Word: fetus
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Both technically and morally, the most difficult problem is to decide at what precise instant life occurs. Is it in the actual conceptive collision of sperm and egg? Is it only when the fetus "quickens," at five months or so? The Supreme Court in 1973 simply said that abortion in the early stages of pregnancy should be a medical, not a criminal matter; it was best left to the judgment of the woman and her physician. Given the violence of warring moralities in the abortion debate, the law was unreasonably strained. The statutes forbidding abortion were a kind of Volstead...
...enough off to buy their own way out of their fecundity. The women (often young girls) who cannot raise the money must presumably either bear their unwanted children-thus bringing many thousands of new customers to welfare-or find some way, however dangerous, dark and filthy, to kill the fetus more cheaply. Such methods have had the result of sometimes disposing of the mother as well...
...relieved. No more deaths from illegal abortions, no more unwanted children in families that couldn't give them healthy physical and emotional environments--a lot of agony could be prevented. And it was a decision in the best liberal tradition of the law: since the question of whether the fetus is a living being in the first three months after conception remains unresolved, the court left it up to the people involved in an unwanted pregnancy to decide whether to terminate it. Abortion is a private decision, based on the individual's own views, and the legal system politely bowed...
...raise a child under decent conditions. They are far more likely to turn to cheap, unsafe abortions, or to go unwillingly through with the pregnancy and give the child up for adoption. The court asserts the state has a "strong interest in protecting the potential life of the fetus"; what of the lives of the mothers? Thousands of women died from illegal abortions before the 1973 decision, and the court should recognize that its decision will effectively force many poor women to return to kitchen table butchery. And surely the state cannot have a strong interest in providing for thousands...
Despite the protection offered a fetus by the so-called placental barrier, there is growing evidence that certain activities of a pregnant woman-smoking cigarettes, taking drugs, pursuing extreme diets-can seriously affect its wellbeing. Last week the Federal Government singled out a special danger. Citing evidence that "fetal alcohol syndrome" may be more widespread than had been supposed, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism warned pregnant women that consuming more than three ounces of pure alcohol-or perhaps as little as one ounce (two drinks)-a day could increase the risk of their giving birth...