In her latest New York Times column, “Lindsey Graham’s Unbelievably Cruel Abortion Ban,” Michelle Goldberg took Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) to task for defending his proposed 15-week nationwide abortion ban as being “in the mainstream” compared to the rest of the developed world:
Graham was making an argument, common in anti-abortion circles, that American abortion laws are unusually permissive, and that banning abortion at 12 or 15 weeks would bring us in line with Europe. France and Spain, for example, both permit abortion for any reason through 14 weeks, and Germany through 12 weeks post-conception. “If we adopted my bill, our bill, we would be in the mainstream of most everybody else in the world,” said Graham. “I think there are 47 of the 50 European countries have a ban on abortion from 12 to 15 weeks.”
This is, at best, a highly selective reading of European abortion laws. It ignores the fact that, on most of the continent, abortion is state-subsidized and easily accessible early in pregnancy, so women aren’t pushed into later terminations as they struggle to raise money. More significantly, the restrictions on later abortions have broad exceptions.
Despite her allegations surrounding Graham’s “selective” reading, the only country Goldberg cites as evidence of those “broad exceptions” to later-term abortion is Germany. In fact, even left-wing media have admitted that Graham’s central claim — that U.S. abortion laws are unusually permissive — is correct. As the Catholic News Agency reported last year:
The Washington Post’s fact-checkers concluded in 2017 that “the data back up the claim” that the U.S. is one of only seven countries that allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. (PolitiFact also determined that the statement was true.)
The other six countries are North Korea, China, Vietnam, Canada, Singapore, and the Netherlands.
This is an inconvenient fact for abortion-rights activists, but it is one that they have to face. As Angelina Nguyen noted in an essay for National Review about the 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi that was the subject of the Dobbs decision:
Recently, the Washington Post published a piece titled “How Abortion Laws in the U.S. Compare to Those in Other Countries,” comparing nations where “abortion is broadly legal” to weave a narrative that the global trend is toward abortion permissiveness. But even the Washington Post acknowledged the truth that “many European countries limit on-request abortions to the first trimester” and called this “more restrictive than much of the United States.” [Emily] Matchar came to a similar conclusion in her 2013 Atlantic article: “I assumed that Western Europe would be the land of abortion on demand, likely government-subsidized, and possibly with a free bag of condoms afterward. But as it turns out, abortion laws in Europe are both more restrictive and more complicated than that.”
By any measure of international comparison, Mississippi’s 15-week abortion law is mainstream and falls within the same gestational framework as laws in most of the world’s nations. If the United States Supreme Court allows Mississippi to become one of many states that desire to draw a bright-line gestational limit on elective abortion to protect the unborn, Mississippi will certainly not be alone in the international community, which has largely done the same.
This isn’t some deceptive anti-abortion trope — it’s just empirically, demonstrably true. Facts are stubborn things.