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The key question is whether limited legislation is any solution. In fact, the new laws merely codify what hospitals are already doing. They do embolden doctors, but in practice they may prove more restrictive—and even increase illegal abortions. So it seems in Sweden, which in 1938 enacted a law almost exactly like Colorado's. Far from being an abortion mecca (foreigners are rarely accepted), Sweden puts women through a multilayered screening that creates excruciating delays; 56% of Stockholm-area legal abortions occur after the 16th week of pregnancy. Bureaucratic paper shuffling often holds up legal operations until the 24th week—producing live babies that sometimes cry for hours before dying. To avoid de facto infanticide, Swedish women flock to Poland for early, efficient $60 abortions. Appalled, the Swedish government has concluded that the law must be broadened to allow more and faster abortions.
More complicated objections to limited legislation are now being raised by Catholic clerics, who regard Colorado-style laws as a blatant c^se of state-approved eugenics, never before established in U.S. law. To abort a rubella (German measles) victim, they say, is to rely on the purely statistical chance (average odds: 50-50) that her child may be defective—and to doom a possibly perfect baby in the process. To abort a fetus produced by rape or incest, they say, is to execute the most innocent partv in the trianele purely for the mother's social convenience. Even the rapist is guaranteed a trial based on all of law's due-process standards. Why no due process for the fetus? Not only that: some states already grant an unborn child rights of inheritance and recovery for prenatal injuries. Since those rights are contingent on his being born alive, does he not also have a right to be born in order to exercise them?
Conscience & Intelligence
Beyond these profound moral questions, however, lies the stubborn reality that women denied legal abortions go on getting illegal ones—and that those unborn babies get even less due process than would a rape-fetus in Colorado. This leads to the argument that the real immorality is the retention or enactment of laws that drive women to illegal abortion. In empirical terms, the debaters are mired in side issues. Vital as fetal rights unquestionably are, the bedrock problem is not whether the fetus is inchoate and hence expendable, as law reformers claim, or whether it is human and inviolable, as opponents insist. The problem is unwanted pregnancy and how to treat it.