Word: fetuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Medicaid funds for abortions that is somewhat more liberal than the bill originally passed by the House: instead of banning funds for abortions except where the mother's life is endangered, it would permit such payments for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, and where the mother or fetus would suffer "serious, permanent health damage...
Neither side in the abortion debate can claim to have positive knowledge of whether or not abortion constitutes the taking of a life. Yet a real biological possibility exists that this is the case. Given this possibility, the government must accord the fetus the same rights it grants the average criminal suspect: the assumption that it is innocent, until proven guilty, of being an "expendable" member of society. Until proof exists to the contrary, any "moral justification" for abortion simply does not exist...
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...
...early, Trivers thinks, that the action may actually begin before birth. He believes there are "chemical tactics" that the fetus uses on the mother to increase its size and fitness while still in the womb. Even more surprising is Trivers' theory (for which he admits there is yet no evidence) of genetic conflict between egg and sperm before conception: under some conditions, the egg may try to repel sperm with female-producing X chromosomes in order to be fertilized into a boy rather than a girl...