If something is defensible, you’d expect to see it defended. But if it isn’t, then it’s not. That’s the situation with progressives and abortion.
Earlier this week Senator Lindsey Graham unveiled his proposal for federal legislation on abortion: a ban on the procedure after the fifteenth week of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother. His bill included an explicit ban on the prosecution of women seeking illegal abortions.
In the real world, this bill is roughly aligned with the American people’s position on abortion: It should remain legal, but with more restrictions. Graham’s bill is also broadly in line with abortion laws in most European countries. In France, for example, abortion is legal up to the fourteenth week of pregnancy, with exceptions thereafter. In Sweden, the legal limit is set at eighteen weeks. The Senator’s bill is problematic in one respect: It contains no exception for unviable pregnancies, i.e. cases in which the child would be born dead or moribund. But in the large, it’s not at all radical.
No radical, that is, unless you ask American pro-abortion activists. In their world, Senator Graham’s proposed bill is cruel, inhuman, barbaric and similar adjectives—with the unspoken subtext that abortion on demand with no restrictions, up to and perhaps beyond the moment of birth, is the enlightened and progressive policy. You might have trouble getting pro-abortion activists to admit it, but that’s the logical conclusion to be drawn from their oft-repeated claim that abortion should be a private matter between a woman—sorry, birthing person—and her, his, or zis doctor.
Roe v. Wade, now thankfully consigned to history’s trash compactor, made it possible for abortion with no restrictions to exist in the United States. True, Roe didn’t say so explicitly. But by establishing a floor only, it empowered states like New York, California and Oregon effectively to legalize abortion on demand. Pro-abortion activists will deny this, pointing for example to California, which imposes a 24-week limit on legal abortion. But the exceptions to this limit are so broadly construed as to render it moot. And in Oregon, there are no restrictions on abortion at all.
Incidentally, Roe’s demise has not affected these abortion-friendly states. Contrary to pro-abortion agitprop, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe and related rulings, did not outlaw abortion. Merely, it left the issue up to the states.
For progressives, the barbaric radicalism of the pro-abortion position is problematic in a public-relations sense. Here and there on social media you’ll run across a pro-abortion activist who’s willing to say the quiet part out loud. But typically the pro-abortion side will defend Roe v. Wade while denying that what they’re defending is an unlimited right to abortion—in effect the legalization of infanticide.
Take, for example, Representative Val Demings, Democrat of Florida, who’s running against incumbent Republican Senator Marco Rubio this year. Recently Rubio charged that Demings supports the radical pro-abortion position. His evidence was Demings’ vote for a federal abortion bill, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have established an unlimited right to abortion in the United States, coast to coast, border to border.
The progressive authors of the WHPA employed the usual dodges and workarounds to cover up the bill’s radicalism. The WHPA would legalize abortion after fetal viability until birth when a single “health-care provider”—who need not be a physician—determines that a pregnancy “would pose a risk” to the patient’s life or health. The latter term includes physical, emotional and psychological factors; family situation; and the woman’s age. This is a loophole so gaping as to negate any restrictions or limitations specified elsewhere in the WHPA, as explained in a National Review editorial published in May 2022, when the bill died in the Senate. NR noted that the WHPA went beyond even Roe in its abortion radicalism. It would have negated over 500 state laws, including long-standing conscience laws and laws prohibiting partial birth abortion.
So Senator Rubio’s charge was quite accurate: Rep. Demings did vote to establish an unlimited right to abortion in the United States. She denies this of course, and of course the media hastened to her defense, PolitiFact cranking out an article that rated Rubio’s charge as mostly false. But what is mostly false—or, at a minimum, disingenuous—is PolitiFact’s defense, which skirts around the inconvenient facts detailed above.
As a Senate candidate in a red state, Rep. Demings has good reason to cover up her abortion extremism and as usual in such cases, there are not lacking media lapdogs prepared to help her out. But facts are facts, and the saliant fact here is that the pro-abortion side’s current campaign to codify Roe v. Wade in federal law would effectively remove all restrictions on abortion in the United States. As it is, this country is saddled with infanticide states like California, Oregon, and New York. And if pro-abortion zealots get their way, we’ll become an infanticide nation.
Recently President Biden has taken to bloviating about “the soul of America.” As the leader of a political party that incorporates a barbaric death cult, perhaps he’d be better advised to leave theology to the theologians.