Posted: 6/1/2003 12:01:12 PM EDT
[url]http://www.msnbc.com/news/920645.asp?0bl=-0[/url] the poll is down the right side a bit results:
2674 responses The same rights accorded children and adults 72% The same rights, but only after they are viable outside the womb 16% None until they're born 12%
View Quote here's the story The War Over Fetal Rights By Debra Rosenberg, Newsweek
It was nearly Valentine's Day, 1992, when Tracy Marciniak's estranged husband, Glenndale Black, showed up at her Wisconsin apartment. A 28-year-old mother of two, Marciniak was expecting another baby in just five days. But the night was hardly romantic. Within hours, the two argued and Black punched her in the stomach.
"IT FELT LIKE IT had gone all the way through me," says Marciniak, now 39. The baby, whom she'd already named Zachariah, had seemed fine on a prenatal visit just the day before, she says. But when she arrived at the hospital that night, doctors couldn't find his heartbeat. Marciniak pulled through, but the baby did not. Because Zachariah was not considered a "born person," prosecutors could not charge Black with homicide. They attempted to try him under an old state law banning illegal abortion, but Black's lawyer argued that the baby would have been stillborn anyway. In the end, a jury convicted Black of reckless injury and sentenced him to 12 years in prison. Though Marciniak has long supported abortion rights, she became furious when she discovered that the law didn't protect her unborn son--and that women's groups wouldn't back her quest for a state law punishing his killer. Now she is allied with the National Right to Life, appearing in an ad for the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act. "There were two victims," Marciniak says. "He got away with murder."
PARENTAL CONFLICTS Halfway across the country, in Connecticut, Pieter and Monica Coenraads want to defend their child, too. But as observant Roman Catholics, they've had to confront a question that strikes at the core of their religious and moral beliefs: Monica, 40, is so opposed to abortion she decided to skip amniocentesis in all three of her pregnancies, even though such testing is standard in older mothers. Whatever the test results, Monica knew she would never choose to terminate a pregnancy. Their first daughter, Chelsea, was born apparently healthy, but at the age of 2 she was diagnosed with Rett syndrome, a debilitating neurological disorder (which would not have been picked up by the amnio in any case). Now 6, Chelsea thinks clearly but cannot feed herself, walk without assistance or speak.
The Coenraadses believe that the only hope for their daughter and for the estimated 15,000 children like her is embryonic stem-cell research--which requires destroying human embryos. "My conscience tells me that for me personally having an abortion would not be the right thing to do. That same conscience tells me that stem-cell research is needed," says Monica, who now helps run the Rett Syndrome Research Foundation from her dining room.
The politics of the womb have never been more personal--or more complicated. When abortion foes are willing to destroy embryos for lifesaving medical research and abortion-rights supporters are willing to define a fetus as a murder victim, the black-and-white rhetoric of the 1970s abortion wars no longer applies. People on all sides of the debate are confronting long-held beliefs, often sending their most private emotions on a collision course with their political principles. With the Laci Peterson case making headlines and Congress poised to tackle both the Unborn Victims of Violence Act and the ban on partial-birth abortion this month, fetal rights have found new prominence on the public stage.
Recent dramatic breakthroughs in fetal and reproductive medicine only add to the confusion. Once just grainy blobs on a TV monitor, new high-tech fetal ultrasound images allow prospective parents to see tiny fingers and toes, arms, legs and a beating heart as early as 12 weeks. But while these images can make parents' hearts leap for joy, they also pack such an emotional punch that even the most hard-line abortion-rights supporters may find themselves questioning their beliefs. View Quote [img]http://a799.g.akamai.net/3/799/388/548d06926b51bd/www.msnbc.com/news/1917437.jpg[/img] A 3-D ultrasound image taken of the development of a fetus (clockwise from upper left) at seven, nine, 13, 16, 23 and 35 weeks When 100,000 times a year, doctors are joining sperm and egg in a petri dish, and sometimes freezing the leftovers to be implanted in a woman at a later date, the question "When does life begin?" takes on new resonance. When specialists can do lifesaving surgery in utero, fetuses that once might have been terminated now have a shot at a normal life.
THE MEANING OF LIFE Along with forcing Americans into more-nuanced stances, the new science is also fanning longstanding, divisive political feuds--over the legality and morality of ending a pregnancy, about the rights of a woman versus the rights of an embryo or fetus, and, ultimately, over the meaning of human life. Abortion foes hope to take advantage of the new technology and sympathetic political environment to win fresh support. For their part, abortion-rights activists worry that the new focus on the fetus is part of a broad strategy to undermine the very bedrock of Roe v. Wade.
Activists on both sides are struggling to tread this new territory without losing their political footing. For decades, abortion opponents have offered moral and ethical arguments about protecting the fetus. Now they're building a legal case, defining the fetus--and even the embryo--as an individual entitled to basic human rights. With the recent murders of Laci Peterson and her unborn son, Conner, nearly 9 months old, abortion-rights supporters are finding it increasingly difficult to claim credibly that a fetus just a few weeks, or even days, from delivery is not entitled to at least some protections under the law--but they vigorously argue against such laws anyway, fearing that giving a fetus rights will lead to the collapse of abortion protections. "If they are able to make fetuses people in law with the same standing as women and men, then Roe will be moot," says Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt. On the other side of the debate, the anti-abortion camp strives to make laws protecting a woman's right to choose seem absurd. "It's not OK for the husband to kill his wife's child, but it's OK for the mother [to have an abortion]?" asks Ken Connor, president of the anti-abortion Family Research Council. But by equating any use of embryonic research with murder, and even objecting to the storage of undeveloped embryos for future use by potential parents, anti-abortion activists risk alienating many Americans. (According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, 49 percent of Americans think it's OK for an IVF clinic to destroy human embryos with the parents' approval.)
Without any nationwide consensus, individual states have begun settling on their own answers. Last month Gov. Jeb Bush asked a Florida court to appoint a guardian for the fetus of a 22-year-old developmentally disabled woman. A judge is scheduled to rule on the request this week. Within the past year, lawmakers in Georgia and Oklahoma introduced long-shot bills that would routinely require a woman seeking an abortion to obtain a "death warrant" for her fetus. Courts would then appoint a guardian for the fetus and hold a hearing to determine whether a woman could end her pregnancy. Neither bill is considered likely to pass, but they are visible signs of how abortion foes are using fetal rights as new ammunition in the abortion war.
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