By Paul Moreno 

January 15 -- Every political appeal today is made in terms of helping “the children,” but this perhaps indicates the guilty conscience of a people becoming inured to the destruction of its children. 

Politicians exploit the desire to help wanted children, while the unwanted and inconvenient are abandoned or killed.  The unwanted children are piling up and now a disposal crisis looms. 

Thousands of embryos have been left in cold storage at Boston’s fertility clinics, the Associated Press (covering a Wall Street Journal story) reported last week. 

“When the couple doesn’t want to implant the embryos, but can’t bring themselves to destroy their potential offspring, doctors are left with the ethical dilemma of how long they can keep a fertilized egg in suspended animation,” the AP said. 

Insurance companies, required to pay for the storage, advise them to discard the embryos as “abandoned property.”  “But few clinics have the stomach to do that,” the report noted. 

The explanation for these qualms is revealing:  It is not because these fertilized eggs are human beings, but because of the effort that parents and doctors expended to conceive them. “We know what people go through to make these embryos, and if there’s any chance they might want them back, we don’t want to throw them out,” said an infertility worker. 

Admittedly, these embryos are but two or four cells.  And even though every one of them has a unique genetic code that makes it a distinct person, it is difficult to convince people that these fertilized eggs are persons.  Some argue that life begins not at fertilization but when a fertilized egg implants itself in the uterine wall.  But one must wonder how the status of these embryos suddenly changes, turning them into objects of dignity and care, if the parents decide they “want” them.  But the dilemmas do not stop here. 

Last month the problem of what to do with older fetuses arose in California.  A trucker dumped the bodies of fifty-four aborted children on a roadside, and they were later discovered by two boys. 

“The first count came to a lot less than fifty-four,” George Will wrote in the Washington Post.  “Forgive the counters’ imprecision.  Many fetuses had been dismembered—hands, arms, legs, heads jumbled together—by the abortionist’s vigor.  An accurate count required a lot of sorting out.” 

One group wanted these abandoned children.  “Cradles of Love” proposed to take the bodies of these babies and give them a decent burial.  The ACLU tried to stop the group, fearing the suggestion that unborn children are at all human, but failed. 

The media did not make an issue of the ACLU's extreme position, being too busy doing PR for the pro-abortion forces.  The Boston Globe provided a long accolade for an abortionist (“abortion provider” is the term of choice), depicting a courageous doctor who cannot enjoy her condo’s atrium windows for fear of anti-choice assassins. 

At no point does the article describe or address what the abortionist actually does, merely noting that after performing seventeen abortions in one day she says, “I absolutely love my work.  I know that every time I do an abortion on a woman who chooses it, I am saving her life literally, figuratively.”  The life of the child does not enter into her thinking at all. 

But those who doubt that a four-cell embryo can be “aborted” will point out that most abortions take place in the early weeks of pregnancy.  But we have gone further, and now accept that children, if unwanted, can be killed up to the moment of birth.  This has been revealed by the debate over “partial-birth abortion.” 

President Clinton has killed a federal ban of partial-birth abortions, but many states have passed such laws.  Federal courts have struck most of them down.  Despite the effort of pro-life forces to focus public attention on the unborn child, judges weigh these laws only in terms of their effect on mothers. 

State laws banning partial birth abortions “never established the premise that the child is an entity, with any standing in the law,” Amherst moral philosopher Hadley Arkes writes.  Outlawing a particular type of abortion procedure would not prevent any abortions (as the laws' critics pointed out), but merely require abortionists to proceed by other means.  Judge Richard Posner, in a decision striking down Wisconsin’s partial-birth abortion ban, noted that the law “cannot save any fetuses—but can merely shift [the locus of the killing] from the birth canal to the uterus.  What interest has the state in such a shift?”  Arkes says, “It is one thing to seek to protect the child, it is quite another to bar one grisly method of killing while leaving in place the premise that the child has no claim to be protected.” 

“He is no more than a collection of body parts—a torso, a thigh, a shoulder, a groin,” wrote Eileen McNamara in the Boston Globe.  Was she describing one of the fifty-four children dumped by the roadside in California?  No.  Was she describing a "dilatation and evacuation" abortion, in which a fetus is dismembered in utero and removed from the womb piece by piece?  No.  She was reporting the trial of the killers of Eric Dawood, a six-year old mentally retarded boy beaten to death in Boston.  The same day, newspapers reported a Taunton couple accused of savagely beating a seven-month old. 

McNamara used the Dawood trial to urge the state government to spend more money on children.  Instead, she should consider that our callousness about human life from conception to birth is driving forward, as it already has to the elderly and disabled. 
 

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