Headlines beneath the fold

Supreme court bans Partial Birth Abortion. A barbaric procedure that is so dangerous to the mother that we don't even do it for dead babies (danger of perforation and hemorrhage).

So now abortionists will have to kill the kid with injections before doing a safer delivery for mom, at least until we get a few moms dead from the KCl injections...

the dirty little secret is that when we deliver kids early to save the mom's life or health (e.g. toxemia, lupus, heart disease), it is not an abortion, it is an induction of labor. The difference? We also try to save the kid. Of course, a lot of times you have a 1 lb kid with little chance of living. Should you go and treat a kid with less than a ten percent chance of living (meaning you torture the 90 percent with tubes and isolation before they die) or let mom hold the kid until it dies? They've been arguing that for 50 years...but 50 years ago we argued it about 3 lb babies, who with modern care do fine.

So let's not hear of "mother's health" as a reason for or against delivering these kids alive. If the mom is in danger, so is the kid, and if she is so sick that we have to remove the kid, the kid's chances of living is better outside than inside. If you have an easy answer, let me know.

But the dirty little secret is that most of these are done for convenience, or when a child with abnormalities is expected. Think Down's syndrome, average IQ 50. Mom hears the kid will be retarded and often a "vegatable" (which is not true for Down's syndrome, by the way) and panics into aborting it. Similar scare jobs are done for children with myelomeningocoels.

Again, with some abnormalities (anencephaly, myelomeningocoels, bad kidneys,) there is so much amniotic fluid that we induce labour and if the child has a lethal disease it dies. But again, this is not an abortion, although some prolifers who are not docs call it a live birth abortion. Nope. The object is to save mom's life and health.

No easy answers, but before the "perfect baby perfectly planned to fit into our life" ideas started, it used to be babies were sent by God and even if the child was imperfect, well, somehow you'd find a way to cope.