Arkansas Limits Abortion to First Trimester

Orville Faubus, Gov of Arkansas Resists Integration

Arkansas State Capital 

There are certain issues which seem to brook no compromise. Slavery was one of these. You were either for slavery or against it; it was either evil for one man to "own" another or it was not. If it was not, then a human being could be property and treated as property. Unless you were Abraham Lincoln, who sought a third way, by saying slavery had to end, but it ought to be phased out by 1900 or maybe 1940. Lincoln sought a compromise less drastic than a civil war, but even he could not hold back the tide of history.

Abortion is another one of those issues.  It involves the unknowable: When does life begin? What is in the mind of God? Who can speak for God? 

The Phantom wrote his senior thesis on abortion in college, and although the Phantom was a science major, he realized he needed to find a faculty adviser who knew how to look at the issues involved and he found one, in the Department of Religious Studies, an episcopal priest, Donald Colenback. Sitting in the professor's office the Phantom tried to answer the questions hurled at him from the professor:  When does the termination of existence become the termination of human life?  If you can insert a blade up the birth canal and cut out the conceptus at 36 weeks, a few weeks prior to delivery, is that abortion or infanticide?  All the organs are formed. The conceptus, were it delivered by C section could likely survive with intensive care in a neonatal ICU. What about using that blade 15 seconds before that conceptus emerges into the air, as it is sliding down the birth canal? Is that abortion or infanticide?  Suppose you insert that blade or a suction catheter at six weeks of gestation? Is that infanticide?

One thing the Phantom knew, from his four years as a biology major is life is not defined by science. "Life" is defined by theologians, or by citizens, but science cannot answer questions about when life begins.  If the theologian says life begins when the fetus emerges into the air and takes his first breath, the doctor waits for that to happen and says, "It's alive."  If life begins at quickening, when the mother first feels the fetus move in the womb, then the scientist detects quickening by placing a hand on the womb, or an ultrasound, and then he says, "It's alive."  If life begins once the fertilized egg, one egg cell, one sperm cell united, implant into the womb,  then the scientist can look for evidence of implantation and say, "It's a life."

If life begins at conception, when a one cell sperm enters a one cell egg, then the scientist detects that event and says, "It's a life."

When the Phantom first saw an abortion by dilatation and curretage in medical school, he watched the doctor who performed the procedure inspect the smear of blood from his metal instrument on a gauze pad, looking for fetal material and what looked like nothing more significant than a chunk of skin from a skinned knee was all there was visible of that "life," and the Phantom found it hard to think of that blob as a human being. There was potential there, like the potential in any seed, but there was nothing the Phantom could, emotionally, think of as a human life.

On the other hand, when the Phantom saw a "salting out" of a perfectly formed 28 week old fetus, and that doll like thing was carried on a metal tray into a utility room and disposed of--that looked like infanticide to the phantom, and he was appalled.

At a certain point the thing passes from a small bit of tissue which is mostly potential but little realization, into a larger, formed thing which is enough realization and beyond just potential. 

So, for the Phantom, the line drawing between abortion and infanticide was all about line drawing, where you draw the line.

Reading Roe vs Wade, the Phantom marveled at how the Justices of the Supreme Court of the  United States got it just about right. They drew the line at was in the early 1970's the point of "viability"  that is, the point at which the fetus was capable of survival outside the womb, even if that survival was possible only in a neonatal ICU.

The problem with that line drawn is everyone realized, it would be a movable line--as technology improved, the point of viability would move earlier and earlier in pregnancy as neonatal intensive care got more sophisticated.  Now a 24 week old fetus stands a good chance in an NICU. So that's when life "begins" in the 21st century, if life means the point of viability.

The Arkansas legislature has now seen fit to draw the line at 12 weeks.  The Republican majority reasons that if all the organs are fully formed, even if they are barely visible with the naked eye, and if you can convict a man of murder who beats a woman who is 12 weeks pregnant and she loses that fetus and aborts, then you have defined a life as being present at 12 weeks. After all, you cannot murder what is not alive.

There is certainly reason in this. Defining abortion and infanticide is about line drawing. Arkansas draws the line early. Who are we, in New Hampshire to tell Arkansas where to draw that line? 

The Phantom might well draw that line later. The percentage of "fetal wastage" is thought to be high early on in pregnancy. A woman is a little late for her period, has a heavy flow and that was a lost pregnancy. She never even knows she was pregnant. Treating that 2 week or even 4 week tissue as a human life, which requires last rites strikes the Phantom as a bit bizarre. 

In the days when Purgatory was a place all those unbaptized souls went, it must have been a crowded place, if those fragments of tissues all had souls.

If a two cell organism if a human life, before it even implants into the womb, then Plan B might be considered an abortifacient--although now there is evidence Plan B simply prevents conception. And IUD might be an abortion machine, unless it works by preventing the sperm from meeting the egg.  Only condoms and birth control pills would be true contraceptives, the first preventing sperm from meeting egg and the second preventing ovulation and the production of an egg. 

The big question remains:  In the absence of knowledge, what can we do? One approach would be to say, well, if we can't be sure when it's alive, let us err on the side of life and not allow interference with the progress of the pregnancy at the earliest stage it is even remotely possible we are dealing with an ensouled bit of tissue. But that might be at the two cell stage and then we are back to some very early bits of tissue and more potential than realization.

The Phantom does not know where to draw the line. He does know the mother must have some right to exert her own judgment since, beyond the conceptus, she is the one most intimately affected by the decision.  She is the one who will have to carry, deliver and ultimately either care for the child or give it up and live with the knowledge her child is making its way through life without her. 

If you read that De Maupassant story about the mother who gives up her child to be raised in luxury by a rich family which provides a wonderful, fulfilling life for the child rather than being raised in the  abject poverty in her home, and you think: the mother who was wiling to give up her child had the best interests of the child at heart, rather than the mother who clung to her child and raised it in squalor, then you might say, sometimes the emotionally conventional thing is not the right thing. Sometimes giving up that child may be the best thing. 

Children who are raised in unwelcoming circumstances may have a happy life, but it is possible and the Phantom thinks even likely, their lives will be lives of misery, and there is some evidence, lives of crime and a burden to society. 

Of course, then you are arguing some lives are so miserable, so bereft of love and so entrenched in suffering, they were never worth living.  There were slave women, maybe some of them were in Arkansas, who slit the throats of their own babies as they were being returned to a slave state, having briefly escaped. These mothers killed their own babies rather than allow them to live as slaves.  Thus was a clear eyed, bleak but informed judgment from women in dire circumstances. Could you say they acted from selfishness?  The Phantom thinks not. He respects their judgment. 

How different is the judgment of the woman who chooses abortion for a child she knows she will not be able to provide a decent life?

There are no easy answers here. There may not even be uniform answers. What is right for Arkansas may not be right for New Hampshire.