Living past abortion

CNN: Italy investigates report baby lived through abortion

This is a seriously troubling article in so many ways.  A baby (there's really no other way to phrase that) who was aborted at 22 weeks in Italy apparently lived through the procedure for "a whole day" after.  The article states that hospital staff left the baby to die after the procedure, implying that they knew the baby was still alive after the abortion.

This is going to raise some serious questions worldwide in the abortion debate.  I think the most concerning issue here is that the fetus was clearly viable outside the mother's body, as the baby lived for nearly a day afterwards [1].  The Wikipedia article on feticide (the killing of a fetus) has an interesting quote on feticide during abortions, especially the use of drugs injected into a fetal heart in order to kill it.

When used before labor induction, feticide prevents the possible complication of live birth. [Emphasis added]

I find it very disturbing that live birth is considered a 'complication', seeing as how this is generally how pregnancies are supposed to end, although, this does appear to be a 'complication' in the Italian case.  The real complication, though, is why they left the baby to die when they should have been able to tell (and therefore most likely did tell) that the abortion resulted in a live birth.

This whole situation will most likely promote another debate over when life starts.  Some say at conception, some say when the fetus is viable outside the mother's body, others say when the baby is actually born.  This 'complicaton' of having a baby survive after an abortion procedure is certainly going to throw a wrench into this whole debate.  No matter what, things are only going to get messier from here.

On a different note, in the course of writing this post I came across this story, which was a very moving tale about what the author called aborting a "wanted pregnancy".  To me, it seems as though this is one thing that is missing in the abortion debate (although this pretty much falls under the classification of 'if the health of the mother is in danger', I feel this should be separate).  So much is discussed about unwanted pregnancies, but nobody talks about wanted pregnancies, at least in specifics.  It would be interesting to see which category the Italian woman's pregnancy fell under.  Although the article cites Italian law as allowing abortions past 20 weeks if the fetus shows defects or if the mother's physical or mental health requires it, as the procedure was so messed up it would be interesting to see the actual circumstances of this particular procedure.

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[1] I will be using the terms 'fetus' and 'baby', but they are not interchangeable in these circumstances.  Here, 'fetus' refers to while it is still inside the mother's body, and 'baby' refers to it after it is removed from the mother's body.