Texas Republicans earned friendly fire, including from yours truly, for voting for an extreme, but legally futile, de facto ban on abortion, including for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest, after six weeks. If a single state’s bill, one ultimately hamstrung by the Supreme Court, is supposed to reflect the GOP as a whole, what should we make of 46 Senate Democrats voting to legalize abortion up until the very point of a baby’s birth?
Just one Senate Democrat, Joe Manchin, voted against the Women’s Health Care Protection Act, which would ban states from imposing any rule or regulation that would be “reasonably likely” to “delay … some patients” from obtaining an “abortion at any point or points in time prior to fetal viability, including a prohibition or restriction on a particular abortion procedure” and even any restriction “on abortion after fetal viability when, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.”
The bill wouldn’t just codify the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which restricts states from imposing undue burdens on women seeking abortions prior to the approximate point of fetal viability — the courts currently regard this as 24 weeks of gestation despite babies as young as 21 weeks surviving out of the womb. The bill would also grant doctors leeway to authorize post-viability abortions under the intentionally broad condition of “good-faith medical judgment.”
“Since 1973, the Supreme Court repeatedly has recognized the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability, and to terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability where it is necessary, in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care professional, for the preservation of the life or health of the person who is pregnant,” the bill notes. Richard Blumenthal, the bill’s sponsor, has previously said that it “doesn’t distinguish” between physical and emotional or psychological health.
The median American opinion on abortion is complex, not entirely rational, and not nearly as polarized as the debate in Washington, D.C. Gallup has found that 3 in 5 people favor the legal protection of first-trimester abortion, and Marist found that 3 in 4 support legal protections only for pregnancies in the first trimester, conceived from rape or incest, threatening the life of the mother, or never at all.
By contrast, little more than 1 in 10 people polled by Gallup and Marist favor legalizing abortion up until the point of birth. In effect, that’s what 46 Democrats just voted to make the law in all 50 states.
On the plus side, Democrats came nowhere near the 60 vote majority required to pass the bill. But on a matter of life and death, the mainstream national Democratic Party has taken up the mantle of radicalism.
