Word: wading
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Supreme Court attempted to address these questions in its landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. The court's solution rested on the concept of viability, defined as the time the fetus is "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb albeit with artificial aid." Until that point, said the majority, a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy was guaranteed by the privacy rights implicit in the 14th Amendment, which has been interpreted to include personal rights relating to marriage, procreation and contraception. But once viability occurs, the court ruled, a state may limit or proscribe abortion...
...reality, things have never been so clear-cut. Medical advances have enabled increasing numbers of babies as young as 24 weeks to survive. Indeed, the framework of Roe v. Wade makes jurisprudence dependent on technological developments. If the moment of viability is pushed back much further toward conception, the state's right to limit abortions will gradually increase. The Roe decision, concluded Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in a 1983 opinion on an abortion-related case, is "on a collision course with itself...
Right-to-Lifers have latched onto this argument as a principal weapon in their war to overturn Roe v. Wade. Given the uncertainty of the viability standard, they claim, potential life should be recognized from conception. They point to medical technologies such as sonography and fetal-heart monitoring that have literally raised the visibility of the unborn well before viability. "It's now common for young couples to see their ((unborn)) little baby moving around, sucking his thumb," says John Willke, president of the National Right to Life Committee...
Even so, abortion advocates and most doctors argue that the viability debate is still largely academic. "The fact is that the threshold of viability is not that much different from what it was at the time of Roe v. Wade," says Dr. Alan Fleischman, director of neonatology at New York City's Montefiore Medical Center. "There is a biological limit to what we can do." Even at the most sophisticated hospitals, babies born before the 24th week of gestation or weighing less than 500 g (1.1 lb.) have virtually no chance of survival. Meanwhile, fewer than...
...pairs have not seen each other since infancy, when a shipwreck separated the Syracusan pair and their father Egeon (Wade Wilcox) from the Ephesian pair. No one realizes that the entire family is now roaming the streets of Ephesus. The twins are constantly mistaken for each other, confusing not only themselves but also the residents of Ephesus...