Supporters of abortion would respond to a renewed push for a time limit on abortion the same way they always do. They say it is a disingenuous tactic and that what the proposal’s advocates really want is to work up to a complete national ban. The response should be the same, too: We would like to go further; we do want legal protection for unborn children throughout pregnancy as soon as our democratic system is willing to provide it. In the meantime, we want a limit on abortion after (say) five months of pregnancy. Can we at least agree on that, and keep debating about the rest?
No ban is going to become law anytime soon: not one at 15 weeks, not one at 20 weeks. Congress is not going to enact a permissive abortion policy nationally either. The filibuster remains in place and neither side is within striking distance of supermajority support in the Senate. But it is at least conceivable, and it would be desirable, for an abortion time limit to become law some years from now; and it is more likely that it would than that a more sweeping ban would.
Republican politicians (and consultants) who are skittish about abortion like to imagine that they can defuse the issue by keeping quiet about it. But abortion is a key issue in this year’s elections, and will be in future years’ elections, whether or not they want it to be. The question they face is whether they should try to influence the terms of the argument to their advantage: whether we should be talking only about those aspects of abortion policy that separate Republicans from the median voter or also about the ones that unite them.
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