Last week, Russ Douthat of the New York Times wrote an opinion piece, ”What Do Liberals Believe About Late-Term Abortion?”, in which he outlined some of the parameters of not only the debate regarding both late-term and abortion in general. This year the Democrats have used the abortion access issue as key part of the electoral strategy.
Some excerpts.
First Douthat provides a definition:
”The phrase ‘late-term’ itself is contested, but for the purposes of this discussion I’m talking about abortions that take place around or beyond the threshold of potential fetal viability, which (thanks to medical advances) currently sits somewhere in the range of 22 weeks to 25 weeks of pregnancy.”
Then to put the number of late-term abortions in perspective:
”… (the) belief, that these procedures are vanishingly rare, turns on the question of what “rare” means. Relative to other abortions, yes, late-term procedures are extremely rare: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 percent of American abortions take place at or after 21 weeks, which, by my calculation, would be slightly under 10,000 out of slightly under one million.
On the other hand, relative to other causes of childhood death that liberals take extremely seriously, thousands of late-term abortions loom quite large. The C.D.C. reports that in total just over 10,000 American children under 14 died of natural and unnatural causes in 2022. As the demographer Lyman Stone points out, if you included late-term abortion in those numbers, it would instantly be the leading cause of childhood death, eclipsing diseases, drugs and gun violence.”
He then covers the implications:
“…if you accept that they will be killed in meaningful numbers (numbers that would almost certainly increase under Harris’s preferred legal order), well, then you need to either retreat to the life-begins-at-breath position — radical but consistent, mystical but stable — or else come up with some other marker that establishes personhood at, say, 35 weeks of pregnancy and consigns viable fetuses before that line to a less-than-human status.
Having followed these debates for many years, I think it’s fair to say that the pro-choice side — not every pro-choice individual, but the political collective — consistently refuses to make this choice, preferring to occupy an ambiguous zone where late-term abortion is permitted in law, minimized as a reality and left unjustified by any consistent argument about human life or human rights.”
Bill Clinton’s 1992 statement that “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” was politically shrewd as it provided an umbrella for a wide-range of pro-choice supporters. However that umbrella was more of facade than of any structural significance. Popular opinion points to the 2022 overturning of Roe as the radicalization of the pro-choice movement which saw abortion not as a regrettable choice, but rather as an affirmation of identity and, dare I say it, a sacrament. However in reality that radicalization began long before 2022 as the radicalism of feminism and the Left in general overcame humanism.
In short, for all the caterwauling among the Left regarding the supposed radicalism of the pro-life movement, the energy pushing the pro-abortion movement even before Dobbs was even more radical.
A quick perusal of the post-Dobbs political landscape, as the various state legislatures passed or updated abortion laws, showed a peculiar style guide in the media as far as how the term “ban” was applied to legislation. “Abortion ban” did not only refer to states such as Alabama where abortion is permitted only in cases where the mother’s life is in danger, but also in other states where it permitted only up to 18 weeks (which makes it more liberal than well known Christian-fascist states such as France, Belgium, and the Czech Republic.)
The reason for the Left’s radicalism is that to ban abortion at any time before birth would require that the personhood of a fetus be established at some point during gestation. This would require the Left to define when the individuality, and not just the viability, of the fetus occurs.
That today’s Left can never do, not in a world which calls abortion “reproductive health care” as if the fetus is a tumor to be cut out and disposed of.
Douthat playfully states the possibility of 35 weeks as that cut-off point; however, it becomes more problematic when one looks at the unique genetic structure of the fetus and the point of consciousness. The late writer Christopher Hitchens, noted leftist and atheist, believed that:
”Look, once you allow that the occupant of the womb is even potentially a life, it cuts athwart any glib invocation of “the woman’s right to choose.”
The Left on the abortion, as with so many other issues, projects its radicalism onto its opponents. Once again the national Republican party has cut and run on an issue that with a little imagination and some guts would turn the table on the Democrats and their embrace of unrestricted abortion.