I’ve seen enough: based on today’s oral arguments, the Supreme Court is going to strike down the Texas abortion law (SB8)’s mechanism for evading judicial review, which will lead to SB8’s quick death in lower courts.

Only question now (in my mind) is vote count. Could be anywhere from 5-4 to 9-0, but I think 7-2 (Gorsuch, Alito in dissent) is most likely. Thomas and Gorsuch are the most questionable votes. Of course, one should never infer too much from orals, because things can change a lot when the justices go back to write opinions, but it was hard to see how you could get 5 justices to sustain SB8 after the stripping Texas took at the podium today.

Again: the question the Court is deciding today is “can a state pass a law outlawing a constitutional right and use shenanigans to prevent courts from protecting that right?” not “is abortion a constitutional right?” The second question gets argued in Dobbs v. Jackson on December 1st.

The Texas law was designed primarily as a tricky way to force the Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of abortion rights, and I supported the law for that purpose. (The Supreme Court itself has used shenanigans to avoid confronting the obvious & murderous falsehoods of its Roe/Casey precedents. Looking at you, Johnny Roberts. Shenanigans for shenanigans, I say.) But the Court’s decision to review Dobbs largely obviated the “need” for the Texas law, and SB8’s shenanigan is clearly so subversive of our constitutional order that that aspect of it had to get killed one way or another — so SB8 has been sort of a zombie since late May.

Of course, SB8 is still doing a lot of good! Statistics show that abortions in Texas have been cut in half since the law went into effect, from the mid-4000s/month to the low-2000s/month. (Don’t let anyone tell you that abortion bans don’t decrease abortions. They sure as heck do, even after accounting for mothers who travel out of the jurisdiction to abort, and have no negative impact on maternal mortality… as even a passing glance at Ireland under Amendment 8 proved.) Literally thousands of people are alive today because the Texas legislature acted to protect them from murder. Whatever legal shenanigans were involved in saving those lives, it’s quite a lovely outcome! And when the Supreme Court strikes the law down (as I am now convinced they will, and probably should), thousands of people are going to die because of that, too.

But as long as the Supreme Court makes the correct decision in Dobbs — and I think it will — the blood on our nation’s hands will be limited, or (if the Court moves swiftly in Dobbs and slowly on SB8) perhaps minimized.

I replied, without rancor:

This is like saying that Roger Taney wasn’t anti-Black.

In fact, it’s exactly like that.

Now, I get it: you don’t think unborn people are people, and think it’s not just reasonable but necessary (for gender equality) to exclude them from legal personhood, the protections of the Constitution, and the 14th Amendment. Okay, that’s where you stand. We all know how abortion debates crash and burn in this thread, and we don’t need to have one tonight.

But declaring that you think the unborn have “no rights the [born] man is bound to respect” makes you — and the mainstream Democratic Party — anti-unborn. This is as plain as the fact that triangles have three sides. Please don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

(Roger Taney was the Supreme Court justice who authored Dred Scott v. Sandford.)

My acquaintance was infuriated. He demanded I apologize for my “insulting, disgusting” comparison to “a slave-owning SCOTUS justice” and contended that I had attacked the basic rules of civil discourse by drawing that parallel. He stated that there was no similarity between abortion and slavery, because of course everyone has always known that Blacks are full-fledged human persons, but nobody knows or ever can know whether unborn children are full-fledged human persons, in large part due to their limited cognitive abilities.

I answered (intemperately, this time) that if he was uncomfortable being compared to Taney and the slaveholders, he should stop relying on the same logic, the same arguments, and even the same legal theory as the slaveholders. I said that, like the George Floyd protestors (who were on the streets at the time), and like the great William Lloyd Garrison, I had lost patience with being called uncivil just because I said plainly that our society should stop murdering kids. I noted that, in fact, White Europeans like us had spent centuries pretending not to know that Blacks are full-fledged human persons. You saw it from the theological debates of the 15th century over whether indigenous people had properly human souls, to the scientific racism of the 20th century, which claimed Blacks lacked Whites’ cognitive abilities.

At this point, my friendly acquaintance ended our conversation, unfriended me on social media, and never spoke to me again.

This is not the first time I’ve had a conversation go like this.

I think the last time it was when an abortion rights advocate insisted that parents should be able to abort if there’s evidence that the child has a serious defect, like Down’s Syndrome. I responded with a comparison to lebensunwertes leben (“life unworthy of life,” the 1930s progressive ethic used by the Nazis to justify euthanization of the disabled).

The time before that, it was when I noted that Roe v. Wade‘s death toll eclipses that of the Holocaust, and that those who support Roe have some of that blood on their hands. (62 million American children have been killed under the Roe regime. 12 million died in the Holocaust, including 6 million Jews.)

In each case, once I drew the comparison, the conversation was derailed and the relationship seriously damaged.

Now, you are free to criticize my approach for being imprudent. I, too, wonder whether I could have caught more proverbial flies with more honeyed tactics.

What you can’t really dispute, though, is the logical basis for my comparisons. If unborn-rights advocates are right about our core claim, that fetuses are people, then it’s impossible to see the abortion-driven eradication of people with Down’s Syndrome as much different from Aktion T4. It becomes impossible to see your local Planned Parenthood as substantially different from a death camp. It becomes impossible not to recognize the thread of logic that runs from Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson through Roe and Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

Inherent in the unborn-rights position is the conclusion that we, as a nation, are guilty of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

Yet, when I say this very obvious thing out loud, my interlocutors always seem completely stunned that I would think such a thing. Even if they started out believing that they wanted an open, honest, constructive dialog with a pro-lifer, they are so outraged that I actually, seriously, for real think fetuses are people (and that people who kill fetuses are actual, serious, for real murderers) that many of them end our relationship on the spot.

And I’m, like, dude, you knew I was pro-life! How did you think I saw the willful murder of 62 million innocent children? How did you think I saw your complicity in it?

Yet I think their shock is real. Most pro-choicers really can’t believe you think they support atrocities… and they really can’t imagine carrying on a friendly relationship with you afterward. Who could possibly be friends with a Nazi or a slaveowner or even a run-of-the-mill modern racist? And didn’t I just tell my friends that they are Nazi-grade monsters? Who could possibly be friends with someone who sees them as a monster?

And here, finally, is the point I’ve been meandering toward: I suspect there’s a real difference in how abortion abolitionists and abortion defenders generally view the world. We don’t just differ on the question of whether and how to protect fetuses and their mothers. Our understanding of abortion informs our whole approach to good and evil.

