In this edition:
Welcome
Fetal heartbeat bills
Polls: What are they good for?
In other news
Off-topic
Welcome to the first edition of this newsletter! It exists to follow abortion as a public reality in America. I hope, therefore, to cover legislative and judicial news, trends in the public conversation, and stories and information that a narrow focus on the legislative and judicial side would leave out—though at the start I will be focused more heavily on those areas.
For more about what this newsletter, check out my Substack about page.
Other notes: I'll be refining and tweaking this—format, design, content all fair game—as I go along and I hope this newsletter will improve as I iterate. Suggestions are welcome. In addition, this edition is out of date, as I was soliciting some feedback before I published it and sent it out more widely.
Fetal heartbeat bills are a popular pro-life goal in states right now (Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Florida, and Georgia). These are bills that would ban abortions after a heartbeat is detected, which can happen as soon as six weeks. Tennessee Right to Life didn't support its state's bill. The group believes, correctly, that the law is highly vulnerable to legal challenge and that the Supreme Court is unlikely to review a lower court’s adverse ruling in this case. Instead, TN Right to Life supports a bill which would ban abortion, with exceptions, should the federal legal situation change.
What both the bill supported by TN Right to Life and fetal heartbeat bills have in common is that they do not seem to alter present legal realities. The former prepares for a possible post-Roe world—a major theme right now for both sides of the abortion debate occasioned, at least in part, by Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court— and the latter are not legally sustainable.
They doesn’t, of course, mean these efforts are valueless. But insofar as they are valuable, they should also be to joined to a push to enact legislation that has a good chance of being reviewed by the Supreme Court, as per Americans United for Life, which, for its part, recommends in this regard that states "prioritize legislation that defunds the abortion industry and provides affirmative legal protection for unborn child in non-abortion circumstances."
Speaking of which, in Ohio, a legal ruling has gone in favor of defunding. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a lower court decision, saying that the state is allowed to defund Planned Parenthood (article h/t Consistent Life Network).
The results of two recent Marist polls differed as to the number of respondents who identify themselves as pro-life and pro-choice. A January poll had pro-life/pro-choice self-identification at 38% and 55%, respectively, while the February poll found a equal 47% for both.
Both polls were commissioned by the Knights of Columbus, an organization that, to the regret of Sens. Harris and Hirono, still exists. As quoted by the Knights, Marist Poll director Barbara L. Carvalho said “Current proposals that promote late-term abortion have reset the landscape and language on abortion in a pronounced – and very measurable – way."
Is this correct? Shockingly, people differed: Yes, No-ish, No (a very different No).
A subsequent data point bears on the discussion. A new NBC/WSJ poll finds that 51% of respondents say that the Democratic party’s position is “in the mainstream”, while 41% say it’s “outside the mainstream.” The NBC story compares these results to a 2015 poll, in which those numbers were 54% to 34% respectively. In analyzing this difference, the NBC article echoes the Carvalho quote above: “recent public debate about proposals to expand late-term abortion in Virginia and elsewhere appears to have somewhat dampened the perception that the party’s positions are in the mainstream.” No doubt there would be further rejoinders to that assessment.
Which raises the question: how much, and in what ways, do these poll matter?
If the events in New York, Virginia, or on the Senate floor did indeed disturb public opinion, that would be good to know—though I am not sure it would really tell us anything we didn't already have the means to realize.
But if you rely too heavily on the latest polls in public argument (using this Marist poll, for example, as a rhetorical tool) an antagonist may bring up other polls, challenge the way the questions were asked, or articulate other objections. Answering such objections, even should you be on solid ground in doing so, can you draw you into a debate that distracts from the main issues.
The abortion debate does not want for distractions, and minimizing them is an important priority.
As an aside, the GOP fares most poorly on climate change out of the surveyed areas in the new NBC/WSJ poll. Perhaps soi-disant Republican moderates reading the polls for issues to drop from the GOP agenda could focus on climate change rather than abortion, though I’m not sure if such people still exist after the political Thanos snap of Trump’s election.
In other news:
Pro-life Democrat watch: “How can we continue to protect animals, wolves, coyotes, prairie chickens, frogs, minnows, but we can't protect a beautiful beating heart in a woman’s womb?" -State Senator Gabriel Ramos (D, NM) h/t New Mexico Alliance for Life. Said during a debate over a bill that would have repealed "an old, unenforceable New Mexico law that makes it a crime to perform an abortion.” The state senate rejected the bill with eight Democrats voting against it.
A recent study in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology found that there were fewer abortions as a whole in Texas after the passage of HB 2 but a greater number of second trimester abortions.
CNN reports that the FDA has sent a "warning letter" to Aid Access, "a European organization that provides doctor-prescribed abortion pills by mail."
In Maine, Gov. Janet Mills has put forward a bill to allow non-physician health care providers to perform abortions. In reporting on the Maine bill, the Portland Press Herald states that figures show the state abortion rate declining by 31 percent between 2005 and 2015.
In culture : "I think that it’s really, really important to present that kind of mundane counterexample to the way that abortion is presented in media because people don’t understand that it can, not just be a neutral and mundane part of people’s lives, but a positive part of people’s lives.” -Lindy West, author of a memoir that’s been made into a Hulu show, Shrill, which stars SNL cast member Aidy Bryant. The show contains an abortion plot.
Off-topic: A recent piece in LRB by Daniel Soar recommends watching a conversation between Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens that took place in 2017, and so I did (part one and part two). I, as a Catholic, found this conversation repays watching for several of its moments, such as when Hitchens flusters Dawkins by saying that he is not sure he would like faith entirely to disappear, or when he (Hitchens) incredulously asks Sam Harris, who had been stating that witchcraft was, more or less, a thing of the past, "you think you've got rid of that?" Hitchens also says that Dinesh D'Souza is "one of the much more literate and well-read and educated of our antagonists." This statement could perhaps reveal deep truths if one could bear to face it.