Life of the Mother "Exception"

An "exception" means a child intentionally killed. A physician should never postpone his efforts to save the mother in order to take time out to kill the child. If a doctor can only save the mother and not the child also, that is a tragedy, but it is not an intentional killing. Unintentional, unavoidable, and accidental death is not the same as intentional killing.

A personhood amendment has no exceptions. But what if a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother? The doctor's goal should be to save mom and the baby if possible. The goal should never be to kill the mother to save the baby, nor to kill the child to save the mother.

In an ectopic pregnancy (see below for more), we save mom and typically the baby tragically dies. A mom on the verge of death from preeclampsia is saved by a doctor (not by an abortionist) who delivers the baby. The only way that doctor would thereby  become an abortionist is if that doctor then performed an overt act to kill the baby. Saving the mother often requires delivering the baby, but never killing the baby. That baby may not survive the premature delivery but the child's death must not be the intent of the medical intervention. For every good doctor follows the Hippocratic Oath to first, do no harm.

Society's attempt to justify killing unborn children leads to absurdities like the "exception" for the life of the mother in the partial-birth abortion ban. For the PBA "procedure" is not designed to save the mother but only to kill the baby. And partial-birth abortions, which are the intentionally breech, i.e., feet-first, delivery and then killing of these babies, were not performed by surgeons generally but only by abortionists.

Ultimately, abortionists use "exceptions" including "incest" and "life" only as an excuse to defend the slaughter of all unborn children for any reason. In reality, if the mother's life is threatened by her pregnancy, the doctor would deliver the baby through normal medical procedure but never stop midway to kill the baby. However, the very idea of delaying caring for and saving the mother long enough to take the time kill the baby is such an obvious cruelty and deception that it exposes the confusion in some, and the hardheartedness in others, who argue for such exceptions.

Ectopic Pregnancy and Intentional Killing: Abortion has so hardened the heart of the modern medical community that no thought is given to the unborn child who is growing outside of the uterus. In situ or by transplant to the uterus, rarely has an ectopic child survived. In the vast majority of cases, the child will die and so will the mother unless a physician intervenes. Those who desire to justify abortion claim that such a complication proves their point because proper medical treatment for an ectopic pregnancy requires the intentional killing of the embryo. As demonstrated below, this is not true. But consider their motivation and the form of their argument.

Those who try to undermine the biblical teaching of absolute morality will claim, for example, that Christians should not oppose suicide. They give examples such as a soldier throwing himself on a hand grenade or even Jesus Christ going willingly to the cross. However, suicide is the act of killing onseself intentionally. If that soldier could have saved himself and his buddies, he would have done so, for it was not his goal to kill himself but to save others, and thus, he is not guilty of commiting suicide. Likewise as Jesus Christ prayed at Gethesemane the night before His crucifixion, "if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me." Thus it was not His desire to kill Himself, but to save others. Lawyers speaking Latin refer to mens rea, i.e., the guilty mind, which distinguishes such heroic acts from the sin of suicide including, for example, the three such instances in the Bible of Saul, Abimelech, and Judas Iscariot.

The Latin word ectopia comes from the Greek ektopos meaning out-of-place. So a doctor who cannot save a mom's ectopic (out-of-place) child should not of course intentionally kill that child. But because of the modern disregard for the unborn child's life, many claim that the only valid medical treatment in many circumstances is to induce abortion by administering methotrexate, a drug lethal to the little one.

The Association of Pro-Life Physicians in What About an Ectopic Pregnancy? show that methotrexate abortion is never required and that it has been known even to kill an existing uterine twin. Consider also this case documented in the Harvard Medical Library in Volume XXIV of the medical journal Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics. In the article Transplantations of Ectopic Pregnancy from Fallopian Tube to Cavity of the Uterus, Dr. C. J. Wallace describes a successful transplant of such an out-of-place baby into his mom's womb:

In Duluth, Minnesota during an operation on a 27-year-old woman Dr. Wallace:

"found an ectopic gestation in the left tube," which was "enlarged to the size of a walnut... Knowing their anxiety for raising a child, I decided to try, at least, the only thing at hand -- to transplant the ectopic pregnancy. ... I carefully opened the tube and dissected the pregnancy out intact, being careful not to injure the sac in any way by keeping wide away and including part of the tube-wall. It came out very easily and was in size about equal to a large olive. It was at once placed within the cavity of the opened uterus... The tube was closed in like manner and left in place. The patient was watched carefully... for two weeks with no symptoms whatever. ... The pregnancy went on normally to full term and resulted in the natural birth of a fine boy, fully developed and without a scar, May 2, 1916."

Sadly at that time Margaret Sanger was 36 years old, the over-population myth was devaluing children, and America's medical community was being seduced by Darwinian eugenics. Thus, with the ensuing war against children, there has been a 100-year delay in the fulfillment of Dr. Wallace's prediction that, "I have not the least doubt that many such transplanted ectopic pregnancies will be reported in the near future."  Dr. Wallace also predicted "failures in this as in other transplantation procedures, but there is not the [same level of] danger involved in this transplantation that there is in many others." And whether the baby is able to be successfully transplanted, or whether he or she dies, what is crucial before God, before man, and for the sake of the parents, is that every effort is made to love and protect both mom and this little one.

Abortion is always wrong because it's a baby, and it is always wrong to intentionally kill a baby. So without exception, abortion is wrong and should be abolished.

Please see also AmericanRTL.org/exceptions regarding other so-called "exceptions," and check out our Focus on the Strategy II video online or via DVD. And remember, we are the makers of the world's largest protest sign!

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