For those who oppose unborn rights, I have to imagine that the story our culture tells itself about evil seems more or less true:

Most people are basically decent folk who just want to prosper and raise their families in peace. But a few people are monsters. Your basic Adolf Hitlers or Simon Legrees don’t just make bad choices; they are utterly depraved. Everything about them serves evil. Even when they do a good thing, it’s mere hypocrisy, which actually underlines their depravity. Is there anything more infuriating than a slaveholder taking the slaves he tyrannizes six days a week to Christian church services on the seventh?

These rare monsters, the story goes, have a knack for finding other monsters and giving them power, whether big fish like Joseph Goebbels and Sen. John C. Calhoun, or mere thugs like Karl Frenzel and Isaac Franklin. Worse, these monsters are sometimes able to convince superstitious, less-educated decent folk to follow them, often by exploiting their poverty and ignorant prejudices. These decent folk can be saved through education, welfare, and outreach. The monsters may perhaps be mentally ill, in which case they can be treated. However, many of the monsters can only be ostracized and destroyed, so that the decent folk who make up the overwhelming majority can live in peace. Think of how our society regards Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis — the modern ones, who don’t have the excuse of living in a time when that sort of thing was more acceptable.

Fortunately, in our enlightened times, we have much better education, mental health care, material wealth, and empathy than our forebears. Evil may still occasionally erupt into our lives—Donald Trump and his supporters are often treated like an inexplicable, unanswerable darkness of this sort—but modern civilization has made it difficult for real, Nazi-level, slavery-level evil to gain a foothold… and, if it does, we may rely on the legions of Educated Decent Folk to beat it back into the hole it came from. Then the world returns to decency. We’re certainly not perfect, but we’re trying, and, for the most part, we muddle through to doing the right thing.

This is not the world a pro-lifer grows up in.

When I was growing up, the heart of my neighborhood was on Ford Parkway. When I was around ten years old, if you’d asked me to list the major landmarks on Ford, I would have said something like, “Well, there’s the Blockbuster, the bookstore, the hobby store that has Star Trek cards, the old 31 Flavors, the library, the place where they kill babies, and the Pizza Hut they’re turning into a Dairy Queen.”

I never had nightmares about abortion clinics or anything, they were just a daily fact of existence, a constant reminder that evil wasn’t some distant eruption of darkness. Evil lived in my neighborhood. It had an address and a business permit. When I once naively suggested that police would help Operation Rescue protestors shut down the clinic, it was explained to me that, in fact, the police would be arresting and dispersing the protesters.

I slowly became aware that the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, not only supported the killing, but refused to put a stop to even the most brutal forms of infanticide. And, even as a kid, I knew you didn’t become President without votes — a lot of votes.

It eventually emerged that some of those voters were loved ones within my own family, people I’d known and adored my whole life. Some of the people who considered abortion rights crucial to human rights were the parents of my best friends.

These were people I knew to be Decent Folk, genuinely. They were not totally depraved Simon Legree types, doing the occasional good thing merely to underline their own hypocrisy. Nor were they ignorant rubes dragged along by Justice John Paul Stevens’ soaring rhetoric and immense charisma. (/s) These were educated people, many of them churchgoing. They loved their families, gave to the poor, supported racial equality, worried about the well-being of all mankind, and occasionally even let me and my friends play extra time on the computer near the end of the day. (Which practically made them saints!) I loved them, and I still do.

Many, no doubt, were uncomfortable with the idea of abortion and tried not to think about it. Or perhaps they tried to absolve themselves by insisting that they didn’t support abortion, just the choice to have one. And yet, here they were, part of the machinery of death, doing their small part to help churn out the tens of millions of crushed infant skulls upon which our “civilization,” if you want to call it that, is built. Thirty-five hundred skulls a day, every day—more than 9/11, more than a really bad day of covid-19—every single day, for almost five decades and counting.

Evil is not an abstract darkness erupting in the form of some freakishly clever psychopath. Evil runs through everything. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds us all together. Its ubiquity makes it banal beyond the dreams of Hannah Arendt. Take a trip to the library, and evil looms over you out the window while you read your kid Peppa Pig. Hang out with a buddy from the softball team, let the conversation veer toward “social issues,” and you discover evil sits right behind you in the batting order—and you’ve got a dinner party with him and his wife and kids next week that you’re really quite looking forward to. By the time you’re my age, you can be statistically quite certain that you have friends, perhaps even family, who have personally solicited, paid for, or committed murder… even if you don’t know which ones.

So that’s the world I grew up in.

I suspect I felt this at an unusually young age, but, if you believe that fetuses are people, it’s inevitable. This is the reality we all eventually have to come to grips with.

I suspect there are even people out there who would support abortion abolition, but can’t, because the reality of abortion is simply too awful to contemplate. As Dr. Gines Gonzales Garcia, a leader of the (largely male) Argentinian movement to legalize abortion, said last month:

Here there are not two lives as some say. There’s clearly a single person and the other is a phenomenon. If it were not like that, we would be facing the greatest universal genocide, [because] more than half the civilized world allows it.

But why should that be surprising? Read The German War, 1939-1945. Read the letters of average Southerners living in the Confederate States of America. We all seem to think we’ll be the first to leap to our feet and fight back heroically when atrocity comes our way, but every atrocity in every society in history teaches us the same lesson: rationalization is simple, and Murder Is Easy.

We can’t answer this evil by ostracizing it. We’d have to ostracize the whole world.

We can’t fight this monstrosity by hating the people who participate in it. They’re our friends, families, colleagues, and teachers. We know they are Decent Folk, many of whom we’d trust with our lives… and that they are willing supporters of a crime against humanity.

We know the United States is a great country, built on high ideals, and we’re proud to sing her anthems… and we realize that the U.S.A. can’t seem to stop committing atrocities, skipping almost instantly from slavery to Jim Crow to abortion (which disproportionately targets Black children).

If we have an ounce of wisdom, we recognize that we pro-lifers aren’t all that different. Many of us would have ended up pro-choice, at best, if things in our lives had played out just slightly differently. The evil that’s swallowed the world flows through our veins, too.

If we have two ounces of wisdom, we come to realize that our only hope against such pervasive evil isn’t ostracism, but love.

