Complete insanity and partial-birth abortion

Precisely. That's the analysis handed down to us by the smart guys on the Supreme Court. Indeed, that's a pretty good pr6cis of the logic of the entire pro-choice position. The beginning and end of the pro-choice argument is--stop me if you've heard this before-who are you to say when life begins?

Where to Kill the Baby

Okay, let's say we don't know absolutely whether that thing is human-the little clump of cells that left attached to an umbilical cord will inevitably develop into a fullgrown human, and from the moment of conception has all the genetic material that predetermines baldness, eye color, left handedness, and so on, and which may even at this point have a head, arms, toes, and fingers. Let's say we just don't know.

Even a determined agnostic on the question of when life begins would have to admit that there's at least a 10% chance that the clump of cells is a human life. Would any criminal law-as Judge Posner points out-permit you to abort that clump of cells if "you have only a 10% chance of actually killing anyone"?

No, not any criminal law under the sun--except those governing abortion.

If you kill a baby out of the womb, it's murder. If you kill a baby in the womb it's a constitutional right-no matter what the odds are that the thing you've just killed is a human. The states are writing the best laws they can under a regime of insanity.

A couple years ago, in South Dakota twin girls were born three months apart. The mother experienced premature labor just 23 weeks into the pregnancy and out popped Stephanie Bartels. The doctor stitched up the mother's cervix to keep the other twin in the womb. Though a 23-week-old fetus is not considered "viable," Stephanie beat the 4-to-1 odds against her survival and was alive and healthy to greet her twin sister when she was born fully three months later. During that three months, killing Stephanie would have been murder, killing her twin sister Sarah would have been a constitutional right.

Yes, I'd say that is irrational. But state legislators struggling within the interstices of such a legal monstrosity to prohibit infanticide are not the source of the irrationality.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Nov 12, 1999
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