I was going to post this yesterday, but I didn't want it to get overwhelmed by the Pope-Fest. I considered posting it in two or three pieces, but I felt at least the first time this idea is introduced all the aspects should be looked at. I also realize that this is a
very divisive topic, and even people who seem at first to hold similar ideas can in fact be approaching the subject from opposite underlying stances.
Please be civil to each other! I am posting this because I had the idea, and felt it should be discussed and dissected, not because I am truly comfortable with it.
**************
There is a way for those on both sides of the abortion debate to join forces, knowing that they're fighting together for a sane, compassionate solution to the tug-of-war between an unwilling mother and a blameless infant. Instead of throwing money into fighting against each other, they could both put their efforts into biomedical research to find a way for a pregnant woman to have a safe pre-term delivery of a healthy fetus.
More...
To set the stage, we must first consider a boiled-down version of the basic premises of the two currently opposed groups. The simplistic version of the pro-life position is that even a newly conceived ball of undifferentiated cells is human life, and therefore precious and deserving of rights equal to those of any other human. The pro-choice position can be boiled down to the fact that although human life is precious, a newly conceived ball of undifferentiated cells is not "human" until it is born and affirms its right to live as a separate entity by living apart from its mother's bloodstream. Until it is born (or at least until it is no longer dependent on its mother for survival) it is not a separate human entity, and therefore its mother's rights must be given more weight than its rights.
The basic outline of the proposed solution is that instead of pumping drugs into the mother's system to cause a miscarriage, or engaging in surgical removal of the fetus, we should be looking for a way to induce labor without injuring the baby, and on methods to keep the early-induction baby alive and safe while it develops outside the mother's womb. I realize doctors are already studying some parts of this subject in detail, to handle the many pre-term births that currently occur naturally in our country. Pour more and more money at the problem.
I know this sounds creepy (at least it did to me), and I don't know whether or not there's any value to an idea that leaves even the pro-choice community freaked out, but I felt someone ought to take a look at it and I chose you.
Potential Avenues for Research
To the skeptics, I suggest that the solution may not be as far off as you may think. Given a problem (ensure the safe survival of the newborn and safety of the mother) scientists will come up with a solution, even if it's one that many people find disturbing. Possibilities that come to mind include human surrogate mothers, in which case the research would involve procedures for transplanting healthy embryos and fetuses from a pregnant women to a non-pregnant woman (possibly extending current in vitro fertilization implantation techniques), animal surrogate mothers, which would involve transplanting healthy embryos and fetuses into another animal for the remainder of gestation, and extensions of medical technology, which would be an extension of current neonatal intensive care procedures.
I am in no way proposing that the scientific community take responsibility for the resulting children and attempt to raise them. Instead, I simply propose that they research ways in which a pre-term (substantially pre-term) fetus could be born and safely develop until it can be sent home with its new parents. I am also not trying to suggest that this goal would be easy or cheap to attain. But over time, with sufficient funds, a woman at any stage of pregnancy would have an option for ending it without requiring the death of the embryo/fetus/baby.
Legal Issues
There will, of course, be many legal issues to be addressed. My personal opinion is that these issues and their potential solutions should be addressed and agreed on by the groups espousing the research. However, I am willing to put my ideas of some issues and potential solutions to each out here simply to forestall the inevitable accusations of not having thought through the ramifications of the idea.
Responsibility. Currently, once a baby is aborted, it is dead and is no longer anyone's responsibility. In the event that pre-term birth becomes a possibility, there will be many legal issues related to the mother's (and the doctor's) responsiblity, both for the procedure itself and for the baby. In my opinion, the mother should be relieved of all responsibility to the baby once it is no longer part of her body if the procedure is being performed in lieu of an abortion. The procedure may of course end up being used by women who for one reason or another are unable to carry to term but who still want their babies. In those cases current legislation regarding newborn welfare will likely prove sufficient. Essentially, at the moment the baby becomes independent of its mother, it would become the responsibility of its adoptive family/caregiver. Possibly existing surrogate parent law could be applied.