So if I ever compare you to a Nazi camp guard or a slaveowning Supreme Court justice, consider the possibility that I am not calling you an irredeemable monster who must be instantly cast out of polite society. Consider instead the possibility that I’m saying that the Nazi camp guard was probably a decent person who loved his family, had great empathy for all humanity, and sincerely tried to better his community—not a monster, but someone a lot like you. And a lot like me.

If only these good, decent, neighborly men and women had extended that empathy to one more small, inconvenient class of human beings. The ones they decided weren’t really “people.”

The ones they rationalized away.

The ones who died—the ones they slaughtered—by the thousands. By the millions.

Today is January 22nd. It is the forty-eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the total legalization of abortion in the United States. 62 million people have died, and thousands more will die tomorrow. Once you understand how many good, decent people play a necessary role in making this happen, you can never see the world the same again.

There’s a chart going around social media that looks like this:

“If you want to prevent abortions, vote baby blue!”

This isn’t a new argument. I started encountering versions of it as early as the 2008 presidential election, and I’m sure some intrepid pioneer tried it out in the 2004 presidential election. “Abortion rates fall faster under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents, like magic, so pro-lifers should support Democrats–or at least feel guilt-free about doing so!”

There are some problems with the data (as PolitiFact points out in that link), but the data can be roughly cleaned up using Guttmacher Institute abortionist census data. (You can’t trust Guttmacher — it’s like trusting ExxonMobil’s studies on climate change — but, in the absence of a federal abortion reporting law, Guttmacher provides the closest thing we have to a consensus reality.) The cleaned-up data shows a pretty similar trend:

Oddly enough, though, very few people ever try to explain how this argument could possibly be true. Even if you buy that President Obama’s social policies drove down the abortion rate by alleviating poverty and reducing demand for abortion, President Obama’s major social policy reforms didn’t pass into law until 2010 and largely didn’t come into effect until 2011 — yet the abortion decline started in the depths of the Great Recession, just as Obama took office! Now that’s some real personal mojo!

This kind of thinking reminds me of other arguments I’ve heard over the years. For example, “If you want to increase U.S. spending on science, space, and technology, encourage more people to commit suicide by hanging!”

Or: “If you want to reduce murders by bodily force, save marriages in Mississippi specifically!”

Actually, though, come to think of it, I’ve never actually heard anyone make those arguments. That’s because they are insane. Sometimes, statistics line up with each other in funny, but entirely spurious, ways.

One way to almost guarantee that you are about to discover a spurious correlation, though, is when you try to associate a complex national trend with a single variable that has no direct impact on the trend at all — a variable like “what letter is next to the name of the guy in the White House.” Yet, somehow, this never stops anyone from trying to use this single variable to explain all kinds of incredibly complex things the President only indirectly and slowly affects, from the economy to war to trade balances to incarceration to the national debt.

Presidents do influence all these things, of course, but they influence them through discrete executive or legislative measures. These usually take place later in their terms, and they take even longer to have effects. Anything bad that happens in the first year of a president’s administration is probably not his fault; anything good that happens in that year is probably not to his credit… and even anything that happens after that first year is only to the president’s blame or credit if the president actually took identifiable actions that influenced it. (Even then, there are probably lots of other factors at work. The President is not supposed to be a monarchy, and even monarchs don’t control everything.)

There are, of course, lots of factors influencing the steady decline in the U.S. abortion rate. The teen pregnancy rate has crashed. Nationally, fewer children are being conceived in the first place. The causes of this are also complex. Democrats often tout their promotion of contraception, and there’s evidence that indicates this does indeed play a role. (On the other hand, growing teen abstinence, not something Democrats are known for promoting, also seems to play a role.) Meanwhile, states continue to tighten the availability of abortion through legislation, independent abortionists continue to close up shop, and the federal government only tightens the spigots on abortion funding.

I’d like to take a look at one of those factors in particular, though: U.S. court rulings on abortion. I think examining this history sheds more light on how abortion law and partisan politics interact with abortion rates in the United States — and it will provide us with an update to the original chart that is somewhat more informative than the original.

Let’s dive into a Brief History of U.S. Court Rulings on Abortion:

1973: In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court hands down Roe v. Wade. In conjunction with a companion decision, Doe v. Bolton, Roe and Doe created an unlimited right to abortion-on-demand throughout the United States, up to the moment of birth.

Many Roe supporters, including Roe‘s own authors, insisted that Roe established a “trimester” framework for abortion regulation, but Doe created an exception to that framework that applied to literally anyone, swallowing the “trimester” framework whole.

Notably, a 6-3 majority of Supreme Court justices on the Court at this time were Republican-appointed. (One Republican-appointed justice and one Democrat-appointed justice dissented from Roe.)

It’s unimaginable today that 5 Republican-appointed justices would create an unlimited right to abortion out of constitutional thin air. It’s also unimaginable today that a Democratic-appointed justice would dissent! But the parties back then had not yet polarized on abortion.

The 1970s: The nascent pro-life movement repeatedly tried to overturn Roe v. Wade through judicial appeals and through constitutional amendments. They were repeatedly rebuffed by a bipartisan coalition. Many Democrats who are today anti-unborn were still pro-unborn at this point — including Sen. Joe Biden, who supported a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe. Abortion continued without meaningful limitation.

The single major victory won by unborn advocates during this period was the Hyde Amendment (also supported by Sen. Joe Biden). This funding restriction prevented federal taxpayer dollars from paying for abortions except to save the mother’s life. (A rape exception was not added until 1995.) Although passed in 1977, the Hyde Amendment did not go into effect until the Supreme Court upheld it 5-4 in Harris v. McRae (1980). The Guttmacher Institute finds that the Hyde Amendment reduces the abortion ratio by roughly 25% among Medicaid-eligible women.

(After forty years of relatively strong standing in federal law, the Democratic Party of 2020 has announced its opposition to the Hyde Amendment in its platform, and candidate Joe Biden now opposes Hyde as well.)

The Reagan Years: Abortion becomes politically polarized. Democrats either become anti-unborn or lose their primaries. In 1983, Biden recants his support for the Human Life Amendment. Republicans become pro-unborn. In the states, the unborn-rights movement turns to state legislatures to try to restrict abortion — but, aside from Hyde, the courts strike down nearly all their efforts.

Ronald Reagan was President for most of this decade. He was the first President in history to explicitly make unborn rights part of his platform, and he was also the first in recent history to embrace the idea that the Constitution should be read with its original meaning in mind. He attempted to support both originalism and the unborn through his three Supreme Court appointments.

Reagan’s appointment of originalist, anti-Roe Antonin Scalia (replacing pro-Roe Republican Warren Burger) went swimmingly.

