During Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing she was asked many times about abortion; in fact, One Republican senator spent several minutes asking Judge Sotomayor about the viability standard. In other words, is it acceptable to abort a fetus once it is able to live outside of the mother?
What if, in the future, a group of scientist develops a synthetic womb that can function exactly like the female uterus? In that case any fetus—as soon as it is conceived—would be viable. So, if viability was the legal standard abortion would become de facto illegal in America. Obviously, this is the result many hard-line conservatives would like to see, but it is simply not a practical one for our society as a whole.
In a nation where many children are living without homes and where one million fetuses a year are being aborted we can not afford to create a standard of permissible abortions that could wind up cannibalizing itself. Unfortunately, the only way for America to guarantee that the sad but necessary practice of legal abortions continues is to leave the decision up to individual women.
Tags: abortion, Congress, politics, Republicans, Sonia Sotomayor, women, women's rights
