Abortion is back in the news* thanks to the recent SCOTUS decision to revisit Roe v. Wade in hearing arguments about a Mississippi law that would severely restrict abortion, and this week’s passage of a Texas law that would ban abortions after about the sixth week of pregnancy. So what better time to lay out why I think both the right and the left are ridiculous extremists on this issue?
Right wing pro-lifers. This one’s easy to get out of the way first. To the extent that their argument rests on religious doctrine, that’s a nonstarter for me as an atheist and has no business being used to justify legislation in a country with explicit (and very welcome) separation of church and state.
To the extent their argument can be disentangled from religion and stated as “it’s a human life from the moment of conception”, well…the idea that an egg with a sperm in it is a person is just absurd. (And there is no actual moment of conception anyway: it’s a gradual process that plays out over hours or even a day or two.)
Even more absurd, and cruel, is the notion that a woman with a blastocyst inside her— which cannot think or feel and for the first six weeks is smaller than a grain of rice—should be forced to carry the pregnancy all the way to term.
So I absolutely support the morning after pill, the abortion pill, and first-trimester surgical abortions.
But pro-choice activists and politicians tend to be extremists too. Very few public figures in this country express support for allowing abortion to be unrestricted in the first trimester but then banning it in most circumstances thereafter (even though this is the standard in other advanced nations like France and Ireland). And pro-choicers generally stand strongly against parental notification laws, even though you can’t give a teenager a Tylenol without parental permission. The whole concept of “it’s between a woman and her doctor” simply does not apply to minors in any other context, and if abortion is “just a medical procedure”, why is it different?
I believe once you get into second trimester abortion, you really are getting into something akin to infanticide at this point. I said it was ridiculous to call a blastocyst a baby, but in the middle and late stages of pregnancy, it really is just a baby that hasn’t been born yet.
Is there something magical about the day the first trimester ends? Was it just a clump of cells the day before, and now it’s a human being? Of course not, but we have to establish somewhat arbitrary lines when it comes to making legislation (even the most ardent abortion rights activist would acknowledge this, as presumably they don’t believe there is “ensoulment” or a bestowal of sentience at the moment of birth that was not there five minutes earlier). Ethically, I’d prefer women use a Plan B morning after pill, but in balancing the rights of the pregnant woman and the developing life inside her, I think you have to give her up to 12 weeks to figure things out (and I do BTW believe the government should pay for abortions for poor women). After that, she had her chance and the ethical pendulum should swing to factoring in the developing baby’s rights.
That doesn’t mean there should be an absolute blanket ban on abortion after the first trimester, only that there should be medical ethicists involved in deciding whether special circumstances should allow for an exception. Serious risk to the mother’s life would obviously qualify, as could damage to her health; however, we should be vigilant that this does not just become a meaningless loophole based on the idea that all pregnancies carry some risk. A non-viable fetus (such as one that is anencephalic, meaning it has no brain) should also be eligible for abortion at any stage.
And no, it’s not true that all or even most abortions after the first trimester are because of tragic circumstances the mothers are as heartbroken about as anyone. This may be true for very late third trimester abortions, but according to a study of reasons for seeking abortion after 20 weeks (horrifyingly late if you ask me!), rare medical reasons were not a signficant factor, so this oft-cited defense of late term abortion would appear to be a canard (whether this is knowing propaganda or honest misconception in most cases, I cannot say). The #1 reason was procrastination based on pure indecision:
Having recognized their pregnancy, 37% of women reported that the process of deciding whether to have an abortion slowed them down. For some, difficulty deciding resulted strictly from indecision about what to do and a desire not to rush into anything. A 30-year-old Latina woman from California, who had her abortion at 23 weeks’ gestation, talked about being slowed down because she was “deciding whether or not to do it. I had to make sure I was okay with myself.” Other women explained that their personal stance against abortion made the decision difficult. A 28-year-old multiethnic woman from California who sought an abortion at 22 weeks’ gestation explained that she was delayed in seeking care because she “didn’t believe in abortion prior to this.”
Ugh. The irony here of course is that by wrestling with the personal ethics of abortion for so long, these women made it into a much more morally dubious action! This is where my “nanny state” politics come into play: the government, by setting a firm line at a much earlier stage, can clarify the stakes and spur women to figure out what to do toute de suite rather than agonizing over it and thereby making the consequences, when they do finally decide to go through with it, that much more awful.
Other factors in post-20 week abortions described in this study revolved around either chaotic personal lives (drug addiction, depression, struggles with relationships or childrearing) or straight-up difficulty with access, either because clinics were too far away or because the women lacked insurance and had difficulty coming up with the money. These are all issues we should be addressing directly through a more robust social safety net and interventions by social workers, not by shrugging and saying it’s okay to abort a 23-week fetus that any reasonable person should acknowledge is by this point killing an unborn baby.
Long before the rise of woke progressive politics gave me other reasons to feel discomfited by the Democratic Party that I do still adhere to (technically here in Minnesota it’s actually the DFL), the extremism of abortion rights activists gave me pause. Not that the extreme pro-lifers are much better!
