Helping to Change the Climate of Opinion Knowledge of Fetal Development and Fetal Pain Grows Over Last 10 Years.(Column)

Question: When does a decade seem like 700 years?

Answer: When one considers the evolution of public awareness of life in the womb over the past 10 years.

In the 1300s, a new life was judged to have begun when a living, breathing baby emerged completely from her mother's womb. This "born-alive" rule was thus established as the first point of a person's legal protection, a standard that was entirely justified and logical, given that it was a product of the best scientific evidence at the time. They simply didn't know any better.

Flash forward to the late 20th century when, paradoxically, the scourge of widespread abortion in the Western world emerges against a backdrop of accelerating knowledge of the remarkable degree of human development in the womb. The last decade, in particular, has witnessed striking advances in our knowledge of fetal life.

Yet the legalized practice of abortion, and the related denial of rights to unborn victims of violence against the mother, holds fast to a legal standard based on the scientific knowledge current at the time of Henry IV: the venerable "born-alive" rule. Pro-abortionists, once admired by the media as the vanguard, now bring up the rear, clinging to "science" seven hundred years out of date.

But a once tiny rent in the fabric of the case that denies the unborn her humanity has now spread, threatening to rip this lie apart. The evidence that the unborn is "one of us" is virtually everywhere in popular culture.

You see it while you wait in the grocery line - - the front covers of magazines which feature marvelously detailed photos of prenatal development - - or as you surf across the dial and run into that unforgettable commercial showing a mother positively captivated by the 4-D, full-color ultrasound of her unborn child.