Terri Burton's List: Research & Writing

• Environment: Where you  are has no bearing on who you are.  Does your value change when you cross  the street or roll over in bed?  If not, how can a journey of eight inches  down the birth-canal suddenly change the essential nature of the unborn from  non-human to human?  If the unborn are not already valuable human beings,  merely changing their location can’t make them so. 

• Likewise, just because a fetus  may not have the positive right to drive a car or vote in the next election does  not mean he lacks the natural right not to be harmed without  justification.  Elective abortion unjustly robs the unborn of his or her  natural right to life, as Hadley Arkes explains:

   

  No one would suggest that a  fetus could have a claim to fill the Chair of Logic at one of our universities;  and we would not wish quite yet to seeks its advice on anything important; and  we should probably not regard him as eligible to vote in any state other than  Massachusetts.  All of these rights and privileges would be inappropriate  to the condition or attributes of the fetus.  But nothing that renders him  unqualified for these special rights would diminish in any way the most  elementary right that could be claimed for any human being, or even for an  animal: the right not to be killed without the rendering of reasons that satisfy  the strict standards of “justification.”

• Sadly, opponents of the  pro-life view believe that human beings that are in the wrong location or have  the wrong level of development do not deserve the protection of law.  They  assert, without justification, the belief that strong and independent people  deserve the protection of law while small and dependent people do not.   This view is elitist and exclusive.  It violates the principle that once  made political liberalism great: a basic commitment to protect the most  vulnerable members of the human community. 

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• When a woman learns from the results of prenatal testing that a  fetus has severe abnormalities, such as an undeveloped brain, a severe metabolic  disorder, or no working kidney, she may wish to end the pregnancy rather than  give birth to a child who will suffer and die in infancy or who will have severe  disabilities. Unfortunately, the results of amniocentesis, one of the most  important prenatal diagnostic tests, are generally not available until the 15th  or 16th week of pregnancy, thus delaying the abortion decision.

• A pregnancy may have been planned and very much wanted - until  tragedy strikes. For example, the diagnosis of some debilitating disease, a car  accident, a job loss, or a natural disaster might lead a woman to decide this is  the wrong time to have a baby and to choose abortion, even if the pregnancy has  advanced past the first trimester.

• In general, though, women getting an abortion between six and ten  weeks' gestation can expect to pay about $350 at an abortion clinic and $500 at  a physician's office. Providing abortions later in pregnancy is somewhat more  complicated, and is usually more expensive. For example, at 16 weeks gestation,  abortion clinics generally charge around $650 and physicians' offices generally  charge around $700. After the 20th week, the cost rises to above $1,000.²
• Paying for abortion is not usually a problem for middle- and upper-income women,  because the majority of private medical insurance plans and HMO organizations  currently cover abortion services. However, the availability of abortion funding  for low-income women is controlled by elected government officials. Since 1978,  Congress has imposed a restriction on the use of federal money to cover  abortion. This restriction, known as the Hyde Amendment, forbids federal funding  of abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or when a woman's life is  endangered. The restrictions apply to Medicaid, the government program that pays  for medical care for many low-income families, as well as other federally funded  medical programs such as those for Native American women, military personnel and  their dependents, and Peace Corps volunteers. Only 23 states use their own funds  to cover abortion services beyond the Hyde Amendment's restrictions.

• A moral, medical, and ethical consensus exists that the practice of performing a  partial-birth abortion--an abortion in which a physician deliberately and  intentionally vaginally delivers a living, unborn child's body until either the  entire baby's head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the baby's  trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother and only the head remains  inside the womb, for the purpose of performing an overt act (usually the  puncturing of the back of the child's skull and removing the baby's brains) that  the person knows will kill the partially delivered infant, performs this act,  and then completes delivery of the dead infant--is a gruesome and inhumane  procedure that is never medically necessary and should be prohibited.
  
  
• Pursuant to the testimony received during extensive legislative hearings during  the 104th, 105th, 107th, and 108th Congresses, Congress finds and declares  that:
  
  (A) Partial-birth abortion poses serious risks to the health of a  woman undergoing the procedure. Those risks include, among other things: An  increase in a woman's risk of suffering from cervical incompetence, a result of  cervical dilation making it difficult or impossible for a woman to successfully  carry a subsequent pregnancy to term; an increased risk of uterine rupture,  abruption, amniotic fluid embolus, and trauma to the uterus as a result of  converting the child to a footling breech position, a procedure which, according  to a leading obstetrics textbook, `there are very few, if any, indications for *  * * other than for delivery of a second twin'; and a risk of lacerations and  secondary hemorrhaging due to the doctor blindly forcing a sharp instrument into  the base of the unborn child's skull while he or she is lodged in the birth  canal, an act which could result in severe bleeding, brings with it the threat  of shock, and could ultimately result in maternal death.
  
