Why don’t we focus on what happens to kids once they’re out of the womb?

This is part seven of a dialogue about having a late-term abortion between Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother, 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. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, and part six here.

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, readers are debating how to go about protecting our right to make hard choices. One woman wonders if suing Terry Randall 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?

Tags: abortion, George Tiller, late-term abortion

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the co-author, with Dara Torres, of Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams At Any Stage In Your Life.

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Life

Elizabeth Weil and Ayelet Waldman: After Babies Are Born

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