HAMBURGER IN PARADISE
London's Sunday Times reported this weekend that researchers in Atlanta have been communicating with a chimpanzee and an orangutan using voice synthesizers that "speak" when the apes press symbols on a keyboard. So what have they said so far? Among the orangutan Chantek's first words was the request: "Please buy me a hamburger." The Times's Jonathan Leake goes on to report: "Recently [Chantek] saved money paid to it in return for carrying out tasks and building artefacts, then told scientists in sign language: 'I want to buy a pool,' because a heatwave was making life in the cage too uncomfortable." No word yet on whether researchers have broken the news about taxes to Chantek.

PRO-STRIFE
New Jersey pro-lifers are poised to kill a bill banning post-viability abortions-and possibly kill a major opportunity in the process. Gov. Christine Todd Whitman has hinted that she would sign the bill. For pro-lifers, that's reason enough to be suspicious. And the bill's critics have legitimate objections: The bill lets abortionists decide when "viability" has occurred and when abortions are medically necessary.

But the bill's virtues go a long way to counteracting its faults. Most important is that the bill does not have an exception for "psychological health." As such it would constitute a direct and powerful challenge to the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling in Doe v. Bolton (the companion case to the more famous Roe), which made even post-viability abortions a "right" when women seek them for "psychological" or even "familial" reasons.

Thus the definition of medical necessity in the bill is limited and objective. If a woman has a post-viability abortion, regrets it, and sues the abortionist, her lawyer would be able to come up with four or five doctors willing to testify that no, her abortion was not medically necessary. A woman who lost her baby through the perfidy of an abortionist should be a sympathetic plaintiff. In any case, the legal risk would effectively nullify the loophole in the bill.

We'd buy ringside seats for a fight between the trial lawyers and the abortion lobby. And however that fight turned out, the legal principle would have been established that the people, acting through their elected representatives, have the right to protect unborn children.