Word: fetus
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...attending physician." After the first trimester, a state may "regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health," for instance by requiring hospitalization. But to demand that a panel of doctors okay the abortion, said Blackmun, is an unconstitutional complication. Only after the fetus has developed enough to have a chance of survival on its own-usually during the seventh month-may a state "regulate and even proscribe abortion except where it is necessary. . .for the preservation or health of the mother...
...WHEN DOES LIFE BEGIN? Most theologians and philosophers believe that she should base her decision on the question that Newman found to be a matter of individual judgment: when does a human being begin to exist? Is a fetus only "a bit of vegetating unborn matter" that counts for nothing, as Physician H.B. Munson asserts? Or is it a real person whose destruction Terence Cardinal Cooke describes as "slaughter of the innocent unborn"? The view of the fetus as a person has spawned a nationwide, Catholic-dominated, Right to Life movement whose partisans insist that abortion deprives the fetus...
...more persuasive argument makes a distinction between an embryo and a viable fetus-one sufficiently developed to survive outside the uterus. Because of incubators and sophisticated medical techniques, such survival is now possible after 28 weeks. "In this modern day," asserts R. Paul Ramsey, a Methodist and a professor of religion at Princeton University, "viability must be regarded as the equivalent of birth...
Most behavioral scientists, however, do not believe that viability marks the beginning of humanity. In their view, a fetus is not a person but a coherent system of unrealized capacities, and humanity is "an achievement, not an endowment." Anthropologist Ashley Montagu concurs, arguing that the embryo, fetus and newborn do not become truly human until molded by social and cultural influences after birth...
...believes that society has a "social responsibility" toward pregnant women: it must protect the "mission of motherhood against the clamors of individuals or of social movements. To give this mission over completely to individual choice oversteps the order of nature." Others disagree. According to Reform Rabbi Israel Margolies, a fetus "is literally part of its mother's body, and belongs only to her and her mate...