When a 6-Day-Old Baby Isn't a Person

by Kim D.

A recent ruling by a New York court overturned the conviction of a drunk driver who killed her baby in a car accident, citing that since the infant was only six days old when it actually died, it was not yet considered a person because it had been born via an emergency cesarian. 
However, in 2012, Jennifer Jorgensen was found guilty of this act:

Seven years ago Jennifer Jorgensen, who was in the third trimester of her pregnancy, swerved her car into oncoming traffic and ran head long into another car. She killed the two people in the other vehicle and was herself seriously injured. Since her baby was in distress from the wreck doctors birthed the child by cesarian section. The baby lived for only six days before succumbing from injuries received in the crash. 

Jorgensen was aquitted of killing the couple in the other car but was held accountable for the death of her child. After the conviction in 2012, Joregensen's defense lawyers appealed to higher courts basing their argument on strict interpretation of NY law: 

This law essentially says that a human is not a “person” until they pass through the portal of birth, as if the birth canal itself bestows “personhood” on human beings. This is such an arbitrary and silly claim that it makes a mockery of the law not to mention belittles life itself.

The idea that you are not a person on one side of the birth canal but you are on the other is absurd–especially in light of the capabilities of modern medicine.

This case lays bare the illogic of proclaiming that a human doesn’t count as a person until it clears the birth canal. And the reason these illogical backflips are made in legislatures across the country is merely to give sanction to abortion–which is murder, too, but that truth can’t be said for political reasons.