Decked out in her “Thank God for abortion” shirt, pregnant artist and mom Emily Boyd Dahab (@dahabulous) posted to Instagram on her “viability day” to contemplate the idea that viability determines the legality of abortion in many states. She argued that this “strange and arbitrary” day chosen by “our legal system” shouldn’t be a reason to restrict abortion.
The ‘arbitrary’ age of viability
“24 weeks. In my opinion, there’s a single weirdest day in any American pregnancy and it’s the very last day that you could legally get an abortion. For me, that day was yesterday. In New York state, abortions become illegal when you turn 24 weeks pregnant, which is the time the average pregnancy has a good chance of being viable outside the womb. It’s so incredibly strange and arbitrary that our legal system has created one specific day before which abortion is allowed, and after which it isn’t,” she wrote.
She’s wrong about the New York abortion law — abortion is legal after 24 weeks “if your health or pregnancy is at risk,” with ‘health’ being defined to include reasons other than the physical health of the mother or baby — so essentially any reason counts.
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Regardless of the reason, if at any point, especially after 21 weeks, a woman’s health is actually on the line and the pregnancy must end, the baby can be delivered alive by induced labor or emergency C-section. If the baby dies because she is too young to survive, this is not an induced abortion done with the intent of killing the child. Induced abortion is not medically necessary. To argue that babies should still be killed by abortion once they are classified as able to survive outside the womb makes absolutely no logical, scientific, or medical sense.
Dahab is also wrong when she says 24 weeks is “the time the average pregnancy has a good chance of being viable outside the womb.” First, a pregnancy can’t be viable outside the womb because pregnancy is defined as the period of time a preborn child grows and lives inside the womb. It is a human being who becomes viable outside the womb and a human being with whom the woman is pregnant. Babies in the womb are in their natural environment and alive, and as long as they are alive in their appropriate environment, they are viable — a word derived from the French vie and the Latin vita, meaning life.
Anyone who argues that a living human being is not “viable” is mistaken.
But Dahab is right about one thing: the concept of viability is arbitrary. Using so-called viability as a legality marker for abortion is ‘weird,’ as she said, but she was misguided in arguing that viability should be removed as a marker in order to allow abortion at any time for any reason. This thinking is a twisted way of admitting the obvious — that viability as a legal marker for abortion is ‘weird’ (unethical) because it discriminates against younger, more vulnerable humans.
A randomly drawn 24-week line in the sand (especially when babies born as young as 21 weeks have survived) determining who can live and who can be killed is in line with the false idea that certain individuals could be killed in gas chambers because they were Jewish or had a disability.
It’s discrimination.
It’s the same baby
“What’s the difference in my fetus, actually, between today and yesterday? Functionally, nothing. Legally? Everything,” Dahab wrote about the arbitrary 24-week point.
She’s right on this. There is no difference “functionally” between her preborn child at 23 weeks, six days, and 24 weeks. So why does the law include the 24-week mark as a point at which it is acceptable to abort a baby? Does the baby become human and worth protecting from abortion at midnight of the 24-week date? The obvious answer is no.
The human in utero has always been human and has always been worthy of protection from the moment of fertilization. His level of “functioning” has nothing to do with his humanity. If what Dahab argued in favor of is true — that abortion should be allowed at any point in pregnancy — then it would also stand to reason that it should be legally and socially acceptable to kill any human at any point during life. Where would the line be drawn? What level of functionality is good enough for Dahab to consider a human to be a human?
Babies don’t torture mothers
Dahab continued, “I’m just so grateful that I’m pregnant with a wanted child. … Being put through this mess if you don’t want it — it’s torture. Really.”
This is an elitist attitude for two reasons. First, labeling some humans wanted and others unwanted is discriminatory. Using discrimination to determine when it should be legal to kill an innocent person (based on another person labeling them ‘unwanted’) is a horrific abuse of power — by politicians, abortionists, and women who celebrate abortion as empowerment.
The millions of babies who have been conceived unexpectedly aren’t lacking in value and aren’t ‘unwanted.’ Their mothers shouldn’t be led to believe that if they didn’t want to be pregnant then suddenly their baby is less than human or less than worthy of existence.
Second, pregnancy is not torture and to claim that it is comes from a place of privilege.
To torture someone is to inflict severe pain or suffering, often as punishment. No one can force a woman to become pregnant; ask anyone struggling with infertility. And if a woman does become pregnant, it is most often the result of her own decisions. Pregnancy is not a punishment; it’s a natural and to-be-expected result of sex. And though pregnancy can be difficult (more so for some than for others) pregnancy is certainly not torture because the baby did not create herself and is not deliberately inflicting pain and suffering on his mother.
Viability as a determining point of abortion legality says one thing: the more vulnerable you are, the more acceptable it is to kill you.
