National Review Online
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Explicit support for abortion “all the way up to 40
weeks” is increasingly becoming a mainstream Democratic position. The quote is
from Kathy Tran, a Virginia state legislator; but her bill has the support of
the state’s supposedly moderate governor, Ralph Northam, who in defending it
suggested that in some circumstances a full-term child should be delivered and
then (at least) allowed to die.
Most Democrats still would not go as far as Northam. But
Tran’s position is shared by New York Democrats, who have passed a law
stipulating that abortion at any stage of pregnancy is legal so long as an
abortionist says it is necessary to protect a pregnant woman’s health. The law
does not claim that the pregnancy itself has to threaten her health and does
not limit health to physical health. It is a restriction designed to be
unenforceable, and thus also to be deceptive.
Many of the leading Democratic presidential candidates
have endorsed similar federal legislation: It would wipe away any state laws
that protected unborn children even late in pregnancy. Bans could remain on the
books only if they included health exceptions rendering them, too,
unenforceable.
These Democrats are aware that the public does not share
their enthusiasm for abortion late in pregnancy, and so they are explaining
that it is only ever done for the most compelling medical reasons. Northam says
that they are only done in cases of severe fetal abnormality or unviability.
The available evidence does not bear out this contention, but the laws these
Democrats support do not require such reasons anyway. Northam wants to deny any
legal protections even for children who are viable and suffer no abnormalities.
So do those presidential candidates.
Killing a two-month-old infant is rightly prohibited and
punished. Unborn children late in pregnancy differ from two-month-olds in no
way that could plausibly justify this radical difference in treatment. To allow
them to be killed, to expose them to lethal violence, to treat them as
non-persons, is manifestly unjust. It is unjust to do these things even if one
does not directly participate in the killing. And that injustice lays moral
obligations on all of us.
Those Democrats who have taken this extreme position
should reconsider it. Those who have not should repudiate it. Republicans
should expose the Democrats’ indefensible position to the light. So should
journalists, by reporting on the Democrats’ stance rather than simply repeating
their spin. Catholic bishops should stir themselves to do real pastoral work on
those Catholic politicians who have fallen into this grievous moral error,
which includes reminding them that those who obstinately persist in it have
broken communion with the Church.
And the Supreme Court — which believes, or pretends to
believe, that the Constitution requires this policy of abortion-on-demand at
any stage of pregnancy, a contention as absurd as it is outrageous — should
find the earliest occasion possible to reverse its mistake.
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