Awareness of Intrauterine Life

Of course, not everyone is aware of this picture of intrauterine life. A medical social worker in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Monash University, Melbourne, presented to women booking in at an antenatal clinic a blank diagram of a trunk and asked them to draw on it just where they thought their baby was and what it was like at their particular maturity.

She collected a fasinating assortment of amoebae, jellyfish and tadpoles located everywhere from the pelvis to the diaphragm. Such naivety is surprising but hardly alarming, because it is amenable to teaching and there are many excellent books and films as teaching aids.

More sinister is the attitude of people who do, or whould, know better, but choose to suppressor deny their knowledge. A Select Commission in South Australia in 1966, having to accept on the evidence before them that logically human life was a continuum, beginning at conception, then disarmingly remakred: "However, many people simply will not accept this conclusion", and proceeded to the novel argument that criminal law should be amended to cater for popular ignorance.

A less blatant but more persistent variant of this flat denial is seen int he use of words. Despite the time-honoured use of: such terms as "quick with child" and "heavy with child", the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child is criticised for bringing children into the issue of abortion at all. You may speak of terminating a pregnancy, not of exterminating the fetus.

Now pregnancy is a state, and a sell-terminating state at that - no pregnancy goes on forever. Sometimes in late pregnancy, with severe toxaemia, serious haemorrhage or fetal illness, we will deal with the problem by terminating the state of pregnancy, but not by exterminating the fetus - rather, we will energetically strive, and probably succeed, in saving the child.

Here a clear distinction is made between the pregnancy, the state, and the fetus, the entity. In the abortion argument this distinction is wilfully confused; but the facade cracked a little with the Edelin case: the defence was advanced that the abortionist was not required to expect the child would survive; indeed the whole purpose of the act was to guarantee that it did not.

Even the "liberal" interpretation of R.v. Bourne perpetuates the confusion for what Mr Justice MacNaghten considered was "the probably consequence of the pregnancy will be to make the woman a mental or physical wreck". In the vast majority of abortions nowadays no-one is suggesting that continuation of the pregnancy represents any particular risk to the woman. It is the survival of the child that must be prevented.

Others acknowledge the existence of intrauterine life, but qualify it in terms which suit their purpose in destroying it. One writer in the New Zealand Law Journal a few years back proudly paraded his elementary knowledge and ignorance of biology and medicine by suggesting that we should take an evolutionary view of abortion - that as the conceptus was in turn a amoeba, a jellyfish, a tadpole, a monkey, etc., so it increasingly deserved recognition and protection.

His argument, of course, is flatly contradicted by other abortion advocates, American researchers who insist the reason they must do research on human fetuses is because they are human, not animal.

However, apart from the absolute nonsense of this writer's premise, his argument has certain attractions if logically continued beyond the point where he found it convenient to abandon it.

If the human fetus were an animal, then its welfare might be entrusted to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, where I feel it might well be safer than at the present mercy of the Health Department. Moreover the hackles of the SPCA would rise at the physical treatment it received.

Another qualification or disqualification attached to our developing human is that he is incapable of independent existence or is previable. However, the concept of independent existence or viability does not negate the existence or human-ness of under which that life can continue.

By the same token, as a [unclear: physio can] define quite accurately the [unclear: ph] conditions (and ridiculously [unclear: cir] they are) under [unclear: when the] lives of everyone here today may continue. Anyone proclaiming incapability of independent existance, even in a social sense, as a forfeiture of a claim to life should think carefully the next time they plan to call a doctor themselves.