By George Oldroyd
The Unborn Victim’s of Violence Act that was signed into law in Montgomery this week is the result of a strange semantic compromise. The Birmingham News reported that the original version of Rep. Spencer Collier’s bill would have recognized the rights of “an unborn child at every stage of gestation (in the uterus) from conception to birth, regardless of viability.”
Rodger Smitherman, a State Senator from Birmingham and a frequent opponent of pro-life legislation, requested a subtle adjustment in the bill’s language that removed the final hurdle to passage of the bill. It now reads, “an unborn child (in the uterus) at any stage of development regardless of viability.”
Rep. Collier believes the language accomplishes the same thing, and it may, but the bill reveals another dimension of the abortion debate in Alabama that most people don’t get a chance to see. The two phrases are very different when you take into account that both employ the parenthetical “(In the uterus)” as a specific qualifier, but word “conception” is removed from the second.
“In the uterus” seems like an almost unnecessary phrase, doesn’t it? Where else would an unborn child be but in the uterus? There’s an intriguing answer. Did you know that in Alabama, it is not considered that a human embryo is legally “conceived” until it has passed through its mother’s Fallopian tube and become implanted in the uterine wall? That may seem like splitting hairs, but it serves a purpose elsewhere in the law, and the distinction is exceedingly necessary for abortion proponents.
Every day, county health departments around Alabama, funded by taxpayer dollars, are able to distribute the so-called “morning after” abortion pill, which is designed to prevent the implantation of a fertilized embryo in the mother’s womb. The embryo is swept out of the mother’s body, and the embryonic human life never has a chance to grow into the baby it would otherwise have been. Nowhere else in biological science is such a distinction made, nor was this insidious concept present in human medicine until about twenty years ago, coincidentally around the time that the pharmaceutical technologies for earliest-stage abortions were being developed.
It’s a clever pharmaceutical intervention in nature’s plan, and legally, it’s not abortion. Legally, Alabama law considers conception to have occurred when the embryo–a living organism that without interference would grow to full term–is implanted in the uterine wall, and that is why pro-abortion Democrats were so fervent that the phrase “at every state of gestation” and any mention of “conception” be stripped form the Unborn Victims of Violence Act before they’d support its passage.
Abortion proponents in Alabama don’t want to talk about what conception really is and the inequities of our current laws because they know two things. First, surgical abortion will not survive this generation because the vast majority of Americans consider it the killing of a human being. That writing is on the wall in very heavy, very bold letters.
Second, that doesn’t matter anymore because the abortion industry sees its future in pharmaceutical abortion, not surgical, and they are setting the stage for the day when surgical abortion is gone by strip-mining the law of any provision that would challenge the abortion pill. When having an abortion is no more complicated and no more time consuming than taking an aspirin, the job of pro-life activists will become exponentially greater.
Democrats are incredibly eager to prevent Rep. Collier’s original common-sense language from becoming the subject of legal action. Although Senator Smitherman himself commented that the courts would ultimately decide whether the law protected the unborn all the way back to conception, we have to regard his concern with suspicion because, quite troublingly, the legal standard of conception in Alabama bears no resemblance to the meaning the word holds for common people, and to the rest of science outside of the complicated legalistic gymnastics that have usurped the natural order of life in Alabama juris prudence.
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act is a good bill, and the notion that personhood begins before birth is a worthy step forward. That precedent, as pro-abortion Democrats know, boldly turns Alabama toward a goal of becoming a state that respects all life. But pro-family activists need to be aware too that the compromise that enabled the bill to pass conceals, and may in the course of judicial review substantiate, an abominable notion that the Democratic majority in Montgomery prefers: an arcane, dispassionate understanding of conception that serves solely to enable high-tech pharmaceutical abortion, put its practice beyond the reach of the law, and set the right to life back by a generation.
