After Birth

(NC17)

What's the difference?

We wonder as things change if they might slip and go too far.  Remember back when the abortion issue was new, we wondered about how our national values might be changed.  Did we need to worry about the sanctity of life?

The discussions were heated and long.  I remember being told by the proponents of abortion that this wasn't about babies.  This was before babies were people; just fetuses.  Just a mass of tissue.  Nothing to worry about.

So the court cases came and went, new laws and medical practices. Abortions were just shapeless blobs at first, but later we found out there were these  perfectly formed humans. Some are dismembered by surgeons while still in the womb, then extracted piece by piece, or they have their brain sucked out seconds before being born alive.  And if a child should survive an abortion, Planned Parenthood admits they would let the baby die on the delivery table.  It's unwanted.

Scholarly discussions are now in the journals of medicine discussing the lack of difference between pre- and post- birth babies.  It's all the same, philosophically speaking.  A day before versus a day after; no difference.  A week before versus a week after; no difference.  A month before versus a month after; no difference.  It makes no moral difference, the scholars tell us, if an unwanted baby is aborted or if it is killed on the table after being born.

They admit, they'd leave a baby who survived abortion
to die in the delivery room.  It is, after all, unwanted.

They're right, of course.  There's no distinguishable moral difference between what the law calls 'abortion' and what the law calls premeditated murder.

It's legal but not morally different if done in utero rather than in the bassinet a few days later.

It's a more difficult issue than first imagined and a more slippery slope than even the worst forecast.