Reagan’s appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor (replacing pro-Roe Republican Potter Stewart) misfired. Believed to be an originalist, therefore almost by definition anti-Roe, O’Connor turned out to be more of a pragmatist once in office. She was inclined to weaken Roe, but not to overturn it. Reagan’s error is understandable: O’Connor’s appointment came in 1981, when originalism was still just getting off the ground. There was no known pool of originalist judges, and no one existed to vet them; the Federalist Society would not even be founded until 1982.

Finally, Reagan nominated the highly-qualified Robert Bork (to replace pro-Roe Republican Lewis Powell), but newly pro-choice Democrats like Ted Kennedy, citing Bork’s anti-Roe tendencies (among other things), rejected him as unfit. Reagan’s follow-up nominee, Douglas Ginsburg, was also a sterling candidate, but NPR’s Nina Totenberg dug up the totally damning dirt that Ginsburg had (GASP!!!) smoked pot a few times 20-30 years earlier. Outraged Democrats would no longer provide the votes to get Ginsburg through the Senate. So Reagan was forced to nominate Anthony Kennedy, who turned out to be a garbage fire as a justice and joined O’Connor as a second vote to weaken Roe without overturning it.

The H.W. Bush Years: President Bush continued Reagan’s judicial project, with similar mixed success. (He also successfully defended the Rust v. Sullivan regulations defunding Planned Parenthood.)

For his first vacancy (replacing pro-Roe Republican Brennan), Bush wanted to avoid a Bork-style fight against Democrats, who still controlled the Senate. Instead, Bush appointed someone with good credentials, whom his administration could vouch for… but who had virtually no paper trail for the Senate to scrutinize and attack. This was called the “stealth bomber” strategy, it made sense at the time, and it worked. Unfortunately, it backfired: the Bush Administration’s vetting process had failed, and Justice David Souter went on to become one of the staunchest anti-originalist, pro-Roe voices on the Supreme Court.

For his second vacancy (replacing pro-Roe Democrat Thurgood Marshall), Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, who barely survived his Senate hearings in the face of hostile Democratic opposition — but did ultimately reach the Court as an anti-Roe justice.

After over a decade in power, two Republican presidents had appointed five Supreme Court justices. Two were anti-Roe. Two wanted to weaken Roe. And one supported Roe.

However, supporters of the “Republicans don’t actually want to end abortion” thesis should take note: Republicans were pushed into two of their three mistakes (Kennedy and Souter) by implacable Democratic support for abortion, and one of their successes (Thomas) only barely overcame that same Democratic devotion to abortion rights.

The Court now had 3 pro-Roe members, 4 anti-Roe members, and 2 members who wanted to weaken Roe but retain it. Even though Roe would not be overturned, Reagan and Bush had still won a huge prize for the unborn-rights movement, because Roe was about to get weakened.

1992: The Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision effectively replaced Roe v. Wade as the controlling American law on abortion. Loathed by pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike, Casey maintained the notion of a constitutional right to abortion, but, for the first time, allowed states to pass modest disincentives against it (like waiting periods)… as long as they didn’t impose an “undue burden” on abortion access.

If Senate Democrats had not blocked Robert Bork, Roe would have ended that day.

But, as it was, the decision finally opened a viable avenue for pro-lifers to enact at least some protections for the unborn.

That same year, Bill Clinton won the election, ending twelve years of Republicans in the White House.

The Clinton Years: President Clinton moves against the unborn as quickly as possible. He immediately unlocks the funding that Bush and Reagan had defended in Rust v. Sullivan, restarts funding for abortions overseas, and vetoes all pro-unborn legislation that crosses his desk. This includes even the overwhelmingly popular and bipartisan Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which Clinton vetoes twice. Congress nearly overrides Clinton’s veto, but a minority of Democrats kills the bill.

However, Clinton can do nothing about the states, and Casey has just given activists new running room in the states. They start passing restrictions with gusto, regulating some clinics to the point of minimizing or closing them, while finding ways to promote the idea in law that unborn people are people, too.

Clinton counters their successes with Supreme Court appointments of his own. He makes no mistakes. Pro-Roe Ruth Bader Ginsburg replaces anti-Roe Democrat Byron White, and pro-Roe Justice Breyer replaces pro-Roe Republican Harry Blackmun. The Senate, still under Democratic control, embraces both, and Republicans offer no resistance through filibuster. The court shifts to 4-3 pro/anti Roe, with 2 swing justices who want to keep Roe in a limited way.

This shift pays off for Clinton just as he is about to leave office.

2000: The Supreme Court’s Stenberg v. Carhart decision rules 5-4 that late-term abortion bans are unconstitutional unless they contain a “life or health” exception for the mother. The “health” part is problematic, because that is the same, very vague exception that Doe v. Bolton used to bypass all limitations on abortion under the original Roe framework. Effectively, Stenberg declares that even modest restrictions on abortion procedures are unconstitutional. (Sandra Day O’Connor splits from Anthony Kennedy to join the Clinton-enlarged pro-Roe wing in this decision.)

The effect of Stenberg is that the wheels of pro-life progress grind down to a crawl. By this time, much of the low-hanging fruit for state-level restrictions on abortion has been picked, and Stenberg makes it impossible for states to go much further, even to ban extremely unpopular late-term abortions.

The Bush Years: Bush paid his chits to the pro-life movement by appointing two well-vetted textualist judges to the Supreme Court (Roberts, replacing the “swing justice” O’Connor, and Alito, replacing the anti-Roe Rhenquist). This seemingly left the court tied 4-4 on Roe, with Kennedy as swing justice.

Bush then finally passed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act with bipartisan support in 2003, setting up a direct challenge to Stenberg v. Carhart.

Bush also passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, the first federal law recognizing the personal rights of unborn persons.

2007: After nearly four years of litigation, the Supreme Court finally ruled on the Partial-Birth Abortion Act — and Bush’s work paid off. Roberts joined the dissenters in Stenberg to make a 5-4 majority to uphold the Act and effectively overturn Stenberg.

This unlocked the engines of pro-life innovation in the states once again. Unfortunately for President Bush, his term was nearly over. His labors would not bear fruit until the next administration.

