Life: Equal Care for Everyone

by Peg Luksik (Pennsylvania)

Imagine that you are at the beach. Suddenly, you hear a scream from the water. A small child has wandered out too far and is caught in an undertow. She is frantically calling her mother for help. A woman breaks away from several other young children and plunges into the water. She rushes to the place where the tiny head was last seen and dives beneath the surface of the waves.

You wait breathlessly until you see two faces emerge from the water. The mother triumphantly carries her little one to safety on the shore and checks for injury. Little arms encircle Mom’s neck and you hear their mingled laughter and crying.

You rejoice in the happy ending to what appeared to be a certain tragedy. The mother is praised for her courage and answers that any other parent would have done the same.

Can you imagine a parent, standing on the beach watching her child drown, reflect that she can’t possibly put her own life in jeopardy to save the little one because she has two other children who might not have a mother if she died in the rescue attempt?

We would hold such a parent in utter contempt.

Unless the child was not yet born.

Then we call it a "life of the mother" pregnancy, and make those exact same statements.

Let’s examine the situations behind the slogan.

The first deals with a mother’s prior medical problems, such as diabetes or cancer. Her medical condition could be worsened by carrying the child. Before Roe v Wade, when abortion was universally banned in most states, without exceptions, doctors dealt with these most difficult situations in their practices. But once abortion was allowed, it became an easy avenue for avoiding a potentially difficult medical situation and a possible malpractice lawsuit. In today’s world of liability-driven medicine, many women are denied care or pressured into having abortions because the doctor is afraid of a lawsuit if something does go wrong.

A doctor should deliver Equal Care to mother and child, constantly considering the needs of both patients and trying to save both lives. In the Equal Care concept, the doctor never seeks to kill a child. All his decision-making is based on saving lives, not destroying them. There are rare instances where only one life can be saved. For example, a severely cancerous uterus must be removed early in the pregnancy. The child dies a natural death because we don’t yet know how to sustain the tiniest of our children outside the womb. THIS IS NOT AN ABORTION. No one was dismembered.

The second case is more common. It is called an ectopic pregnancy. The baby never reaches the uterus, attaching instead to the walls of the Fallopian tubes. In such cases, the tube must be removed or it will rupture, causing the deaths of both mother and child. There are no other treatment options. Again, the baby dies a natural death because we do not know to save its life, too.

The difference between these cases and abortion is the intent and actions of the doctor. In abortions, the intent is to destroy the child, and the actions directly carry out that intent. In these difficult cases of Equal Care, the intent is to save as many lives as possible, even though we don’t always succeed in saving them all.

It’s like a person who finds an automobile accident with two people trapped inside the car. If the person rescued one victim and shot the other, it would be equivalent to an abortion. But if the person rescued the victim closest to the car door and the car burst into flames before he could reach the other, it would be Equal Care -- there was an honest attempt to save both lives. Sometimes a rescuer can save both victims, and sometimes he can’t. But the rescuer NEVER kills a victim.

The third case is the rarest. It occurs when the pregnancy itself is the problem, when a uterus is so damaged, that it may not handle the stress of carrying the child. It is just like the parent on the beach who jumps into the water, except that the action to save the child takes nine months instead of several minutes. And just like a drowning, some of these mothers will die trying to save their children.

The alternative action is to deliberately destroy the child’s life to save the mother’s. But while the parent chose to jump into the water, the child has no options. In a "life of the mother" abortion, the child is forced to die for her mother. This automatically means that the child’s life is less valuable than the parent’s. And once the child’s life is considered less valuable than the mother’s, the floodgates of abortion on demand have been opened. All lives are no longer equal before the law.

Some pro-lifers argue that "life of the mother" must be allowed because the mother must have the right to save her life, that she has the right to defend herself. That argument defines the baby as an attacker. It isn’t. The baby is as much a victim of the circumstances of the pregnancy as the mother. And it has an equal right to survival.

Let’s return to the car accident analogy, with one rescuer and two victims. If one of the victims shot the other to ensure his own rescue, we would not call it a "life of the victim" exception. We would use a different word.

In the life of the mother situation, it is easy to overlook the baby. But the reality is that two people, equal in God’s eyes, are involved. Those two people must be equal in the eyes of the law as well, or we cross the line from sanctity of life to equality of life. And when all lives aren’t sacred, no life is sacred.