A Backdoor Ban on Abortion

Abortion law is one of those issues that really shouldn't be an issue due to the US Constitution's ban on laws that endorse religious beliefs. Because when you get right down to it, whether or not an unborn fetus is a human being is a matter of your personal beliefs.

If you believe that there is a thing called the soul, and that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception, then you are probably going to view a fertilized egg as a human being from that moment of conception and will probably be opposed to abortion. There is a chance that, while personally opposed to abortion for yourself, you would still support a woman's right to choose, recognizing that you have no right to impose your moral beliefs on her.

However, if you don't believe in a soul, or don't believe that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception, chances are you won't be opposed to abortion and will support a woman's right to choose what is right for her. You may believe that an unborn fetus makes the transition from potential human being to actual human being at the moment of birth or at the first breath, whichever comes first.

There's no arguing that an unborn fetus is a potential human being. But then an unfertilized human egg is also a potential human being IF the right conditions all come together at the same time. In fact, an unborn fetus is only one step closer to being a human being than an unfertilized egg-- and that step is that the actual fertilization. Once that fertilization occurs, the development of the fetus is a natural process that continues to occur unless interrupted. There are really only two ways in which that process can be interrupted: naturally or through human intervention.

There's not much that man can do about ending naturally occurring abortions, but there's a major push by mostly religious groups to put a stop to human-caused abortions. However, since abortion is legally considered part of a woman's right to privacy, which is considered a civil right, banning abortion outright is not something any state has successfully done. So these organizations seeking to ban abortion are coming in through the back door.

Their first attempts were highly successful: 36 states currently have fetal rights laws that make it a crime to "kill" a fetus during the commission of a crime. I wrote an article called "An Effective End to Abortion" at least nine years ago in which I explained how fetal rights laws would eventually bring about an end to abortion. (Link provided below.) But apparently this way of ending abortion isn't fast enough for some, so they've taken it to another level.

The state of Oklahoma passed a law that is set to go into effect on November 1, 2009, in which personal information in the form of answers to a 37 point questionnaire every woman seeking an abortion has to fill out must be published on a website maintained by the state of Oklahoma. Now, anyone driving through the Sooner State knows that there's a whole lot of nothing but farms for the vast majority of the state. Farms usually mean small communities. Communities where the answers to those 37 questions can be as identifying as if a giant hand was holding a sign over the woman's head with "I had an abortion!" In essence, the state of Oklahoma is attempting to use shame and the social stigma of having an abortion to scare women away from seeking to terminate a pregnancy, no matter how negative the impact of continuing the pregnancy will be on the woman's life.

Even more recently, the state of Kentucky is mulling over a bill (Senate Bill 38) which would require doctors to do an ultrasound on every woman seeking an abortion and, if she chose, allow her to view the ultrasound and explain what she is seeing. The doctor would also be required to answer any questions the woman would have. The attempt here is to make the woman think that because the fetus is moving around that it is a separate person. But what they don't tell you is that even if there's NO chance that the growing fetus will become a person, it could still move about under its own power.

For example, a woman in England was told she was having twins. But a later ultrasound showed that one of the twins was acardiac, which means it had no heart. In fact, it had no upper body at all. No head, no brain. Just the lower torso and legs. It was surviving by virtue of the fact that its umbilical cord was attached to the umbilical cord of the other twin. There was NO chance that this fetus would ever be a human being and during a risky operation in utero, the umbilical cord to the deformed "twin" was severed. Yet while it was still attached to the umbilical cord, despite having NO brain, the legs were kicking and moving of their own accord. (As shown on the Discovery Health channel show called "Vanished Twins" which aired in January, 2010.)

In another example from the same show, a baby born in Connecticut had a very rare condition called "fetus in fetu". This condition begins when a fertilized egg splits into two-- one bigger than the other. And during the first few hours of growth, the larger part of the egg envelops the smaller part. In rare instances, the smaller part continues to grow. In the case of the baby from Connecticut, an ultrasound taken while he was still in utero showed that his severely malformed identical twin was actually growing in his abdomen. It had its own "amniotic sac" and it was moving of its own accord. Even after the baby was born, you could see the movement of the other "twin" inside the baby's abdomen. At three days of age, the baby was operated on and the parasitic twin was removed. The young boy is now doing fine.

The point is that the intent of the new law is to make women feel guilty for choosing abortion by showing them a moving image of the fetus inside them. This is emotional manipulation and is just as harmful and dangerous to the woman's emotional and psychological well-being as the Oklahoma law.

Unfortunately, this kind of moralizing by state legislatures, despite many rulings by the US Supreme Court that state that it is not the job of the law to impose morals on the general public, will probably always continue. We who support the US Constitution and who believe in the individual's right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" must remain vigilant for laws like this and do what we can to help defeat such laws or help get them removed from the books should they be enacted.

UPDATE: On 12/27/09, an Oklahoma judge delayed the enacting of the law requiring the publishing of "anonymous" questionnaires women seeking abortions would be required to fill out before the procedure could take place. A decision on the law is expected by February 19, 2010.

UPDATE: On 2/19/10, the Oklahoma County District Court ruled that the anti-choice law was unconstitutional. A victory for those who support the US Constitution!