Op-Ed: For Dems, Third-Trimester Abortion Has Always Been the Endgame
Back in February, Senate Democrats blocked the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
Only three Democrats of exceptional integrity, Sens. Doug Jones of Alabama, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, voted to consider mandatory life-saving postnatal care for newborn abortion survivors.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska described the bill’s purpose in a news release.
“A child born alive during a botched abortion should be given the same level of care that would be provided to any other baby born at that same gestational stage,” Sasse said.
Who could object? Only the most extreme pro-abortion ideologues.
Senate Democrats, clinging mindlessly to the runaway donkey reasoning of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, have long since hurtled past the original point of “viability” as a limit on abortion and now have reached the cliff of endorsing lethal negligence of infants who survive post-viability abortions.
“The Right to an ‘Effective’ Abortion, Or a Dead Child”
In a 2018 National Review article, Professor Hadley Arkes confirmed that the right to abortion has been extended now through the entire pregnancy — and even when the child is born, state law need not provide protection.
“In one notable case of a child who had survived an abortion for 21 days, a well-known federal judge ruled that ‘the fetus in this case was not a person whose life state law could protect,'” Arkes wrote.
“It was a child marked for abortion — which is to say, the right to abortion meant the right to an ‘effective’ abortion, or a dead child.”
Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe had, after all, provided only a token concession.
“If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period,” he wrote.
Indeed, even this concession was cancelled out effectively in Doe v. Bolton, released the same day as Roe. In the companion case, the lawfulness of abortions was extended beyond viability right up to birth.
As to whether “an abortion is necessary,” Blackmun averred that “medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant to the wellbeing of the patient. All these factors may relate to health.”
Today, these very broadest grounds of the well-being of the woman now encompass post-viability killing of children classified as a burden on their mother’s health (see New York state’s 2019 Reproductive Health Act).
Roe’s Decoy of “Viability” as “The Compelling Point” for Infant Protection
The original constitutional natural law duty to protect human life from its commencement was reduced by Blackmun in Roe to a mere partial permission which “may” be exercised by the states only after “viability.”
“With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb,” the justice wrote.
But Justice Byron White saw through the fraudulence behind the “compelling” point device. In Roe’s oral argument, he uncovered the deception in the case being argued by Sarah Weddington for the appellants:
White: “I’m just asking you, under the federal constitution, is the fetus a person for the protection of due process?”
Weddington: “All of the cases, the prior history of this statute, the common-law history would indicate that it is not…”
White: “Well, what about — would you lose your case if the fetus was a person?”
Weddington: “Then you would have a balancing of interest.”
White would go on to clarify, “You’re going to be balancing the rights of the mother against the rights of the fetus.”
Weddington: “It seems to me that you do not balance constitutional rights of one person against mere statutory rights of another.”
White: “You think a state interest, if it’s only a statutory interest or a constitutional interest, under the state law, can never outweigh a constitutional right? … So all the talk of compelling state interest is beside the point. It can never be compelling enough.”
As it turned out, Justice White’s skepticism was well-founded.
Only One Patient in a Pregnancy?
Regrettably, Blackmun had no word for our duties towards “the unborn” because he was persuaded that the word “person,” as used in the 14th Amendment, “does not include the unborn.” He started with the unwarranted assumption that abortion is a benign medical procedure involving only one person, only one human being he repetitively called “the woman.”
He claimed that abortion is “like any other medical procedure.”
But he was wrong. He glossed over the fact that abortion is not “like any other medical procedure” for it is the only medical procedure involving two patients that has for its purpose the direct and deliberate killing of one of the patients.
Blackmun could not have been listening when, in oral argument, Justice Thurgood Marshall inquired into the reason for Texas restricting abortion operations.
“Why don’t you limit some other operation?” Marshall asked.
Texas Assistant Attorney General Robert Flowers replied, “Because this is the only type of operation that would take another human life.”
Yet all too glibly, Blackmun asserted in Roe that “[t]he State has a legitimate interest in seeing to it that abortion, like any other medical procedure, is performed under circumstances that insure maximum safety for the patient.”
Providing Emergency Access to Neonatal Hospital Care for Newborn Abortion Survivors
Today, in emergency situations following botched abortions, not only the life of the mother but also the life of her newborn daughter or son can hang in the balance.
Yet the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 struck down a Texas law in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt with a 5-3 ruling that hospital admitting privilege requirements posed “a substantial obstacle” to abortion access and created an “undue burden” for women.
In March, the Supreme Court examined the legitimacy of a similar law — the Louisiana Unsafe Abortion Protection Act, which required doctors in an abortion practice to have hospital admitting privileges. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has pointed to evidence of Louisiana abortion clinics’ poor safety records, inadequate credentialing practices and questionable efforts to undermine health and safety regulations.
There are indeed two patients in every pregnancy — and surely nothing confirms that more dramatically than the sight and sound of a newborn baby who has survived a botched abortion.
Lack of Empathy for the Harsh Fate of an Abortion Victim
Justice William Douglas, in concurring with Roe and Doe, demonstrated the gross lack of concern for the health and well-being of the smaller patient targeted for abortion.
In his concurring opinion in Doe, he enumerated histrionically “the vicissitudes” visited on women by unwanted pregnancies: “suffering, dislocations, misery, or tragedy as to make an early abortion the only civilized step to take.”
“These hardships may be properly embraced in the ‘health’ factor of the mother as appraised by a person of insight. Or they may be part of a broader medical judgment based on what is ‘appropriate’ in a given case, though perhaps not ‘necessary’ in a strict sense.”
Since then, Roe’s permission for abortionists to exercise a broader medical judgment has been extended far beyond “early abortion.”
The unpalatable truth is that since Roe, the legality of abortion has been extended to cover not just late abortions but the deliberate withholding of life-saving care from infants born alive after a failed abortion.
Legislation recently proposed by Democrats in Virginia was intent on “legalizing” just such an atrocity.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s defense of a mother’s right to refuse life-saving treatment to her child even as she is giving birth, or just after she has given birth is indicative of the extremes to which pro-abortion ideology has brought many good people.
“We Have No Time Limit”
The seed for this expansion from “early abortion” to lethal post-birth negligence of abortion survivors was already sown in oral argument preceding Roe. Chief Justice Warren Burger asked, “Do you make any distinction between the first month and ninth month of gestation?”
“We have no time limit,” replied Weddington, the plaintiff’s counsel.
But surely there can be no justification for the recent blocking by Senate Democrats of the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
Future historians looking back at these inane shenanigans may find it difficult to explain how almost the entire Democratic Party has arrived at this point where the so-called constitutional right to abortion has been permitted to extend beyond pregnancy.
It now entails, it would seem, the right to refuse ordinary postnatal care to a child born alive after an attempted abortion.
Routine health care is withheld from the newborn in order to complete that abortion post-birth.
Weddington’s “no time limit” for abortion has been achieved.
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