When I am not posting on ProWomanProLife, I am doing graduate research into decision-making in neonatal intensive care. Came upon this in an academic article on prenatal decision-making, that is, medical management decisions made when a woman is threatened by premature labor and delivery at the margins of viability (22 to 24 weeks gestation):
In Canada, a foetus is not legally considered to be a person. It is only once born that a neonate becomes a citizen with full rights. Therefore, [parents] are engaged in a decision concerning a person that does not yet legally exist and that cannot be considered a medical patient by neonatologists. The situation is even more so ambiguous when the foetus is not yet a reality for parents who, in anticipating their parenthood, have only imagined their baby.” (From Payot et al., 2007)
If nothing ever highlighted the hypocrisy of a system that delivers and treats infants at the margins of viability on one floor while aborting them on another, this should.
I have yet to meet a family in neonatal intensive care that considers the non-personhood of their baby when making medical management decisions. And what is that bit about the baby being “only imagined”? I’ll bet any pregnant woman who has ever been kept awake at night by a tossing and turning fetus would describe her baby as anything but “imagined”.
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