As the general election heats up, Democrats continue to pour tens of millions of dollars into advertising that hammers Republicans on the issue of abortion, and too many congressional GOP candidates are responding by looking at their feet, mumbling something about letting the states decide, and pivoting to a discussion of inflation.
That response simply won’t do. Pro-life candidates need to punch back before they pivot.
Congressional Democrats are perhaps one or two Senate seats shy of providing unlimited taxpayer funding of elective abortions for Medicaid recipients — a policy that would result in tens of thousands more babies being dismembered or poisoned to death in the womb each year.
Most congressional Democrats have pretended for decades that they support limits on abortion after viability, the point in pregnancy when a baby can survive outside the womb. But they have almost unanimously opposed legislation that would ban abortion beyond the fifth month of pregnancy, when babies are viable and capable of feeling pain. Congressional Democrats have almost unanimously voted for legislation that would create a national right to abort a baby beyond viability until birth whenever a midwife, nurse, or doctor asserts the continuation of that pregnancy poses a risk to the pregnant woman’s mental or emotional health. That same abortion bill — the one almost all Democrats are promising to make law in 2023 if they get the chance — would also gut conscience laws that protect health-care workers, strike down parental-consent abortion laws, and override some state laws banning partial-birth abortion.
Even after the fall of Roe, pro-life candidates for federal office should continue to focus on opposing taxpayer funding of elective abortions and ending the barbaric practice of elective late-term abortion in America.
Each human being is endowed with the unalienable right to life at her creation, not her birth. But at this time, the majority of the American public is not willing to support a law protecting life from conception. There is, however, national support for setting limits on abortion later in pregnancy when it becomes even more indefensible for anyone to deny the humanity of a developing child.
At 15 weeks of pregnancy, as one maternity website notes, “your baby is looking more like a little person, with eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, hair, and well-defined fingers and toes. If you could see inside your womb, you’d catch your baby sucking a thumb, yawning, stretching, and making faces.” Starting at 21 to 22 weeks of pregnancy, some babies born alive are cared for in the neonatal intensive-care unit and grow up to be healthy children and adults. Viability — primarily a function of lung development and medical technology — makes little moral or legal sense as the point at which a human being is endowed with the right to life, but it is the point when a pregnancy may come to a conclusion without necessarily ending the child’s life.
The lives of more than 15,000 unique human beings are killed by abortion each year in America later than 20 weeks of pregnancy, and most abortions between weeks 20 and 28 of pregnancy are not performed for “reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment,” according to a 2013 study. Most Americans can recognize that these late abortions are tantamount to infanticide. But several state laws explicitly allow elective abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. Other states have loopholes that effectively create the same kind of barbaric abortion policy found in North Korea and China. Last week, NPR reported that a new “all-trimester” clinic will soon open in Maryland that will offer abortions up to 34 weeks into the pregnancy.
When the U.S. Senate voted in 2015 for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which bans most abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy, it received the votes of 51 Republicans and three Democrats, falling six votes short of overcoming a filibuster. Pro-life congressional candidates and legislators should continue making the case for some national limit on late abortions for however long it takes to make it law.