Abortion, technology, and viability

[tim_duncan2000]

As the John Roberts' Supreme Court nomination fight opens, the predicted battle to save or kill Roe v Wade already has taken to the streets, the Internet and the media. But the 32-year-old constitutional right to an abortion may face its gravest challenge not from red state values triumphing on the Supreme Court, but from medical research being carried out in elite blue state universities and in Europe and Asia.

It is the very language of Roe that carries the seed of its own possible irrelevance within the next several years. Roe enunciated the more or less unencumbered right of a woman to obtain an abortion prior to fetal viability. After viability, the right of states to regulate or prohibit abortions arise. The court defined legal viability as "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid."

But medical science is remorselessly advancing on two fronts along paths that may fairly soon seize and destroy in a scientific pincer movement the viability of Roe's reasoning.

When Roe was handed down in 1973, the survivability of prematurely born babies was not medically possible before 28 weeks of gestation. Today, babies born after only 20 weeks of gestation routinely survive -- and thus are viable under the Roe definition (and thus potentially legally safe from the abortionist's medical weapons).


http://www.townhall.com/columnists/tonyblankley/tb20050727.shtml

I have always felt that abortions should not be allowed after 20 weeks since many babies in the neonatal ICUs were born at that stage. Since it would be murder to kill one of them, it would be hypocritical to condone the killing of one still inside the woman at 20 weeks.

20 weeks is only the beginning. Roe's definition of viability is vague, so the window might keep shrinking. What do people think about this?