The Murder in the Middle by Diane Carey

In the early 1980s, I met a woman and her two-year-old son, who was adopted from India. As I bounced this wild handful on my knee, his mother laughed because she’d asked the adoption agency for a handicapped child who might be “slow,” easier for a 50-year-old single mother to handle. I asked how she’d ended up with this strong, bright, perfect little boy. She took out photos.

I found myself looking at an embryo. The pictured infant’s skin was pale and veined, giant eyes protruding from a narrow head which was too big for the newt-like body. Obviously under-cooked, he was more like a fish than a human.

In India, the mom explained, nuns paw through dumpsters outside abortion clinics. If they find a breathing fetus, they take it and try to make it live.

Yes . . . in my arms was a rescued abortion.

With that little boy in mind, even if we can’t agree about the moment of conception, can’t we at least agree that at some point before birth, a person is indeed “a person?”

How about if we start with a “viable fetus” – an infant who can survive outside the woman’s body. That points us at procedures like partial birth abortion, in which the child is pulled part of the way out of the woman, then his head is cut open and his brains is sucked out. Then he’s pulled the rest of the way out.

What kind of moral mutant could possibly be “for” this?

Abortions of viable fetuses are especially barbaric simply because the baby doesn’t just die... he has to be actively murdered. Because this is hard to defend, pro-choicers don’t talk about the death of the baby. Instead, they talk about being “for” the “health of the mother.” OK, let’s have a look.

First of all, she’s a woman, but not a mother. She’s avoiding being a mother, so let’s not call her that. Mothers fight for their babies’ lives, not against them.

The “health” argument assumes that most, some, or even any partial-birth or late-term abortions are performed on women who are sick and pregnancy is endangering their very lives. I understand that. My sister-in-law had pre-eclampsia. Doctors pushed for abortion to save her life. She refused. She nearly died, but she fought for her baby and won. That, my friends, is a real mother.

Partial-birth abortion, or any viable-fetus abortion, is actually a birth, except there’s a murder somewhere in the middle. How does it help the woman’s health if the child is pulled halfway out, then killed, when pulled all the way out? If the child is pulled out alive, is the woman’s health any worse? If we just don’t do the brain-sucking part on the baby, is the woman any sicker?

The big lie of the “health or life of the woman” argument is that the woman’s life-style is in danger. Her “health” is defined as her financial condition, her home life, her job situation, her emotional state or whether she’ll just be inconvenienced by this child.

And then there’s that “protecting future pregnancies” hogwash. Kill this baby so the woman can have babies in the future? That’s like the Menendez brothers slaughtering their parents, then asking for sympathy from the jury because they’re orphans now.

So we agree that the baby isn’t allowed to kill the pregnant woman, yet we allow a woman to kill her baby for some mighty flimsy reasons.
Instead of partial birth abortion, let’s just do entire-birth births. Adoptive parents like me would be happy to take over and leave the birth-woman’s style, home life, emotional state alone. She’ll have plenty of time to look after her “health.”

If a living baby can be pulled out of a woman and somehow that’s healthy for her, let’s just not commit the murder in the middle.

Then we’ll have two healthy people. Simple.

A resident of Owosso, Diane Carey is a New York Times bestselling author.

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