Care of the newborn. Currently, in some states full term babies born to unwilling mothers can be dropped off without fear of retribution at local fire stations and hospitals. Early-induction babies could be handled under similar laws, but their care is likely to be extremely expensive. In my opinion, the best solution to this problem is similar to the Texan law saying that hospitals can refuse life-support to patients with no hope of recovery (overriding their family's wishes) if the family is unable to pay for care. Apply that law to this case, and babies who do not have families lined up willing to pay for their expenses (and presumably to adopt them after they are released from the hospital) will die anyway. In this case, the law would result in a situation where all the babies that have a chance are given it, and the babies that don't have that chance die as they would have if they were conceived and aborted before the procedure was available. The pro-life groups can respond by either setting up organizations to match babies up to families and pay for some of their expenses (extensions to their current adoption matching programs), or by accepting that laws currently in existence will apply in these cases as well.
Some members of pro-life groups are likely to have problems with this solution, as part of their platform appears to be the assumption that raising the baby is in some way punishment for irresponsible behavior on the mother's part. Those for whom this principle is fixed are unlikely to support the proposed solution, since the mother would still be relieved of responsibility for the results of her behavior. However, it is always possible that in the long term, sustained presentation of the disadvantages of large numbers of unwanted children raised by unwilling or incapable mothers may prove convincing enough to divert their efforts into finding loving homes for these babies.
The pro-choice individuals to whom I have shown this have also had problems with it, as they in many cases would feel extremely guilty producing a child and leaving it to others to care for it. Personally, I feel it should be the mother's choice whether the baby lives or dies, but again, this is not something I feel I have any power over.
Advantages. Currently, there is a hard deadline for many women who want an abortion. That deadline is in many states set at the end of the first trimester. Given that many pregnancies spontaneously abort before that point, and that the current threshold of theoretical viability is somewhere around 22 weeks gestation, it is a reasonable limitation. However, some women do not even discover they are pregnant until close to that point. With this approach, delaying "termination" (or induction) of the pregnancy may prove advantageous, since a more developed fetus could be more likely to survive. Whatever solutions become available may result in windows in which the pregnancy can be induced with a good prognosis for the baby. There are many advantages to this. Instead of requiring the mother to decide the fate of her baby as soon as she discovers she is pregnant, she can wait and terminate the pregnancy (but not the baby) at any time. This research would also be of huge benefit to the women who are carrying wanted babies but who go into pre-term labor. Their prognosis would be substantially better if doctors are used to handling such young babies and have techniques in place for helping them survive.
Adverse medical conditions. There are some abortions each year performed because the baby is sick either due to disease or genetic defect. In these cases, my personal opinion is that this is not our business. There will be parents who feel very strongly that the baby's life would be tragic and the baby should be aborted rather than born. There will be parents who wish to adopt such babies. Again, I personally feel the birth parents should have the final say, but that would be up to the courts and the legislators to decide. If the mother's health requires an early induction or an abortion, then I feel the mother's life should take precedence, but again that should end up being between the woman, her doctor, and her family. These issues will likely concern many of the same people currently lobbying for one or the other of the current sides, but hopefully without the violence.
Religious Issues
One critique I have received on this proposal is that it will slow the process by which our society comes to terms with "what we base our education and laws on". That the arguments we have about abortion are a critical component of determining our society's position on separation between what religion teaches in faith and belief and what we establish as scientific investigation and knowledge and our institutions of education and government, and that it is important that the argument take place, since otherwise the fanatical and those who think only in limited religious terms will determine the way the debate is shaped.
I agree that it is important that society have this debate and determine an appropriate separation between religion and science. However, I also feel that the majority of this debate is happening in the context of arguments over evolution and not in the context of arguments over abortion. Undeniably, abortion kills a potential human and it should be avoided if possible either by abstinence or birth control. The religious overtones of the abortion debate (is a fetus a human individual with a "soul" or not?) have moved into the debate over birth control (witness the spate of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills without even knowing why they were prescribed). I certainly don't feel that the religious certainty of the few should outweigh the experimental evidence of the many, but those religious feelings are not going to change. And if those with such religious fervor can be given what they want while supporting the scientific community and hopefully learning a little more about science, I'm certainly not against it.
Fundamentally, I feel that by supporting the scientific community in this way, this proposal has the potential to build a stronger bridge between the two groups. In the long term, this will hopefully enable them to reach a point where they get to know each other in a spirit of cooperation rather than confrontation. In turn, this will help give each side an appreciation for the other's opinion and eventually produce common goals and shared vocabulary in which they can engage in productive discussion, rather than counter-productive tirades.
Emotional Issues
The majority of the feedback I have received so far has involved emotional issues, primarily negative responses from pro-choice individuals. Partly they cite "validation," that many women who have had abortions need society's stamp of approval to reassure them that their abortion was not wrong. Partly they cite the general creepiness of the idea of having a child of yours running around, with or without your knowledge. And partly, they don't feel that it will change anything or that it has any hope of being acceptable to anyone.