As you can see from the graph below, I am part of a silent majority, or at least a big plurality:
I can anticipate a valid criticism of these numbers, that the “legal in some circumstances” category might be quite diverse in terms of what those circumstances should be.
Fortunately, NPR commissioned a poll with Marist in 2019 that provides some clarity. Fully 23% of the population supports the exact policy I favor, the one that’s the law in those European countries: make abortion legal in the first trimester only. 9% would allow no abortions at all, and another 9% only to save the life of the mother. I think these should probably just be combined to 18% at the most extreme pole, because there’s no world I can conceive under even the most right wing polity that would privilege a baby’s life over the mother’s—that’s beyond insane. Another 20% would add exceptions for rape and incest. (For what it’s worth, I consider the rape/incest exceptions nonsensical. If it’s murder/manslaughter, it’s still murder/manslaughter regardless of how the baby was conceived. If it’s not, you shouldn’t be prohibiting it just because a woman had consensual sex with someone they are not related to. Doing so tends to reify the suspicion by pro-choicers that pro-lifers want to slut-shame women and punish them for promiscuity or even just for having premarital sex.) So you can really further combine these and say there is a pretty large chunk of the population—38 percent—who would outlaw the vast majority of abortions, even those undertaken very early in pregnancies that resulted from consensual sex with non-relatives.
Then there is the group that believes “abortion should be available to a woman any time she wants during her entire pregnancy”. That’s pretty much the bog standard Democratic position, yet this represents just 18% of the population.
Now, all the numbers provided in the NPR story only add up to 79%, and there is no link that I can see to crosstabs. I would argue that the remaining 21% are much more properly thought of as belonging to the middle rather than the extremes. If you think abortion should always be legal or almost always illegal, you’re going to say so. The ones not choosing any of these possibilities, I’d wager, probably think abortion should be banned after 20 weeks, or maybe after six weeks. This is hinted at by slightly different questions asked elsewhere in the poll, about state laws with various restrictions:
“Allows abortions, but only up to the time there is viability outside the womb, at about 24 weeks” gets 37% support.
“Allows abortions, but only up to the time cardiac activity is detected, about six to eight weeks into pregnancy” is supported by 33%.
I say “hinted at” because support for these different laws is not mutually exclusive, and we don’t know how much of the opposition is because the laws are too strict as opposed to not strict enough. But mulling all this data, let’s imagine the following nationwide referendum, with three choices; the one garnering the most votes would become a new constitutional amendment making it the law of the land across the country:
Outlaw all abortions at any stage of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. This is the standard GOP platform position.
Allow abortion on demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy, with no restrictions.
Adopt the policy found in France or Ireland, allowing unrestricted first trimester abortion and then allowing exceptions after that based on a case-by-case basis decided by judges or a panel of bioethicists.
I really believe my preferred option, #3, would win—and fairly handily at that! Yet it doesn’t figure into our political debates at all, which is frustrating.
Looking at the graphs from the NPR/Marist poll, it’s striking how much diversity there actually is among rank-and-file Democrats on abortion, a diversity that is not at all well represented at the politician or party messaging level. A majority of Democrats actually supports 24 hour waiting periods; and perhaps most surprising of all, one in three Democrats supports laws like the one in Texas, which bans abortion after a heartbeat can be detected (again, at about six to eight weeks).
The variety of approaches described here (and I’m sure this list is not exhaustive) make it clear not only that no abortion policy would satisfy everyone, but that there is probably not one that could even get an outright majority of support if there is a variety of options on the table. But I believe the policy I advocate would not only gain a plurality of support in the three-way scenario I laid out, but would be seen as a reasonable compromise by many of the people who might want restrictions that are a little stricter or a little looser than mine.
There’s even quite a lot there for the pro-choice extremists, if they can calm down and grudgingly admit it: under my approach, the vast majority of women who currently seek abortions would still be able to get it. Therefore, this policy is really going to be the hardest to swallow for that 38% that wants to ban either all or the vast majority of abortions. But you’d never know it by the intense hostility I face whenever I run this proposal by pro-choice Democratic women, who accuse me of wanting to “control women’s bodies”, like there’s no worthwhile, substantive difference between me and the religious right on this issue.
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*BTW, I’m pretty skeptical of the color-coded map in that article. It asserts that Minnesota would join a bunch of deep red Bible Belt states in banning abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned. As a longtime Minnesotan myself, I’m immediately very dubious about this possibility (there is certainly a sizable contingent of vehement pro-lifers here, but they are outnumbered), and the AGI report linked in the article only gives information for 36 states, not including MN.
EDIT: The first image below shows how the map looked when I wrote the above, and you can see my tweet responding to AGI and raising questions about Minnesota’s orange coloration.
Today I received a PM letting me know that in response to my tweet, the WaPo had fixed the map. And sure enough, they have, at least as regards Minnesota. I didn’t check other states for accuracy, but it sure looks a lot more plausible now: