Maybe we shouldn't be killing babies in the first place

Many years ago, when I was in college, I was encouraged that the media elites and many in academia had begun to notice the hurdles that the abortion proponents had to jump at every turn. An article in the Chicago Tribune dated October 10, 1983, reveals the recognition of these hurdles:

If Abortion Becomes Murder

Surely when the Supreme Court decided more than a decade ago that women had an almost unrestricted right to abortion, the justices never foresaw the kind of tragedy that led, last week, to a physician being convicted of murder in connection with the termination of a pregnancy.

Dr. Raymond Showery was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges that he drowned an infant in a bucket of water and dropped the body in a plastic bag after the baby survived a hysterotomy abortion. Although the mother was reported to be 24 weeks pregnant, witnesses described the newborn as weighing 3 to 5 pounds. The bag was apparently thrown away; the infant's body was not subsequently found.

Dozens of other infants have been born alive as a result of abortions. Most are too small and too damaged by the abortion process to survive for more than a few minutes or a few hours. Most states have laws requiring that such infants be treated as other premature babies and every effort made to keep them alive.There have been other instances in which physicians have been tried on charges of killing a baby who survived abortion. Dr. Williams Waddill, accused of choking to death a 2 pound, 14 ounce girl following a saline abortion, went through two long trials, but charges were finally dismissed when neither jury could reach a verdict. Dr. Kenneth Edelin, who allegedly stalled in completing a hysterotomy abortion to make sure the baby was dead, was found guilty of manslaughter, but the Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed the decision. It is a tragic irony that physicians can be charged—and in Dr. Showery's case, convicted—for murder in killing a baby outside his mother's womb just minutes after it is perfectly legal to kill the same infant inside his mother's body. It is even more ironic that the infant who can be killed legally is probably healthy and normal; the abortion survivor who must be kept alive no matter what is almost certainly damaged by the abortion process, may suffer serious, lifelong handicaps as a result of being born so prematurely, and has parents who tried to end his life because they so intensely didn't want him.

The Supreme Court's 1973 decision legalizing abortion rested on assumptions about scientific facts that may have been dubious even at the time. Since then, new medical technology and new neonatal intensive care centers have made it possible for babies to survive after much shorter pregnancies than envisioned a decade ago. The inevitable result will be that more infants are going to survive abortion, although the odds are high that they will have serious handicaps as a result and taxpayers and health insurers will not only have to pay for expensive neonatal care for them, but perhaps lifelong institutionalization as well.

The Supreme Court isn't likely to reverse the basic thrust of Roe v. Wade, the case that made abortion legal. The court has already overturned many state and federal laws that sought to put restrictions on the access to abortion....

As Franky Schaeffer said regarding this article in his book Bad News For Modern Man, "The Tribune, while clearly seeing the absurdity of doing everything possible to kill babies in the womb at one moment and then at the next moment turning around and doing everything possible to save those same babies when the "abortion procedures" don't work, fails to make the simple, logical connection—that maybe we shouldn't be killing babies in the womb in the first place."

May God have mercy on our nation.