I have not been able to keep up with all of the misleading coverage of abortion in the press, but I wanted to flag this especially egregious passage from the Washington Post. In an op-ed, Democratic strategist Lis Smith writes,
There is not a single Democratic member of the House or Senate, nor a single Democratic governor in the country, who supports the right to an abortion without limitations. Even the failed Senate measure upheld the basic framework of Roe, which prohibits late-term abortions except under the most limited of circumstances.
Roe does not prohibit late-term abortions. It does not prohibit them in any circumstances. It purports to allow legislatures to prohibit abortion after viability, but only so long as the legislatures make an exception for abortions that are needed for the mother’s health — which Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, says includes “all factors–physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age–relevant to the wellbeing of the patient.”
Bans on abortion late in pregnancy are thus effectively unenforceable even where they remain on the books. (The only two successful prosecutions against late-term abortionists I have ever run across in research for the entire post-Roe period involved defendants who had so many other charges against them that they did not mount a constitutional-law defense on the charge: Kermit Gosnell and “the butcher of Avenue A.”) In 2016, Hillary Clinton was asked whether an unborn child “just hours before its delivery” had a right not to be killed. She correctly explained that the answer under U.S. law was no.
The CDC reports roughly 13,000 abortions after the 18th week of gestation for 2019. A 2013 literature review found that most late abortions are not done because of fetal abnormalities or threats to the mothers’ lives. The bill that nearly every Democrat in Congress supported includes a post-viability health exception and says that the terms of the bill should be “liberally construe[d].”
For years Democrats have tied themselves to a position that is substantively extreme but can easily be disguised. (Most people favor Roe v. Wade; most people oppose elective abortion after the first trimester.) Smith’s article is an attempt to offer political advice to Democrats on winning the abortion debate. Some of her explicit advice strikes me as sound. But her best advice is implicit: Democrats should keep misrepresenting the abortion policies they support.