Mind the Gap

Important mainstream media outlets have consciously decided not to cover the newsworthy trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist accused of killing babies who survived botched terminations.  I previously posted about this trial earlier this month.  To fill in the media coverage gap, let me point to a few pieces that stand out.

An inch of difference?

What difference does an inch make?

That is really the question raised by this USA Today column, "We've Forgotten What Belongs on Page One."

The author writes about the events that form the basis of an ongoing trial in Philadelphia about infanticide performed routinely by a physician. The question surrounds the seemingly artificial, in the author's eyes, distinction between what is moral and what is legal:

...whether [the doctor] was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.

So an inch makes the difference between what is illegal and what is legal, between permissible termination of a life and the impermissible termination of it.

The details that emerged during the trial and that are described in the column are just horrifying.  The trial seems to highlight the real dispute at issue:  not when does life begin but when does life become socially valuable?

Our enlightened society and its legal system have an answer. An inch makes all the difference.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is famous for writing in his essay "Self-Reliance" that "[a] foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers..."  Apparently, little statesmen are also wont to adore foolish inconsistencies.  And it reflects the smallness of their minds.

Terminating 2 at 20

Exercising her right to choose ... to kill her twins.

I ran across a disturbing opinion column from one week ago about a woman in Florida who was pregnant with twins.  "Was."  She is pregnant no longer.

No, she was not a sad victim of urban violence -- but her twins were.  She terminated them at twenty weeks of gestation.  She ended their lives half-way through her pregnancy.  Why?  For the supremely sensible reason that ... she just didn't want them, and she felt nothing for her twin children.

The website on which the column appears is littered with annoying political ads, and the column itself ends with an appeal to "the church" that may not make sense to readers or even follow from the text that precedes it.  But what the column does do well is to bring to attention how commonplace this sort of ending of innocent life is in the United States.

It also prompts questions in my mind about what sort of person possesses such a psychological and emotional disposition that she does not think twice about killing the two twin children who are so visibly alive and growing in her womb.  What really causes a person to feel and act that way?

Forcing the Issue

Today's The New York Times runs with a front-page story on forced abortions in China.  A woman is pictured whose child at around 36 weeks (a universally recognized point of viability) was killed by Chinese officials.  (Supposedly third-trimester terminations are illegal in this woman's province.)  The article reports on the growing push by some segments to end the policy.

The Chinese government insists that it will maintain its one-child policy, which was begun in 1980 and is a cause of many terminations in China.  The government attributes the policy to avoiding 400 million births.  Assuming that only 1 out of every 1,000 -- that is, only 0.1% -- avoided births were so avoided by termination of the child, that still amounts to 400,000 deaths.

That amount of deaths might garner "epidemic" status if the issue were different, say, West Nile virus.  That hypothetical figure of 400,000, as large as it is, still is less than one-half of the actual number of abortions performed in the United States each year, for example, about 860,000 in 2006 which were aided by publicly funded family planning services.  For comparison, the Rawandan genocide in 1994 involved the murder of an estimated 800,000 people.  That was genocide and in one year, not a "political disagreement" and per annum.  Maybe the problem in China is an epidemic; apparently it is not at home.  To the child in utero, however, that abortion to end life is, well, forced.

A tad more than a $6,300 fine

This article in today's The New York Times about a Chinese woman's pregnancy and the government's decision to execute her child touches on some topics I raised in previous posts this month (first here and then here).

Safe, Legal, and Targeted

Is it morally permissible to terminate a human life based upon that life-holder's sex (male or female) as long as the decision to terminate is free rather than forced?

This is essentially the question that was voted on in the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday.  Technically, the question was the legality, not the morality, but never mind since those are confused in promulgating legislation that is supposed to reflect society's sense of justice, or what is right, which is to say what is moral.  Congress took up the question of selective abortion -- i.e., the termination of the life -- of a healthy and developing human fetus based on sex, especially if the baby is female.

The answer that Congress gave in its procedural way was yes.  Freedom of one's individual will is so important, evidently, that it allows one legally to discriminate lethally against another.  Free termination of a life based upon sex discrimination is legally permissible.  The message of the government, then, is that it is morally acceptable in the United States.

Perhaps reflecting home country bias, forced and frequently selective termination as practiced, for example, in China and India, is, however, not acceptable -- in fact it is condemnable -- according to U.S. standards.  This practice in China and India is commonly called gendercide, or female foeticide.  The definition includes the deliberate determination to commit the killing act.  Whether one party is forced or free, a deliberate determination to kill an innocent is made.

Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton has said that this termination of a female life based on the fact that the child is female should be stopped:

Obviously, there’s work to be done in both India and China, because the infanticide rate of girl babies is still overwhelmingly high, and unfortunately with technology, parents are able to use sonograms to determine the sex of a baby, and to abort girl children simply because they’d rather have a boy.

So has the typically ineffective United Nations.

This raises a number of moral questions that relate to very practical considerations of wisdom:

• Should one's individual freedom of decision be held in such high esteem that the state entrenches lethal sexual discrimination of females?
• Could one legitimately call these targeted killings?
• Why is the practice in one country acceptable but not in another?
• What is the real "war on women"?