Ian Tuttle:
Give Dahlia Lithwick credit: She abides by her convictions — namely, her conviction that killing a living unborn child by dismembering it in the womb should be legal. That is her argument today at Slate, where she opines that the bans on abortion-by-dismemberment recently signed into law in Kansas and Oklahoma are a “watershed” tactic in pro-lifers’ assault on reproductive rights.
If you suspected that defending abortion-by-dismemberment might be difficult, Lithwick proves you right. Her arguments are twofold — 1) the abortion-by-dismemberment ban is based on inflammatory rhetoric; and 2) it endangers women — and both are sleights of hand.
Lithwick contends that “dismemberment” is a “completely nonmedical term” employed because it has no practical referent, and because it is emotionally charged. Nonsense. Here is the definition of “dismemberment abortion” from Kansas’s “Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act”:
‘Dismemberment abortion’ means, with the purpose of causing the death of an unborn child, knowingly dismembering a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.
Even if it is not the terminology used in the medical journals, the proscribed procedure is unmistakably clear.
But note, more importantly, that Lithwick objects to Kansas’s using the word “dismemberment,” but she does not suggest that the word misrepresents what actually happens. So what Lithwick really objects to is calling abortion-by-dismemberment what it is.
Kansas’s new law will apply to what are usually called “dilation and evacuation,” or D&E, abortions (far more obfuscatory, one might observe, than “dismemberment,” that label), and Lithwick correctly points out that Kansas’s new ban will significantly reduce the number of D&E abortions in the state. But she exaggerates the consequent horrors of this reduction. As she herself observes, D&E abortion is a second-trimester procedure that accounted for just 8 percent of the state’s abortions in 2013. And besides the fact that the legislature has taken aim at a statistically rare abortion method, it has popular nationwide support: Only one in four voters supports legal second-trimester abortions, according to Gallup. Kansas lawmakers are far more in step with the public than is Lithwick.
True, a liberal would prefer to apply some benign, neutral-sounding term to partial birth, dismemberment or late-term abortion. Just as they do with abortion itself, calling it “reproductive rights”. But, the left loves mislabeling behavior in order to give a more respectable and/or acceptable face to it.
Less than 1% of all abortions are done due to rape or incest. That stat is from the statistical arm of Planned Parenthood.
What the left will never tell you is that “reproductive rights” and a woman’s “right to choose” began prior to conception. Conception doesn’t just happen magically. It requires a woman agreeing to engage in unprotected sex with a partner that has the capacity to impregnate her.
But abortion on demand is the sacred cow of the political left. Too bad they are not as dedicated to religious freedom, or national security, as they are to being able to murder unborn children.