Keen to make New York and the racists and rapists in Virginia look good by comparison, the Vermont House just passed a sweeping and abominable abortion law which deems terminating a pregnancy at any stage and for any reason a “fundamental right.”
Unlike the Virginia proposal and New York’s recently passed law, Vermont makes no attempt to guild their law with a facade of women’s health or medical discretion. It’s a celebration of the positive good, not the necessary evil, of murdering a viable, sentient human being for the sheer ideological pleasure of it, or perhaps just the utility.
The New York law, unconditionally legalizing abortion through 24 weeks, past the early point of fetal viability and likely fetal pain, and authorizing physicians to sign off on an abortion up until the point of labor due to the mother’s “health,” may have seemed like a fluke. But between New York’s success in passing the law, allegedly “blue” Virginia seriously entertaining its own incarnation of the law, and now Vermont on the cusp of its own unrestrained abortion-on-demand law, one thing has become abundantly clear: The abortion lobby has abandoned its pursuit of public opinion. It is now putting all efforts into fortifying state laws against the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
The Democratic Party abandoned “safe, legal, and rare” long ago, but the average American has not and shows no signs of doing so. The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that first-trimester abortions should be legal in some capacity, especially for victims of rape or cases of deformity. But the statistics are clear: Americans absolutely do not view abortion as a positive good, but rather as a necessary evil, as a last resort they would happily restrict but would hesitate to make legally impossible early in a pregnancy.
Just one-quarter of Americans believe abortion should be legal in the second trimester — mind you, that’s where the 24-week mark stands — and only one in five Americans, with some polls showing even smaller numbers, believe third-trimester abortion should be legal “when the woman does not want the child for any reason.”
Vermont may be the U.S. state that missed its chance to join the Soviet Union. But the overwhelming public consensus against late term abortion, combined with the fragile but perennial peace the abortion lobby has managed to keep together since 1973, raises the question: Why would the Democratic Party across the country move in lockstep to finally show their hand, that they believe abortion is not a last resort but a sacred slaughter to be celebrated?
Because for Democrats, it’s about enshrining their dogma into law before the Supreme Court changes the status quo. Consider that nearly half a century has passed since the Supreme Court decided on. Roe v. Wade, and public opinion on abortion has remained almost completely stagnant. In 1976, 54 percent of Americans favored legal abortion under certain circumstances, 21 percent favored legality under any circumstances, and 22 opposed any form of legal abortion. In 2018, those numbers were 50 percent, 29 percent, and 18 percent, respectively. Compare that to almost any other social issue, say, marijuana legalization or prison reform or gay marriage, and you can see just how tenuous the abortion consensus really is.
And it makes sense. Most Americans are sympathetic, albeit uncomfortable, with the strawman, or woman, who can’t afford another child or a pregnant teenager who made a mistake. Even if many Americans privately balk at the horror of the procedure, the abortion of a putatively non-viable, non-sentient fetus is a less difficult pill to swallow for the average American than watching Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo celebrate crushing the skulls of babies with fully realized and indisputable value as human beings.
The casting aside of the “woman’s health” facade is intentional and necessary to the final steps of the abortion lobby’s bulwark against the legal wars to come. The Vermont bill includes the stipulation that “a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus shall not have independent rights.” That may be true under the explicit terms of the law, but this isn’t a case of un-personing the unborn or specifically demoting the personhood of fully viable and sentient fetuses. It’s an admission that all people are equal but that some people are less equal than others.
