This is a tragic situation all over. It’s ugly.

I raise it because it displays rather well to me the weakness of the pro-choice position and I really wonder where many of them would come down on something like this.

Here’s the truly awful situation – a pregnant woman ate rat poison. Friends rushed her to the hospital. While still in the hospital a week later she gave birth to the baby who died three days later from the poison, The Star Telegram reports.

You see the quandary this might cause a pro-choicer, right? Because the mother took the poison while the baby was still in the womb it should be all cool for pro-choicers for whom it’s always open season on babies. But the baby didn’t die from the poisoning until three days after being born which makes it infanticide, right?

Most self labeled pro-choicers don’t like to admit in public they’d actually be pretty OK with killing babies outside the womb so what’s the answer for them in this case?

Insert pro-choice hemming and hawing here.

There’s a couple of ways for them to look at this. I remember a few years ago there was a case where a guy shot a police officer. The cop lived but was paralyzed so the shooter was jailed for a short while for attempted murder. But then the officer died from complications due to his paralysis so there was talk of charging the shooter with murder. I don’t remember what the outcome there was but the idea would be the same here.

But the other argument is that this mother made the “choice” while the baby was still unborn so the unborn had no rights up until the moment of birth.

Police have ruled the infant’s death to be a homicide and the mother could face murder or attempted feticide charges.

These kinds of things aren’t really quandaries for pro-lifers. To us, the killing of a baby is equally wrong inside and outside the womb. It’s part of the whole consistent life ethic and all that. It takes all the picking and choosing who should die to God, who’s been handling such matters for a while now.

HT Jill Stanek