Witnesses pushed back on Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) on Wednesday after he suggested women were receiving abortions "up to the moment of birth."
At a Senate Budget Committee hearing about reproductive health, Middlebury College Prof. Caitlin Myers disagreed after Kennedy called a fetus a "baby."
"There is no economic justice for the baby, because the baby's dead, right?" Kennedy asked.
"I don't really know how to answer your question," Myers said. "I would refer to it as a fetus."
"If the mother is healthy, and the baby is healthy, do you support abortion up to the moment of birth?" Kennedy wondered.
"I think that's a really hard question to answer, because that just doesn't happen," Myers explained. "You're asking me about something that simply doesn't happen."
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The senator posed similar questions to Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung.
"If the mother is healthy and the baby is healthy, do you support abortion up to the moment of birth?" he said.
"So Senator, you're using really inflammatory language to talk about a medical procedure, and it's not a simple yes or no," Zahedi-Spung noted. "Not to mention, when you make statements like that, you're erasing the grief and the trauma that my patients are going through."
"You're not going to answer my question either, are you?" Kennedy complained.
"It's not a question that can be answered in an appropriate way, Senator," the doctor remarked.
In the discussion of human development, important distinctions are made between the terms "fetus" and "baby," reflecting not only biological differences but also the stages of development.
A fetus refers to an unborn offspring, from the end of the embryonic stage at about the 8th week after fertilization until birth. This period is characterized by significant growth and development, where all major organs start to form and function, yet the fetus is not fully developed to survive outside the womb without medical assistance before a certain period of gestation.
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