Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 2

The RealClearPolitics web site keeps track of the latest 2020 presidential polls, even though it's only mid-2019. As of today, Wednesday, June 19,

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former Vice President Joe Biden, in a USA/Suffolk poll, has a sizable lead of 15 percentage points over his closest Democratic presidential rival. Biden's point total is 30 percentage points — i.e., 30 percent of polled Democrats said they would prefer Biden as their 2020 candidate against President Trump. Biden's two closest rivals are Senator Bernie Sanders, at 15 points, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, at 10 points. All the other Democrats have single-digit point scores.

In direct matchups between leading Democrats and Donald Trump in a hypothetical 2020 general election

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we find that Trump would lose to any of these five candidates: Biden (+10 points over Trump), Sanders (+9), Warren (+2), Senator Kamala Harris (+1), and South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (+1). This poll was published by the pro-Trump FOX News organization on Sunday, June 16.

Looking back at "Real Clear Politics 2020 Presidential Polls, No. 1," posted on Tuesday, May 07, 2019, we find that as of this point the leading Democrats all surpass Trump, whereas in the earlier post Trump had a 1-point lead over Warren while losing to Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris, or then-very-popular Texas former-Representative Beto O'Rourke. This indicates that Trump has lost a lot of ground in general and that Warren has gained quite a bit of ground in the last month or so. Meanwhile, O'Rourke seems to have lost most of his earlier popularity.

Here's an overall look at the state of affairs among Democratic hopefuls:

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On the above graph, Biden (the green line at the top) still leads all the other candidates, but his lead has fallen since the beginning of May. Second is still Sanders (blue line), but his support has also dropped since May. The only candidate to show much of a gain is Warren (brown line), whose following has jumped up in the month of June. Buttigieg (purple line) has also shown a bit of an increase in June. Harris (orange line) has lost some support recently. All of the other candidates remain stuck in the low-to-middle single digits.

The top 20 Democratic candidates will engage in two televised debates on June 26 and 27. The lineups:

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Expect changes in their relative positions in the polls afterwards ...

Abortion and Religion

A lot of political opinion on the topic of abortion rights has to do with organized religion, or the absence of it, in people's lives. I personally am Roman Catholic, and my Church teaches that abortions are sinful, so it's probably no coincidence that I am pro-life. But there are a lot of other pro-life people. I expect that many many pro-life people, though not Catholic, are nonetheless intensely religious.

I am also aware that there are many Catholics and members of other traditional Judeo-Christian faiths who are not pro-life, but instead pro-choice. Some are pro-choice "all the way," meaning they support the right of every pregnant woman to obtain an abortion no matter what the background of her pregnancy is or how long she's been pregnant. Others are pro-choice in a more limited way, believing that abortions ought to be available only early in pregnancy and only in cases such as rape, incest, or a medical threat to the life of the mother.

And of course, there are large numbers of pro-choice people who are not active members of any traditional religious faith. Some are outright atheists or agnostics. But, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, today there are an increasing number of folks — particularly millennials — who call themselves Wiccans or neo-pagans. See Brooks's "The Age of Aquarius, All Over Again! Belief in astrology and the occult is surging."

The millennial Wiccans/neo-pagans have a wide progressive agenda, not necessarily just a pro-choice one. Their overall agenda is, broadly speaking, born of today's radical, anti-Trump left. That can be seen in this photo:

Protesters at a free speech rally
in Boston in 2017.

There are now some 134,000 people who today identify as Wiccans, and when combined with the many people who style themselves neo-pagans, together they form quite a large group of over a million Americans. These people, says Brooks, are into astrology, witchcraft, mindfulness, and (in today's polarizing terminology) "wokeness."

According to Wikipedia, Wicca is, say certain authorities, "a form of nature religion, a term that is also embraced by many of its practitioners, and [Wicca is also seen] as a mystery religion." Wiccans are, by their older name, witches. Wikipedia says:

... the Modern English term "Wicca" is derived from the Old English wicca ... and wicce ... , the masculine and feminine term for witch, respectively, that was used in Anglo-Saxon England. By adopting it for modern usage, Wiccans were both symbolically cementing their connection to the ancient, pre-Christian past, and adopting a self-designation that would be less controversial than "Witchcraft".

