(Opinion) On Monday, the Senate debated the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, and then voted against it. Among the various arguments that Democrats offered against the legislation was that it would prevent women from electing to abort in cases of fetal abnormalities.Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) shared stories of some of her constituents who have made that decision. One woman had carried a child with a malformed brain. Another woman had carried a child with a malformed heart.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash) told a similar story of a woman who decided to abort one of her twins at 23 weeks whose lungs had failed to develop.
Why this matters: Sens. Warren’s and Murray’s discussion only of cases of fetal abnormality had the rhetorical effect of burying the overarching motivation for abortions in this country: inconvenience. Why? It’s much easier for them, and perhaps their consciences, to argue for abortion in cases of fetal abnormality because it may be perceived as compassion; that the child is actually spared from a life of suffering (Sen. Warren says the aborted child is given peace). In any case, the senators failed to explicitly defend – and even to address – abortion motivated by inconvenience, and instead defended “bodily autonomy” because even for them, such motivations are morally dubious.
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