Mr. vice president, do you favor passage of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, or
do you believe, as your supporters at the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action
League (NARAL) do, that a woman who seeks an abortion has an indefeasible right to a dead
baby, no matter what? Here is the story behind that question, which George W. Bush
should ask Al Gore next week during the first debate.
The Act, authored by Rep. Charles Canady, Republican of Florida, would extend the
laws protections -- would protect the right to life -- to infants who survive
abortions. Such babies sometimes are born as a result of abortions sought because the
babies have (or sometimes are mistakenly thought to have) defects like Down syndrome or
spina bifida. The House committee that passed Canadys bill 22 to 1 heard
heart-rending testimony about born-alive babies being discarded alive into soiled hospital
linen or left on a baby scale, unattended, without warmth or nourishment, their hearts
beating and limbs moving, until they died.
Canadys bill responds to the recent radical extension of the pro-choice agenda.
The federal court that overturned New Jerseys ban on partial-birth abortion
cavalierly declared it nonsensical and irrational to believe that
an infants physical location relative to the mother has any relevance as to whether
she may choose to have it killed. This pushes abortion rights beyond Roe v. Wade s
framework. Roes distinction -- now a crumbling wall against infanticide -- held that
a childs legal status depended on whether the child was unborn or
born -- that is, the status depended on the childs location in relation
to the body of the mother. Now the federal judiciary is close to saying that a child
marked for abortion can be killed even if it is born alive. Canady notes that under this
new radicalism, a real child, with an objective existence, is treated as merely a
conceptual construct, and in that way, swept aside as though he or she had no existence at
all that anyone was obliged to recognize. The bill would acknowledge that, at the
very least, when a baby is fully born it has an intrinsic dignity and a claim to the
protection of law, irrespective of whether it is wanted.
The bill is a mild measure against the abortion-rights lobbys increasingly
infanticidal agenda. Yet NARAL shrilly says the bill is an anti-choice assault
that would interfere with the medical decision-making process. However,
NARALs opposition is understandable, given its mission. If a baby alive moments
after an attempted abortion has a right to life, why exactly did it utterly lack such a
right moments before? And a week before that? A month?
But by its opposition NARAL is endorsing a central tenet of the right-to-life argument.
The tenet is that it is arbitrary, and morally and philosophically problematic, to say
that a baby has no intrinsic dignity, and that its claim to respect for its life is
contingent on its physical location or on whether it suits the convenience of anyone else.
That tenet should, but does not, trouble the Supreme Court majority.
In June, when the court declared unconstitutional Nebraskas ban on partial-birth
abortion, Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, said that such abortions,
although gruesome, might be safer for the woman than the common procedure of using
instruments to dismember the child in the womb:
The use of instruments within the uterus creates a danger of accidental
perforation and damage to neighboring organs. Sharp fetal bone fragments create similar
dangers. And fetal tissue accidentally left behind can cause infection and various other
complications.
But if avoidance of those dangers justifies killing an almost-entirely delivered baby,
why not be even safer and just deliver the baby and then kill it or let it die? After all,
even partial-birth abortion requires insertion of some instruments into the woman.
Now that one of the nations finest universities (Princeton) has given a
prestigious position to an advocate of infanticide (Peter Singer suggests that for perhaps
a month after birth parents should be entitled to dispose of unwanted children), it is not
surprising that the Senate has what deserves to be called an Infanticide Caucus. The
caucus has at least three members.
Two of them, Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of
New Jersey, identified themselves when, during the Sept. 26, 1996, debate on partial-birth
abortion, Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, asked: Suppose during such an
abortion (during which a baby is delivered feet first until all but a portion of the skull
is outside the mother, then its skull is punctured, its contents vacuumed, then collapsed)
the baby slips all the way out of the birth canal. Should killing the baby even then be a
permissible choice? Neither senator would say no.
During the Oct. 20, 1999, debate Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, joined the
caucus: Santorum: You agree, once a child is born, separated from the mother, that
that child is protected by the Constitution and cannot be killed. Do you agree with
that? Boxer: I think when you bring your baby home... She said more.
What she would not say was yes.
A Germantown, Md., teenager, who has been convicted of attempted first-degree murder,
will soon be sentenced for trying to kill her newborn child. After giving birth in a
bathtub, she abandoned the baby in an unheated trash room on a January morning.
Considering that partial-birth abortion is a fundamental constitutional right, and
pro-choice people like NARAL oppose Canadys bill, the teenager will be forgiven for
wondering what, exactly, she did that was so wrong.
Some pro-choice people cast their opposition to Canadys bill almost as a matter
of protecting consumer rights -- a woman purchasing an abortion is entitled to a dead
baby. Does Al Gore agree? If not, why not?