Do New York Times readers need anyone to explain to them “What Liberals Believe About Late-Term Abortion”? I mean, I know the paper’s nowhere near as left-leaning as those on the Right make it out to be — particularly in their choice of columnists — but I’m pretty sure that readers, by and large, can probably figure out what liberals believe about it for themselves. (Hint: It starts with the fact that “late-term abortion” is not an actual medical term, but rather something made up by anti-abortion rights activists.)
That being said, if I am wrong, and people do need to be told “what liberals believe,” then what they really don’t need is Ross Douthat interpreting this for them. There are approximately 85,000 writers in the United States who could explain this, and yet … none of them are Ross Douthat.
Unfortunately, that is exactly whom The New York Times tasked with explaining this to their readers on Friday of last week.
Let’s jump right in, shall we?
Any productive debate about abortion — a rare thing, but worth pursuing — has to start by acknowledging each side’s strongest arguments and most sincerely held beliefs.
If you tell yourself that opposition to abortion is rooted exclusively in a patriarchal desire to control women, as opposed to a sincere commitment to the human rights of the unborn, you have not really begun to reckon with the persistence of the pro-life cause.
Well, gee, Ross, it sure would be a lot easier to believe that if every single argument against abortion did not devolve, eventually, into “but there must be consequences for whores!”
Likewise, if you tell yourself that support for abortion is entirely driven by a desire to defend hedonism and sexual promiscuity, as opposed to a sincere concern for the burdens that pregnancy can place on women and a sincere disbelief in the full personhood of embryonic human life, you will not really understand the strength of the pro-choice position.
Sure, but just to be clear … hedonism and sexual promiscuity are no one’s business but the person doing the hedonism and sexual promiscuity, and if you do think that “support for abortion is entirely driven by a desire to defend hedonism and sexual promiscuity,” you absolutely do have a patriarchal desire to control women.
Because he is so open-minded and reasonable, Douthat begins by pointing out the “hypocrisy” of abortion opponents who say they are fine with IVF before claiming that there is a similar cognitive dissonance hanging over the pro-choice attitude toward late-term abortion.
These positions are basically a moving target — evasive and indeterminate, seemingly designed to frustrate a sincere pro-lifer trying to grapple with the best pro-choice arguments.
Take a moment and guess who that “sincere pro-lifer” links to. Did you guess Ross Douthat? Because it was Ross Douthat. Ross Douthat linked back to his own article, just to drive it home that he is a “sincere pro-lifer” just trying to understand what it is we believe.
Alas, grapple as he might, he does not have an especially firm grasp on this topic:
One possible liberal position on post-viability abortions is that they’re no different morally or legally from pre-viability abortions. This is the position suggested by those Democratic politicians who oppose legal restrictions on both second- and third-trimester abortions, and who use legislative majorities in blue states to enshrine abortion rights with essentially no limitations — as Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, did when he signed a sweeping codification of abortion rights as governor of Minnesota.
Looking at this record, you might assume that the pro-choice side simply believes that human rights begin at birth — that “life begins with breath,” to borrow a phrase Pete Buttigieg once used in a discussion of religious rationales for abortion. No matter how far a fetus develops in the womb, in other words, the only thing that matters morally and legally is whether it’s in or ex utero.
Once again, for the people in the back — the reason we don’t want legal restrictions on abortion is because we don’t want doctors hindered if they need to perform one for emergency reasons. We don’t want doctors going “Oh gee, we’d better wait until she goes into sepsis before we do anything to help her.”
Does this mean that someone might have a later-in-pregnancy abortion for a reason other than a medical emergency? It does. But better that happen than a woman die because she couldn’t get an emergency abortion.
Douthat then goes on to insist that later-in-pregnancy abortions are not as rare as we say they are.
“That’s not true,” Harris insisted in the presidential debate, when Donald Trump argued that the Roe v. Wade framework that Democrats say they want restored allowed for abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy.
It’s not clear what she meant by “not true,” since Roe did allow for late-term abortions. […] But the most charitable reading is that she meant to express the common pro-choice talking points that later-term abortions are, first, vanishingly rare, and second, typically only obtained in situations where there’s a significant danger to the mother or a late-discovered fetal anomaly.
