The Devil is in the Details, so Let’s Avoid the Details

[Geee]

American Mind

The pro-abortion party tries to defend the practice by not talking about it.

The reported leak of a Supreme Court decision returning the question of abortion laws to the states drove the leftist media into a state of outrage and indignation. But after so many years of fundraising and voter mobilization based on the threat of Roe being overturned, it seems the Left has forgotten its arguments in favor of the unrestricted right to abortion. Instead, it is struggling to find an argument that is consonant with their present focus on race-based injustice as the through line for all social and political debate.

Amid the predictable race-and-gender based invective against the three white men among the five-justice majority indicated by the leaked draft, there is a discernible effort to steer the discussion away from the issue at hand. We are told that this decision will be quickly followed by reversals of the right to contraception access, state-sanctioned homosexual marriage, or interracial marriage. While there is no clear connection amongst these issues beyond a reliance on “substantive due process,” implication is that the Left would prefer to deflect from talking about abortion itself toward more comfortable subjects.

But abortion, even for its proponents, involves very specific ideas about when a human fetus becomes worthy of protection by the state, and the dubious notion of “viability.” It involves distasteful realities that cannot be elided via euphemism. Today’s abortion rights absolutists insist on a right to terminate a developing fetus well past the point of “viability,” and become incensed by any mention of what would be involved in terminating a fetus at 40 weeks.

While abortion remains one of the few issues still framed by progressives as central to the interests of “women” in the old sense, it is also one of the few issues in which race cannot be centralized and the logic of disparate impact cannot be readily employed. The reality that black women get more abortions per capita than anyone else would be widely known if abortion supporters thought it supported their case. But mentioning the prolific number of terminated black pregnancies is not a politically palatable injustice to raise in defending legal abortion.