America is the only civilized country that allows late-term abortion on demand yet America is regarded as more hung up on abortion than European countries. What gives? Outside the recurring re-election campaigns of people like Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, who insist if they do not get 80% of the votes in Democrat bastion San Francisco women will be 'having abortions in back alleys', abortion is not really an issue.
In Mississippi, progressives were wringing their hands over a "Personhood Amendment" while literally no one who actually knows anyone in Mississippi felt like it had any chance of passing - and anyone who knows how to read knows it was progressives who hyped up the situation to where it became a referendum at all. It still lost easily for a simple reason; people in Mississippi are conservative so even though they don't agree with abortion - 65% of Americans are against abortion - they disagree more with telling people what to do. Progressives only agree with 'I don't want to dictate how people behave even if I find it distasteful' sentiments when the vote goes their way but conservatives sometimes make the hard choices. In California, there is no end to busybodies telling people how to live their lives, and it ain't the religious right.
Abortion is basically a non-issue in America, like I said. It whips up the kooky base in San Francisco, because they really believe without Nancy Pelosi as one of the 535 (425 in Congress, 100 in the Senate, nine on the Supreme Court and one president) America will become some post-apocalyptic wasteland where their rich white constituents are forced to have kids and give them up for adoption. Oh, the humanity. Instead, teens getting pregnant and not aborting are such a novelty they get their own TV shows.
That doesn't mean the debate is over in Europe; there are plenty in Europe who think
the moral significance of fetal development is subjective throughout pregnancy. Personally, I got no dog in the abortion fight. I'm happy it didn't happen to me but when it comes to the societal value of abortion, pro-choice people were right; it did reduce crime, it did reduce poverty, just like they claimed it would. Sure, we don't always want to be culturally mercenary like that, but we live in the real world, and if it can be gussied up as 'choice', everyone claims to be for freedom to decide.
What does 'subjective throughout pregnancy' mean? Well, we know a lot more about fetal development in 1973. Each week in gestation we can see new and distinct things happening. Ann Furedi, the chief executive of BPAS (the British Pregnancy Advisory Service) debated William Saletan, journalist at Slate and author of Bearing Right: how conservatives won the abortion war at the Battle of Ideas in London. Those weekly changes were Furedi's argument for having no limit on abortion - each week there were changes so no week was special and thus any limit is arbitrary and therefore meaningless.
If you have any knowledge of logic, it kinda makes your head spin. Using that logic, there can be no laws of any kind and government has no power to make any kind of stance. She sounds like the ultimate libertarian, but she isn't. Her argument is pretty specific; there are so few late-term abortions anyway (Saletan cites 8,000 in the U.K. per year after 21 weeks ) that there is no reason to limit them, the system is not being abused; but that is the reason why it might be okay to ban them unless there are extenuating circumstances too. There is a practical aspect; at 24 weeks, the survival rate for premature births is a whopping 96%. That's life, inside the mother or not.
Saletan says he found a certain compassion in Furedi's stance, though to most she is subjectivism on the fringe; nothing about a developing child has any meaning, she says, which was never the intent of allowing abortion. He makes the obvious retort in his piece about it on Slate; if nothing about the developmental timeline of a child has any significance, why should it after birth? Why does government have the right to control anything in her world of subjectivism?
The hard left who contend they understand all of the knobs in climate change or any other science and accept that the issue is settled yet contend there is no difference between a 10-week-old fetus and a 32-week-old fetus are as anti-science as it gets, because they only accept the science that matches their cultural world view.
Abortion Forever? by William Saletan, Slate
