By Maureen Ferguson
Editor’s note. Maureen Malloy Ferguson is a Senior Fellow for The Catholic Association. This appeared yesterday in USA Today.
The images from Ukraine cut us to the core. Mothers terrified, clinging to their babies. Homes destroyed. Playgrounds bombed. Pictures like these do not require explanation – just action.
Yet, astonishingly, the first vote the U.S. Senate took after Vladimir Putin launched his war proposed neither economic sanctions against Russia nor humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Rather, the Senate’s first order of business was a vote on the most radical abortion legislation ever introduced in Congress.
The Women’s Health Protection Act would have enshrined in federal law, for the first time, an absolute right to abortion – for any reason or no reason – up to the moment of birth.
It would invalidate every law in the country that protects unborn children, even popular measures like parental consent and conscience protections for doctors and nurses who do not wish to be involved in abortion procedures. Perhaps worst of all, it would remove limits on late-term abortion, and require all states to allow abortion even after the point at which unborn children can feel pain.
Thankfully, this bill was defeated on a procedural vote.
And yet, President Joe Biden not only endorsed this legislation, he also set aside time in his State of the Union address-a speech that began with a passionate condemnation of Putin’s killing of the innocent-to defend abortion on demand.
The science has changed
“Roe v. Wade,” the president said, “is under attack as never before.” Biden was referring to the Supreme Court’s pending decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which may overturn Roe. But the only thing “attacking” Roe are the scientific advances in the years since the case was decided.
Five decades ago, women were told (falsely) that their unborn children were “clumps of cells,” and that abortion was similar to having one’s appendix out or a tooth pulled. However dubious these assertions were at the time, decades of advances in embryology and prenatal ultrasound imaging have exposed this for the misinformation it always was.
Today, moms “meet” their babies long before they are born. Moms hear their babies’ heartbeats, see their kicking legs, and proudly display ultrasound pictures in social media posts.
Evidence of unborn children’s baby-ness is everywhere today, and it reaffirms the moral intuition we’ve always had. Like those terrifying images from Ukraine of mothers clutching babies in bomb shelters, pictures from inside the womb speak for themselves.
That is why a huge majority of Americans support limits on abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy – where most European nations draw the line, too. The Mississippi law at issue in the Dobbs case sets the limit at 15 weeks.
According to the popular pregnancy website What to Expect, a baby girl or boy at 15 weeks is the size of a pear, “holding daily aerobics classes – kicking, curling toes and moving those little arms and legs.” You don’t have to be a philosopher or a theologian to know that a pre-born baby is in every way different from a loose tooth.
The Senate vote and the president’s remarks are part of a campaign to frighten the American people about the prospect of Roe being overturned. But all a court reversal of Roe would do is return abortion policymaking to the democratic process in the states.
State legislatures are well-suited to find consensus and compromise. Indeed, that’s what the abortion lobby is afraid of: democracy. Abortion rights advocates have relied on judicial activism to achieve their goals since 1973, when nine unelected justices imposed abortion on demand in all 50 states in the Roe decision.
Upholding human dignity
The news media rarely admit it, but Roe is more extreme than all but a handful of abortion laws in the world. Roe allows abortions even in the third trimester for broadly defined “health” reasons, including emotional and familial health.
No nationwide majority would ever support such extremism. In a post-Roe America, however, states would be free to adopt more restrictive or permissive laws, reflecting their constituencies. And hopefully, in that future, states will reform policies to better support mothers, fathers and children from conception to birth and from birth onward. Texas is already leading in this regard, appropriating $100 million over two years in its Alternatives to Abortion program.
Violence against the innocent is wrong, everywhere at every time, whether inflicted by aggressive dictators or abortion doctors. The same human dignity that makes abortion so heartbreaking also endows us, as citizens in a democracy, the right to decide for ourselves how abortion will be regulated in our laws.
Overturning Roe will give us back our voices to speak up for the voiceless, and the space to build a culture of life for mothers and children in need.