The first time Ashley McGuire had a baby, she and her husband had to wait 20 weeks to learn its sex. By her third, they found out at 10 weeks with a blood test. Technology has defined her pregnancies, she told me, from the apps that track weekly development to the ultrasounds that show the growing child. \u201cMy generation has grown up under an entirely different world of science and technology than the Roe generation,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re in a culture that is science-obsessed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Activists like McGuire believe it makes perfect sense to be pro-science and pro-life. While she opposes abortion on moral grounds, she believes studies of fetal development, improved medical techniques, and other advances anchor the movement\u2019s arguments in scientific fact. \u201cThe pro-life message has been, for the last 40-something years, that the fetus \u2026 is a life, and it is a human life worthy of all the rights the rest of us have,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s been more of an abstract concept until the last decade or so.\u201d But, she added, \u201cwhen you\u2019re seeing a baby sucking its thumb at 18 weeks, smiling, clapping,\u201d it becomes \u201charder to square the idea that that 20-week-old, that unborn baby or fetus, is discardable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scientific progress is remaking the debate around abortion. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided\u00a0Roe v. Wade<\/i>, the case that led the way to legal abortion, it pegged most fetuses\u2019 chance of viable life outside the womb at 28 weeks; after that point, it ruled, states could reasonably restrict women\u2019s access to the procedure. Now, with new medical techniques,\u00a0doctors are debating<\/a> whether that threshold should be closer to 22 weeks. Like McGuire, today\u2019s prospective moms and dads can learn more about their baby earlier into a pregnancy than their parents or grandparents. And like McGuire, when they see their fetus on an ultrasound, they may see humanizing qualities like smiles or claps, even if most scientists see random muscle movements.<\/p>\n