So there’s this television show called House. You might have heard of it: FOX medical drama, Hugh Laurie, Tuesday nights at nine. Well two weeks ago, towards the beginning of April, we were treated to a special episode cleverly entitled “Fetal Position” wherein Emma, a pregnant photographer hospitalized with a stroke and other serious symptoms, faced the classic dilemma of a) terminate the pregnancy and save herself or b) risk her life in an attempt to save the baby. She picks b.

“You’ll both die,” Dr. House tells her, but Emma refuses the abortion, even with the prognosis of two days left to live. The rest of the episode is, of course, a scrambling attempt to cure Emma and allow her to keep the baby, wherein we’re treated to touching moments such as empathy from another doctor and the fetus reaching for House’s fingers during one of the surgeries. Awww. Or Ewww depending how you look at things. Miraculously, Emma and her baby both live.

So allow me to pose a riddle:

Q: If “Fetal Position” aired today, how would the moral dilemma be different?

A: Terminating the pregnancy would NOT be an option because abortions this late in the term are now illegal regardless of whether or not the mother’s life is as risk.

The Supreme Court ruled on this ban yesterday. No late term abortions, and no legal exceptions for when the mother’s health is in danger.

It’s possible you didn’t hear about it in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy on Monday (CNN hasn’t even reported on this yet, as far as I know). If anything, the media has so far downplayed the ruling. So if you’re interested in the details, here are a couple of articles I dug up:

• Denying the Right to Choose
• Doctors Weigh Next Move on Legality of Abortion
• Abortion Law is Upheld
(googling “supreme court abortion ban” will inevitably bring up more)

I’m not about to start an abortion debate, but I think this particular issue goes a little beyond whether you do or do not believe a fetus is a life. It’s about the government denying a woman a life-saving procedure.

So what’re we going to do about it?

ETA:  It was brought to my attention that my presentation might be “exaggerating” the ban, as it refer to second/third trimester partial birth abortions–and whether the removal of a fetus through a C-section-like procedure (the issue on House that I mentioned prior) would be okay or not under this ban isn’t totally clear.  The NPR article I linked to above shows a concern from doctors that the actual meaning of “partial birth abortion” (not a medical term) is not as specific as it could be.  So not being a doctor myself, I can’t say for certain that the way that pregnancy would have been terminated would have technically been illegal.  But it certainly raises the issue.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 4:50 pm and is filed under Feminism, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.