"What Man Has Nerve To Do": The New York Full-Term Abortion Law Negates The Relevance Of The Humanity Of The Fetus.

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"Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear."

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (chap. 40).





While the issue of when a fetus becomes human is one that can and should be discussed in certain contexts, such as the cases of individual conscience, the clear message of the recent New York abortion law is that such considerations are no longer relevant to the legal debate, since there can really be no grounds for legitimate doubt that in aborting a full-term baby you are killing a fully viable human being. Indeed, at this point in New York the term “infanticide” represents a fully appropriate synonym for what they are actually endorsing. Henceforth therefore when discussing the issue of the progress of abortion in America, we should avoid being detained by questions regarding ambiguities related to early stages of fetal development.  On the level of public policy, they are simply no longer relevant, and merely cloud the issue. The discussion should focus instead on, 


(1) How its advocates are going to defend the idea of killing a fully-viable child based only on its location, namely on its being in the womb rather than out of it?


(2) How is it that, lacking any valid argument for practicing infanticide on the basis of location alone, the advocates of the New York law still shrink back from endorsing post-natal infanticide as well? Wouldn't the latter practice be less risky to the health of the mother? Or is it simply the fact that seeing a new-born baby causes one to recognize an immediate human bond accompanied by a natural protectiveness once the new born baby comes into view? Is wanting to commit the act while retaining a certain amount of emotional distance the real basis for the hesitation, killing the baby while it is still a hypothetical thing hidden there from view in the darkness of the womb, thus avoiding having to face and humanly process the reality of the act of killing the child in full view on some metal table and watching it die under the clarity that can only be provided by neon hospital lights? 


(3) That the New York law really calls for  a cessation of the use of the term "rights" in relation to it (see e.g., references to "reproductive rights"). Claiming to endow one class of humans with the "rights" to ultimately violate the "rights" of another class of humans is not a sustainable position. Such a situation has been, and often is arbitrarily imposed though the misapplication of political power, but to couch such actions in the language of "rights" is entirely inappropriate. The language of tyranny would be more correct.  The continued illegitimate use of the language of language of "rights" entraps those using it in a moral contradiction of the sort that W. E. B. Du Bois described of Jefferson Davis when he referred to the Southern President as "the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free."* 

*"Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization," in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (ed. David Levering Lewis; New York: Henry Holt, 1995) 17.

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