From: Hank Roth <odin@halcyon.halcyon.com>
Subject: I'm for Frankenstein's Baby
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 06:36:14 GMT

<<< via P_news/p.news >>>
{From LIVING MARXISM, December 1992}
I'M FOR FRANKENSTEIN'S BABY
by Ann Bradley
 
A brain-dead pregnant woman placed on a life-support system until 
her child can be born alive has caused a political storm, which 
has united feminists and religious bigots and left anti-abortion 
groups not knowing which way to turn.
 
Marion Ploch, aged 18, was killed on her way to work in a car 
crash in October. Her death certificate has already been filled 
out. But the 13-week old fetus survived the crash unharmed and 
doctors at University clinic in Erlangen, Germany, are intending 
to keep Marion's corpse functioning artifically until it is 
sufficiently developed to survive outside the womb. At this 
point, expected to be next March, the baby will be born by 
Caesarian and its mother's live-support will be turned off.
 
  It's not the first case where a woman has been kept alive to 
have a child, but it's the first time it's been tried from so 
early in the pregnancy. In Finland in 1984, Marko Ylitalo's 
mother was kept alive artificially for 10 weeks before he was 
born. In Britain, too, Deborah Bell was on a life support system 
for five weeks in 1986 before her daughter Nicola was born, but 
doctors avoided controversy by postponing tests to confirm that 
she was dead, so they could avoid the completion of the death 
certificate.
 
Doctors say it's technically not too difficult. As long as blood 
circulation through the womb is adequate, oxygen and carbon 
dioxide levels controlled and nutrients maintained, the pregnancy 
should progress--but util it's been tired, they'll never really 
know.
 
The case has provoked outrage, uniting oppositon across the 
political and social specturm. Nobody except the doctors seems to 
be in favour of the `heroic intervention'. Opinion polls in 
the German yellow press showed that 80 percent of readers thought 
that the life-support should be turned off. There have been 
abusive phone calls and letters ot the clinic, accusing doctors 
of `Nazi-style' experiements to produce `Frankenstein's baby', 
and the clinic walls have been daubed with graffiti.
 
Senior figures in the Free Democrats, members of Germany's ruling 
coalition, have described the procedure as an `intolerable 
perversion of humanity'. The president of the Catholic doctors' 
association in Germany has concemned the use of the woman as a 
`breeding machine' and the Social Democrats have called for an 
emergency parliamentary debate on `post-human motherhood'. 
Women's rights groups argue that the decision to sustain the 
pregnancy has reduced women to the status of mere `baby 
machines', and that Marion's right to a dignified and peaceful 
death has been denied.
 
Personally, I'm on the side of the doctors. I'm sure critics are 
right when they claim that the doctors are motivated by a desire 
to experiment rather than by compassion---but so what? Medical 
science still has a lot to learn about fetal development, and if 
this can provide some answers that will be of benefit to pregnant 
women, so much the better: Marion is beyond caring what happens 
to her body.
 
My only reservation about the `Erlangen Baby Case' is the 
consequences it may have for LIVING pregnant women.
 
Professor Scheele, the responsible consultant, has justified his 
actions with the argument that the fetus, `was life. We couln't 
and simply shouldn't have pulled the plug'. It remains to be seen 
what consquences this approach will have, as the German 
parliament braces itself this month to review its abortion law 
yet again.
 
If it is accepted that Marion's baby has a RIGHT TO LIFE, then 
the argument that women have the right to end unwanted 
pregnancies will be serverely denied.
 
Fortunately, perhaps, the anti-abortionists, have been loath to 
take this approach. In both Germany and britain, the supposedly 
absolute moral principles about the `right to life of the unborn' 
are less than absolute when they conflict with other traditional 
values. Those who argue that abortion is unnatural, a sin against 
God and a medical aberration, are somewhat flummoxed by the fact 
that in this case the maintenance of fetal life depends on `anti-
natural' intervention.
 
It's a sign of the anti-abortion campaign's unease that in Britain 
the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC)--who 
never usually miss the chance of a headline---has declined to 
comment on Marion Ploch. It seems rather sick that SPUC is so coy 
in this case, where everyone concerned wants the outcome to be a 
healthy child, when it has no compunction about trying to force 
pregnant women to have babies that they don't want.
 
I find no contradiction between supporting doctors striving to 
push back the frontiers of medical science, conceding to the 
desire of the prospective grandparents to raise their dead 
daughter's wanted child, and supporting the rights of living 
women to end unwanted pregnancies. Marion is dead and her body no 
longer has any rights. Her fetus will not acquire any rights 
until after it is born. No action in respect of either of them 
should be allowed to prejudice the situation of living women. But 
neither should mystical notions of what constituties life and 
motherhood be permitted to interfere with potentially useful 
medical developments. 
---------------------------------------------
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