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.