By DAVID BROOKS
In the beginning there is the wonder of life, and at the end there are the curlicues of nonsense adults have constructed while arguing about it. In the beginning is the fetus and the mother, and at the end there are the adults who have spent the past decades fighting about abortion, and who have been altered by their own hatreds, evasions and rivalries.
In the beginning there is the womb and the creature inside. It is creating 2.5 million nerve cells in the brain every minute, and will have well over 100 billion by the time it is born. By the end of the third month, the fetus will have begun making steplike movements. Shortly thereafter its taste buds begin to work, and it can tell whether the amniotic fluid is sweet or garlicky, depending on what its mother had for lunch.
By 17 weeks, the fetus can feel its own body and will begin making facial expressions. At about six months, it can open its eyes, and if you hold a bright light to its mother’s abdomen it will startle and move away.
By the third trimester, the fetus seems to begin dreaming, or at least making the same eye movements that adults make when they dream.
It is hearing and making sense of what it hears. Through a series of ingenious experiments, scientists have determined that fetuses attune to the pitch and tone of their parents’ voices. They can distinguish their own language from other languages. If their mothers read “The Cat in the Hat” to them over a period of weeks, they can remember the tonal patterns of that story and distinguish them from the patterns of some other story.
By this stage, the fetus has a personality. If it is unusually active now, it will probably be unusually active after birth. If it has trouble sleeping now, it will have the same trouble after birth.
It is not only the product of uniform chemical processes; it is responding to its own distinct environment. If its mother is stressed, it will feel stress.
It has those traits all human beings share — a talent for orienting itself in space and for learning language. And it has traits distinct to itself. It already has a tendency to be introverted or extroverted, neurotic or calm, temperamentally happy or temperamentally morose. Nothing that happens later in life will fundamentally reverse these prenatal qualities.
In short, when you focus on the fetus, you see a process of emerging life that begins with small biological clumps and culminates by the third trimester with a creature who is not significantly different from a living baby. And the obvious mystery is: When in this continuous process does human life begin?
And yet when you look at the abortion debate that grows from this mystery, you find that over the years, adults have built these vast layers of argument and counterargument, and the core issue is buried far down below.
The Carhart case, which the Supreme Court decided last week, is prompted by revulsion over the practice of killing late-term fetuses. Yet for reasons having to do with political tactics, the law that was upheld wouldn’t even prevent a single late-term abortion. It would forbid doctors from crushing the skull of the fetus, but would permit them to poison and dismember it. Furthermore, the reasoning Justice Anthony Kennedy used to uphold the law — about mothers who may come to regret their abortions — is not only bizarre, but far removed from the original revulsion that prompted the whole issue.
Meanwhile, when you look at the statements of the abortion rights forces, you find they can’t even look this matter in the face. Read the statements by the Democratic presidential candidates. Read the protests from Planned Parenthood and Naral. They can’t even bring themselves to mention the word “fetus.” They are terrified of having an honest discussion about human life, so they have built this lofty etiquette of evasion that treats abortion as the moral equivalent of a tonsillectomy.
If we could get this issue away from the abortion professionals and their orthodoxies, we could reach a sensible solution: abortion would be legal, with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal except in extremely rare circumstances afterward. Instead we get what we saw last week. A law that doesn’t address the core issue, a court decision so tangled in jurisprudence as to be impermeable to the outside world, and howling protests by people who can’t face the central concern.
