“Did we want her too much?” That was the question that Kelley Benham asked her husband, Tom French, when the baby inside of her was 23 weeks old, when the doctors had run out of ways to keep her pregnant just a little bit longer.

Benham, a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, had gone through several rounds of in-vitro fertilization to get pregnant, and the couple wondered whether trying to save this baby, who was right on the edge of what medicine now considers viability, was the right choice.

The couple, who were recently featured on the public radio program Radiolab, explained how it was the baby made the decision for them. Though Juniper, as she was named a few days after her birth, was only 1 pound, 4 ounces and looked barely human, Tom slipped his pinky finger into her palm. “What got to me,” he recalled tearfully, “was how I could be so afraid when she was so strong.” Kelly agreed, “The baby declared its will to live.”

The story of Juniper was not meant to be a political one. The word abortion is not mentioned. But for anyone still on the fence about whether a fetus in its second trimester is in fact a baby, on whether it’s right that New York allows abortion until 24 weeks, stories like Kelley and Tom’s are hard to forget.

And they are becoming more common. As medical advances allow us to save premature babies earlier and earlier and more hospitals and doctors are able to perform such lifesaving feats, more Americans will experience these miracles firsthand or through their friends and relatives. This is having a real impact on the way Americans see abortion, according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. While the pro-life movement has often used “shock the conscience” strategies to get people to join their side, she says, “warming the heart” can be very effective.



It is difficult for the same culture that pays hundreds of millions of dollars each year to care for premature babies … to also accept abortion on demand.

Take the experience of Deanna Fei, mother of a girl born at 25 weeks at 1 pound, 9 ounces. Writing about the experience in a new book, “Girl in Glass,” Fei describes the child: “Her head is too large, her ears barely formed. Her legs look like those of a decrepit woman or a starving child, the skin shriveled and sagging over twigs of bone…Why shouldn’t it be? No part of her is supposed to function out here. She’s supposed to be part of me.”

Fei gained prominence when Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, where Fei’s husband worked, blamed the company’s decision to cut benefits for employees on the medical costs incurred by two “distressed babies,” who cost the company a million dollars each. Fei’s story started as one of fighting back against corporate America’s insensitivity, but its true value is in explaining the lengths to which parents, doctors, and American society will go in order to save a single child, one whose death a few years ago would have been categorized as a miscarriage.

Indeed, what has also changed are the lengths we will go to even to give birth to a single child. While there are reasons to worry about the popularity of fertility treatments and the bioethical questions they open up — should we be able to choose traits for a child or change genetic material to eliminate disabilities? — IVF, surrogacy and other options for childbearing remind us of how valuable a fetus really is.

Conway notes that it is powerful, educated women who have delayed childbearing — the ones who are more often reflexively in favor of abortion rights — who are undergoing these treatments.



“They’re thinking, ‘Maybe having a child is difficult and life really is precious.’ ” And, she adds, these are women “who have a megaphone” and can influence others.

It is difficult for the same culture that pays hundreds of millions of dollars each year to care for premature babies and cheers the incredible medical advances that allow infertile couples to carry home a bundle of joy to also accept abortion on demand. There will always be those who say that it doesn’t matter whether a baby is viable outside the womb — as long as she is inside a woman, she is the property of that woman. But for most Americans who find themselves torn by this issue, the stories of people like Kelley Benham and Deanna Fei will undoubtedly make them look at life differently.

In her account in the Tampa Bay Times, Kelley writes that she and her husband were told there was a 20 percent chance Juniper could live and be reasonably all right. “I contemplated that figure: 20 percent. It didn’t seem hopeless. Then again, imagine a revolver with five chambers. Now put four bullets in it and play Russian roulette. Would we bet on a 20 percent chance if losing might mean losing everything we cared about? Would we torture our baby with aggressive treatment just so she could live out her life in a nursing home or on a ventilator? Would we lose our house? Would our marriage fall apart?”

Once Juniper declared her will to live, though, none of that mattered.