Questions for Those Who Support Partial-Birth Abortion
I have some questions for the pro-abortion crowd here. More precisely, the questions are directed to those who support partial-birth abortion. (I hinted at this the other day, but buried it deep in the post. I’d like to bring it to the fore now.)
Here are the questions:
1) If you can do a partial-birth abortion, then it would certainly be possible to complete the birth — correct?
2) Once the baby is partially born, it would be safer to the mother to deliver the remainder of the baby than to stick a sharp object into the mother to kill the baby — correct?
3) So, partial-birth abortion is more about killing the baby than about a) freeing the mother of the burdens of pregnancy or b) the mother’s health — correct?
Tell me where I have gone wrong in this analysis.
P.S. If the assumptions of my questions above are correct, then the partial-birth abortion debate pits the right of the baby to live against the right of the mother to see her baby dead. And this hypothetical strips away the usual crutches of those who support abortion: arguments concerning the mother’s health or her need to unburden her body of the pregnancy.
After all, there are hospitals where babies are being aborted in one room, and doctors are successfully saving the lives of younger babies in another.
There’s a deeper question here, too: if partial-birth abortion is safer than other forms of abortion, and if delivery is safer than partial-birth abortion . . . then delivery is the safest way of all to allow the mother to end the pregnancy. If that is right, then why can’t the State require a woman seeking a late-term abortion to simply have the baby?
P.P.S. Let me put the same thoughts a different way. When analyzing the morality and/or the legality of partial-birth abortion, should we look to whether it is safer than other abortion procedures — or whether it is safer than any medical procedure for ending the pregnancy, including delivery of the child?
P.P.P.S. Let’s say that a doctor were to opine that compressing the head is somewhat safer because it requires less cervical dilation and thus the fetus can be extracted more quickly. Then the question is not as simple, but still poses a fairly stark moral question: for a viable fetus, is the added safety for the mother involved in collapsing the fetus’s head justified when compared to the baby’s right to life?