Abortion: Setting a 20-week limit

Republicans couldn’t care less about women voters, said Michelle Goldberg in TheDailyBeast.com. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the party’s renewed obsession with restricting abortion. This week, Republicans in the Texas legislature planned to use a special session to ram through a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, despite the nationwide outpouring of support that Sen. Wendy Davis generated in her “pink sneaker” filibuster of the same bill a few weeks ago. Texas will become the 12th state to enact the 20-week ban since 2010. To minimize adverse publicity, the GOP is trying to slip in many of these new restrictions “through the back door,” said Amanda Marcotte in Slate.com. Take Ohio, which quietly added anti-abortion amendments to a budget bill. Or North Carolina, which attached a slew of abortion restrictions to legislation meant to prohibit the “non-existent threat of sharia law.” How’s that for irony?

This time, Republicans have the broader public on their side, said Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg.com. During the 2012 elections, the pro-life cause took a beating when two Republican Senate candidates clumsily stated their opposition to abortion in all cases, even for pregnancies caused by rape. Since then, however, the politics of abortion have changed because of the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortion doctor who routinely killed well-developed fetuses six or more months into pregnancy. The Texas bill reflects the public’s disgust at such “barbaric’’ practices, said Kirsten Powers in TheDailyBeast.com. Without it, women are able to abort a healthy baby up to the 26th week for any reason. By then, a baby’s hands, brain, and nerve endings have developed. Even in liberal Western Europe, abortion is banned at that stage.

Most Americans are neither purely “pro choice’’ or “pro life,’’ said Michael Gerson in The Washing-ton Post.Gallup has found that 61 percent believe abortion should be legal in the first three months—but that support drops off sharply to 27 percent for the second trimester, and to 14 percent for third trimester. Why? Most people do not see a few cells as a full human being, but believe “life emerges’’ over time; once a fetus starts to look like a baby, the thought of killing it becomes repugnant. Laws that permit abortion in the first trimester, but heavily restrict it later, “would be unsatisfying” to the activists on both sides. But it’s our nation’s emerging consensus.

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