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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.
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.
The debates we’ve been having since the fall of Roe v. Wade, however, have revealed the ways in which both sides of the debate live with incoherence or self-deception.
The controversies around in vitro fertilization, for instance, have exposed a fundamental confusion among the many abortion opponents — Republican politicians, especially — who have rushed to reassure the public that their movement would never restrict the popular fertility treatment.
Is it possible to be pro-life and support some form of I.V.F.? Yes — but not the mainstream American form, with hundreds of thousands of embryos kept on ice and a significant percentage slated for destruction. The most sincere and consistent pro-lifers know this, but for a number of abortion opponents the issue is clearly a zone of cognitive dissonance, where they prefer not to follow their own premises to a personally uncomfortable or politically untenable conclusion.
But a similar cognitive dissonance hangs over the pro-choice attitude toward late-term abortion, including the positioning of Kamala Harris in her campaign for the presidency. 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.
The phrase “late-term” itself is contested, but for the purposes of this discussion I’m talking about abortions that take place around or beyond the threshold of potential fetal viability, which (thanks to medical advances) currently sits somewhere in the range of 22 weeks to 25 weeks of pregnancy.
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.
If this position is consistent, however, it’s also much more radical than a moderate pro-choice argument that justifies first-trimester abortions using some alleged biological marker of personhood — for example, viability or pain capability or brain development. It’s also more mystical, since for a fetus to enjoy a right to life one moment after birth and not one moment before implies that rights are constituted through relation and location, rather than through any distinct property of the human organism itself.
Which is why few Democratic politicians will actually take full ownership of this position’s implications. “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. You can read about doctors who perform both second- and third-trimester abortions in the pages of respectable liberal publications, and the sweeping abortion legislation Harris supports would almost certainly make it easier to obtain such procedures.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Again, this inconsistency is somewhat similar to the inconsistent attitude of many pro-I.V.F. pro-lifers, but with the notable difference that cognitive dissonance about the American way of I.V.F. pushes many abortion opponents, and certainly the Republican Party, toward the political center. Confronted with a ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court that threatened to impose substantial regulations on I.V.F., the deep-red Alabama legislature voted for sweeping protections for the practice, while the Republican nominee for president vowed to subsidize I.V.F. outright. These positions don’t make sense given pro-life convictions, but they do make sense as concessions to the muddled middle ground.
On the pro-choice side, though, the cognitive dissonance about late-term abortion mostly serves to prevent any kind of moderating move — putting obfuscation in the service of absolutism and using incoherence to sustain the most radical position possible.
Breviary
David Polansky on Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Jay Mens on the Middle Eastern reckoning.
Mary Harrington on theories of “replacement.”
Katherine Dee on cultural dynamism.
Matthew Bevis on Thomas Hardy’s poetry.
Thomas Casey on the end of a Christian life.
s for Myself
On Thurs., Oct. 17 at 7 p.m., I’ll be hosting a Q. and A. with the cinematographer Roger Deakins and his wife and partner, James Ellis Deakins, in advance of a screening of “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” as part of the Film and Culture Series at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture in Chicago.
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