Word: fetus
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...syndrome (mongolism) and Gaucher's disease (a metabolic disorder); faced with a grim certainty, prospective parents can opt for abortion. But amniocentesis has its limitations; it cannot foretell all defects. Now comes fetoscopy, a technique that takes over where amniocentesis leaves off by allowing direct examination of the fetus...
Using fetoscopy, physicians can actually see the fetus in the uterus and spot certain physical defects. Says Dr. Thomas Gindhart, of the National Cancer Institute: "You can look right at parts of the fetus as it floats by. You can count the number of fingers." That alone can reveal much about the condition of the fetus. A six-fingered hand, for example, may accompany some forms of retardation. Also discernible are such features as eyes, ears, mouth and genitals. Even more important, the technique enables doctors to take blood and tissue from the fetus. From these samples they can diagnose...
Analyzing the outcome of almost 27,000 pregnancies, Pathologist Richard Naeye of Pennsylvania's Hershey Medical Center found that infections of the amniotic fluid cushioning the fetus, and the subsequent death of the baby, were more frequent among women who had intercourse in the month before delivery than in those who abstained. Also, according to his report in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, certain other problems, including respiratory distress and jaundice, were twice as common in infants whose mothers had been sexually active in their last month...
Abortion involves a lot of pain. In the United States, one abortion is performed every 30 seconds. The three major abortion procedures--dilation and curettage, suction, and use of a saline-solution--correspond to slicing, crushing, and burning the fetus to death. The saline solution, usually used after the twelfth week, is comparable to napalm in its effect on fetal skin tissue (and on the fetus' internal tissues, because the fetus drinks the amniotic fluid). Almost all abortions occur after the sixth week of pregnancy. Electroencepholographs reveal a fetal brainwave pattern at 42 days, and this date probably represents...
...argument over abortions really centers on whether we are sure that a fetus is human. There is no totally satisfactory answer to this. But does the burdon of proof rest on pro-lifers at all? To say that abortion is all right until somebody proves the humanity of the unborn is like saying that it is okay to do test bombing in an area, so long as there might not be people there. The area might be desert, it might be a city of 1.5 million people-- how can it be enough to say that abortion might not be violent...