The Frustrating Abortion Debate

The debate over Gov. Janet Mills’ late-term abortion bill was one of the most controversial of the session, but it was also one of the most frustrating. It was a frustrating debate because neither the pro-abortion side nor the anti-abortion side could come to an agreement about what the bill even meant. They still can’t.

On the pro-abortion side, left-wing politicians said over and over again that the bill was limited only to fatal fetal abnormalities, rare cases, and would not permit elective abortions of health babies carried by healthy women.

On the anti-abortion side, conservative politicians insisted that the bill, as written, was broad enough to allow abortion at any time for any reason. Obviously I side with conservatives on this one. The law that the Legislature just passed is very clear.

To address the concern that the bill was too radical and too permissive, the pro-abortion side introduced an amendment at committee saying something about “standards of care.” But the standards of care would apply to any medical treatment even without that language; that’s why they are standards of care. So the amendment was meaningless. The whole play reeked of a dumb ruse to pull the wool over the eyes of undecided moderates.

But the anti-abortion side, now that amendments were in the air, proposed a new one.

If, they said, the intention of this bill was to permit abortions in rare cases of fatal fetal abnormalities, then let’s just put in language that says exactly that: abortions after 24-weeks are permitted in cases of a diagnosis of fatal fetal abnormality. But the pro-abortion politicians refused to allow it.

Hence the frustrating part of the debate: Many pro-life conservatives would have backed LD 1619 if it actually did what the pro-abortion crowd said it did.

If LD 1619 actually allowed abortions post-24-weeks only in the rare instance of fatal fetal abnormality — but not in the case of an elective, post-viability healthy pregnancy — then the bill would have passed without so much acrimony.

But for some strange reason, pro-abortion politicians, many who benefited from Planned Parenthood’s prolific campaign spending, refused to countenance changing the bill so it would do what they were saying it would do. Rather than amend the bill so it would do what they said it would do, they instead insisted on calling anti-abortion conservatives overly emotional idiots and liars, albeit with some different words.

The stubborn refusal to amend the bill so that it clearly aligned with their messaging and rhetoric raised the troubling possibility that many supporters weren’t being truthful about the bill. It raised the possibility that LD 1619’s most strident backers knew that opponents were right, that the bill had no guardrails, that elective abortions of healthy pregnancies would be legalized. Yet they continued to insist otherwise.

In a place with a lot of fake collegiality, no one wanted to just come out and say that the backers of LD 1619 were either too dense to understand the language of the bill or they were tactically misrepresenting what it would accomplish. But remember where this all began: Nine months ago, Gov. Mills was on the campaign trail repeatedly stating that she would not change Maine’s abortion laws, including the viability threshold. Then, two months after the election, she introduced LD 1619.

So if the head of the party had no problem lying on behalf of Planned Parenthood, then why would her foot soldiers?