Just this week the news reports tell us of a real event that we would only imagine coming from some sicko horror story. A lady in Longmont Colorado put an ad to sell baby things in an on-line classified advertising site. A young mother-to-be responded and went to the first lady’s address. She was seven months into term – only two before the baby was due to be born.
Instead of finding a selection of articles that she could use, the young lady got beaten, stabbed – and the demon who had posed the advertisement cut open her womb and took out the baby. Of course, this injured the baby, so the demon took it to a hospital, claiming she had miscarried it herself. The baby could not be saved, and the scheme fell apart. The mother is alive, and the demon is in custody. But there is a problem in finding a just reward for the demon: In Colorado, there is no “living human being” until a child is born and alive outside the womb. Without a “living” victim, there can be no charge of homicide.
But was this not a homicide? Wasn’t that little foetus an actual human being? Did it not have feelings and did it not go through intolerable pain, suffering, and, finally, death? When does that mental step that we might call “self-awareness” begin? Biological science confirms that a central nervous system begins to operate within weeks after conception. Self-awareness, however, is a step beyond the simple reflexes that first develop. If the doctor taps your knee with that little rubber hammer, and you kick, that is not self-awareness. But, if you feel some discomfort, and you wiggle your foot to relive it, I think that would be considered genuine self-awareness. In order to sense a discomfort, and to generate a purposeful problem-solving effort, no matter how trivial, there has to be a “self” who is doing the sensing, not to mention the action that follows.
Looking more closely at the baby’s growing consciousness of himself, how does this “appear” to him? He has no concepts to start with. Everything has to be learned, and put in a place in his brain. He uses the past impressions to frame how he puts the next things he senses into a pattern that makes sense to him. This is learning, and the accumulated things learned are “experience.” It starts with, I submit, the very first sensation that he notices, and grows through life – birth is just one more volley of sensations that make up our experience.
How do the sensations in the womb impact the child? As we look at the mother, resting perhaps on a quiet afternoon, she rolls from her back to her side. That’s how we see it, anyway. What does the child sense? Perhaps the crowding of the womb around him shifts from his right side to his feet? His sense of what we know as “up” is unstable for a moment, then settles in the new orientation.
All these things show us that the pre-born infant is more than a senseless blob of protoplasm. It is a human being, and it is learning. It is “alive.”
Here is a twist you might think stretches too much; but I believe that I remember being born. Of course, I cannot say I saw nurses, the doctor, the yellow walls, etc. of the delivery room. I had never sensed any visual images, yet, so I would not be able to recognize and categorize these new sensations. I did not know about air, or the absence of the womb’s warm fluidity. How did I place the sensations of birth into memory? Here’s what I think:
Through my life into early adulthood, I had recurring dreams that I was in a room, or a cave, close around me. There was an urgent necessity for me to climb a set of stairs, or a slope of stones, to reach the door or cave exit up and ahead of me. But the ceiling crowded me tightly, and the urgency grew. As my head approached the opening the pressure of the stairs and the ceiling increased dramatically. Suddenly, I sensed brightness through the opening, and as I began to pass through it – I awoke from the dream. This happened every so often across many years. But then, one day, as I was thinking about it, the thought came to me that this was like being born. From that day, the dream has never come back to me.
That demon killed a living human being, The baby sensed the pain and horror of death - and the charge should clearly be homicide. Moreover, the whole decision in Roe v. Wade was based on the Supreme Court deciding that man’s learning had not yet advanced to the point where we could know when “life” begins. I think that is hogwash.
Hal Rounds is a resident of Tennessee. Born in California, his undergraduate degree was in Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is an Air Force veteran of the Viet Nam war, working with munitions including rockets, bombs and, later, nuclear weapons. During a career in air express he attended law school and entered practice. He is presently a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and the Supreme Court of the United States.
