Scenario for a Suspense/Thriller/Horror Movie
I came up with this while debating with Pyrrhonist what the legal status of infants who are born alive as the result of botched abortions ought to be, in this thread. I was going to put this in there, but then I developed it to a point where I think it deserves its own thread. If you don’t want to follow the link to see the whole argument, basically I am arguing that a child that is “born” as the result of a botched late term abortion deserves the same legal protections as a child born any other way, and Pyrrhonist is arguing that it does not.
So, the scenario: We posit the existence of an Evil Corporation. Easy enough. Evil Incorporated wants to perform experiments on live humans, to develop new medical technologies. This is illegal, of course, but EI’s lawyers believe they have found a loophole. We assume the scenario takes place in a near future in which the use of fetal stem cells from abortions is legal and generally accepted (not by the hard core pro-lifers, of course, but you know what I mean).
Here is what EI does: It finds some women who are pregnant and want to have abortions. How exactly is not important. EI has lots of money and clever lawyers; they will find a way. It offers the women an inducement: They hold off on their abortions until sometime in the third trimester, they get financially compensated, plus free room and board and top quality medical care at an EI-run medical facility.
Here we must make some stipulations. First, most women looking to get an abortion want to get it overwith as soon as possible, and will not want to be put through the emotional wringer of delaying it, even for a lot of money. However, EI has money and resources to burn. And if you look hard enough, and are willing to spend the money, I think we can assume you can find quite a few people willing to do some pretty unsavory things. For a price.
So. Let us say EI digs until it finds 100 such women. It sets them up at a medical facility in a state with lax laws concerning 3rd trimester abortions. Some of the doctors know what’s going on here, and are being paid hush money on the side. The other medical personal are given some kind of plausible cover story, perhaps about some kind of legal medical research.
In due course, the abortions are performed. If the laws in the state make it necessary, one or more of the corrupt doctors getting the hush money certifies a medical necessity. And now we get into the suspense/thriller/horror aspects. The abortions are performed in such a way that the chances that the fetus will survive the procedure are maximized. IANADoctor, but I assume this is possible; I have heard of very rare cases in which botched “conventional” late term abortions result in the fetus coming out alive. If it can happen accidently, I am sure EI’s doctors can cause it to happen on purpose.
By now you no doubt see where the scenario is going. The “children” that came through the procedure alive are put in respirators, and the attempt is made to keep them alive, using the same methods used to keep children born prematurely alive in hospitals.
We assume a success rate of 25%. So, EI now has 25…25 what, exactly? Fetuses? Blobs of tissue? I will adopt the convention of calling them “children”, like that, with quotation marks. EI now has 25 “children” with no legal status as human beings. No laws protect aborted fetuses. You cannot be a “citizen”, protected by the law, unless you were “born”. These children were never “born”, so it would seem they have the legal status of “medical waste”.
The “children” are raised in an EI-run “orphanage” presumably in some isolated place. As they grow to an age where they are useful, medical experiments are performed on them. If the whole thing is profitable, EI repeats the process. EI, of course, is not perfect. They are bound to slip up at some point, and so the information about what they are doing is bound to get out.
We assume, for our scenario, that the information gets out to Our Plucky Heroine (played by Julia Roberts) who is, I think, one of the nurses hired by EI to work at their “orphanage” who wasn’t “in on it”. Things then proceed in typical suspense/thriller fashion…a handsome love interest (played by Denzel Washington), a little gratuitous nudity, maybe a car chase, etc, etc.
We eventually wind up at the climactic scene in which OPH confronts the Evil CEO of EI (played by Anthony Hopkins) who, in the film’s big twist (of course there’s a twist) doesn’t try to kill OPH. Oh no. Why should I try to do that? he asks. Yes, the information OPH has dug up is certainly embarassing. A veritable public relations disaster. But neither ECEO nor any other employee of the company can be subject to any legal action. Yes, some of the “children” died during the experiments, but to be prosecuted for murder, you have to kill a person, and none of these “children” were “people” under the law. They were…“products of conception”. “Blobs of tissue”. “Medical waste”. An aborted fetus has no rights under the law.
It seems the Bad Guys have Our Plucky Heroine backed into a corner. Heck, I don’t even see where she has legal grounds to get the surviving “children” out of their custody, or even to prevent them from doing further experiments, as it’s not against the law to use material from the “products of conception” in medical experiments (as per our assumption about fetal stem cells).
What I am trying to bring up for debate here, with my admittedly over-dramatized example, is, what is or ought to be the legal status of “children” who emerge from late term abortions, against all odds, alive? Are they, or should they be, consider “people” just as any other newborn is so considered? What grounds would anyone have to oppose such a thing?
The House addressed this issue a few years ago with something called “The Born Alive Infants Protection Act”. It was passed overwhelmingly by the House, opposed by pro-choice organizations, and iirc never became law…I don’t know if it was bottled up in the Senate, or vetoed by Clinton.