Brooks writes that "During the Kavanaugh hearings, 13,000 'resistance witches' cast a hex on Brett Kavanaugh." Brett Kavanaugh, of course, is President Trump's recent appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court. He, it's said, could become the deciding vote in some future case that would overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortion once again illegal in states that choose to ban it.

One researcher on "progressive occultism," Tara Isabella Burton, says, “Wicca ... is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.” She calls this movement "the Great Awokening." Per Brooks, "Burton’s essay is really about how astrology and witchcraft have become important spiritual vocabularies within parts of the social justice movement." Per Burton herself, "Last month ... when pro-choice advocates marched on the South Carolina State House to protest the Alabama abortion ban, protesters held signs identifying themselves as 'the grandchildren of the witches you could not burn.' (This phrase has also been spotted on placards at the annual Women’s March)."

Brooks points out that today's burgeoning Wiccans are people who:

• Want to "find a way to be spiritual"
• Want to "slow down," to "escape the pace of life technology wants and to live at a human pace"
• Want "identity markers" that "tell [them] what sort of people [they're] likely to be compatible and incompatible with"
• Want to "express alienation" and reject "the traditional organized religions [that] are implicated in the existing power structures"

Brooks adds:

Being occult is a way to announce that you stand on the fringe of society, that you stand against the patriarchy, against the heteronormative culture and against the structures of oppression. Political alienation manifests itself in the alt-right and [also in] the energized radical left. It makes sense that it would manifest itself in the spiritual realm ...

Brooks sees Wiccans and neo-pagans as having "the desire to live within a coherent creed and community, but without having that creed impinge on your individual autonomy. ... The emerging spirituality is a hodgepodge spirituality. Each person borrows practices from, say, Native American, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and SoulCycle [see "When SoulCycle Is Your Religion"] traditions and blends them in a way he or she finds moving. There is no grand narrative, no specific way one is expected to live, no set of laws you have to obey or even a specific cult leader who might boss you around. Religion bows before individualism."

*****

David Brooks is a middle-of-the-road opinion writer by today's standards, and so is The Washington Post's Michael Gerson, who calls himself an "evangelical Episcopalian." Gerson's recent column "Gillibrand’s vilification of pro-life people proves how hopeless she is" has it that:

One measure of the seriousness of a Democratic candidate for president is his or her understanding of the importance of religion in our common life. I am not talking here of the perfunctory bow toward personal, sectarian belief, which is neither qualifying nor disqualifying in a prospective president. I refer instead to a candidate’s recognition that faith helps define compassion and justice for millions of Americans.

Barack Obama provided the model in his 2006 Call to Renewal speech. “Secularists are wrong,” he said, “when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King — indeed the majority of great reformers in American history — were not only motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Kirsten Gillibrand

But what happens when over a million people, many of them millennials, expressly reject the Judeo-Christian tradition in favor of Wicca or neo-paganism? One Democratic candidate who would like to unseat President Trump is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Gillibrand is (according to "Religious affiliation in the United States Senate") officially Catholic. Yet it's not clear whether Gillibrand actually supports Catholic teaching. Gerson writes of Gillibrand:

In a recent interview with the Des Moines Register, [Gillibrand] judged the religious motivations of people who are pro-life to be democratically illegitimate, because it is wrong to “deny women basic human rights.” She continued: “I think there’s some issues that have such moral clarity that we have, as a society, decided that the other side is not acceptable. Imagine saying it’s okay to appoint a judge who’s racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic. Asking someone to appoint someone who takes away basic human rights of any group of people in America, I don’t think those are political issues anymore. . . . All these efforts by President Trump and other ultra-radical conservative judges and justices to impose their faith on Americans is contrary to our Constitution.”

In Gillibrand's view, I assume, the faith being "imposed" on Americans by pro-life people is that of the Judeo-Christian tradition — including her own nominal Roman Catholicism — which many of its opponents reject as intrinsically patriarchal.