The Obama Years: President Obama reinforced the pro-Roe side of the Court by replacing two pro-Roe justices (Souter and John Paul Stevens) with two more pro-Roe justices (Sotomayor and Kagan). Because a Democrat was President, the Court remained 4-4-1 on Roe (with Kennedy as the swing justice), rather than becoming 6-2-1 or 5-2-2 anti-Roe. On the other hand, because Republicans held the Senate, Obama was unable to seat presumptively pro-Roe Merrick Garland to replace anti-Roe Scalia, preserving the 4-4-1 balance.

Obama’s nominations paid off when the Court handed down Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016. Kennedy joined the pro-Roe wing this time. This decision put a stop to a wave of pro-unborn legislation in the states.

But it was a bit late for that. Thanks to Gonzales, red states had become more aggressive in regulating abortion, and the Republican wave of 2010 made a lot more states red from 2011 forward. By the time Whole Women’s Health came out, Obama’s term was nearly over. Hundreds of clinics were closed, abortion rates were down substantially, and (depending on how you calculate it) tens or hundreds of thousands of lives had been saved.

These children, regrettably, owe their lives to the Republican Party. The once-great caucus of pro-life Democrats, which had been slowly marginalized since the 80s, were made virtually extinct during the Obama Administration. Only a handful (like the great John Bel Edwards) survived.

The Trump Years: We have very little data so far on the Trump years.

We know that President Trump has worked hard to tighten federal restrictions on taxpayer abortion funding, and he has opened a few regulatory options to states that weren’t available under Obama. We know that Trump has nominated three Supreme Court justices, but we haven’t seen any of the nominees squarely face the issue of Roe. Gorsuch and (presumptive justice) Barrett are almost certainly anti-Roe. Kavanaugh’s position is less clear. We know state legislatures have been creative about working around Whole Women’s Health — and about challenging it directly.

We also know that Roberts has politicized the Court’s rulings in recent years, issuing some rulings based on pleasing certain political constituencies, not on obeying the law of the land. In 2020, the Court ruled in June Medical Services v. Russo that Whole Women’s Health should be reaffirmed… only now, with Kennedy gone, Roberts joined the Democratic appointees. According to the John Roberts confirmed in 2005, that should not have happened. (I stood by Roberts a long time, but June Medical Services made it impossible.) Roberts’ swing to the Dark Side in June Medical is the first time the “Republican judges will never overturn Roe” got a real point in its favor. Finally, we know that chemically induced abortions, using drugs administered at home like RU-486, are on the rise, potentially working around the closure of clinics and other restrictions.

But it will be a while before enough data is collected on abortion during these years for us to know what actually happened to the abortion rate between 2017 and 2020.

I would be surprised if the abortion rate continued falling at the same pace as during the Obama years — the years between Gonzales and Whole Women’s Health. I suspect the rate of decline will slow, or even reverse. That’s the legacy of the Obama Administration, the Clinton Administration, and the Democrats’ rejection of Robert Bork. They provided all five of the votes in WWH.

So here’s a better version of the original chart. Instead of asking, “Which party is in the White House?” we ask “Which party’s appointees brought about the last major Supreme Court decision on abortion?” (We ignore all appointees before 1980, when the pro-life movement first had a say in justices.) This revision gets us something like this:

As I noted at the top, there are lots of stories you can tell about the decline in the abortion rate, and lots of them are true. It’s a complex issue.

There’s almost certainly some truth in this revised chart. (There is very little, if any, in the original.) We have good, solid demonstrations going back thirty years that incremental pro-life legislation passed at the state level reduces abortions, and we can clearly associate favorable court rulings with new waves of pro-life legislation. We know that restriction and abolition work: there is probably no faster way to reduce the abortion rate than outlawing abortion. (See above; also here and here, among others.) It should be surprising to absolutely no one that waves of anti-abortion legislation following favorable court rulings were soon followed by faster declines in the abortion rate. And those favorable court rulings–even the weak ones–are all owed to judges appointed by Republican presidents.

For all their faults, Republican presidents, senators, and state legislators have saved countless thousands by their vigilant opposition to abortion… and many of their greatest gains have come while a Democrat in the White House was still working to undo a predecessor’s protections for the unborn. Lots of these reductions could not have come about if Democrats had held the White House for longer — and Democratic proposals like abolishing state-level restrictions and repealing the Hyde Amendment would certainly increase the abortion rate, as even Guttmacher recognizes. By contrast, Republicans would almost certainly have achieved deeper reductions in the abortion rate if they had held office longer, with a freer hand to appoint more judges and pass more laws without anti-unborn Democrat opposition.

Republicans use pro-lifers cynically for votes, of course. This is obvious. They count on our votes, then pay us back verrrrrry slowly. President Trump may be the most cynical of the bunch.

But nobody uses pro-lifers for votes more cynically than Democrats. The handful of talking points they give out to defend the crazy idea that “we should vote for people who hate unborn rights to help the unborn somehow” don’t stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Professor William Cavanaugh made a similar argument in America this year (roughly: “Republicans have been trying to end abortion for fifty years, they’ve failed, and abortion rates decline regardless of who is in office, so it is time to stop voting based on abortion”), but Cavanaugh’s argument falls apart with the slightest knowledge of the history of the nominations process, or any knowledge of abortion laws favored by the Democrats and thus far blocked by Republicans. Marginalizing a toxic ideology that dominates the Supreme Court is a decades-long project (assuming you don’t take shortcuts like court-packing, which I suppose Cavanaugh thinks Republicans should have done in 2005). Nobody should be surprised that it’s taking this long — especially when too many pro-unborn voters turn around and vote for anti-unborn candidates, who vow to appoint anti-unborn judges, who then reverse many of our gains!

I can understand the temptation to be taken in by those wafer-thin “pro-life left” talking points. President Trump is awful, and has been for four years. The Republican Party has been in bad shape for much longer than that. Alasdair MacIntyre, the great ethicist, condemned voting for either party starting way back in 2004. I myself do not plan vote for either major-party presidential candidate this year, largely for the reasons Brandon McGinley lays out at The Public Discourse, with a small side-order of “I won’t spend down my small stockpile of credibility to shore up the losing campaign of a vicious, lying adulterer who should have been impeached.”

Yet it is a hard truth that, based on the evidence, Republican abortion policies have likely prevented tens to hundreds of thousands of fetal killings. I will be voting for Republicans for Senate and House, even Jason Lewis, whom I loathe. If, knowing all I have just said, you choose to be taken in by the facile “Democrats reduce abortions” argument anyway, and throw your lot in with them (instead of abstaining)… then I can only imagine that you will eventually have to explain that decision to the children who died because you chose to cooperate with their killers. I hope your reasons are truly proportionate.

