Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - How the Smallest Born Baby Proves Abortion Is Wrong

Episode Date: June 30, 2019

Alan explains how the birth and survival of the smallest baby challenges four tenets of abortion-choice advocacy. Download the mp3...

The world's smallest surviving baby, baby Sabie, was born just 30 minutes from my house. She weighed 8.6 ounces, or approximately the weight of a large apple. Now, Sabie's mother experienced severe pregnancy complications, and she was forced to give birth via emergency cesarean section at just 23 weeks gestation. Now, just to give you some context here, normal pregnancy is about 40 weeks long, okay? And baby Sabie was born at 23 weeks, so very, very early. Now, the doctors, of course, worked heroically to save baby Sabie's life and to provide her life-saving medical care. Now, though the uterus is by design a place of protection,

what's ironic is that baby Sabie's early departure from her mother's womb actually granted her immunity from a form of human evil known as abortion. And the reason is because modern laws have made the womb one of the most dangerous places to be for a developing child. These laws do not protect the child from the abortionist, but rather they protect the mother from her own child. And the womb that was once a protective sanctuary can now become a crucible of death. But baby Sabie brings attention really to the reasons why abortion is wrong. And when we see her human appearance, when we see her frail frame, when we see her vulnerability,

we intuitively know that she's a human being just like us who deserves protection and care. And Baby Sabie's birth and survival really challenges four tenets of abortion choice advocacy. And I want to outline what those four tenets are that her birth and survival really point out. The first is this. Baby Sabie's birth challenges the idea that size is relevant. You see, at the time of her birth, baby Sabie was the smallest surviving human. And despite her diminutive frame, doctors knew she was a valuable human being deserving of protection and care. And so if a child the size of a large apple is clearly a human being,

then a child smaller than baby Sabie is also human. And that's because a difference in size is not a difference in kind, but rather in degree. And so humans, of course, come in all sizes, but someone is not more or less valuable because of their size. Here's the second way that baby Sabie's birth challenges abortion choice advocacy. Her birth challenges the idea that level of development of the child is relevant. Because you see, baby Sabie was taken from her mother's womb after only 23 weeks of development. In other words, she still had 17 weeks to reach full term. And though we don't typically consider premature birth a privilege, baby Sabie could have been killed at any time during her remaining 17 weeks, had she remained in utero, of course,

by the same doctors who worked heroically to save her life after she was born. Of course, this doesn't make any sense, right? I mean, if a premature child is protected at 23 weeks gestation when she is out of the womb, then why can the very same child be legally killed through abortion simply because she is still in the womb? Apparently, abortion choice advocates consider the child's location to be relevant, which, of course, brings us to our next point. And that is the third challenge, And that is baby Sabie's birth challenges the idea that a child's environment is relevant, right? Because your environment and

location should have no effect on whether you are valuable. When an astronaut, for example, travels to outer space in a spacesuit or a scuba diver swims underwater, they have changed their environment. But despite their new location, which, by the way, renders them non-viable without an assistive technology, despite their new location, they are still viable human beings. And so, in the same way, Baby Sabie changed location. She moved from inside her mother's room to outside of it. And that move, according to our current U.S. law, fundamentally changed her status. She went from being a vulnerable human being to a protected human being. And so now that she's born, no abortionist can harm her. But if baby Sabie had remained inside her mother's womb, she could have been legally killed.

She would have been vulnerable not just at 23 weeks of development, but even for the remaining 17 weeks of gestation. And so if it's wrong to kill a baby in one location, how can it be moral to kill the very same baby when it's moved to a different environment? to kill the very same baby when it's moved to a different environment. And then here's the fourth way that baby Sabie's birth challenges abortion choice advocacy. Her birth challenges the idea that being dependent on the mother's body is relevant. You see, baby Sabie was dependent on her mother's body until 23 weeks gestation. And at this point in development, commonly called viability, many children can survive outside of their mother's body. Now, some abortion choice advocates claim that abortion is justified only prior to viability because the unborn depends on its mother's body for survival. Now, after viability, they argue, the unborn can live on its own and

therefore abortion would not be permitted at that point. The mother could simply just deliver the child prematurely if she no longer wanted to be pregnant. The moment of viability, however, is not fixed, right? As time progresses, technology advances and viability moves to earlier stages of development. And so had baby Sabie been conceived decades ago, she would have not been viable at 23 weeks because of the more primitive medical techniques that were available at the time. Viability may have been, say, at that time at, I don't know, 28 weeks. And that means the very same baby Sabie at the very same stage of development could have been killed through abortion during one era decades ago, but protected in today's era. And that, of

course, is absurd. Baby Sabie's birth challenges abortion choice advocacy in these four ways. And they can be more easily remembered by the acronym SLED, S-L-E-D. So the S stands for size, the L stands for level of development, the E stands for environment, and the D stands for degree of dependency. And so we call this a SLED test because it's an easy way to remember the four ways that her birth, baby Sabie's birth, challenges abortion choice advocacy. And so though the unborn differs from a born human being in these four ways, none of them justifies disqualifying the unborn because none of these factors affects its value.