Caplan’s Abortion Politics

November 29, 2005

In his latest column for MSNBC, bioethicist Art Caplan concludes, “When abortion politics are permitted to twist, obscure and ignore the facts about fetal development, fetal pain and the nature of informed consent in medicine that is a fact that those who are pro-life and pro-choice should not tolerate.” We at Bioethics.com are in complete agreement and hope that Caplan will stop obscuring and ignoring the facts about fetal development in order to defend his pro-abortion position.

Caplan claims, for example, that “A quick search of the medical literature reveals no consensus at all among physicians and scientists about when a fetus can feel pain. Estimates range from 16 weeks to 28 weeks. How is it then that Congress can legislate a 20-week line in the sand as the date when a fetus can feel pain despite a lack of consensus on the part of actual doctors and scientists?” The simple answer in his opinion is “abortion politics.”

Perhaps Caplan missed the article in the UK’s The Sunday Times yesterday about botched abortions. The guidelines set by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which regulates methods of abortion, say that babies (the term used by the newspaper) aborted after more than 21 weeks and six days of gestation should have their hearts stopped by an injection of potassium chloride before being delivered. In practice, few doctors are willing or able to perform the delicate procedure which results in some “aborted fetuses” being born alive.

“They can be born breathing and crying at 19 weeks’ gestation,” says Stuart Campbell, former professor of obstetrics and gynecology at St George’s hospital, London. “I am not anti-abortion, but as far as I am concerned this is sub-standard medicine.” He adds: “If viability is the basis on which they set the 24-week limit for abortion, then the simplest answer is to change the law and reduce the upper limit to 18 weeks.”

The “facts about fetal development” are that babies are viable and survive the birth process at 18 weeks. Yet Caplan expects us to believe that they do not feel pain? Is he really that naïve and uninformed? More likely the answer for his obscuring the facts is, as he says, simple — abortion politics.