A Modest Proposal For “Post-Birth Abortion”

Here’s my final article for the Daily Trojan (you can also find it here).

The Supreme Court weighed in with an atrocious decision a week ago that, for the first time, upheld a restriction on abortion. It is truly a sad day for liberty in America when a doctor cannot deliver a fetus (so that all but its head is outside its mother’s body), stick scissors in its skull and suck its brains out.

Thankfully, this horrendous assault upon women’s liberty did not happen without protest; leading Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama nobly defended this fundamental constitutional right.

What is truly galling about the law is that it makes no exception for when “partial-birth abortion” is advantageous to the health of the woman. Only an anti-choice extremist could fail to see women should be able to use whichever method a doctor determines best. While it may be rare for this method to be safest, how dare a legislature full of men tell women how not to terminate their pregnancy?

Yet even among those progressives who rightly condemn this, I fear there is a failure to appreciate how we should apply the principle that the safest method is always best. While it might be rare, there may be times when partial-birth abortion is the safest method available.

And yet, if it is advantageous to a woman’s health that a fetus be delivered most of the way outside her body before being aborted, can we not imagine that it might be even safer to deliver the fetus all the way outside the mother’s body before terminating it? For instance, there would be no chance of the scissors accidentally slipping and cutting the woman, which could be a risk if the fetus’ head is still inside her.

Therefore, I would like to present a modest proposal for “post-birth abortion.”

Granted, some may at this point object that a fetus that has actually gone all the way outside the mother’s body is now a person with the right to life. Yet a moment’s reflection will show that this is simply more of the mystical hogwash that typifies the thinking of the misogynistic, theocratic anti-choice movement. Does moving a fetus a mere matter of feet – from inside its mother to outside its mother – somehow magically endow it with personhood? In consciousness and intelligence it remains exactly the same. There is no objective difference except location, and what kind of ridiculous theory would make personhood depend on a foot’s difference in location? If abortion is justifiable (and it most certainly is), how can we possibly object to this? Abortion and “post-birth abortion” will stand or fall together.

In moments like this, we may be tempted to abandon our principles. We may be tempted to give way to the emotional and mystical mumbo jumbo that anti-choicers spout about the inherent dignity and right to life of all human beings being independent of any other factor such as race, sex, religion, disability or – in this case – age and physical and mental development. Yet let us stand firm, knowing the rightness of our cause. The road to full equality for women may be paved with the skulls of 40 million fetuses, but we must continue to tread this path of progress.

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