What the push for legal-until-birth abortion tells us about the abortion debate

Some pro-choice purists have always been comfortable confessing, at least in private, that their highest priority is the right not to mother. Now they are, in effect, confessing it publicly, too. But this raises uncomfortable questions, most obviously: What sort of political party is willing to cheerfully advocate destroying infants even as they’re getting ready to be born?

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For those of us in the Muddle, the arguments about a woman’s right not to parent are much less compelling than the right to control her own body. Luckily, there are other ways to avoid parenthood if you’re not ready, so there’s no need to drag abortion into it. The justification for legal abortion is that pregnancy is slightly dangerous and very physically taxing, and women shouldn’t be forced to endure it against their will.

Yet like most of those in the Muddle, I find arguments about bodily control steadily less compelling as the pregnancy advances, and another body develops, which has its own claims to bodily integrity. And so, like my fellow Muddlers, I am eventually willing to say enough, you’ve gone too far.

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