Medicine

Baby love?

John Linklater

The reassuring tone of the recent Law Commission* report and the headlines under which it was welcomed in the medical press last week, contrast ironically with its contents. The report states that the unborn child should be entitled, as a matter of urgency, to recover damages for any harm done to it whilst still in the womb, exactly as if that harm had been done after delivery, but only if the child survives birth by forty-eight hours.

The Commission then proposes a Congenital Disabilities Bill to give effect to its suggestions, having the superficial appearance of yet another, slightly meddlesome effort to extend detailed government control into every facet of private relationship. The full implications, however, boggle the mind and defeat the imagination.

A man who carelessly transmits rubella to his wife in the eighth week of her pregnancy, to take but one example, could be forced to pay a resulting injured child, substantial financial compensation. A ruthless wife can guard against this by adding insult to injury and invoking paragraph 1 (b) of the Abortion Act. If, on the other hand, she is compassionate and courageous, she may well spend the rest of her days in poverty as a result of her child's lawsuit.

Such a bill, claiming overtly to protect the interests of the unborn child, in fact puts financial pressure on the pregnant mother to have the child aborted if there is the slightest chance of a handicap. In whose interest, then, has the Law Commission made this suggestion?

The Commission nevertheless admits that a child who is injured in

* Report on Injuries to Unborn Children. The Law Commission, No 60. HMSO

the womb as, for example, by drugs, already seems to have adequate redress under Common Law. The proposed bill will not, therefore, offer this child any striking advantage, but it will prevent a congenitally injured person from establishing explicitly under Common Law his own continued identity as a human being from conception onward. A succession of such cases could, in due course, cast doubt upon the legal validity of the Abortion Act with its fictional, non-human, non-person fetus.

The Law Commission report takes the matter further. In claim ing to establish the legal rights of the unborn child, it specifically states that no rights should be given to the fetus while it is a fetus and not a "living" person, and that it should only acquire rights retrospectively, after being born alive. We now begin to glimpse the real purpose of the report, as an effort to tidy up the frayed ends and incom patibilities of the Abortion Act. The tragic thalidomide children, and others like them, merely provide the emotive facade behind which the Government hope to introduce another piece of Orwellian, new speak legislation, into which will be built a clause that finally takes away from the unborn child all status whatsoever, simultaneously inducing his mother to see to it that, if he is injured, he is not born alive.

But there is a further subtlety. It is now becoming widely known that some 10,000 larger babies are being aborted annually by Caesarian Section. The newspeak euphe mism, if the baby is to be killed after delivery, is "hysterotomy" but, by whatever name, the procedure is a Caesarian Section and the baby is, therefore, alive and uninjured when it leaves its mother's body. Some may be floppy due to anaesthetic or muscle relaxant but their hearts are beating, and the metabolism of a newborn child allows it to live up to half an hour without breathing. Some are ,deli vered crying and wriggling, but even the limp ones are capable of being woken. The Infant Life (Pre servation) Act of 1929 therefore becomes irrelevant, since these children acquire a legally separate existence, whether viable or not, and are protected by the Infanticide Act.

The Lane report (Vol I. p 261) speaks blandly of the disposal of

these "large fetuses which had reached the stage of legal (or actual) viability." Some are sent for

experimental research, some to public health laboratories, no doubt to grow viruses for vaccines, while

others are "sent to the mortuary and treated as still-births or neonatal deaths." The questions that

the Lane Commission should have

asked were: "At what stage, by what means and by whom, are they killed?" and "If they are treated as neo-natal deaths, what certifica

tion is completed, and what is stated as the cause of death?"

It is this safeguard, of the infanticide Act, which the proposed Congenital Disabilities Bill will so conveniently obscure with the clause that unless the child survives delivery by forty-eight hours, there will be no claim for damages for loss of expectation of life. The way will then be paved for the ultimate nightmare proposed by Dr Crick and others, of a universal, two-day, post-natal, probation period before each child is admitted to the grim, brave new world of healthy survivors.