|
|
|
Jewish World Review July 27, 2005 / 20 Tammuz, 5765 Roe v. Wade v. Technology By Tony Blankley
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As the John Roberts' Supreme Court nomination fight opens, the
predicted battle to save or kill Roe v Wade already has taken to the
streets, the Internet and the media. But the 32-year-old constitutional
right to an abortion may face its gravest challenge not from red state
values triumphing on the Supreme Court, but from medical research being
carried out in elite blue state universities and in Europe and Asia.
It is the very language of Roe that carries the seed of its own
possible irrelevance within the next several years. Roe enunciated the more
or less unencumbered right of a woman to obtain an abortion prior to fetal
viability. After viability, the right of states to regulate or prohibit
abortions arise. The court defined legal viability as "potentially able to
live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid."
But medical science is remorselessly advancing on two fronts
along paths that may fairly soon seize and destroy in a scientific pincer
movement the viability of Roe's reasoning.
When Roe was handed down in 1973, the survivability of
prematurely born babies was not medically possible before 28 weeks of
gestation. Today, babies born after only 20 weeks of gestation routinely
survive — and thus are viable under the Roe definition (and thus
potentially legally safe from the abortionist's medical weapons).
But radical research may soon reduce that 20 weeks to just a
few — or perhaps no weeks. At Juntendo University of Tokyo, Dr. Yoshinori
Kuwabara and his team of scientists have successfully removed goat fetuses
from mother goats and placed them in tanks of amniotic fluid stabilized at
goat body temperature, while connecting the baby goat's umbilical cord to
machines that pump in nutrients and dispose of waste.
Meanwhile, at Cornell University's Center for Reproductive
Medicine and Infertility, Dr. Hung-Ching Liu and her team of scientists have
been approaching the problem of fetal out-of-womb survival from the other
side. She is developing a full artificial womb that can receive a
just-conceived embryo — with the hope that it will successfully gestate for
the full nine months.
Her team's method is to remove cells from the mother's
endometrium (the lining the womb), and grow those cells in a
hormones-and-growth-enzymes "bath." Then they let the cells rapidly grow on
a scaffold made of biodegradable material molded in the shape of a uterus,
into which she plants the embryo. By this method Dr. Liu has already
successfully kept alive a brand-new human embryo/fetus for six days — after
which she voluntarily ended the fetus's existence to comply with current
medical ethics regulations.
While Dr. Kuwabara's technology is being designed for normal
pregnancies cut short by miscarriages, Dr. Liu's technologies will have
special appeal to homosexual couples who want to have a child, as well as
women with defective wombs and women who just can't be bothered to be
pregnant (although the first few minutes of such pregnancies might still be
valued for extraneous reasons).
But both, or either technology, once routinely available, could
have a profound, if unintended, effect on the constitutional right of
abortion. Once such technologies make it medically possible for a fetus to
be "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with
artificial aid" the language of Roe v Wade will not have to be overturned.
It could stay on the books as legally valid, but factually meaningless.
Of course the irony of all this cut so many ways, it is hard to
count. A technology designed to help homosexual couples and radical
feminists have wombless babies may come into the service of conservatives
(who oppose homosexual marriage and feminist values) as a means of ending
abortion.
Cutting the other way, it is the technology of stem cell
research and cloning (which many right-to-life conservatives want to outlaw)
that may be needed to develop a technology that could be used to effectively
legally end abortion — thus creating for such conservatives the moral
dilemma of supporting the use of what they judge to be unethical or immoral
technologies to end the greatest slaughter of the innocent (millions of
abortions a year).
These emerging technologies give academic ethicists (as well as
the rest of us amateur ethicists) plenty to think about. Remember, in Aldous
Huxley's disturbingly prescient "Brave New World," the normal people were
genetically cloned and gestated in artificial wombs, while the savages
living in remote locations were the only ones who still naturally conceived,
carried their own babies and then breast-fed them. The "normal" cloned
people thought the natural people were animals to procreate naturally. As it
always has in history, the definition of normal is subject to unexpected and
seemingly abnormal change.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
© 2005, Creators Syndicate |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||||||||
Click 
