Saturday, February 24, 2007

LEGAL RIGHTS OF THE UNBORN



C. The obstetrician has two patients. Mother and child.


(1) The obstetrician has two patients: mother and child. It is deplorable to think that discussions of mortality can so easily exclude the child. The court should recognize that the mortality to the child is nearly 100%. Only an occasional child has the strength to survive. Let us not forget that abortion kills children of varying ages and stages of development. Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Supreme Court of the United States, October, 1971. p. 46

(2) "Our own repeated observation of a large group of fetal infants (an individual born and living at any time prior to forty weeks of gestation) left us with no doubt that psychologically they were individuals. Just as no two looked alike, so no two behaved precisely alike. One was impassive when another was alert. Even among the youngest there were discernable differences in vividness, reactivity and responsiveness. Those were genuine individual differences, already prophetic of the diversity which distinguishes the human family." Arnold Gessel, The Embryology of Behavior, Harper and Bros., (New York. 1945) p. 172

(3) From conception the child is a complete, dynamic, rapidly growing organism. By a natural and continuous process the single fertilized ovum will, over approximately nine months, develop the trillions of cells of the newborn . . .

At fertilization a new and unique being is created which, although receiving one-half of its chromosomes from each parent, is really unlike either. Robert Rugh and Landrum Shettles with Richard Einhorn: From Conception to Birth: The Drama of Life's Beginnings (Harper and Row, New York, 1971.) p. 18