Today I found myself reflecting on the issue of reproductive freedom, and it occurred to me that when state governors ban abortion, they feel heroic. It appears they believe—likely based on religious doctrine—that the protection of fetuses is a sacred mandate and that abortion is murder. If that is their genuine belief, then of course restricting or eliminating abortion access would feel like an act of righteousness.
I do not happen to subscribe to those beliefs, and there’s the rub: Our country is deeply divided on, among other things, the issue of embryonic and fetal “personhood,” even at the expense of the well-established, independently viable life of the mother.
I am not sure how or when frozen embryos were first identified as being persons, but all I can say is that if you plunged a living human child into an embryo freezer, you would kill it. An actual person could not survive. Embryos, and even fetuses in their early stages of development, are nothing more than collections of cells that may have the potential to evolve into actual persons, but are nowhere near that benchmark. Fertilized eggs and fetuses are vague blobs of protoplasm that, if wanted and carried to term, will eventually develop the features of fully formed humans and be born, healthy, and alive, to loving parents who will nurture, raise, and provide for them.
Every child who is born should be wanted and cherished. But that is not, in fact, the case. Women sometimes seek abortions because they know how deeply unprepared they are to raise a child. They do not have the financial resources, the emotional resources, the educational resources, or the level of family support that would be needed to successfully parent and raise another human being. This is particularly true of pregnant teens. But that appears to be of little concern throughout the red states of America. They see themselves as champions of the “unborn.”
In 2021, when Gov. Greg Abbot of Texas instituted an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, he insisted that women would never again be raped in the Lone Star State, because he would put a stop to it. The implication was that if he waved his magic governor’s wand, no woman in Texas would ever be forced to carry her rapist’s baby to term because there would be no more rapists, and therefore abortions would be unnecessary.
The pro-life governor then returned to his favorite project: filling the Rio Grande River with razor wire to kill migrants attempting to enter the country illegally. He probably forgot that they used to be fetuses, too.
Government crime statistics indicate that Texas led the nation in number of reported rape cases in 2020, totaling approximately 13,500. One must consider that rape is a historically under-reported crime, so there were likely far more actual rapes than that. In 2023, following Gov. Abbot’s 2021 abortion ban, there were 16,510 rapes reported in Texas.
Evidently, ending rape in Texas is more difficult than the governor imagined.
When eliminating women’s long-held right to control their own bodies, Gov. Abbot assured his fellow citizens that children born from unwanted pregnancies would be welcomed into the loving homes of good Christians who so valued the sanctity of fetuses that they would adopt all of the unwanted children born to ill-prepared women.
In 2020, prior to the fall of Roe v. Wade, Texas statistics indicated that there were approximately 15,000 children in foster care statewide. In 2023, that number rose to approximately 18,000.
Texas’ year-to-year adoption data, maintained by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, indicate that Texas hit its adoption high-water mark in 2019, prior to the fall of Roe. In that year, Texans adopted 6,105 unwanted children. By the end of 2021, following Gov. Abbot’s abortion ban, that number dropped to 4,647. This means that adoptions in Texas appear to be decreasing rather than increasing.
So much for the willingness of people who just cannot seem to get enough of fetuses to actually adopt them after they have turned into people. For those who might be interested, foster placement is one of several significant life stressors that lead to poor childhood and adult outcomes for the children in the system. They are at elevated risk for school failure, drug addiction, homelessness, and incarceration. Children raised within the foster-care system often find that their paths lead inexorably from foster placement to prison.
This would come under the heading of “Save the fetus and warehouse the child.”
Perhaps in Texas they could pass an additional law requiring all the men who participated in producing those unwanted children to assume full responsibility for the babies that they helped create. If mom declines to become a parent, then dad should be required to step right up and take possession of the child. This will undoubtedly come as a shock to that subset of men who think that their only obligation following sexual intercourse is to zip up their pants.
I predict that this would go a long way toward solving the foster-care crisis in Texas, and it just might end up being the best way of making sure that the men in that state start wearing condoms.