I have made the data used in this post available on a Google Sheet.

It’s worth remembering that Planned Parenthood kills babies and then sells the body parts.

Planned Parenthood insists that it doesn’t technically gain any profits from these sales, which inspires two responses:

(1) Who cares whether they technically profit or not? Selling baby parts is a particularly ghoulish epilogue to a barbaric practice, and “we sold their innocent, mutilated flesh to research scientists” doesn’t make it any better.

(2) As it happens, Planned Parenthood is demonstrably lying. They absolutely do profit off the sale of baby parts. They scream at the top of their lungs that they don’t (they have to; selling baby parts is illegal). Some outlets dutifully reprint their lies as though it were the last word in the discussion. Nevertheless, Planned Parenthood is demonstrably lying.

Here are the videos proving it: http://www.centerformedicalprogress.org/cmp/investigative-footage/

You can watch the short “highlight reel” clips or the full multihour unedited videos. The highlight reels are punchier, but the multihour videos are more damning, as the weight of evidence just builds up and up and up.

Planned Parenthood defended itself by claiming the videos were “deceptively edited.” This, too, was a lie. Here is the independent forensic audit by Coalfire Systems (a company with no interest in the matter, commissioned by Alliance Defending Freedom) which proves it: http://www.adfmedia.org/files/CoalfireCMPvideosReport.pdf

Perhaps you prefer wading through documentary evidence? Try the document vault here: http://www.centerformedicalprogress.org/human-capital/document-vault/

If that doesn’t do it for you, read the report of the United States Congress Select Committee that investigated these allegations: Final Report of the Select Investigative Panel

They produced 15 criminal referrals. Unfortunately, the evidence needed to convict was mostly locked up in states with non-cooperative Attorneys General. We must hope that today’s ongoing investigations eventually yield indictments.

Planned Parenthood sells baby parts, at market prices, and uses the profits to pad its bottom line. As in the Gosnell murders, where pro-choice state regulators turned a blind eye to rampant abuses of mothers and aborted children alike, Planned Parenthood is able to use the political power of the abortion industry to evade legal scrutiny. As the biggest abortion provider in the country, with a body count of 345,672 in 2018, nobody is better positioned to do so.

Planned Parenthood receives approximately $500 million/year through taxpayer-funded Medicaid. All Democrats currently running for President wish to increase this funding and expand it to include Title X as well.

Happy 47th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. May it finally be the last.

This strategy is somewhat successful, because many voters are comfortable with legal abortion on demand as long as the child is still a “blob of cells,” but become uncomfortable once the child begins to take on human characteristics like a heartbeat. No one would accuse this view of coherence, but that’s life in a country with a vast, muddled middle on abortion. You attach unborn-child protections to a relatable human milestone, and you can gin up the votes to get them passed in a few states.

Of course, the pro-choice Cathedral* is unhappy about this. If there is a conflict between the political underpinnings of abortion rights and reality, it is always reality that has to go. (We’ve seen this before on this blog… and, of course, the very term “pro-choice” is a euphemism: what choice? Who, whom?)

So, on May 31st, the press dutifully invented a brand new term for fetal heartbeat: “embryonic pulsing.” A few days after that, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) announced the henceforth official terminology for “fetal heartbeat”: “electrically induced flickering of a portion of the fetal tissue that will become the heart.”

This whole thing was a bit awkward. Ordinarily, the journalism arm of the Cathedral knows better than to start using the new euphemisms before they have been officially promulgated by the “medical experts.” The New York Times jumped the gun, which exposed the game they are playing.

We should take a moment to notice that, despite ACOG’s official decree, it’s not actually “fetal tissue.” At this age, it’s still embryonic tissue. Yes, a medical doctor speaking on behalf of tens of thousands of medical doctors made an obviously false medical statement in a sentence that was supposed to clarify medical reality. Yes, it’s the very same distinction that pro-lifers get hammered on all the time by the exact same people. (“It’s not a fetus; it’s a blastocyst!”)

No, it’s not surprising. It all makes sense once you realize that they don’t actually care about the embryo/fetus distinction; they only use these terms so they can avoid the ordinary English term: “baby.” ACOG holds pro-lifers to strictly accurate terminology for prenatal development, but they have no reason to hold themselves to the same standard.

So, the new official term is medically inaccurate. But ACOG hath spoken, and We the People are supposed to pretend that ACOG is an objective body of experts acting on pure rationality. “Fetal heartbeat” is now going to be safely suppressed for being, they say, “medically inaccurate.”

Please remember that they are lying.

I try to reserve that strong term, “lying,” for clear cases of deliberate deception. But that’s exactly what we have here.

The medically accurate, scientifically correct term is “embryonic heartbeat.” This term has been in the literature for generations. It is universally accepted and unchallenged, a poster child for “scientific consensus.” Just look at a tiny fragment of the literature:

“Embryonic Heart Rate as a Prognostic Factor for Chromosomal Abnormalities” (Journal of Ultrasound Medicine, 2009; deals with embryos younger than nine weeks)

“Evaluation of normal gestational sac growth: appearance of embryonic heartbeat and embryo body movements using the transvaginal technique.“(Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1991; deals with embryos between five to twelve weeks’ gestation) (of

“Embryonic heart rate in the early first trimester: what rate is normal?” (Journal of Ultrasound Medicine, 1995; embryos are six to eight weeks’ gestation)

“Embryonic heart rate in human pregnancy.” (Journal of Ultrasound Medicine, 1991; embryos are three to seven weeks old)

“Slow embryonic heart rate in early first trimester: indicator of poor pregnancy outcome.” (Radiology, 1994; “embryonic heart rate” is determined “prior to 8 weeks gestation”)

“Predictive value of the presence of an embryonic heartbeat for live birth: Comparison of women with and without recurrent pregnancy loss.” (Fertility and Sterility, 2004; embyronic heart rate obtained “between 6 and 8 weeks of gestation)

“Predictive value of early embryonic cardiac activity for pregnancy outcome.” (American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1991; embryos are 5 to 9 weeks’ gestation)

“A close look at early embryonic development with the high-frequency transvaginal transducer.” (American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1988; embryos are as young as 5 weeks 6 days when “the heartbeat appeared.”)

“What’s new in first trimester ultrasound.” (Radiologic Clinics of North America, 2003; “the primitive heart begins to beat at the end of the third week after fertilization”)

“Transvaginal versus transabdominal Doppler auscultation of fetal heart activity: A comparative study.” (American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1996; embryos are between 6 and 9 weeks of gestation when “fetal heart rate” is detected.)

