The Late-Term Abortion Bait-And-Switch
By Suppose it were possible to engineer a permanent national deal (it’s not, but just consider it as a thought experiment) wherein in exchange for a strictly enforced ban on post-viability abortions that didn’t involve direct threats to the life of the mother, we’d also start treating all forms of contraception and pre-viability abortions not only as legal, but as medical procedures that would be publicly funded just like other medical procedures, under normal (not prohibitive) inspection and regulatory regimes? I suspect a large number of pro-choice folk would go for that kind of deal, which isn’t that different from the situation in much of Europe. It would reflect the fact that most late-term abortions happen not because some bad girl has had sex and now finds motherhood inconvenient, but because she hasn’t had meaningful access to contraception, Plan B, or early-term abortions.
But would any antichoice activists go along with it? No. Because they don’t really care about late-term abortions other than as a lever to move public opinion away from legalized abortion generally. I mean, if late-term abortions were really what upset you, wouldn’t you perhaps be even more adamant than the Planned Parenthood folk in trying to make sure steps short of late-term abortion were not only tolerated but encouraged?
This has been a central strategy of opponents of reproductive freedom for a long time; bring up abortions that are already illegal pretty much everywhere in the United States in order to defend regulations that don’t merely apply at every stage of pregnancy but make obtaining pre-viability abortions more difficult. And almost as irritating is conservatives touting French abortion policy while ignoring rather crucial aspects of French abortion policy like “economically accessible abortions easily available in public hospitals.”