Amendment 3, Coming to a City Near You

When SCOTUS kicked Roe back to the states, as it should have, the states took up the issue with petitions and ballot initiatives. In Missouri, we have Amendment 3, which ensconces a right to abortions up to the point of viability but also beyond (with conditions). This means that the state’s current ban on abortion will be lifted, and women would be able to abort up to the point of birth provided they could make their case to a practitioner that their health would be adversely affected if they carried full term.

The current ban permits abortion only in the event of a medical emergency and does not make provisions for rape, incest, or mental health. Amendment 3 does account for those possibilities. It’s a lot to think about.

Personally, I think protecting life from the point of conception (as it now stands in Missouri) is very important to my beliefs. I realize, however, that there may be a lot of pro-lifers out there who will disagree. Nonetheless, I’m going to vote no on the ballot because my vote is a vote about my own interests and it’s not my responsibility to vote for someone else’s.

There will always be exceptions to the rule, like the rape argument or the incest argument or the ectopic pregnancy argument or the mental health argument. But by and large, and according to AGI/Planned Parenthood, most abortions are done because carrying and delivering a baby is just an inconvenience to the mother.

Now, Amendment 3 says abortion shall be a constitutional right up to the point of viability, but it does not prohibit them at any point after. If the mother has mental health or physical health issues, it is between her and her doctor to determine if she can get an abortion. It seems as though the state loosely regulates this, but in the end, it is those two who will make the determination. This is sort of like Roe always was.

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But…Viability. I have always thought this was a bogus concept, not only because that “24 week” line is going to differ from one baby to the next, but it is also an arbitrary one. And when you’re dealing with something so important as human lives, I don’t think there’s any room for happenstance.

So the point goes that at least before fetal viability, abortions are permissible because the baby (fetus: Latin=little human) cannot live outside of the mother’s womb. And if it cannot live outside of the womb, it is not independent of the mother. And if it is not independent of the mother then it is reliant on the mother. And if it is reliant on the mother, then it is within the mother’s right to terminate the pregnancy because the mother has self-agency and primacy over the baby. In other words, the mother at this stage has more value than the baby because the baby is not yet a human person before it is viable. Some would say the baby is not a human person until it is born, though, and while this is a pretty extreme view, in my opinion, it is becoming a more acceptable one every day. So, with Amendment 3, abortions are not illegal up until the instant of birth. 

Viability, as most people would understand it, comes at some point when a baby could be born either naturally or by caesarian section and still survive outside of the mother. This would obviously require medical intervention and care through scientific means like incubators, bilirubin lights, and a NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). It’s kind of generally agreed upon to be about 24 weeks or so, but everybody is different so that could even be less. In fact, a baby named Curtis survived after being delivered at 21 weeks. No doubt that as Science progresses, because that’s what Science does, the odds of a baby surviving will get better as the point of “viability” gets earlier.

So. Viability. I would argue that this is pretty much a non-argument because no one can really and empirically know the day, hour, or minute a baby crosses this arbitrary threshold. And if you cannot know, you can only assume, then viability as a line in the sand is a pretty poor argument for abortion. If you abort because you think the baby might not be viable, then you have to admit that it might also be viable. And if it might be viable, then having an abortion is reckless because you could be destroying someone. There’s no possible way to know and so I think that’s an unacceptable risk. If respect for human lives is at the core of our system of laws (eventually, even theft can go back to that), then why do we tolerate this viability argument? If you fired a weapon into a dark room where someone might or might not be hiding and killed a person who had a perfect right to be there, you might go on trial because maybe you did something wrong.

However, as a thought experiment, I’d like to propose the following. A woman in NYC is pregnant and has delivered a child at the point of 22 weeks. The baby gets the best of medical care in the NICU and, after an extended period of time, is released as a healthy child. Simultaneously across the planet in Ethiopia, another pregnant woman delivers her child at the exact same moment and in the precise period of gestation. This birth is not successful. The baby dies because, in its small, impoverished village, no effective medical care is available. In the first case, the baby at 22 weeks is viable because doctors and nurses can do amazing things. In the latter, the baby at 22 weeks is not viable because those amazing things cannot be employed.

So, in two parallel cases where everything is the same, except location, we have babies who are exactly the same but do not share the same outcome. At least philosophically speaking, you have a baby that is viable and non-viable at the same time. And this is contradictory. The woman in Ethiopia carries a non-viable baby, but if you could fly her out to NYC for care, then suddenly, the baby becomes viable. All that this demonstrates is that viability is dependent on socioeconomic inequities and who has access to better healthcare…man-made things. In the broader consideration of human life, and the value it has, are we not going to look deeper than whether or not the pilot of the plane wants to fly a racetrack pattern over the International Date Line? Viable…Not Viable…Viable…Not Viable. Surely, the answers for what viability is — and the big question, by extension — what human life is, deserve better than this.

Amendment 3 is not an outlier. If it can happen here in the Midwest, it will happen anywhere people will tolerate it.