Word: fetuses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...anti-contraception law and recognized for the first time a constitutional right to privacy in family, sexual and other matters. The Justices were also influenced by the 1972 opinion of U.S. District Judge Jon O. Newman that overturned Connecticut's anti-abortion statute. Newman concluded that a fetus is not a person until it is born, and that it has no constitutional rights. Though acknowledging that there are wide differences of opinion about the moment when human existence begins, Newman ruled that the moral certainty of some people "must remain a personal judgment, one that they may follow...
...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...
Methadone, which easily crosses the placental barrier, may impede the fetus's normal development. More than 50% of all children born of methadone mothers are either premature or small for their gestational age. The same is true of the heroin baby, but most mothers on heroin receive minimal prenatal care and often have poor eating habits. By contrast, the methadone mother in a registered maintenance program is usually referred to a doctor for prenatal care. Although physicians cannot yet prove it, some suspect that the underdevelopment and prematurity of the methadone baby is a direct result of the drug...