I pulled all those off Google Scholar in twenty minutes. There’s tons of them. I had room to be choosy for this article, but give me an hour and I can find a hundred more examples of peer-reviewed medical doctors and scientists talking about “embryonic heartbeat” like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

That alone doesn’t prove anything. Maybe ACOG’s official new terminology is even more popular than “embryonic heartbeat.” So now we ask: how often does the phrase “electrically induced flickering of a portion of the fetal tissue that will become the heart” show up in peer-reviewed scientific literature?

Of course, Google Scholar’s not the be-all end-all of academia, but it seems safe to say that, when Google Scholar can immediately find hundreds of matches for Phrase A, and zero matches for Phrase B, then Phrase A is the more common and scientifically accurate one.

How about the New York Times‘ even more made-up phrase, “embryonic pulsing”? That gets three matches on Google Scholar, but one’s an English paper and two are about a scanning technique. None are about embyronic heartbeats. Why? Because doctors refer to those as “embryonic heartbeats.” It’s the New York Times and its friends at The Daily Beast et. al. that doesn’t want to make the heartbeats go away. (They should re-read Poe’s “The Telltale Heart;” it will resonate!)

One more: in December 2015, Dr. Jen Gunter, a late-term abortionist who is sometimes treated as a neutral source by mainstream media, asserted that the most correct term would be “fetal pole cardiac activity.” She’s since been quoted favorably on this in outlets like Wired and Forbes. Does her euphemism have any more traction than the others? At first glance, you might think so! There are 38 results for “fetal pole cardiac activity” on Google Scholar! Doesn’t hold a candle to the 735 for “embyronic heartbeat,” but still, that shows some scientific uptake of her terminology, right?

But that’s when you realize that the matches for “fetal pole cardiac activity” are actually for lists: things like “…fetal pole, cardiac activity, and gestational sac,” or, “If a fetal pole/cardiac activity is detected…” or, “presence of a fetal pole +/- cardiac activity.” Some of the authors of these articles even appeared on my list above as users of “embryonic heartbeat!” So it appears that nobody in the literature has used the actual phrase to describe an actual embryonic heartbeat except Dr. Jen Gunter… and, of course, a mainstream media that is desperate to escape the simple, uncomfortable reality of “heartbeat.”

Now that the Cathedral has denounced the term “embryonic heartbeat” as wrongthink, you can expect it to disappear within a year or two. New articles will have the phrase stripped out and replaced with the new, politically correct terminology… even if it makes the articles less clear and less accurate. The authors of the articles I’ve cited will either keep their heads down or apologize for ever having used it. (They’re probably mostly pro-choice anyway.) Anyone who does use the term now will be accused of having “an agenda.” They’ve pulled this very same language trick before: with the beginning of pregnancy (it’s at fertilization), with the word “abortionist,” with the very idea of an “unborn child.” I already see it happening with “embryonic heartbeat.”

That’s why I wanted to get this down, on the record, before it’s washed away by the overwhelming coercive power the abortion industry can bring to bear on the scientific and journalistic communities: they are lying. The only people who have ever challenged the scientific term “embryonic heartbeat” are people who find that language politically inconvenient. It’s an uncontroversial term with consistent usage and universal acceptance that dates back decades.

So, when you hear a complaint that a “heartbeat bill” uses medically inaccurate or unscientific terminology, remember:

They are lying.

They are lying.

They are lying.

*I spent about 15 minutes trying to find a good, succinct, link that would define “the Cathedral” concept for those unfamiliar with it. But the term comes from Mencius Moldbug, who did nothing succinctly, and I don’t think anybody who has tried to boil it down has succeeded. So, sorry to throw an 11,000-word article at you in an aside, but it’s a pretty good one.

**Image credits: human heart development by OpenStax College. Fetal remains by Wikipedia user “Anatomist90.” All images used under their open CC BY 3.0 licenses.

Hollywood agrees. For example, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, there’s a really good scene where Lieutenant Dax, who is considering killing someone, asks Major Kira about what it’s like. It runs like this:

DAX: How many people did you kill?
KIRA: What?
DAX: While you were in the underground.
KIRA: Too many.
DAX: Were they all faceless Cardassians or did you know who you were killing?
KIRA: Why are we talking about this?
DAX: If it bothers you, we can stop.
KIRA: It bothers me.
DAX: I’m sorry.
KIRA: Why, are you thinking about killing somebody?
DAX: Me?
(Kira realizes)
[…] 
KIRA: Jadzia. Your questions about my experience with killing. If you’re wondering what it’s like. When you take someone’s life, you lose a part of your own as well.

You’ve probably never seen this one scene from a particularly obscure episode of Star Trek, but you’ve probably seen a hundred others like it. This exchange is everywhere in our media, from MacGyver‘s speeches to Harry Potter’s Horcruxes. There’s a deep, deep belief in our culture that most of us are incapable of committing murder, because we would just feel too guilty about it. Murder is supposed to feel different from other crimes. We are therefore shocked when we see unrepentant murderers in courtrooms, and we have never, as a culture, been able to come to grips with the way murderous governments can rise to power and enlist their own citizens in committing atrocities. “How could anyone do such a thing?!” we ask.

But, actually (with rare exceptions, like Major Kira) there’s nothing very special about murder, from the murderer’s point of view. It’s the same old story as any other act of cruelty: I want something, I have to do something wrong to get it, and so I’m going to convince myself it’s not really wrong. Human beings are incredible rationalizers. Murder isn’t different; it’s just a little bigger.

Murder is easy.

With all this in mind, I call your attention to new footage released today by the anti-abortion investigative outfit Center for Medical Progress. The footage is of an interview between CMP investigators (undercover as fetal tissue buyers) and an abortionist named Dr. DeShawn Taylor, currently in independent practice but, until recently, medical director of Planned Parenthood Arizona.

I didn’t watch the edited “highlights reel” CMP put together. I watched the full, unedited, 27-minute conversation–so you don’t have to!–and then I wrote a transcript.

In this passage, which begins at 14min 46sec in the video below, Dr. Taylor obliquely refers to the killing of babies. I don’t mean fetuses here. I mean 100% born babies. See, every once in a while, a fetus survives an abortion, and is delivered while still showing “signs of life.” According to Arizona law, since it is unquestionably a baby at that point, doctors must take all possible measures to save the baby, including transporting the baby to the hospital.

