Babes in the arms of the criminal law.

• Author: Watson, Jack

"You have a fine and healthy baby." When spoken by the physician who has just assisted at the delivery of her child, these words are possibly some of the most comforting, reassuring, and welcome words to a parent. One suspects that at the moment the child is presented to the mother, the good mother undertakes, if silently, a lifetime promise to cherish the little one. So also does the good father at his first chance to see and touch the baby. No law is relevant to the moment. Nevertheless, society has enacted many reminders in both the civil and criminal law intended to ensure the mother and father remember these promises in the years that follow.

The civil and criminal law have been, to some extent, insinuated into life's renewal well before any child enters society thus wrapping the child in as much an embrace of law as the embrace of parents. In our modern society, law has come to attach itself to life and to the reproduction of life in many respects.

There may be a certain strangeness that, despite persevering and evolving positively for thousands of years of living without law, our ancestors developed law to address the fundamental aim of any living being and species-reproduction. That certain strangeness may seem enhanced by the fact that even the most forceful of our laws the criminal law, has been introduced into what is such a natural process. That certain strangeness may reach another level still when resort to the criminal law has itself been used by some for political purposes, and for the distribution of both legal and personal power within our society.

Yet such is the way we have evolved. It is interesting to consider how the criminal law touches us even before we breathe.

One aspect is the topic of abortion, about which this column can offer no glib or onesided opinion. The debate about abortion has divided many rational and sensitive people, as well, sadly, as serving as a basis for some persons to take irrational and insensitive positions towards others. Reproduction is not just passion followed by pain, payments, and patience. There are many issues of conscience involved in the question of whether the reproductive process must, in a given situation, end. It does not resolve the matter to assert that the debate is just a matter of whether one looks at developing life as fetus or as baby. It does not resolve it to assume that the persons most affected are acting conscientiously only if they choose to proceed in one manner-or...