http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/if-republicans-wont-fight-for-late-term-babies-what-will-they-fight-for/article/2559119If Republicans won't fight for late-term babies, what will they fight for?
By Timothy P. Carney | January 23, 2015 | 5:00 am
Babies after 20 weeks of gestation can feel pain. If allowed a couple more weeks to grow inside their mothers, they can survive outside the womb. Most Americans — especially most women — believe that government should protect these babies by banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
After 20 weeks, a baby is entering her 6th month of in-utero life. She is forming taste buds and can hear her mother’s voice. At 20 weeks, an unborn child is on the brink of viability: James Elgin Gill was born after 21 weeks and 5 days gestation. He’s now a healthy 17 year-old.
Almost all countries prohibit abortion at this point. China, North Korea, the United States, and a few others allow it. Polls show that Americans favor a ban on aborting babies after this point.
In 2013, the U.S. House passed such a ban. This week, on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision — widely understood to be a sloppy mess of motivated reasoning — Republicans planned to pass it through the House again. But two co-sponsors, Reps. Renee Elmers and Jackie Walorski, removed their sponsorship and demanded party leaders pull the bill. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Speaker John Boehner complied.
Why the freakout?
A National Journal article conveyed the fears of the GOP K Street consulting class:
If Hillary Clinton is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, Republicans will have a hard time winning suburban women, and so the last thing Republicans need is to be branded as opposing a woman’s right to abortion.
There was one detail notably lacking from this National Journal piece: a single poll suggesting that defending late-term pregnancies is unpopular among swing voters.
The pro-life side has a winning hand when it comes at least to limiting abortion. A 2014 CBS News poll found that 60 percent of Americans wanted stricter limits on abortion than currently exist. In a National Journal poll, the 2013 20-week bill was supported by 48 percent of Americans, compared to 44 percent who opposed. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed 60 percent in favor and only 33 percent opposed.
The hottest 2014 Senate races — North Carolina, Iowa, and Colorado — all pitted open and proud pro-choice Democrats against staunch pro-lifers. In all three races (all in 2016 Presidential swing states), the pro-life Republican embraced his pro-life position and won. The same was true in easier GOP open-seat pickups in South Dakota and Montana.
Yet Republicans this week ran away from an abortion fight because they’re afraid of how it will play politically. Maybe they were told that the Left would make hay over the details of the rape and incest exception to the law.
The pro-choice lobby has proven creative in coming up with attacks that are unexpected because they are nonsensical. For instance, when Republicans pushed abortion bills that included a common legal distinction between forcible rape and statutory rape, Democrats speciously accused the pro-life side of trying to “redefine rape.”
The pro-choice Left can always launch tendentious and misleading attacks on pro-lifers. It’s what they do. It’s what they have to do: gin up some controversy, declare a “War on Women,” and watch as the ideologically sympathetic media plays along, avoiding the issue at hand. Because the issue at hand is killing babies that can feel pain, and that could possibly survive outside the womb.
The Left will launch these attacks no matter what Republicans do. Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., removed his support for a “personhood” bill that could have affected contraception (because some contraceptives can kill a nascent life, too), and supported making contraception available over the counter. The Democratic Party, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer, and Sen. Mark Udall attacked Gardner constantly for trying to ban birth control.
Gardner won anyway, the first Republican to win a top statewide race in Colorado in 12 years. Udall underperformed the Democratic governor by 90,000 votes. Why? Gardner didn’t win by running away from his pro-life position, but by highlighting how absurd Udall’s attacks were.
It wasn’t fun for Gardner. To be blasted as a misogynist and to be lied about is not fun. Many media outlets mocked him and repeated the Democrats’ silly attacks. The media tend to work against pro-lifers. Reporters who ask pro-lifers difficult questions, almost never ask tough questions of the other side, such as, “Why is it okay to abort viable babies?” or “Are you cool with sex-selective abortion?”
These attacks are frustrating and personally hurtful, and the media usually acts like they are legitimate. But that doesn’t mean they work politically, as the polls and the 2014 results show.
Being a politician means you fight back when you're unfairly attacked. So many Republicans are out of practice fighting on abortion, because the party’s default reaction is to run from the issue. They run from the fight in part because the GOP consultant and donor classes don’t like talking about abortion — they’d rather push Keystone Pipeline votes and fight over capital gains rates.
Fighting over abortion isn't easy. But if you're not willing to fight to protect the most innocent and most vulnerable from being killed, it's hard to imagine what you will fight for.
