A new Arizona abortion ballot measure would effectively create a legal right to kill a healthy child through the ninth month of pregnancy.
A new Arizona abortion ballot measure would effectively create a legal right to kill a healthy child through the ninth month of pregnancy.
A rizona law currently allows abortion during the first 15 weeks of pregnancy for any reason, with an exception beyond that gestational limit to protect the life or physical health of the mother. But last week, a new political action committee called Arizona for Abortion Access filed a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would replace the current law with a fundamental right to kill babies capable of surviving outside the mother’s womb — all the way through the ninth month of pregnancy — under a broad mental-health exception.
The text of the proposed Arizona amendment, which will likely be on the ballot in 2024, explicitly forbids any law from protecting the life of a baby who could survive outside the womb whenever a lone “health-care professional” — an undefined term not limited to doctors — deems aborting the viable child necessary to protect a pregnant woman’s “mental health.” There is no requirement that the threat to mental health be severe, and the findings section of the amendment states that the provisions of the amendment should be “liberally” interpreted: “This act should be liberally construed in furtherance of the fundamental right it establishes.”
While Roe defined viability as the ability for a child to survive outside the womb “with artificial aid,” the Arizona amendment is actually more extreme: It defines viability as the ability to survive outside the womb “without the application of extraordinary medical measures,” and it leaves it up to the lone “health-care professional” to determine whether a particular child is viable.
Many Democratic politicians claimed for years that they only support late-term abortion when there is a serious physical threat to the mother, even as they backed legislation that implicitly creates a right to post-viability abortions for mental-health reasons.
In 1997, then-senator Joe Biden said he backed a federal law banning all abortion after viability unless continuing the pregnancy would “risk grievous injury to [the woman’s] physical health.”
“This is not mental health. This is not a minor ailment,” Biden said. “This is grievous physical injury.”
After winning the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama told a Christian magazine:
I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that “mental distress” qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions. [Emphasis added.]
Just last week, NBC reporter Dasha Burns insisted during an interview with Florida governor Ron DeSantis that “there’s no indication of Democrats pushing” for abortion to be legal throughout pregnancy. But some Democratic senators and governors have admitted that they oppose any legal limits on abortion. States such as Colorado have no gestational limits on abortion whatsoever, and would anyone deny that Arizona’s proposed abortion amendment essentially amounts to the same policy?
When abortion advocates and their allies in the media admit that late-term abortions do occur, they try to minimize the horror of the practice in two ways.
First, they try to downplay such cases as a tiny percentage of all abortions. But in terms of raw numbers, there are thousands of abortions performed annually in the U.S. later than 20 weeks into pregnancy — perhaps a greater number than all American gun homicides annually.
Second, they often claim that “the only time you really see” late-term abortion “is when it’s a medical emergency,” as Meet the Press host Chuck Todd said last fall. But that’s simply not true.
Infants born as early as 21 weeks or 22 weeks of pregnancy have survived their stays in the neonatal intensive-care unit and grown up to be healthy children. But the Atlantic recently profiled a late-term abortionist in Colorado, Dr. Warren Hern, who admitted that most of the abortions he performs later than 22 weeks target physically healthy children of physically healthy mothers:
Hern makes a living by killing preemies “who are 22, 25, even 30 weeks along,” according to the Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey. Most of the time, these babies and their mothers are physically healthy: “Abortions that come after devastating medical diagnoses can be easier for some people to understand. But Hern estimates that at least half, and sometimes more, of the women who come to the clinic do not have these diagnoses.”
Godfrey reports that Hern “believes that the viability of a fetus is determined not by gestational age but by a woman’s willingness to carry it,” and he even admitted that he has killed a baby girl in the womb simply because she was a girl.
The authors of a 2013 study on late-term abortions reported that “data suggest that most” abortions performed between weeks 20 and 28 of pregnancy are not performed for “reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” (“Little is known about the relatively few abortions occurring in the third trimester,” the same authors reported.) After viability, a pregnancy that threatens the mother’s physical health can be ended by delivering a living child in a matter of hours or minutes, but the late-term abortion procedure Hern performs takes a matter of days.
After a streak of referendum victories, Democrats are giddy about running on abortion in 2024. “In 2024, national Democratic donors and stakeholders should look to Arizona as the next state with a serious, layered return on investment for putting abortion on the ballot,” the progressive group Indivisible wrote in a memo to donors last week. The best strategy that advocates of the amendment have is campaigning against Arizona’s pre-Roe law, which generally bans abortion, but an Arizona appeals court ruled in December 2022 that the 15-week abortion law signed by Republican governor Doug Ducey takes precedence over that law (something Ducey himself had claimed when he signed it).
Do advocates of the amendment really want to run in a key battleground state on creating a right to kill a perfectly healthy baby that could survive outside the womb? Why not simply allow the viable child to be delivered alive? What exactly is the moral difference between killing a child in the womb at 26 weeks and Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s practice of slitting the neck of a premature infant born alive at 26 weeks moments after birth? These are questions every supporter of the proposed Arizona abortion amendment, which is sponsored by prominent groups including Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, ought to answer.