Then there are the women who have been left to die in hospital parking lots because doctors are afraid to perform life-saving late-term abortions. It seems that the advocates for fetal and embryonic personhood believe that late-term abortions are common. In fact, late-term abortions are rare and typically occur only when the fetus is no longer viable and/or the mother is dying of late-term complications. It is pretty straightforward. I have never met a woman who had a late-term abortion for no good reason. No woman carries a child for eight months and then decides, on a whim, at the last moment, to abort it. Women have late-term abortions almost exclusively due to unforeseen and life-threatening conditions.
Donald Trump’s preposterous assertion that Democrats kill babies after they are born is just another ridiculous lie in the sea of lies he tells each day. The truth, sadly, is that sometimes babies die, and it is not because the doctor killed them. They die because they are born so compromised that no form of medical intervention will save them.
According to the World Health Organization, the leading causes of death among newborns include “premature birth, birth complications, neonatal infections and congenital anomalies.” In those cases, all that agonized parents and their doctors can do is to make those poor infants as comfortable as they can and ease their suffering as they die.
That is about as far from murder as one can possibly get. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of infanticide: It is medically compassionate, palliative care. Palliative care is designed to ease the suffering of terminally ill patients, regardless of age, including terminally ill newborns.
It should also be mentioned that Donald Trump, who is evidently wracked with concern that newborns are being killed by Democrats, recommended to his own nephew, Fred Trump III, that Fred’s severely disabled 19-year-old son be left to die, because Uncle Donald thought his medical care was too expensive.
Donald Trump, who knows darn well that Democrats do not roam from NICU to NICU killing infants, had no problem proposing that a 19-year-old with disabilities, to whom he is related, be denied life-saving treatment.
Like all fetus-loving hypocrites, Trump could not care less about what happens to those fetuses after they have been born.
The Republican Party is now the dog that caught the car. Anti-abortion rhetoric was long seen as an animating force among the party base. Well, maybe it was, but now that it is the law of the land throughout the red states of America, about 72 percent of women are enraged that they are no longer permitted to exercise choice, even in the direst of circumstances. This particular dog is now running as fast as it can away from the car that it caught. Trump, who in 2016 stated that women seeking abortions should be punished for trying to terminate a pregnancy, and subsequently bragged about being the guy who packed the court to end Roe v. Wade protections, is now back-pedaling as fast as he can, too.
Surprised? I am not. Meanwhile, Trump’s vice-presidential running mate is an unabashedly strident abortion warrior. Mr. Vance not only favors a complete nationwide abortion ban, including in cases where the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest (which he refers to as “inconvenient pregnancies”), he goes even further to suggest that women in abusive relationships should stay put and allow their partners to abuse them—and impregnate them—forever.
I cannot be the only person in America who recalls that MAGA Republicans made a huge stink over being required to wear masks—simple pieces of cloth—over their mouths and noses to prevent the spread of a highly contagious, deadly virus that ended up killing over a million Americans.
“The government can’t tell me what to do with my body!” they screamed. “My choices are none of their business!” Yet many of those folks are the same people who now insist that the government should take control of every woman’s uterus.
I would like to ask them to reflect on which circumstance is more of an intrusion: being asked to temporarily mask during a catastrophic public-health crisis; being forced by the state to give birth to children you do not want and are not prepared to raise; or being deliberately denied life-saving treatment as you bleed to death from a miscarriage in a hospital parking lot?
I have complicated feelings about abortion, as do all women. I am not entirely sure that I could bring myself to abort a fetus, but I will never have to make that wrenching decision because I am 67 years old and have never been pregnant. But whatever my personal decision might be, if I had to make such a decision, I would respect the right of other women to make the decisions that work best for them.
Michael Moore once said, “If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married.” A new spin on that adage would be, “If you disagree with abortion, don’t get one.”
State and federal governments have no business telling any woman how to reckon with an unanticipated pregnancy, or a high-risk pregnancy, or any pregnancy whatsoever. Old men in government, most of whom would not know how to change a diaper even if given a set of step-by-step instructions, have no business forcing women to be unwilling incubators.
I am hopeful that the women of America, sick to death of religious zealots trying to control their bodies and their private healthcare decisions, will express themselves in no uncertain terms this November.
