When my daughter arrived at 24 weeks’ gestation, my pregnancy tracking app was quick to note she had reached her first viability milestone.
Viability is an arbitrary line when it’s estimated that a fetus has the ability to survive outside of the uterus with medical help – between 24 and 26 weeks’ gestation, during the sixth month of pregnancy.
At 24 weeks, my baby was the size of an eggplant, surpassing a foot in length, already over a pound, growing hair and muscle and fat. Ears and fingernails fully formed, practicing breathing, developing taste buds.
And in 19 states and Washington D.C., I could have paid a medical professional to end her life up until that point in my pregnancy. In many of those locations, I can still make that choice at 26 weeks’ gestation because there are currently no gestational restrictions on elective, induced abortions in 11 states and our nation’s capital.
Lest we forget (or ignore) what an abortion procedure does to a fetus at this point in pregnancy, that would mean medicinal or manual dilation of my cervix and a physician ripping my child limb from limb and removing her from the safety of my womb – a procedure the American College of Obstetrician and Gynecologists says removes the “contents of the uterus” using “instruments and a suction device.”
This option is available to me in places like Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland. Without legal repercussions, without questions, without qualms.
Even though I first felt her move two months ago.
Even though my prenatal medical team has been referring to her as a fetus, a baby, a human person – not a “clump of cells” or “pregnancy tissue” – since the beginning of my pregnancy.
Even though she’s starting to open her eyes, capable of feeling pain and hearing her dad’s voice, and all of her bodily systems and functions are now intact and continuing to grow.
What changed at 24, 25, 26 weeks in my womb compared to 15 weeks or six weeks? What shifts when her likelihood of survival outside the womb with medical intervention improves at six months’ gestation?
Perhaps it’s that we’re confronted with the reality that an elective abortion kills a human being … because that “pregnancy tissue” is now clearly the corpse of a preterm baby. And now it’s morally questionable to intentionally kill someone who might survive if she had support elsewhere.
While the first marker of viability at 24 weeks ushers in an exciting new stage of pregnancy and a child’s ability to survive outside the uterus with medical assistance should be celebrated, it does not change the worth or humanity of that person.
That’s a fixed reality, unchanged by diagnosis or prognosis or feeling or legislation.
Why?
“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” (Psalm 139:13-16)
My daughter is just as much a person now as she has been this whole pregnancy – just a little bit more developed, a little bit more active, a little bit harder to ignore.
Her value didn’t spike once she hit a viability milestone. Wanted or not, planned or not, able to survive outside my womb or not, the Lord is knitting her together. In His image, for her good, for His glory.
And because of that her value is fearfully, wonderfully fixed.
This article originally appeared in Kentucky Today.
