From Poland to Texas, from Chile via Indiana to Channel 4’s Dispatches, the issue of abortion seems to have recovered its political salience during the past year or so. People are talking about it in legislative assemblies and television studios. Sometimes they are marching in the streets again. But there has been a change in the way the debate is framed nowadays. The old “pro-choice” versus “pro-life” dichotomy has all but slipped from view as the issue has metastasised, giving rise to numerous secondary arguments. These can be as hotly contested as the fundamental principles at stake ever were.
Thus, in June, Texas saw its recently enacted abortion clinic regulations struck down by the US Supreme Court. What Texas had wanted to enforce were new rules requiring abortion providers to keep their premises safe and clean and to have arrangements in place for admitting patients to nearby hospitals in case a procedure went badly wrong.
The attempt to tighten up the rules had been prompted, at least in part, by the case of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia-based abortionist who was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole in 2011 after being found guilty of multiple offences, including three counts of first degree murder, unlawfully performing late-term abortions and failing to maintain basic standards of hygiene and sanitation in his clinic.
Given how frequently the pro-abortion lobby has in the past cited the risk of infection posed by backstreet practitioners as a reason for permitting safe abortions within the law, you might think that Texas’s rule that clinics must be kept spick, span and sterile would have been uncontroversial.
Not a bit of it. Abortion rights activists claimed that the regulations posed an undue burden on clinics and that some would go out of business, thereby restricting access to abortion for local women. The Supreme Court agreed. Since the decision, Planned Parenthood has announced that it will now seek to strike down similar regulations in eight other jurisdictions, including Kermit Gosnell’s home state.
Also now heading towards the Supreme Court is an Indiana statute passed in March this year mandating the dignified disposal of foetal material. Once again the Gosnell case, along with allegations of a murky secondary trade in body parts from abortion clinics across America, had prompted legislators to act. And once again, you might think that dignified disposal could hardly be considered burdensome.
Under the new law, foetal remains would either have to be buried or cremated. But hardcore pro-abortion activists think that dignified disposal rules are tantamount to endowing the aborted foetus with some measure of humanity; and that is something they are absolutely determined to resist.
The “waste products of abortion”, they believe, are simply that, and should go in the dumpster with the rest of the garbage.
This kind of rigid, ideological opposition to even the slightest tightening of regulation is reminiscent of the National Rifle Association’s zero-tolerance approach to gun laws. Just as the NRA regards small, sensible restrictions as likely to be the thin end of a wedge that will one day knock down Second Amendment rights, so Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice groups appear to believe that any regulation of abortion providers is part of some long-term Republican plot to deny access to abortion services.
Oddly, this simultaneous hardening and narrowing of attitudes comes at a time when the American public appears to be moving in another direction. Since 2010, the number of abortions has been falling across the United States. And according to an Associated Press survey, some of the sharpest drops have been in states which have enacted no restrictions on clinics at all: eg Hawaii (down 30 per cent) and New Mexico (down 24 per cent).
Meanwhile, an honest look at what the polls tell us about public attitudes provides a co...