Sunday, March 05, 2006

A Second Look at the Second Trimester In today's Washington Post, William Saletan takes a practical look at Roe v. Wade as it seems headed for the Supreme Court thanks to the South Dakota situation and others. He offers a kind of post-modern technology strategy. Here's the crux: Roe established a right to abortion through the end of the second trimester. The latter part of that time frame has always been the most controversial. Improvements in neonatal care have made fetuses viable--capable of surviving delivery--earlier than was possible in 1973. That's why Justice O'Connor said Roe was "on a collision course with itself" and eventually led her colleagues to abandon the trimester framework. Meanwhile, sonograms and embryology have made people aware of how well developed fetuses are while still legally vulnerable to abortion. We even do surgery on fetuses now, which makes aborting them seem that much more perverse. These developments may explain, in part, why two-thirds of Americans think abortion should be illegal in the second trimester--and why anti-abortion activists targeted partial-birth abortions for legislative assault. But if medical technology has helped to expose this moral problem, it can also help us solve it. Second-trimester abortions are becoming not just harder to stomach, but easier to avoid. In 1973, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, fewer than 40 percent of abortions took place before the ninth week of gestation. By 2000, the latest year for which data have been analyzed, the percentage was nearly 60 and rising. The same high-resolution ultrasound that makes you queasy about aborting a 12-week fetus has made it safer to perform abortions at four or five weeks instead of waiting, as women were once routinely told to do. In 1993, only 7 percent of abortion providers could end a pregnancy at four weeks or earlier; by 2001, 37 percent could do it. And by 2002, two-thirds of clinics belonging to the National Abortion Federation were offering pills that abort pregnancies in the first seven weeks. Saletan also catches us up on the latest advances in injectable and implantable contraception that will obviate the abortion dilemma from the most defendable ground. Worth examining where on the timeline/moral line of abortion you stand. I still see a need for the possibility of second trimester abortion. Circumstances and foresight among couples will never be absolute and perfect. -RH 8:04:23 AM    comment []

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