Abortions for Some, Miniature American Flags for Others

I came across a couple of stories this past week related to abortion. The events are actually 40+ years apart, but the similarity that made me take notice was the upbraiding from the anti-abortion camp.

In 1962, Sherri Finkbine (of Romper Room) decided to have an abortion after finding out she had been exposed to Thalidomide early on in pregnancy. After being on the market for a few years, evidence was piling up that this drug caused horrible deformations in newborns. In advance of the abortion, she went public with her situation hoping to inform expecting mothers who might be in the same boat. Let’s just say there was a bit of a backlash and she had to go to Sweden to have the abortion done; never mind that the fetus was in fact missing both legs and an arm. Here’s the article.

Not to gloss over the issue too much, but if I knew beforehand my baby would suffer from something like this or another serious abnormality, I’d probably make the exact same decision. There’s enough crap to deal with out there without being dealt such a hand to start off with.

The other story involves an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association — and a review article at that, not original research. The group involved found that based on dozens of articles, evidence indicates that a fetus does not feel pain until about the 7th month of pregnancy. The reason this topic is gaining exposure is because of a proposed federal (in US, of course) law that “would require doctors to provide fetal pain information to women seeking abortions when fetuses are at least 20 weeks old, and to offer women fetal anesthesia at that stage of the pregnancy.” (link) Basically it’s a measure to try and scare women away from abortions with the abstract idea of causing “pain” to the unborn fetus.

(How exactly to do you define that? In terms of chemical reactions alerting an organism that something not good is happening? Hopefully those involved in the anti-abortion cause are fighting for the rights of *all* organisms that experience pain — think of all the insects and bacteria killed each day by these activists alone! And don’t get me started on the wholesale slaughter of yeast in the food and beverage industry.)

Anyway, the editor of JAMA is getting quite the response to her inbox, with emails criticizing her to various degrees. I loved some of the quotes from the messages, as highly scientific reasoning has led them to say such things as “You should get a real job” and “Eternity will definitely bring justice for you”. And of course there are the accusations that the article in question and its publication are politically motivated to attack the above mentioned legislation. Oh, it just happens that the editor, Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, is Catholic and personally opposes abortion. Despite the fact that I cannot comprehend the idea of a religious scientific doctor, at least she should be given credit for not letting personal bias influence her editorial position.