the abortion, the woman went into labor. She delivered the dead fetus, by this time a paper-thin collection of cells, and a healthy...
...antiabortionists equate the morality of slavery with the morality of abortion. Slaves were deserving of equal protection under the law because there was no question about whether they were alive. The fetus is not separate from its mother. It is not a life but a potential life...
Some pro-choice biologists counter that human life does not begin until the fetus becomes viable, by which they mean sufficiently developed to survive outside the uterus. In 1973, when the Supreme Court gave women the legal right to have abortions up to the moment of viability, that age was placed at between 24 to 28 weeks. Since then the age at which a fetus is considered viable by medical experts has slowly dropped; doctors are now able to keep alive fetuses as young as 20 weeks and weighing 500 gm (1.1 Ibs.). Indeed, Dr. Norman Post of the Medical...
...biological data at all in trying to determine when life begins. "Most biological data can never be decisive," says Lisa Cahill, a Catholic and assistant professor of theology at Boston College. "Any particular biological line that might be drawn, such as implantation or viability, is relative to the individual fetus, and each fetus reaches each stage at a slightly different time." Yet even if every fetus developed at precisely the same rate, a consensus would never be reached on when human life begins. "The question is unresolvable," says Fost. "It's not a question that doctors or religious authorities...