Amendment 79 would place a right to unrestricted abortion in our state constitution and jeopardize the patient population that I cared for during my 40-year career in metro Denver.
As a neonatologist, I was a pediatrician specializing in the hospital care of sick or premature newly born infants. As such, I cared for many hundreds of premature infants and witnessed the evolution of medical care in this field. Whereas the extremely premature infant (28 weeks gestation or fewer, with full term being 40 weeks) usually requires many intensive care interventions for survival. Those born at more than 28 weeks gestation (the seventh through ninth months of pregnancy) frequently require only monitoring, warmth, and tube feedings for survival, and the great majority of survivors will lead healthy lives with no development issues or disability.
There is no question in my mind, or in the medical literature, that premature infants who are 23 weeks or 24 weeks gestation are individual human beings who feel pain, recognize the touch, voice, and smell of their mother, and have improved outcomes when their mother and father are able to be with them.
They “settle” into restorative sleep and very stable vital signs when they are held by a parent, and skin-to-skin care (also called kangaroo care, being held and warmed on a parent’s chest) is known to improve outcomes. On the other hand, premature infants respond with crying and attempts to withdraw or evade painful interventions, and great efforts are made by medical personnel to alleviate these discomforts in the modern Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Premature infants have a tremendous will to live and will overcome many serious and repeated life-threatening events — such as infections and surgical procedures — if given the proper care.
It is currently legal in Colorado for an abortion to be performed at any time in the pregnancy including in the seventh and ninth months, for any reason, although public funding may not be used for this purpose at present.
I have had the experience while working at the University of Colorado Anschutz NICU of caring for a 32-week gestation infant who was born alive after an attempted abortion, who was admitted to our nursery and required only tube feedings and warmth for survival. He was immediately adopted by a family and went on to have an uncomplicated hospital stay. Who is to say he will not go on to make significant contributions to his family, to his community, or to the world at large?
Data from Arizona, a state that tracks women’s reasons for abortion, shows that most abortions performed in that state after 21 weeks of gestation are performed without a fetal diagnosis or a health threat to the mother.
How can we allow abortion in late pregnancy for healthy babies? Shouldn’t abortion in late pregnancy, after 23 weeks, involving healthy babies be considered murder, since that is what it would be called if the life of a baby in the NICU, or a 2-month-old baby was “terminated”?
Why should I, as a taxpayer, be forced to have my tax dollars used for this purpose when it is antithetical to my entire life’s work? We do not need a constitutional amendment to protect the right to an abortion for any reason at any time in the pregnancy and to allow public tax dollars to pay for it. There is another human life involved in this process; these babies are not just “clumps of cells” or a mass of tissue. They are every bit as human as any other person, although they are not yet able to speak for themselves.
This is wrong, and it is time to consider the rights of the other human beings affected by this decision. Coloradoans should reject Amendment 79.
Elizabeth H. Thilo is a doctor and a retired neonatologist from Aurora.
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