At 26 weeks gestation, a baby’s eyes open for the first time. An uptick in neural oscillations means that the two-pound fetus, probably now taller than a foot, can respond to noises. Even though three more months of pregnancy ideally remain, a baby born at this last week of the second trimester has an 80% to 90% chance of survival.
Americans hold all sorts of conflicting opinions about abortion at early stages of pregnancy, but this irrefutable science of personhood is why fewer than three in ten Americans support legal second trimester abortion, and only 13% support legal third trimester abortion. Even two out of three pro-choice Americans oppose third trimester abortion.
This may be news to analysts at the Associated Press, who seem shocked at the revelation that women seeking to terminate their fully viable and sentient pregnancies often have to seek abortions out of state. Roe v. Wade made abortion legal across all 50 states, but it established a woman’s right to one only up to the point of fetal viability. Hence, 20 states have barred abortions after the point of viability, and another 22 have banned the procedure even earlier.
So when Beth Vial, the antiheroine of the AP’s supposed expose, sought an abortion at 26 weeks of pregnancy, the Oregonian had to travel to New Mexico before she hit 28 weeks. Remember: More than nine in ten babies born at 28 weeks survive.
While pro-life and pro-choice absolutists dominate the discourse about abortion, polling indicates that most Americans support the “safe, legal, and rare” standard that Democrats completely abandoned in the middle of this decade. Most Americans believe the procedure in the first trimester of pregnancy ought to be legal, but even in the first trimester, nearly as many still oppose elective abortions — where women simply don’t want the baby — and half the country still considers it morally wrong either way.
Vial’s case is not morally ambiguous in the slightest for the overwhelming majority of Americans. She had no health complications and her baby was not a product of rape or incest — the two cases in which most Americans still support legal third-trimester abortions. Even if Vial’s baby had a life-threatening illness, less than half the country would support aborting him or her in the final trimester.
But Vial simply didn’t want it. For all the abortion activists like to preach “my body, my choice,” it’s fairly astounding that Vial could go six months without a period, after unprotected sex, with the signs of pregnancy, and still not surmise that she’s carrying another human being inside her.
It isn’t even a pro-life stance to condemn the killing of a fully viable fetus — at least not according to the national public opinion statistics we have long known about. It is a killing, and the science on that is settled.
