Feticide and the redefining of "viability"

So much to blog about, so little time. It's been a big weekend, both personally and culturally. Combine that with the mad scramble to get everything ready to go for my upcoming trip to Oxford, and it's tough to keep up withit all. But we'll do our best. :)

Among other things, I wanted to bring to your attention a very interesting debate that is taking place here in Indy lately, which was prompted by the recent shooting of the pregnant Huntington Bank teller. As you may recall from my previous post on this tragedy, it resulted in the death of her unborn twin babies.

Since then, the Marion County prosecuter, Carl Brizzi, called for an expansion of the current feticide law here in Indiana. (Feticide is the intentional killing of an unborn fetus.) Currently, the law in Indiana allows someone to be convicted of murdering an unborn baby based on "viability", which is legally determined to be a baby who is at least 7 months along in gestation.

Last Thursday, The Indianapolis Star weighed in with their official editorial position on the feticide law by first suggesting that moral outrage shouldn't drive legislation efforts. They also suggested that we should seek a compromise on this issue, namely that we should increase the punishment for those convicted under the current feticide issue.

I disagreed and made an effort to call The Indianapolis Star on it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they printed my Letter to the Editor in today's paper.

Feel free to take a look and weigh in on this critical issue.

Comments

[Jason]

Moral outrage has govern more policies than we may care to realize. the unfortunate truth is that this is a law that is outdated and should be redone based upon our current capabilities medically.

It is a very unfortunate that it takes something like this to change an outdated law.