PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION OUTLOAWED IN THE USA


The US Congress in early June voted by 282 votes to 139 to outlaw a distressing form of late abortion -carried out at five or six months and sometimes known as "partial birth abortion" - and this, in some quarters, is being condemned as a victory for "the Right". It was, The Guardian reported, an example of "extreme Right-wing ideology", and the phraseology of "partial birth abortion" was only used by "Rightwingers".

Mary Kenny, writing in the Sunday Telegraph June 8 2003 commented: "It seems strange, indeed, that the seating arrangements of Frenchmen in an undemocratic parliament in the 1780s should define what is 'Right' and what is 'Left' in some of our contemporary political and ethical dilemmas. Notions of 'Right' and 'Left' are well overdue for re-tooling: when some of the hard-line Communists in the former Soviet Union resisted Mr Gorbachev's moves towards liberalisation, the BBC usually described the old Stalinists as 'extreme Right-wingers'. Extreme Left-wingers, surely?

" It may be accurate to call those who oppose abortion at six months' pregnancy as 'conservatives', and those who favour it, or favour its availability, as 'liberals'. It might be broadly correct to say that those who are opposed to abortion are usually more religious, while those who regard it simply a matter of personal choice, are more likely to be secular. And yet, you cannot be sure about these generalisations any more. Younger people in the United States are now more opposed to social abortion (as opposed to medical abortion, where the mother's life is in danger) than middle-aged people. The rising generation in America is more conservative - they are more patriotic, for example, and they respect the military more than their parents did - but they are not particularly more churchy. Indeed, they tend to have less respect for the clergy and for church institutions than previous generations. What is happening with abortion, specifically, is that the progress of medical technology is making the foetus - or the unborn child, whichever term you prefer - into a more recognisable human being.

" Inter-uterine photographs taken at 20 weeks' gestation, and published in the current edition of Newsweek magazine, quite clearly show that what is in the womb is a very small human baby. Pro-choice campaigners in the 1960s and 1970s used to describe "the conceptus", as it was called, as "an undifferentiated clump of cells". There is no way they could use that language today, in defiance of what science and technology is now visibly showing us. Indeed, those who deny that what is in the womb is a being which is human might just as well be described as 'flat earthers', as 'Leftwingers', since they are clinging to outdated scientific definitions. Mind you, 'Left-wingers' can also be conservatives, as the Arthur Scargill wars of the 1980s demonstrated: those who wanted everything to stay the same were on the 'Left', while those who wanted to update and move on were allegedly on the 'Right'.

" In the abortion case, surprising contradictions are also emerging with the development of embryology, and new thinking on human rights. In 1992, a 28-year-old-mother in Wisconsin, Tracy Marciniak, was subjected to domestic abuse by her estranged husband, Glenndale Black. The brute punched his wife in the stomach - regrettably, it is not unknown for abusive husbands to pick on their wives when they are pregnant - and, in consequence, the baby Tracy was carrying died in utero. Tracy herself was badly injured. Her ex-husband was charged with reckless injury, but she wanted him charged with murder: he had in effect killed their child, who was only a few days from being born.

" But the law could not sustain the charge since the baby was not a born person Tracy Marciniak had always supported abortion rights, but she is now aligned with the National Right to Life, who are running a campaign for an Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Ms Marciniak was extremely disappointed that feminists would not back her in her quest for a murder charge against her abusive husband. They were too nervous of conferring an implied right to life on her unborn son: the political superceded the personal. A current very shocking murder case in the United States - that of Laci Peterson, a young woman who was murdered and her unborn child apparently strangled - is being treated as a double murder, at least in the reporting of the case. What is happening is that the law will eventually have to reassess human rights in the light of embryological advances: a child who is just five days away from being born, as was Tracy Marciniak's son, is, without doubt, a human person, if common sense has any purchase on the matter.

" Contradictions arise, in many respects, where the development of early human life is concerned: Roman Catholics and religious Jews are turning to stem-cell research, and to other embryological technology in an effort to avoid a genetically inherited handicap. The amazing advances in this field of biology have helped to launch a whole new discipline in philosophy - bio-ethics. " Is this 'Left' or 'Right'? It is too complex, suable, anguishing, and also too fascinating a subject to be collapsed into what is now just an archaic 18th century political definition?"

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