Born Alive

Over the weekend, a friend of mine asked me what I thought of this video about Obama’s opposition to the Induced Birth Infant Liability Act – she wanted to know what the real story behind it was, stripped of the partisan framing (she also asked several other friends at various other points on the political spectrum).

Granting or denying a fetus or infant rights based solely on its physical position has always struck me as daft, but that’s the way the laws in this country are written and interpreted. Take partial birth abortion law, for example. Until a few years ago, it was perfectly legal to kill a fetus that was conceived 8 months ago, provided its head is still mostly inside its mother’s body. But once it comes all the way out, strangling it in its cradle is murder. And even after the federal partial birth abortion ban, it’s still legal to kill an 8-month fetus which is entirely inside its mother’s body.

The IBILA and the related federal BAIPA create a similar dichotomy for 5-month (approximately) fetuses. Under the terms of these bills, if it’s still alive when it comes out, you can’t leave it to die. As my views on when a fetus acquires human rights depend on the maturity of the fetus, not on its physical position, it seems natural to me that a hard-line pro-choice politician would oppose these bills. If you believe that a 5-month fetus is simply a lump of tissue which has no rights and may be destroyed at its owner’s discretion, then the IBILA is equivalent to a law requiring hospitals to provide life support for amputated limbs — both extremely silly and a severe impairment of the basic right to control your own body. Conversely, if you believe that a 5-month fetus is a human being, then leaving it to die in the closet is exactly as monstrous as tearing it to pieces in the womb or poisoning it (both of which are perfectly legal, and according to the Supreme Court are constitutionally protected).

Pro-life groups push bills like BAIPA and the partial-birth abortion ban because the abortions these laws ban are particularly ugly — people (like those in the linked video) can describe watching with their own eyes the death of something that looks and acts like a baby. They also attack the life-begins-at-birth standard, by showing situations where it implies that an unwanted newborn who was conceived five months ago is legally (and morally, in the eyes of most observers) a baby. Pro-choice groups then need to decide if this is the hill they want to die on, or if they want to cede a battle in order to avoid a high-profile debate which is very much not in their favor and which attacks the fundamental premise of the hard-line pro-choice position.

For myself, I don’t really fit neatly into either the pro-life or pro-choice categories. It seems very clear to me that an 8-month fetus is a baby, but a freshly conceived ball of a few dozen undifferentiated cells is no more a baby than a tomato seed is a tomato plant. Drawing a line between those two points is hard because the development of a ball of cells into a baby is a continuous process with no hard distinctions (hence the appeal of the life-begins-at-birth and the life-begins-at-conception theories — those are hard, well defined points at which the line can be drawn). My best idea at where to draw the line is to use the same standard we use to declare death (measurable electrical activity in the brain) — as far as I know, this occurs near the end of the first trimester of pregnancy, and drawing the line here would permit the vast majority of abortions which occur under current law (second trimester abortions being fairly rare, and third trimester abortions being extremely rare).

And wherever you draw the line, I am convinced that deciding when life begins is the fundamental issue. If an embryo or fetus is merely the potential of human life, then the right to control over your own body trumps any rights it might have. But once it becomes a human life in being, then you can’t just kill it.