Reproductive Politics

Many, but it depends. The fact check site PolitiFact did a nice job analyzing the question and, in doing so, providing a clear summary of the major differences between abortion laws among countries. Politicians love to use a certain rhetorical technique when conveying information: They make a statement that draws a narrow frame around just the set of facts that they want the listener to hear. In this case, Carly Fiorina (former CEO and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate) asserted that only four countries in the world "legalize abortion after five months" (about 20 weeks), including the United States. Two of those countries have 'bad' governments-- North Korea and China-- and the other is our 'socialist' neighbor to the north, Canada. If you want to get people fired up over a government policy, comparing us to China and North Korea is the way to do it. (People on the left tend to do the same thing, just on different issues.) At any rate, is Fiorina...

The New York Times has been doing some great reporting on reproductive politics lately. There is a lot of material to work with (!) but the paper has been great at getting behind the surface of events and providing context and analysis. Speaking of which: The NYT published a story today on the pro-life push to use the theory that fetuses feel pain before the point of viability to drive legislative bans on abortions at 20 weeks and beyond. What is accomplished by a 20 week ban based on the theory of fetal pain? This kind of ban largely meshes with public opinion. While these bans tend to not allow abortions that threaten the "health" of the pregnant woman, they do allow for abortions after 20 weeks that threaten the "physical" "life" of the pregnant woman. (The U.S. House version, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act  (PCUCPA) also has a rape and incest exception.) As long as women who have life-threatening pregnancies can have abortions at ...

The state of Texas thrust late-term abortion bans into the national spotlight because of legislation passed there over the heroic/infamous filibustering of state senator Wendy Davis. State laws that ban abortions after the point at which a fetus becomes viable are explicitly constitutional under Roe and Casey , so the fact that Texas wants to ban abortions later in pregnancy is itself not a big deal. Texas' ban is controversial because it bans abortions after 20 weeks, which is pegged to a specific time (rather than to a specific fetus' attainment of viability) and also weeks earlier than when any fetus is minimally capable of being viable (about 23 weeks); and the argument for having bans set at 20 weeks is that science has now determined that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks and so aborting a fetus that feels pain is cruel and should be prevented. This is the hot flavor in anti-abortion legislation, because fighting for the right of women to have abortions this late ...