ABORTION: COURTS REVEAL FUZZINESS OF ISSUE

It must be tough to be a judge in today's world. It's a funny thing about law: if you remove its moral foundation, all basis for righteousness and justice continually shifts, like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the winds of relativism.

The latest slippery slope judges and attorneys are attempting to scale involves one of the most volatile issues of our time abortion.

The landmark Supreme Court decision that declared abortion a constitutionally protected right in 1973 has been the focus of public debate ever since, and the courts themselves have done little to clarify the chaos.

In our secularized, materialistic society, people tend to deal with such issues strictly in utilitarian terms. If human beings are just one species of animal evolved from the same ingenious glob of goo that made all other species, and if reality is only impersonal energy shaped by chance, then it follows that there is nothing particularly wrong with abortion on demand as a form of birth control or offspring selection.

But when the issue is analyzed in light of an external reference point that says human life, created in the image of God, is sacred regardless of its function or ability to function, then the abortion question becomes simply: Does a woman's right to end a pregnancy supplant the unborn child's right to birth?

In a hedonistic culture, all things are relative to society's secular purposes. Created in the image of God? Life inherently sacred? It's just so ... prudish.

The "enlightened" apologists for the Supreme Court declare its members justified within the framework of the Constitution, which they claim is a "living document" subject to constant interpretation and re-evaluation. That's their claim, anyway.

In Roe v. Wade, the court ruled that based on this pliable Constitution a fetus in certain cases is something less than an unborn human child. Forget the question of when life begins, medical professionals have long affirmed that point is conception. What the court dealt with was the point at which the fetus becomes "viable," magically transformed from a globule of useless tissue into an unborn human child with rights including, presumably, the right to life. The court determined the viability process takes place the moment the fetus enters its third trimester of gestation. With such an arbitrary yardstick, it wasn't difficult to predict the subsequent ethical quandary.

As medical technology advances, the survival rate of premature babies increases, even among second-trimester "preemies." Doesn't this make it more difficult to apply the court's "viability" standard? And what about the occasional "unsuccessful" abortions that result in a live, albeit maimed, child?

A series of articles in the Dec. 9 issue of the Missouri Lawyers Weekly helps to underscore how fuzzy the abortion issue has become. An article titled "Drunk Driver Gets Manslaughter For Viable Fetus' Death" is particularly interesting. The article relates to a recent ruling by a Missouri Court of Appeals that found a drunk driver could be convicted of involuntary man~slaughter for causing the death of a fetus, which Missouri law considers a "person."

The court found that, according to medical evidence, the child could have lived outside its mother's uterus. The drunk driver argued that Missouri law, which since 1986 states the "life of each human being begins at conception," is unconstitutional, but the appeals court affirmed the driver's conviction without relying on the controversial statute defining when life begins.

Instead the Western District decided simply that the "legislative purpose" of Missouri's involuntary manslaughter statute was "to give more protection to the viable fetus, not less."

Another case in the same issue of the paper told of a Waynesville woman whose baby was born drunk. Charges of second degree assault and child endangerment were filed against the woman, and the case is pending in Pulaski County.

Do unborn children have rights or not? Clearly, these and similar cases establish "viability" as the battleground for both criminal and civil suits involving injuries to unborn children.

In the Lawyers Weekly issue, attorneys said the recent decision is consistent with the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision because it involved a third trimester pregnancy. But surely "viability" of a fetus can't be tied exclusively to fetuses in the seventh, eighth and ninth months of pregnancy.

It seems judges and attorneys are willing to closely scrutinize an unborn child's rights when they're being violated by a drunk driver or drunk mother, but refuse to name as a defendant the mother who has a convenience abortion in the third trimester of her pregnancy.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year the results of a poll that found only about 5 percent of all abortions involve the so-called "hard cases" of rape, incest, or a serious threat to the woman's health. The rest could be classified as convenience abortions, or "birth control" abortions, which Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of. Not only are about 40 percent of all abortions today repeat procedures, as reported by the Journal, but 16,000 abortions each year or roughly 45 every day are performed after the 20th week of pregnancy.

Indeed, Roe v. Wade essentially has prohibited state restrictions on abortion. The result is that most states give women the legal authority to procure an abortion at any stage in her pregnancy for any reason she finds compelling.

How can the courts morally and legally wrestle with the issue of fetal rights in one case (a pregnant woman whose child is killed by someone's negligence or a baby born drunk), but not another (late-term abortions-on-demand)?

It's important to understand that those of us who oppose abortion aren't resisting only abortion, per se, but an abortion mentality that cheapens the sanctity of human life and leads to all variety of civil rights abuses and an overall moral indifference by mankind.

It's the responsibility of individual citizens to resist such indifference and defend the defenseless. It's up to the courts to clarify the abortion issue and resolve such irrational predicaments as how is it that a fetus is not considered a person while inside the womb, but seconds later its gasps for breath outside the womb become the life struggle of a young child who's inherited the law's full protection.