• Partial-birth abortion also confuses the medical, legal, and ethical duties of  physicians to preserve and promote life, as the physician acts directly against  the physical life of a child, whom he or she had just delivered, all but the  head, out of the womb, in order to end that life. Partial-birth abortion thus  appropriates the terminology and techniques used by obstetricians in the  delivery of living children--obstetricians who preserve and protect the life of  the mother and the child--and instead uses those techniques to end the life of  the partially-born child.
  
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• Think of the acronym SLED as a helpful reminder of these  non-essential differences:⁴

   

   

   

  Size: True, embryos are smaller than newborns and  adults, but why is that relevant?  Do we really want to say that large  people are more human than small ones?  Men are generally larger than  women, but that doesn’t mean that they deserve more rights.  Size doesn’t  equal value.

   

   

   

  Level of development: True, embryos and fetuses are  less developed than you and I.  But again, why is this relevant?  Four  year-old girls are less developed than 14 year-old ones.  Should older  children have more rights than their younger siblings?  Some people say  that self-awareness makes one human.  But if that is true, newborns do not  qualify as valuable human beings.  Six-week old infants lack the immediate  capacity for performing human mental functions, as do the reversibly comatose,  the sleeping, and those with Alzheimer’s Disease.

   

   

   

  Environment: Where you are has no bearing on  who you are.  Does your value change when you cross the street or  roll over in bed?  If not, how can a journey of eight inches down the  birth-canal suddenly change the essential nature of the unborn from non-human to  human?  If the unborn are not already human, merely changing their location  can’t make them valuable. 

   

   

   

  Degree of Dependency: If viability makes us human,  then all those who depend on insulin or kidney medication are not valuable and  we may kill them.  Conjoined twins who share blood type and bodily systems  also have no right to life.

   

   

• Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in  10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] Twenty-two  percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2]

   

  • Forty percent of pregnancies among white women, 69% among blacks and 54%  among Hispanics are unintended.

   

  • In 2005, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million in  2000. From 1973 through 2005, more than 45 million legal abortions occurred.[2]

   

  • Each year, about two percent of women aged 15-44 have an abortion; 47% of  them have had at least one previous abortion.[3]
• The reasons women give for having an abortion underscore their understanding of  the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. Three-fourths of women cite  concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they  cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with  work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not  want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or  partner.[8]

• The number of U.S. abortion providers declined by 2% between 2000 and 2005  (from 1,819 to 1,787). Eighty-seven percent of all U.S. counties lacked an  abortion provider in 2005; 35% of women live in those counties.[2]

   

  • Forty percent of providers offer very early abortions (even before the  first missed period) and 96% offer abortion at eight weeks from the last  menstrual period. Sixty-seven percent of providers offer at least some  second-trimester abortion services (13 weeks or later), and 20% offer abortion  after 20 weeks. Only 8% of all abortion providers offer abortions at 24  weeks.[2]

   

  • The proportion of providers offering abortion at four or fewer weeks’  gestation increased from 7% in 1993 to 40% in 2005.[11]

   

  • In 2005, the cost of a nonhospital abortion with local anesthesia at 10  weeks’ gestation ranged from $90 to $1,800; the average amount paid was $413.[2]

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• There is no more pivotal  moment in the subsequent growth and development of a human being than when 23  chromosomes of the father join with 23 chromosomes of the mother to form a  unique, 46-chromosomed individual, with a gender, who had previously simply not  existed. Period. No  debate.

• There is no more pivotal moment in the subsequent growth and development of a human being than when 23 chromosomes of the father join with 23 chromosomes of the mother to form a unique, 46-chromosomed individual, with a gender, who had previously simply not existed. Period. No debate.
  
  The end does not justify the means. - Terri Burton on 2009-04-25
• Perhaps even more dangerous is the concept that it is not a precise moment, but a gradation of human worth. With this model, a preborn baby at 3 months is somewhat of a human being, but a newborn is more of a human being.
  
  So -- is a 10-year-old boy or girl more a human being than a 1-year-old? - Terri Burton on 2009-04-25
• The Roman Catholic Church has already spoken definitively on every single one of these issues, in documents ranging from Humanae Vitae to Donum Vitae to more recent declarations of the Vatican. - Terri Burton on 2009-04-25

• The terms "zygote," "pre-embryo," "embryo" and fetus can indicate in the  vocabulary of biology successive stages of the development of a human being.
• The terms "zygote," "pre-embryo," "embryo" and fetus can indicate in the  vocabulary of biology successive stages of the development of a human being.