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Over my 20-year career as a radiologist evaluating patients of all ages for disease and abnormality, I have been consistently moved by my youngest patients — the pre-born little boy or girl fetuses floating in the silence of their mothers’ wombs. Their lively humanity moves me, but mostly it is their utter defenselessness. Over the course of my entire professional life, these youngest patients of mine, unlike any of my other charges, lacked the most basic protection of law. To me, their doctor, who marveled over them and delighted in their delicate beauty, this was a depressing fact.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade has suddenly given my littlest patients a chance to acquire some measure of legal protection.
Now, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the unborn are protected in some places. In states where the public deeply values the dignity of unborn children, the laws will be allowed to reflect that judgement. To varying degrees and at different stages of gestation, each state will democratically find the point at which to protect unborn patients like mine.
In my own state of Florida, elective terminations are now prohibited after the 15th week of gestation (à la Mississippi). That’s better than the 24-week limit Florida has been operating under for the last several decades. Remember that it is widely accepted that at 24 weeks a fetus can feel the terrible pain of dismemberment. Remember, too, that at 24 weeks an "unwanted" baby can be delivered instead of aborted and very probably survive.
Baby Saybie is believed to be the world's tiniest surviving baby at 8.6 ounces. (Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women & Newborns )
Dobbs has sharply shifted the outlook for unborn children in Florida. Today when I evaluate a 16-week-old female fetus, she cannot be destroyed simply for being the "wrong" sex or because her conception was poorly timed. Or a 22-week-old fetus cannot be painfully aborted for having a cleft lip or the extra chromosome that results in Down syndrome.
All thanks to the end of Roe.
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Despite vehement pro-abortion declarations to the contrary, there is no abortion law in any state in America that prevents lifesaving treatment for women. Miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy care will not be affected, and women’s health will not be endangered. Every law that limits abortion explicitly protects the life of the mother, allowing the separation of the baby from the mother when her life is threatened, even when this leads inevitably to the death of the baby due to prematurity. And ending later term pregnancies, as in cases of pre-eclampsia, can be done by delivering the child — avoiding abortion altogether by giving the little one a chance at life.
Of course, many liberal states are doubling down on their (mis)treatment of the unborn. In Oregon, where abortion laws are especially radical, a baby can be electively terminated (for any reason) through the 40th week of pregnancy. That’s right up until the baby takes her first breath. Medicaid pays for these barbarous elective procedures and private insurance is required to fund them. Similar laws are in effect in California and New York.
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As a physician who evaluates pregnant mothers and their children, I’m glad I’m practicing in Florida and not California. The law is a teacher, and the stronger the protections for the unborn in the law, the more the public grows in its understanding of the inherent dignity of my tiniest patients.
To me, it’s long been clear: The gently grasping hand, the lips that pucker and sometimes lift in a smile, the tiny feet that the baby plants on the wall of the uterus to achieve a leisurely stretch — all these are the tender signs of humanity clamoring for our compassion. Their mothers and families certainly deserve our help to overcome the challenges they face. But so do the unborn deserve our protection and sympathy.
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