PI and The Baby Cudgel

CAUTION:

THIS POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING IMAGES OF A DECEASED INFANT WITH PATAU'S SYNDROME.

Gary Graham, best known for his portrayal of a Vulcan in TV's Star Trek, is a man with a pricked conscience. Like an ex-smoker or someone who's suddenly got God, Mr Graham has suddenly decided that the most cathartic recovery from his past is to tell anyone who'll listen - loudly. Writing in a blog, he opines:

"No. I’m going to say it. I’m going to say what millions know in the front of their brains, and many, many more millions know in the depths of their hearts…but won’t allow themselves to think it, much less feel it. And believe me, I know I’ll be hated for saying it, I’ll be hated by people who don’t know me, have never worked with me, have never golfed with me, had a drink with me, shot the shit with me. They’ve never met me, don’t want to meet me…but they will hate me. I’m going to say it anyway: Abortion is murder."

I don't hate you Gary, I just think you're nerve-jarringly stupid and more than a little guilty of youthful hubris having paid for THREE abortions. Gary goes on:

"I have been on all sides of this issue for most of my life, and I can simply not escape the logic. That fetus a pregnant woman is carrying inside of her, regardless of the gestation stage, is a living, breathing human being. Yes, breathing – the amniotic sac forms 12 days after conception, and in the second trimester the baby is actually breathing the amniotic fluid. It’s not an ‘unviable tissue mass.’ Not a wart, a mole, a skin outcropping, a boil, or a bundle of uncoordinated cells. It’s not just a ‘fetus’."

Yes Gary, a foetus: not a baby. At 12 weeks (the end of the first trimester) the baby is no more capable of living outside the mother's uterus than (with apologies to Douglas Adams) a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster can survive being being bludgeoned by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. It's not viable and therefore, not a fucking baby so stop using the word like a cudgel - it's a red herring. Get over it.

What you call a baby, more correctly a zygote, embryo or foetus depending on the stage of development does not once breath until it leaves the amniotic fluid. Certainly, it inhales - and even swallows - large amounts of the stuff, but its lungs do not exchange oxygen and CO2: that's breathing.

If abortion is murder (as you say) then you are also admitting to being accessory to that - on three occasions by your own admission. You may now go to jail, do not pass go and do not collect $200.

The truth sometimes hurts. You used your good looks to bed at least three girls, failed to take even basic precautions and then left them to suffer. I could almost understand one mistake - but three! Fuck me - don't ask for my forgiveness or understanding because you won't get it.

By like the argument over evolution, a personal favourite of mine, it's not really that simple.

Pro-choice advocates want every pregnancy to reach a natural conclusion - and if every pregnancy was healthy then maybe they have a point, but this isn't that simple.

Let's put aside the proactive birth control that you paid for (I guess rubbers were really expensive in your day) and consider just a couple of examples.

What about an ectopic pregnancy? Should we let that mature until the foetus gets so large that the mother's fallopian tube ruptures and she bleeds internally to death in agony?

What about Patau syndrome? Look at this!
Should we allow this pregnancy to continue until what you call a baby spontaneously aborts - or lives for a few hours and days in agony? That's a baby Gary! "A" is his "face" and "B" is a closeup on his eyes - if they can be called that.

A 37 2/7 week gestational age male infant with Patau syndrome demonstrating alobar holoprosencephaly with cyclopia. A) Facial features included sloping forehead with a proboscis superior to a single central palpebral fissure. B) Close-up of the fused eyelids and proboscis showing a single nostril. C) Polydactyly showing six digits. D) Posterior view of the brain showing indistinct gyri, fusion of the hemispheres, and occipital encephalocele.E) Transposition of the aorta (A), and hypoplastic pulmonary trunk (P). F) Trisomy 13 [47, XY, +13] (karyotype by Giemsa-banding).

Chan et al. Diagnostic Pathology 2007 2:48 doi:10.1186/1746-1596-2-48

That's the choice - because like PI, it's not that simple.

UPDATE:

Therese in the comments has chided me (as is her absolute right) for pulling a particularly nasty example of Patau's and I agree with her that no woman should be forced to terminate any pregnancy. (Google for some more images if you can stomach them.)

Her own child is one of the rare survivors - and that's great. But Trisomy 13 is not just identifiable by blood-screening it can be visualised better than ever before on advanced ultrasound.

Yet I this isn't about Trisomy 13 - it's about choice; informed choice.

I am sick of being battered about the head by these lame "abortion is murder" arguments which rely on deeply held emotion and are invariably driven by religious belief. This unfortunate is the other side of that coin - if this poor creature had been terminated, would that have been better for mother and child alike?

Could you decide? Should you?

We should never, ever legislate the choice away: no matter how hard a choice it is, it's not ours to make.