I’m trying to work out how I feel about this.
Every so often, republicans in the US will accuse democrats & leftists of being “pro-abortion up to the point of birth”. Sometimes they go even further and make stuff up about “post-birth abortions” (I think Trump said something about that at one point).
I always hate it when they say stuff like that because it just feels so mendacious… but honestly, I have trouble refuting it because it does seem like a fair amount of liberals & leftists are opposed to any gestational limit. (Look at the comments in this Reddit thread to get an idea of what I mean). Their reasoning seems to be that even though a qualified restriction on late-in-the-pregnancy abortions might seem like an appropriate rule to have, it’s impossible to write such a law perfectly so that it would still allow abortions to be performed in every appropriate case. There would always end up being a few cases where a woman who really ought to be allowed to get an abortion would be encumbered from getting one.
I understand that argument, but… idk, I guess I just can’t shake the feeling that such a law can still be implemented in a good way, and should be. The UK, the Netherlands, and Pennsylvania all have gestational limits on abortion of 24 weeks, with cases of fetal impairment, risk to the life/health of the mother, and pregnancies that resulted from r*pe excluded from the limit (as is common). I do not see the UK, the Netherlands, and Pennsylvania as particularly oppressive places for reproductive rights. As far as I know, the medical consensus is that 24 weeks is both the point when fetuses become developed enough to survive outside the womb, and also when they become developed enough to experience pain, so I do think there’s some moral consideration to be given to that.
So what’s the right answer here?
The context under which the laws were created can change the overall effects of implementing the law, even if the exact text doesn’t change. The 24-week laws were most likely created just as abortion was moving from illegal/grey-area/taboo to legal/generally accepted, so it would read more so as a law to specifically allow abortions up to 24 weeks for any reason, rather than a law which is meant to specifically restrict something. Given that it is very rare for abortions that fall under this law to actually be carried out, there hasn’t be a real reason to look for it historically, so it is effectively unenforced.
However, if such a restriction was newly created, it would be moving away from a situation where abortion being legal is the status quo, so it would in effect be a law which imposes additional restrictions, rather than a law that mostly removes pre-existing restrictions. The creation of a new restriction indicates that there was no enforcement before, and thus implies that new enforcement is required. How do you create an enforcement mechanism that isn’t trivially bypassed (i.e. having a given doctor just lie about the age of the fetus or level of danger towards the mother) without placing a burden on abortions that supposedly would stay legal (like some sort of verification requirement)? Especially when the religious right will try to push restrictions as far as possible? The status quo of “effectively no enforcement” (at the federal level and the state level in most blue states anyways) seems vastly preferable to the most likely results of trying to enforce anything.
I don’t think this is true. There is a momentum to public opinion, and adding a new restriction would push momentum in favor of the anti-abortion movement, whereas currently existing 24-week laws were created in a context where momentum was moving in favor of the pro-abortion movement. I think it’s hard to deny that a newly created law is easier for right-wingers to capitalize on compared to an old law that has always been pretty much unenforced.
Even if this was passed, the right-wing media would still lie and say that millions of fully-formed babies were being killed. The only people this would convince are those who 1) would not fall for the aforementioned lie 2) consider the 24-week mark to be the most important moral distinction with respect to fetal personhood (i.e. do not believe in “life at conception” or “first heartbeat”) 3) do not consider 0.05% (likely a huge overestimate) of abortions being “unjustified” to be acceptable in the name of protecting abortion rights. I don’t think there are many people that fulfill all of those criteria.
Given that the benefit of such a law is pretty minimal even in the best case, raising the issue seems like a bad idea so long as the religious right still exists.