Ramesh Ponnuru reminds us exactly how weird the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is:
What was the sequence of events? If [the woman described in a New York Times story] had fully delivered the child and then killed it, even at 18 weeks, then that wasn’t a clandestine abortion, and it wasn’t something that would have been “defined as absolutely legal in the United States.” The Born-Alive Infant Protection Act covers cases just like this hypothetical one: Once the fetus has completely left the mother’s body it is counted as a baby with a right not to be killed. As bad as the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on life issues is, it’s not that bad.
Now, my understanding is that a fetus surviving after being delivered before the 20 week mark has basically never happened, and that even up to about 23 weeks, survival is extraordinarily unlikely. So if the woman described here had, in fact, killed her just-delivered fetus, she had shortened its life by, what, minutes? Maybe hours? What sane legal system requires that we treat this little fact as irrelevant?
Update: Ramesh responds—though only in the most technical sense of the word:
If Sanchez were to walk into a hospital room and plunge a knife into the heart of a ninety-year-old woman with acute kidney failure, whose death could be assumed to be hours or even minutes away, he would quickly find out that his view of sanity is not that of the legal system in general.
Right. We’d already established that. And?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Hubert the Friar // Jan 2, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Julian said: So if the woman described here had, in fact, killed her just-delivered fetus, she had shortened its life by, what, minutes? Maybe hours? What sane legal system requires that we treat this little fact as irrelevant?
Good Lord man you can’t be serious…you’re endorsing infanticide. She hasn’t shortened it’s life by minutes, but by 70 years. It’s a living human being deserving full protection under the law. What’s your cutoff point before it becomes a crime? 10 minutes? An hour? A couple of days?
2 Jackson // Jan 2, 2007 at 11:16 pm
“killed her just-delivered fetus…”
If it’s outside the mothers body it is no longer a ‘fetus’ in scientific/medical terms. It is a baby at that point. Doesn’t matter if it’s 18 weeks or 28 weeks.
So write that question of yours one more time with the correct term and this issue should become somewhat clearer to you.
Saying “killed her just-delivered baby” is a lot different than saying “killed her just-delivered fetus”. I suspect you know that though which is why still you used the term ‘fetus’ even though it’s no longer applicable.
Killing babies you know, has that bad ring to it and all. Best to just make it nice and neat with ‘fetus’. Lets people sleep better that way…