I know this is an emotional issue. I have a kindergartner, so I've been through a pregnancy. The result was that my rational "people should be able to do what they want with their own tissues" stance was hardened into an "anybody who doesn't want to be pregnant shouldn't have to be, including teenage daughters of fundamentalist parents" stance. However, I'm also not comfortable whitewashing my personal knowledge that at 16 weeks, when I could feel my child move inside me, he ceased to be a "fetus" and became a "baby". In my lifetime, procedures I initially found creepy and Orwellian (test tube babies) are now an accepted part of fertility treatments. The result is that I don't really think the creepiness of the procedure is a good reason to abandon the idea; creepier things have come to pass.
Political Implications
Of course, the political implications are one reason why this diary is being posted here. I get the impression (possibly faulty!) that there appear to be many people who would otherwise support many of the principles of the Democratic Party, but cannot support candidates who themselves support abortion on demand. This solution allows the democrats to reframe the debate into a conflict between people who claim to be "pro-life" but promote the use of violence to make their point and people who are committed to the elimination of all needless death. This solution provides a powerful story to reframe the "culture of life" argument as so concerned with religious overtones that they are effectively holding us back from a true commitment to life. It also lets us portray ourselves as inclusive and welcoming, making compromises and finding solutions that truly benefit both sides, even those we disagree with. This solution does not require either side to renounce the principles that underlie their arguments.
Checking out the comments in response to Howard Dean's comment "I think we need to talk about abortion differently" and "I don't know anyone who's for abortion" at the Free Republic, the majority of responders seem to believe that the Democratic party is both pro-abortion and pro-death. They believe that changing the rhetoric won't matter, because the party will still represent people who want to kill babies (clearly the majority of voters agree with them, because no-one is for baby-killers). They state clearly and often that the Dean is telling the Democrats "don't say what you truly believe - because it is a repulsive thing," that the Democrats are "trying to figure out ... how to change the rhetoric to get the rubes to believe it." The advantages of the approach I'm proposing are, first, that it is truly a different way of handling the issue, second, that it puts the onus on the pro-life supporters to propose ways to deal with the resulting babies, and third, that it offers concrete ways in which people can prove their support. We go from being all talk and lawsuits to actively funding work that will solve the problem for good.
Conclusions
Fundamentally, pro-life groups want all babies to survive. Pro-choice groups want to ensure the mother's rights are not infringed in favor of the baby's. Channeling the energy currently invested in this conflict towards scientific research into the eventual discontinuation of the procedure would (I initially thought) create a cause that both can support, a cause that would eventually eliminate the discussion entirely. Everyone would be working towards the same goal of eliminating needless death. The importance of taking sides on this issue would be diminished, because the abortion debate as it is currently framed would be over appropriate short-term interim solutions, rather than over a final answer that neither side can agree on. Debates over the details of the final solution rather than its overall desirability would replace the current tirades and polemics. By incorporating this stance into the Democratic platform, the Republican implication that Democrats are part of a culture of death (never explicitly stated as far as I know, but certainly implied) is turned back on them.
Why I'm Posting This Here
I'm posting this here for three purposes. First, this is a new idea. I need lots of feedback to make as strong an argument as possible for it. So please, do your worst. Come up with the strongest RATIONAL arguments you can. I don't expect to be able to defend it against a determined emotional argument on a rational basis, but I have hope that emotional defenses will arise as more people hear about it. Certainly I expect that women who went into labor mid-pregnancy and lost their otherwise healthy babies after birth will be all for more money going into research to prevent such things from happening to others.
Second, I'd like to find out what the Kos community thinks of the idea in general. At a gut level, can you tell a good story around it or is it just too creepy? So far the pro-choice community has been much more disturbed than I expected. Is this something that should be sent on to Dean and the Democrats, or is it not worth the effort?
Third, do any of you have any suggestions for telling the story more succinctly, or more effectively, or even just commentary on how a specific section or sentence could be fixed? The diaries I have read (at least the long ones) tend to be very well written and inspiring to read. I am an engineer in my day job, so writing is not my forte. I was hoping the experienced among you could edit and proof my work should I (or one of you) decide send it on to others.
I know it's long, and I'm sorry, but I really feel the idea should be out there. I'll be stopping by periodically to check in and respond to comments. And, in advance, thank you!