So, I have to conclude, the polarized politics of today is as much about religion as it is about any more traditional "political" subject ...

Abortion: Hot Topic in Today's Politics Could Readily Be Cooled Down

Abortion is such a hot political topic today. Here are some examples from Letters to the Editor, The Washington Post, June 13, 2019:

To have a child or not. To have this child or not. To have a child at this time or not. Having a child or not is a complicated and exquisitely personal decision. Which is why the only one who can make it is the individual who is pregnant. Everything else is commentary.

Kathleen Parker [“Terminate abortion, please,” op-ed, June 9] and others are entitled to their own opinions about abortion. But they cannot and should not feel entitled to prevent — or judge me about — mine.

Susan Bodiker, Washington

*****

It would be great to make abortion irrelevant. Kathleen Parker is either naive or, more likely, willfully cherry-picking the facts regarding the reality for many of the women who need this type of health care.

Ms. Parker wrote in her June 9 op-ed about those millions whose “profound religious conviction” should be respected. The result is that federal funding for abortion is banned. In fact, those beliefs hold much of the country hostage. People refuse to do their jobs in the form of conscientious objection by healthcare workers, beliefs that deprive women of the means to avoid pregnancy and that drive the dissemination of false information about the reality of the procedure.

Why must my federal tax dollars, and those of the millions who believe as I do, be withheld from helping women in need who would choose an abortion? How come only religious beliefs count? How does Ms. Parker see a clear path to making birth control freely available with the likes of the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Green family, who either refuse to cover any birth control or will cover only the forms of birth control they designate as acceptable for their workers? Why can parents opt their children out of sex education in schools in some parts of the country?

“We should be talking about” it, she wrote. Yes. Let’s.

Nancy Poole, Newton, Mass.

*****

Paul Kane ended his June 9 @PKCapitol column, “Democrats on defensive as abortion foes wonder if party tolerates their views,” with a quote from former congressman Bart Stupak (D-Mich.): “It’s not the same party anymore. You’re driving people away.” I am among those who were driven away.

I registered as a Democrat in West Virginia way back when I was first old enough to vote, but I threw in the towel at long last about three years ago. I am pro-life, yet I believe in gun control and climate change, so I could find no seat at the table of either party. I’m now registered as independent.

It seems that right now one has to favor abortion rights, including late in pregnancy, to be included in the Democratic Party. Extremists in both parties and their litmus tests are driving people away. Some of us feel we have nowhere to go without being attacked for our beliefs.

Sharon Klees, Hyattsville

*****

I'm mostly in sync with the last one, that of Sharon Klees. As a pro-life Democrat, I tend to feel I have "nowhere to go" politically these days. None of my party's 20-plus presidential candidates seem to be even tangentially pro-life. This is especially true of leading candidates such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris — not to mention the one whose poll numbers are currently the highest among Democratic voters: Joe Biden. Biden recently flipped his erstwhile support and came out against the Hyde Amendment which currently blocks federal Medicaid payments to cover poor women's abortion costs.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, "Contraception, Pregnancy and Abortion," almost all women can today get health insurance that covers the full cost of contraceptive medications and techniques: birth control pills, IUDs, implants, etc. Women without jobs that provide health insurance can, during "open season," get it online through "Obamacare," i.e. the Affordable Care Act. Households with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level are eligible to receive federal subsidies for policies purchased via Obamacare, so for those households Obamacare is reasonably affordable.

*****

I'd like to find out why there are there so many unwanted pregnancies that often result in abortion. Why aren't more sexually active women — not to mention the men they have sex with — using "protection," if they don't want to get pregnant? Or, if they're using it, isn't it working all that well?

My Catholic religion is super-strict about topics related to sexuality and reproduction:

1. Sex is permissible only between married heterosexual couples. It is never permissible prior to or outside such unions.
2. Means of contraception other than the so-called "rhythm method" — whose official name is "natural family planning" — are impermissible. They are considered "artificial," therefore sinful.
3. Willfully obtained abortions, even for women who have strictly obeyed the first two rules and have still become pregnant, are in all cases contrary to the church's moral teachings.

