Many readers of the Globe and Mail must have been surprised at what they found on the back page of the first section on Monday morning, October 19. In a long column, Dorothy Lipovenko asked, “Now doctors can treat a fetus as a patient, how does this affect our views on abortion?” Readers of The Interim will be familiar with this question, and with our answer to it. Nevertheless the fact that it is being asked in a mass-circulation daily paper marks a new stage in the abortion controversy.
Miss Lipovenko describes an operation performed on Paul Joseph Jileson to remove fluid from his chest, when his mother was 20 to 22 weeks pregnant (September 1992, The Interim, front page). Dr. Jo-Ann Johnson, a perinatologist involved in the case, told a CBC interviewer that “The fetus is our patient, and that’s a relatively new concept. In the past, the mother was the container and the fetus came out after nine months. Now (with ultrasound), people have described it as a ‘womb with a view’; we can now actually see our patient. We can make a diagnosis.”
Miss Lipovenko went on to interview another pioneer in this field, Dr. Frank Manning of Winnipeg, who again described advances in fetal surgery and even though he is a supporter of the “pro-choice” position – commented, “Once you can see the patient, it has dimensions it didn’t have before.” As soon as you ascribe some human characteristics to the fetus, characteristics that are visible on ultrasound, right down to the number of its fingers and toes, it ceases to be an inert clump of cells and becomes (in Manning’s terms) a real seedling of a human being.
That, Dr. Manning says, “continues to change how people approach abortion.”
Though the column contains nothing new about fetal science and development, it is not too much to say that it represents a breakthrough: it may well help to change the way the general public thinks about abortion. Modern technology has provided Morgentaler with an efficient way of destroying what he calls “clumps of cells.” Now modern technology has moved right past him, showing that those clumps of cells have recognizable human characteristics.Many readers of the Globe and Mail must have been surprised at what they found on the back page of the first section on Monday morning, October 19. In a long column, Dorothy Lipovenko asked, “Now doctors can treat a fetus as a patient, how does this affect our views on abortion?” Readers of The Interim will be familiar with this question, and with our answer to it. Nevertheless the fact that it is being asked in a mass-circulation daily paper marks a new stage in the abortion controversy.
Miss Lipovenko describes an operation performed on Paul Joseph Jileson to remove fluid from his chest, when his mother was 20 to 22 weeks pregnant (September 1992, The Interim, front page). Dr. Jo-Ann Johnson, a perinatologist involved in the case, told a CBC interviewer that “The fetus is our patient, and that’s a relatively new concept. In the past, the mother was the container and the fetus came out after nine months. Now (with ultrasound), people have described it as a ‘womb with a view’; we can now actually see our patient. We can make a diagnosis.”
Miss Lipovenko went on to interview another pioneer in this field, Dr. Frank Manning of Winnipeg, who again described advances in fetal surgery and even though he is a supporter of the “pro-choice” position – commented, “Once you can see the patient, it has dimensions it didn’t have before.” As soon as you ascribe some human characteristics to the fetus, characteristics that are visible on ultrasound, right down to the number of its fingers and toes, it ceases to be an inert clump of cells and becomes (in Manning’s terms) a real seedling of a human being.
That, Dr. Manning says, “continues to change how people approach abortion.”
Though the column contains nothing new about fetal science and development, it is not too much to say that it represents a breakthrough: it may well help to change the way the general public thinks about abortion. Modern technology has provided Morgentaler with an efficient way of destroying what he calls “clumps of cells.” Now modern technology has moved right past him, showing that those clumps of cells have recognizable human characteristics.
