Abortion: the one topic that appears to have no compromises. A seemingly unbridgeable gap stands between those desiring that everything be permitted and those wishing that any form of abortion be abolished. Roe v. Wade was decided 30 years ago when medicine could say very little about the state of the fetus in the months leading up to birth; this is no longer true. The scientific discoveries since 1973 necessitate a rethinking of abortion.
The explosion in knowledge about the journey from conception to birth leads to two conclusions that undermine the tenets of the pro-life and pro-choice lobbies. First, conception appears to be little more than brute chemical reactions. There seems to be no mystical spark, only precisely tuned biological pathways. Moreover, medicine has revealed that an astonishingly high number of fertilized eggs never implant in the uterus; they spontaneously abort. Of those that achieve implantation, only 64 percent actually lead to a live birth, the rest end in miscarriage. (Bonus fact: Until 1869, the Catholic Church held that life commenced 40 days after conception. The egg-meet-sperm definition is not even traditional.) Second, science has revealed more about the third trimester fetus. Most importantly, it exhibits full brain activity.
Some of the most obvious changes in medicine since 1973 are the almost unbelievable advances in prenatal care, which allows many fetuses born in the third trimester to survive outside the womb. Physical birth is a completely arbitrary marker of when life begins. Fetuses in the third trimester are responsive to touch, sound, exhibit stress responses, feel pain and show other qualities associated with mental awareness. In fact, electroencephalography of third trimester babies are very similar to those of newborns. In a society that uses the termination of brain activity as a marker to the end of life, it seems entirely appropriate to use the beginning of activity to signal the start of life. In the third trimester, coordinated brain activity begins and life outside the womb is possible. What appears is the beginning of a human being who deserves the right to life.
So the compromise that has been so elusive for 30 years involves allowing abortions for the first trimesters and outlawing them in the third (except in cases that imperil the life of the mother or involve fetuses with serious anomalies incompatible with life). The irony is that this is actually what Roe established as law. Later court rulings, Danforth in 1976 and Colautti in 1979, unfortunately eliminated the bright line between early and late-term abortions and watered down the restrictions on third-term abortions until they are now-nearly nonexistent. This compromise is nothing more than a return to the logic of Roe, placed on the solid footing of new scientific findings.
The National Organization for Women, Naral and other pro-choice organizations often try to play down late-term abortions by noting that they comprise less than 1 percent of all abortions and that these rare abortion cases are for the health of the mother. However, best estimates place the number of late-term abortions around 750 annually, and almost all are elective. Only a few extraordinary cases each year require late-term abortions to save the mother. No one would argue that 750 infants are insignificant. Furthermore, since this third trimester line is established by new scientific knowledge, which will not reveal coordinated brain activity much earlier in development, there is no reason to worry about the \slippery slope"" leading to the abolition of abortion.
Before the third trimester, abortion should be the free choice of the mother, but unless the mother's life is clearly at stake, abortion in the third trimester is morally wrong. These abortions are not far from infanticide. Hopefully, as our new knowledge of the beginning of life becomes public it will lead us back to the letter of Roe v. Wade.