I suppose one reason why certain couples might avoid using "artificial" contraception has to do with a religious ban such as the Catholic Church imposes. But I'd say that that can't be the main reason for so many unplanned pregnancies. According to the Washington Post story "Almost half of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned. There’s a surprisingly easy way to change that":

Many women get pregnant while using birth control. From a behavioral economics standpoint, the most widely used forms of birth control in the United States — the pill and condoms — are pretty terrible. They require frequent and specific action, offer little room for error, require action in times of emotional distraction, and have comparatively high rates of failure: For every 100 women who rely on the pill for one year, nine will get pregnant; for every 100 women who rely on condoms for one year, nearly 20 will get pregnant. By contrast, if 100 women rely on the IUD (intrauterine device) or the implant (a matchstick-sized plastic rod inserted just below the skin in the arm that releases pregnancy-preventing hormones) for one year, just one, or possibly none, will get pregnant.

This story points to better ways of avoiding unplanned pregnancies (IUDs and implants) than those which are currently widely used (the pill and condoms).

If only such facts would get more exposure, the greater part of the hot abortion controversy in today's politics would become moot. Wouldn't that be a great thing? I think so.

Are Abortion Advocates Helping Trump?

Michael Gerson

In Tuesday's Washington Post, middle-of-the-road opinion writer Michael Gerson suggests that the strong pro-choice advocacy coming from Democratic Party leaders today may actually help Republican President Donald Trump win a second term in 2020. In "Abortion supporters have made Trump’s reelection more likely," Gerson writes:

One of the largest obstacles to the defeat of President Trump in the 2020 election is the radicalism of the Democratic Party on the issue of abortion. By forcing Joe Biden to abandon his support for the Hyde Amendment — which currently prevents the funding of abortions through Medicaid — the abortion lobby and activist liberals have taken the first major step toward reelecting Trump.

How vastly things have changed, and quite rapidly, says Gerson. Not that long ago, many leading Democrats supported "the sanctity of human life," meaning that they opposed legalizing abortion or at least wanted to place tight restrictions on it:

Edmund Muskie

At the start of Biden’s career — about the time that Roe v. Wade was decided [in 1973] — both political parties contained diverse views on abortion. Early in 1971, for example, the front-runner for the [1972] Democratic presidential nomination, Edmund Muskie, was both Catholic and pro-life. During a television interview with David Frost, Muskie said: “I’m concerned about diluting in any way the sanctity of human life. . . . If it becomes all right to take a life in that stage, then how easy will it be to slip into the next step? Should people in old age who are senile — does it then become legitimate to take their lives?”

Later in that campaign season, after Muskie had dropped out of the race, fellow Democrat Hubert Humphrey attacked the party’s eventual nominee, George McGovern, for being too liberal on abortion. As Daniel K. Williams recounts in “Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade,” McGovern took the matter seriously enough to run a half-hour television broadcast dealing with issues important to Catholics. At one point, [Muskie] was shown telling a Catholic nun that abortion should be a matter for states to decide and that he supported some abortion restrictions. McGovern’s first choice to be his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was strongly pro-life. [Eagleton had to quit the race after it was revealed that in the past he had suffered bouts of depression.] [Muskie's] second selection, Sargent Shriver, was another pro-life Catholic.

Meanwhile, many important Republicans actually supported legal abortion:

In the 1970s, there were also plenty of Republicans who were pro-choice, including Lowell Weicker, Bob Packwood, Howard Baker, John Tower and Barry Goldwater. In 1975, former first lady Betty Ford called Roe v. Wade a “great, great decision.”

*****

Robert F. Kennedy

I personally call myself "a liberal Democrat in the mold of Senator Robert F. Kennedy," the potential Chief Executive who was assassinated in 1968 during his campaign to gain the Democratic nomination to replace President Lyndon B. Johnson. RFK was a practicing Catholic, as were his wife Ethel and the whole large Kennedy clan. In 1968, legalized abortion was not yet on the political radar screen. My guess is that during those very early days of the women's liberation movement, had abortion turned into the hot issue it has now become today, RFK would have resisted it in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Muskie did in 1971.

