Elizabeth Weil and Ayelet Waldman: After Babies Are Born

This is part seven of a dialogue about having a late-term abortion between Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother [2], and Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the co-author, with Dara Torres, of Age is Just a Number [3]. You can read part one here [4], part two here [5], part three here [6], part four here [7], part five here [8], and part six here [9].

I'm going try to find a good bioethicist to join us here, to shine a light into those cobwebby corners, maybe even help us clean them up.

One of the questions I muse on a lot, without all that much progress, is how the slide from conception to birth works, and how to think about the embryo/fetus/baby along the way. For me, like a lot of us, there's a world of moral difference between aborting a fetus and killing a baby once that baby's been born. And yet the specific moment the baby comes out-passes from fetus to child-is pretty damn arbitrary. As long as you're out on book tour, exposing your life as a bad mother, I might as well offer this here: I'm a terrible gestator (if that's a word). What I mean to say is that I was really, truly lousy at pregnancy, at carrying my kids. My older daughter was induced at 36 weeks because she'd stopped growing. And when she came out, after a megadose of Pitocin, she looked scrawny and pathetic, like the most terrifying looking baby I'd ever seen. Same thing with my second daughter: induced a month early, too. Which, to me, makes this whole debate even more complicated. I do feel there's something different about life pre- and post-birth. But I couldn't clearly tell you what it is.

In comments on our earlier posts [6], readers are debating how to go about protecting our right to make hard choices. One woman wonders if suing Terry Randall [10] et al is the way to go. Another points out that raising a severely disabled child in the United States is a huge financial burden, to say nothing of an emotional one. Not to blow this conversation up into a referendum on all of contemporary American society, but I have a really hard time squaring our pathetic health care and childcare systems with the pro-life stance. If the right is so big-hearted as to empathize with babies from conception, why don't they want to do a better job of caring for those babies—especially the ones with complicated medical needs—once they've been born?