Happy Birthday Roe v. Wade!
By Links to various arguments about why Roe was correctly decided and why it matters can be found here.
Via Edroso, Mollie Hemmingway is concern-trollingly upset that a Republican abortion ban based on evidence-free “fetal pain” arguments has been briefly set aside by the House. (Another anti-abortion bill passed today.) The argument begins, as so many such arguments do, with a risible misunderstanding of the decision being attacked:
Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court legalizing abortion on demand throughout pregnancy.
Well, I happen to have Roe v. Wade right here, and:
With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the “compelling” point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb. State regulation protective of fetal life after viability thus has both logical and biological justifications. If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.
And, of course, if we consider Roe v. Wade as it’s been subsequently modified by the Supreme Court, many American women regrettably do not have access to “abortion on demand” at any stage of pregnancy. But Hemmingway is wrong even about Roe circa 1973.
And then there’s this:
As my colleague David Harsanyi has noted, we have a Republican Congress that doesn’t believe it’s competent enough to make a case against infanticide.
Odd — Hemmingway (absurdly) thinks that second trimseter abortions are like “infanticide.” But I must have missed the harsh criticism of the Republicans who support this legislation, which is plainly incompatible with this view. Here are the criminal sanctions in the proposed, temporarily withdrawn legislation:
Subjects individuals who violate this Act to a fine, imprisonment for not more than five years, or both. Bars prosecution of a woman upon whom an abortion is performed in violation of this Act for violating or conspiring to violate this Act.
Five years seems awfully lenient for an alleged child-murderer. And even more to the point, women who commit what Hemmingway is pretending to consider “infanticide” are subject to no criminal sanctions whatsoever. This is instructive first of all because it inescapably reflects a belief that women who obtain abortions lack moral agency. And the fact that Hemmingway does not even find the fact that women are wholly exempt from criminal sanction worth mentioning makes it clear that when she’s throwing the term “infanticide” around she’s bullshitting, which is highly offensive given the context. But let’s be frank — very few people really think that second trimseter abortions are anything like infanticide. Statutes based on this belief would be extremely unpopular and unenforceable. I know it, you know it, and House Republicans know it. Which is one reason why safe and legal abortions should be accessible to all American women.