At any rate, Gerson thinks the take-no-prisoners attitudes toward anti-abortion sentiments that Democratic hopefuls are now actively ruing may boost Trump's re-election chances:

Now, a Democratic presidential nominee is not allowed even a hint of reticence. Abortion must [in the rhetoric of the nominee, whoever he or she may turn out to be] be supported and funded as a positive good.

Joe Biden

This, despite the fact that many Americans, while they support abortion under limited conditions, also retain ethical concerns about unrestricted abortion-on-demand. With respect to Biden's flip-flop on Hyde, Gerson writes:

... opposition to federal funding of abortion was one of the last remaining ways for a Democratic politician to tell Catholics (and others) that their ethical concerns have some degree of merit. Now, a Democratic presidential nominee is not allowed even a hint of reticence. Abortion must be supported and funded as a positive good.

Gerson's reaction to Biden's flip-flop on Hyde:

The moral question is obvious: How does this allow Biden to live with his Catholic conscience? But the political implications are also relevant. Biden has made it harder — significantly harder — for cultural conservatives who are disturbed by Trump’s cruelty and prejudice to vote for Biden, should he be his party’s nominee.

*****

Note in the above quotation concerning Edmund Muskie that he advocated "letting the states decide" about legalized abortion. Today, pro-choice advocates fear — perhaps with good cause — that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe, thanks to the addition oto it f Trump's two recent appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

Neil Gorsuch (left) and Brett Kavanaugh

If Roe were to be overturned, "letting the states decide" would indeed be the expected result. Roe blocks the state laws, still in place or recently passed, that contravene Roe's three-trimester rule. Roe, according to this Wikipedia article:

The Court resolved [the] balancing test [concerning abortion's legality] by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: the Court ruled that during the first trimester, [state] governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, [state] governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother.

Overturning Roe would, as I say, presumably toss out the three-trimester standard, letting states (for example) adopt "fetal heartbeat" legislation that "makes abortions illegal as soon as the embryonic or fetal heartbeat can be detected." A detectable heartbeat typically is heard at about the sixth or seventh week of pregnancy. Pro-choice advocates complain that many recently impregnated women won't yet know they're pregnant by that point, as they will have missed just one menstrual period.

I think Gerson is correct about overly-progressive-on-abortion Democratic candidates possibly hurting their chances of unseating Trump. I also think there's at least a strong likelihood — particularly if Trump gets a second term and has an opportunity to further stack the court in an anti-Roe direction — that Roe will get overturned or at least rendered irrelevant by one or more subsequent High Court decisions, thereby returning to the individual states their once-held primary responsibility of setting abortion law.

That would surely trigger pitched legislative battles in states where voters aren't solidly pro-choice, and maybe even in states whose electorate is solidly pro-choice. It could well turn out that abortion politics will be an even more dominant mode in years to come than they already are today.

Is There Still Any "Middle Ground" on Abortion?

Karen Tumulty

In yesterday's Sunday edition of The Washington Post, columnist Karen Tumulty said there's no longer any "middle ground" on the issue of abortion. She was referring to the fact that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden last week reversed his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment, "a provision in federal law that, since the 1970s, has banned Medicaid from paying for abortions, except in rare cases."

That amendment, says Wikipedia, "generally restricts the use of funds allocated for the Department of Health and Human Services and consequently has significant effects involving Medicaid recipients." Federal funds, according to the amendment, cannot be used to pay for abortion "except to save the life of the woman, or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape."

Joe Biden

Joe Biden was President Barack Obama's vice president, before which he was a U.S. senator for many years, during which time he twice ran unsuccessfully for president, in 1988 and 2008. Until last week, Biden supported the Hyde Amendment.

Biden, a faithful Roman Catholic, has apparently wrestled for years with abortion as a political issue — given that his church (which is my church as well) opposes abortion. The official Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person — among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life. Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law.

Karen Tumulty points out in her column that among Democrats there used to be a "middle ground" concerning abortion, which became legal in 1973 as a result of the famous Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the wake of Roe:

Biden’s position on the Hyde Amendment was in the mainstream, even among Democrats. With abortion opponents gaining little ground in their efforts to overturn Roe, the provision was framed as an effort against federal overreach in the other direction — taxpayers would not be required to subsidize a procedure that, while legal, was against many people’s moral principles.

