The first-breath definition, by contrast, has nothing to do with fetal development at all, which means that it requires a kind of magical thinking about what happens to the fetus when it passes through the birth canal. Or else it requires believing that there is nothing that could give a fetus a right to life so long as it lives inside a woman; your unborn child could be reciting Shakespeare to you in sign language and it would still have no right to life.

The latter position is held by certain activists and philosophers, but even the most liberal politician hesitates to defend abortion rights so baldly, which is how you get the mysticism of life’s first breath instead. But neither argument, neither form of maximalism, has much support outside the liberal base. Instead, Roe v. Wade has been sustained for many years precisely because the country understands it to ratify some kind of developmental or viability-based system — a system that seems closer to the uncertain, conflicted middle than the more exacting ethic proposed by the anti-abortion side

So it’s striking that with Roe perhaps threatened by the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court (perhaps!), the abortion-rights movement has decided that allowing any room for viability and developmental-based restrictions is capitulation, and that a mystical maximalism is the necessary play.