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Will: Dems ignore science in the abortion debate

By George Will
Published: October 22, 2017, 6:01am

What would America’s abortion policy be if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number — say, seven or 11? This thought experiment is germane to why the abortion issue has been politically toxic, and points to a path toward a less bitter debate.

The House of Representatives has for a third time stepped onto this path. Senate Democrats will, for a third time, block this path when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell brings the House bill to the floor, allowing Democrats to demonstrate their extremism and aversion to bipartisan compromise.

Abortion, which supposedly is the archetypal issue that confounds efforts at compromise, has for two generations — since the Supreme Court seized custody of the issue in 1973 — damaged political civility.

Pro-abortion absolutists — meaning those completely content with the post-1973 regime of essentially unrestricted abortion-on-demand at any point in pregnancy — are disproportionately Democrats who, they say, constitute the Party of Science. They are aghast that the Department of Health and Human Services now refers to protecting people at “every stage of life, beginning at conception.” This, however, is elementary biology, not abstruse theology: Something living begins then — this is why it is called conception.

In 1973, the court decreed — without basis in the Constitution’s text, structure or history, or in embryology or other science — a trimester policy. It postulated, without a scintilla of reasoning, moral and constitutional significance in the banal convenience that nine is divisible by three. The court decided that the right to abortion becomes a trifle less than absolute — in practice, not discernibly less — when the fetus reaches viability, meaning the ability to survive outside the womb. The court stipulated that viability arrived at 24 to 28 weeks.

Predicated on pain

On Oct. 3, the House passed (237-189) the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act banning abortions (with the usual exceptions concerning rape, incest and the life of the mother) after the 20th week. The act’s supposition is that by then the fetus will feel pain when experiencing the violence of being aborted, and that this matters.

Of course, pro-abortion absolutists consider the phrase “unborn child” oxymoronic, believing that from conception until the instant of delivery, the pre-born infant is mere “fetal material,” as devoid of moral significance as would be a tumor.

Only seven nations allow unrestricted abortion after 20 weeks. Most European nations restrict abortions by at least week 13. France and Germany are very restrictive after 12, Sweden after 18.

New medical technologies and techniques are lowering the age of viability. And increasingly vivid sonograms make it increasingly difficult to argue that the “fetal material” is at no point, in any way, a baby. Science is presenting inconvenient truths to the Party of Science, truths that are the reasons the percentage of pregnancies aborted is the smallest since 1973.

In 1973, the court bizarrely called the fetus “potential life”; it is, of course, undeniably alive and biologically human. When the House bill comes to the Senate floor, Democrats will prevent a vote on it. This will be a tutorial on the actual extremists in our cultural conflicts.

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