But today, says Tumulty, that middle ground has disappeared:

Biden on Thursday said he changed his position in response to tough new laws that aim to virtually ban abortion in some states. “I have supported the Hyde Amendment like many, many others have,” he said, “because there were sufficient moneys and circumstances where women were able to exercise that right — women of color, poor women, women who were not able to have access — and it was not under attack as it is now. But circumstances have changed.”

One reason why circumstances have changed is that President Donald Trump has taken opportunities to appoint two new justices to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are expected by pro-choice advocates to give the court a 5-4 majority in some as-yet-unspecified upcoming case that will serve to overturn Roe.

*****

Kathleen Parker

I personally disagree with Biden's decision to drop support for the Hyde Amendment. My reasons — in addition to my purely religious objections to abortion — echo those cited by Post columnist Kathleen Parker in yesterday's paper. "We should be talking about ways to end abortion," her headline reads. She states:

Although abortion rates are down across the board over the past decade, among women aged 15 to 44 (more or less the reproductive years) in 2014, African Americans had the highest abortion rate, at 27 abortions per 1,000 women. Hispanic and white women clocked in at 18 and 10 abortions per 1,000 women, respectively. And abortion is most common among impoverished and low-income women, who accounted for 75 percent of abortion patients in 2014.

If 75 percent of 2014 abortions were obtained by impoverished and low-income women, then it seems to me that the Hyde Amendment's refusal to pay for such abortions with federal funds via Medicaid did little to lower the abortion rate. Accordingly, it seems to me that repealing Hyde — if that were even possible, given the likelihood that Republicans will continue to control the Senate after 2020 — would probably not raise abortion rates among impecunious women.

In other words, the anti-Hyde position of Joe Biden and seemingly all of the other Democrats running for president in 2020 is merely a symbolic one. Kathleen Parker is right. We need to talk less about such symbolic stances and more about practical ways to lower abortion rates.

One of the reasons we need to do so is that a disproportionate number of terminated fetuses are those of African Americans, Hispanics, and impoverished and low-income women in general. Abortion is by no means an equal opportunity way to end unwanted pregnancies. So, given that a great many Americans have religious and moral objections to using taxpayer monies to pay for abortions, why not do as Kathleen Parker recommends?

Shouldn’t we dedicate more effort to tackling unplanned pregnancy across all races and wealth levels before we mandate that Americans pay for others’ abortions?

But a ZIP code isn’t really the point, is it? It’s about whether taxpayers with a strong commitment to life at conception should be on the hook for others’ abortions. Sacrificing our nation’s long history of protecting religious freedom and freedom of conscience is a high price to pay so that strangers can abort their babies. If it’s no one’s business what women do with their bodies, then why is it anyone’s business to interfere with another’s profound religious conviction?

... The real problem with abortion, aside from its obvious complexities, is the way we talk about it. Given the more than 50 million abortions performed in the wake of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, it should be clear that we suffer a lack of imagination. Rather than arguing endlessly about choice vs. personhood, we should be talking about ways to end this primitive, barbaric procedure, which is risky, nasty and, unequivocally, life-ending.

In 21st-century America — with pills, patches, spermicides, morning-after medications, IUDs, condoms or some combination thereof — we should be well beyond all but the rare abortion. If big pharma can give men hours of sexual stamina, surely it can come up with a foolproof, fail-safe method of pregnancy prevention.

If poorer women lack sufficient access to birth control, then let’s use federal funding to get more of it to them. If boys and girls need better sex education, let’s make sure they get it. If you don’t like abstinence lessons, teach them the joys of mindfulness. You want to have sex? Make it extra-special by not creating a fertilized egg. Here’s how. There are a hundred ideas out there waiting to be implemented, if we could only stop our political posturing long enough to imagine.

I agree. I think Kathleen Parker is correct: there is still a "middle ground" on abortion.

