Here's a fascinating story. The U.S. military has charged Staff Sergeant Robert Bales with an additional murder in the shooting spree in Afghanistan earlier this month that killed 16 civilians. The military says there was a 17th victim -- an unborn baby.
How can an unborn baby -- or fetus, as the secular left calls them -- be a baby at all, much less a person? Didn't Roe v. Wade and the companion case Doe v. Bolton answer that question about personhood? Is the military -- part of the U.S. government -- saying that the unborn child was in fact a baby and thus a person within the laws governing murder? If that is the case it wishes to make, and if a court convicts Bales of killing not 16, but 17 people, what about the law governing when life begins and when the protection of it in law also begins?
The woman probably wanted to have the baby, so that's the difference. If you want to have a child, it's a baby. If not, it's a fetus. Nothing changes about the status of the child, only the labeling.
I'm Cal Thomas in Washington.
Publication date: March 28, 2012
