Wesley Smith writes for National Review Online about a medical journal’s recent partisan rant.
Fetal personhood is a controversial issue that deserves respectful debate. But the New England Journal of Medicine just published a screed by two Ph.D.s associating its advocates with past slave-holding racists and — by strong implication — devaluing unborn human life as having zero intrinsic value.
First, the article claims that pregnancy has been “criminalized.” From, “Fetal Personhood and Reproductive Criminalization”:
“Fetal personhood ideology is the underlying force behind abortion bans and restrictions, the prosecution of pregnant women because of conduct deemed potentially harmful to the fetus, and fetal homicide laws that allow a fetus to be treated as the victim of a crime. As a result of this ideology being embedded in state laws and judicial decisions, states have subjected women to investigation, arrest, prosecution, incarceration, civil confinement, and other deprivations of liberty because of their pregnancy.” …
… No, not “because of their pregnancy,” but because of illegal acts committed during a pregnancy that harm or endanger the unborn.
Drug addiction may have been redefined as a medical condition, but it seems to me that does not excuse substance abusers’ endangerment of unborn babies any more than it would their harming or neglecting their children after they are born. Other fetal personhood cases have generally involved accidents or assaults by third parties that kill viable fetuses, punished in some jurisdictions as a distinct legal wrong in addition to whatever harm is done to the mother.
The column then descends into demagoguery:
“Although elements of the modern fetal personhood legal movement took shape in the 1960s, the roots of the idea of fetal personhood stretch back to the era of chattel slavery in the United States, when Black women’s bodies were treated as property and their pregnancies were subject to economic and sociopolitical control.” …
… All cruelties involving slavery were abhorrent. But the authors’ intended implications are defamatory to contemporary fetal personhood advocates, suggesting they follow in the barbaric tradition of slavery. I mean, pro-lifers want more black babies born and protected from harm, not fewer. How in the world can that be racist?