Eugenics and Pro-Abortion Stances

Although I have long been officially pro-choice, I'm reconsidering.

One reason I'm reconsidering is a Ross Douthat column that recently appeared in The New York Times, "Clarence Thomas’s Dangerous Idea. Does anything link the eugenics of the past to abortion today?"

As can be intuited by reading my previous blog post, "Contraception, Pregnancy and Abortion," I posted it in hopes that women who might become unintentionally pregnant and consequently opt to undergo an abortion ought to instead take advantage of free contraceptives in various forms, including pills, IUDs, and implants. These forms of contraception are now available without monetary cost to almost all women who have health insurance.

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat has changed my mind about the question of the morality of contraception. Although I am a Catholic — as is Mr. Douthat, though he's a more conservative one than I am — I had never understood why the Catholic Church proscribes contraceptives even as it also declares abortion a sin.

I don't claim to know the entire set of reasons why the Church opposes contraception, but one of the reasons seems to be the historical connection of contraception with the philosophy of eugenics.

Eugenics was a movement that proposed "a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population by excluding (through a variety of morally criticized means) certain genetic groups judged to be inferior, and promoting other genetic groups judged to be superior."

Sir Francis Galton

It began under that name in 1883 with Sir Francis Galton, "an English Victorian era statistician, progressive, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician [who] was knighted in 1909."

The eugenics movement was co-opted in the 1930s and '40s by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. After the Nazis lost World War II, eugenics fell quickly out of favor in the West. But Wikipedia says:

Since the 1980s and 1990s, with new assisted reproductive technology procedures available, such as gestational surrogacy (available since 1985), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (available since 1989), and cytoplasmic transfer (first performed in 1996), fear has emerged about the possible revival of a more potent form of eugenics after decades of promoting human rights.

Clarence Thomas

Mr. Douthat alludes in his column to a recent Supreme Court dissent written by the very-right-wing justice Clarence Thomas — yet another Roman Catholic who is well known for his pro-life beliefs. Douthat writes:

Criticizing his fellow justices’ decision to block part of an Indiana law that banned abortion based on sex, race or disability, Clarence Thomas performed a public service: He brought two competing historical narratives into contact with one another, on an issue where ideological arguments often pass like trains in the night.

Margaret Sanger

The Thomas argument, common inside the pro-life movement but startling to many, is that the present “reproductive rights” regime may effectively extend older eugenic efforts to reduce populations deemed unfit. His dissent cited the eugenic inclinations of progressive icons like Margaret Sanger [founder of Planned Parenthood], while pointing out that today’s abortion rates are highest among populations — racial minorities and the disabled — that the older eugenicists hoped to cull.

Douthat extends the Thomas argument by "dividing progressive reproductive policy into three historical stages, with attitudes changing substantially but older impulses lingering in each new dispensation":

1. The eugenic period per se.
2. The population control period — with the promise that poorer communities and countries could be uplifted, not just culled, by reducing birthrates, and that such reductions would save the world from famine, plague and war.
3. The contemporary period, in which feminist arguments predominate over the male-dominated rhetoric of the previous period, and reproductive policy is understood primarily in terms of female liberty and general sexual emancipation.

Yet even in the contemporary period there is an after-image of eugenic thought, and Thomas’s point about how legal abortion appears, in the aggregate, to act in racist and eugenic ways [can] be taken as an indicator that something more than just emancipation is at work."

Says Douthat, "In practice, liberal technocracy still has a 'solve poverty by cutting birthrates' bias inherited from a population-panic age, and abortion-rights rhetoric still has a way of sliding into Malthusian fears about too many poor kids in foster care. In practice the medical system strongly encourages abortion in response to disability, with predictable results. In practice Planned Parenthood clinics are in the abortion, not the adoption business — and the disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates is shaped by that reality and others, not just by free choice.

The "disparate impact of abortion on black birthrates" is something pro-choice feminists don't have much to say about, and it's one of the reasons I'm now coming out of the closet about my true feelings about whether abortion-on-demand and, indeed, the use of contraceptives — which don't really seem to have done much to end unplanned and unwanted pregnancies — ought to be considered righteous social policy.