Roe allowed abortions up until viability, at 24-25 weeks. The third trimester begins at 28 weeks. Also, just to be clear, when doctors say “late term,” they mean 41 weeks, which is one week after most babies are delivered. If we are going to talk about people being disingenuous, it’s pretty clear that this is what people who use the term will assume — or that they will assume it’s at least close to the end of the pregnancy and not smack dab in the middle of it.
However, the second talking point is incorrect. Last year, The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey interviewed a Colorado doctor who performs later-term abortions: He estimated that about half his patients have healthy pregnancies. A 2013 paper looking at the universe of abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy found that “most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.”
Hey! You know what can’t survive outside the womb? A fetus at 20 weeks. If we’re talking about post-viability-without-extreme-intervention abortions, then we are talking about 25 weeks and up, at best.
Meanwhile the first belief, that these procedures are vanishingly rare, turns on the question of what “rare” means. Relative to other abortions, yes, late-term procedures are extremely rare: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 percent of American abortions take place at or after 21 weeks, which, by my calculation, would be slightly under 10,000 out of slightly under one million.
Again, the third trimester starts at 28 weeks, so if he’s talking about third trimester abortions as he says he is, he doesn’t get to include abortions that happen at 20 weeks in his calculations. That is just math.
Douthat then goes on to claim that 10,000 born children under the age of 14 die a year, often from things that the Left thinks are bad, like school shootings and childhood disease, and adding in late term abortions would then make “late-term abortion” (which late term? he keeps changing it!) the number one killer of children under the age of 14. How can you think school shootings are bad, he wonders, while also thinking that your choice to have an abortion should be between you and your doctor? No really:
On the other hand, relative to other causes of childhood death that liberals take extremely seriously, thousands of late-term abortions loom quite large. The C.D.C. reports that in total just over 10,000 American children under 14 died of natural and unnatural causes in 2022. As the demographer Lyman Stone points out, if you included late-term abortion in those numbers, it would instantly be the leading cause of childhood death, eclipsing diseases, drugs and gun violence.
It turns out printing the paragraph verbatim doesn’t make it any easier to understand, like: What the actual fuck?
So if those issues matter for our public policy debates, then it also matters a great deal whether you count a post-viability fetus as a human being. If you do, then their protection should be a matter of great importance even if you also support first-trimester abortion.
If you don’t, if you accept that they will be killed in meaningful numbers (numbers that would almost certainly increase under Harris’s preferred legal order), well, then you need to either retreat to the life-begins-at-breath position — radical but consistent, mystical but stable — or else come up with some other marker that establishes personhood at, say, 35 weeks of pregnancy and consigns viable fetuses before that line to a less-than-human status.
How about no?
Having followed these debates for many years, I think it’s fair to say that the pro-choice side — not every pro-choice individual, but the political collective — consistently refuses to make this choice, preferring to occupy an ambiguous zone where late-term abortion is permitted in law, minimized as a reality and left unjustified by any consistent argument about human life or human rights.
Either that or we would prefer to leave these decisions to patient and doctor, rather than to people like Ross Douthat, who clearly do not know what they are talking about.
If forced birthers like Douthat really want to ensure that people get abortions earlier in their pregnancies, there are a number of things they can support (all of which Republicans oppose). They can support universal health care, as regular access to a doctor could certainly decrease the likelihood of any “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant” situations and would also allow for more people to be able to afford pregnancy and giving birth, should they choose to have a child. They could oppose legal restrictions on abortion that require people to have to travel out of state to have an abortion or that require waiting periods, and they could support getting rid of the Hyde Amendment so that people do not have to wait and save up for an abortion.
There are lots of things they can do and support to decrease the likelihood of later-in-pregnancy abortions, but they don’t. So perhaps we are not the ones being disingenuous here!
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Ross Douthat's photo looks more like a stereotype of him than I ever could have imagined.
The NYT picking a forced birther to explain what pro-choice people believe about abortion is on point for the rag that the NYT has become.