Instead, Dr. Taylor talks about doing “maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise,” and how one gets away with that. She strongly implies (though never outright admits), that she has done this. If her conscience is troubled in any way about it, she makes no sign of it.

Again, these are born babies, which even the Supreme Court agrees have a right to live.

Murder is easy.

As a note before you watch/read, both people in the conversation refer several times to “didge” or “didging.” This refers to the use of digoxin poisoning to kill a fetus. (Digoxin is a poison fatal to all humans.) Digoxin is often injected prior to the start of a late-term abortion to ensure that the child dies in the womb. It is a more humane method of killing than dismemberment, and also (as we see here) can help avoid failed abortions and/or violating murder laws.

Here is my transcript of the relevant portion:

Center for Medical Progress [CMP]: Do you didge?
Dr. DeShawn Taylor [DT]: Yeah.
CMP: Starting when?
DT: Ah, 20 weeks.
CMP: Starting at 20 weeks.
DT: Mm-hm.
CMP: Okay.
DT: Yeah.
CMP: ‘cause that’s the other thing, ‘cause, y’know, didge kinda rules out–
CMP2: It ruins the integrity of the specimen.
DT: Oh, yeah.
CMP: And it kills the stem cells. (chuckles)
DT: I mean, so the thing is, it’s really–it’s really tricky, ‘cause in Arizona, if the fetus is—if it comes out with any signs of life, we’re supposed to transport it to the hospital.
CMP: Uh-huh. At any gestational age?
DT: Annnny gestational age. Yeah, yeah.
CMP: Mm-hm. Is there any standard procedure for verifying signs of life?
DT: Well, the thing is…
CMP: That doesn’t go on a chart!
DT: I mean, the key is, you need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?  And, like, you know, because the thing is the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise. So, so, it’s really tricky, um…
CMP2: Yeah, sounds like it’s real hard to navigate that bad boy.
DT: Yeah, it’s really tricky so we do— most of the time we do didge, and it usually works. And then we don’t have to worry about that, because Arizona state law says if any, if there’s signs of life, then we’re supposed to transport them to the hospital.
CMP: Yeah.
DT: (chuckles) Yeah, it’s a mess. It’s a mess.

Now, to be clear, you can’t prosecute this. It’s not, legally, an admission of murder… even though it really obviously is an admission of murder. She killed some babies, but she’s wink-winking about it, so Arizona law can’t reach her. It’s like when O.J. Simpson authored a book called If I Did It. Yeah, he did it, but we can’t prove it in court, even as he winks at us about it. Dr. Taylor will (like O.J.) get away with murder, because that’s how our justice system works–and it’s good that our system requires hard proof for a murder conviction.

Also, I’d be remiss not to mention that CMP has faced both legal and moral problems of its own in the way it obtained these videos, which relied on deception and recording conversations without consent. Further, many have alleged that CMP’s edited videos remove vital context. That is why I watched the raw, unedited footage. If you do keep watching to make sure I didn’t miss any context (feel free to add anything relevant you think I missed!), you’ll be treated–a couple minutes after this exchange–to a rather horrifying discussion of how much easier it is to complete an abortion when the fetus is already dead… and thus, apparently, not able to fight for her life.

But what context in the world could change this?

“I mean, the key is, you need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?  And, like, you know, because the thing is the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers after the fact to try to cause demise.”

“You need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?… the law states that you’re not supposed to do any maneuvers… to try to cause demise”

“You need to pay attention to who was in the room, right?”

Jesus Christ.

As Dr. Taylor shows, it’s easy to commit murder. It’s even easier to rationalize your terrible deeds. Perhaps easiest of all is surrounding yourself with like-minded people who agree with you, many of whom do the same awful things.

This is the same defense mechanism that allows Wall Street bankers to defraud the nation without shame, the same trick sex-abusing priests use to assure themselves that they haven’t done anything wrong–that they’ve actually done something good! It’s natural, and it works. Murder is easy.

There’s a lesson here for all of us: don’t count on your feelings preventing you from becoming a bad person, don’t trust them to alert you once you have, and especially don’t tell yourself that it can’t have been so bad because you feel fine about it. Most bad people feel fine.

(Credit to the indispensable Chrissie’s Transcripts Site for the DS9 excerpt.)

Chris Christie’s kitchen-sink approach to undercutting Senator Marco Rubio took an unexpected turn on Thursday: He portrayed Mr. Rubio’s opposition to abortion as too extreme for New Hampshire Republicans.

But in the process, it appears Mr. Christie misrepresented Mr. Rubio’s current views.

“He’s made it very clear that — on the issue of pro-life, Marco Rubio is not for an exception for rape, incest or life of the mother,” Mr. Christie said. “Now, you know, I think that’s the kind of position that New Hampshire voters would be really concerned about.”

In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, Mr. Christie added, “I am pro-life, but I believe that rape, incest and life of the mother, as Ronald Reagan did, should be exceptions to that rule.”

Mr. Rubio is emphatically opposed to abortion in almost all cases. But contrary to Mr. Christie’s claim, he does support an exception for cases in which a mother’s life is in danger.

Now, one could say a great deal about this, from a political perspective.  One could say, for example, that it’s a despicable, false attack that betrays the shallowness of Christie’s so-called candidacy, his desperation to win (even at the cost of feeding free attack ads to the Clinton campaign), and perhaps the moral bankruptcy of the GOP establishment itself.  But I don’t wish to focus on the impact Mr. Christie’s comments will have on the horse race, nor on the inherent cruelty (and incoherence) of Christie’s position.  Others, I’m sure, are way ahead of me on that.

Instead, I’d like to focus on a subject of much more narrow interest: what this public statement means for Christie’s relationship with the Catholic Church, the church he is baptized in and continues to profess belief in.  Those of you who aren’t Catholic can tune out now, unless you’re really into Church sanctions.

Christie is hardly the first Republican presidential candidate to support rape and incest exceptions to a general prohibition of abortion.  Presidents Reagan and Bush both supported similar exceptions.  Jeb!Bush, who is also Catholic, has stated that he supports exceptions for rape and incest, though his reasoning is not clear.  In 2012, Mitt Romney took out advertisements specifically to clarify that he supports killing kids whose dads are rapists — though he didn’t put it quite like that.  (It was his only ad on abortion in the 2012 campaign.)

However, it is very rare for a Republican candidate to say that these exceptions are positively necessary and good, as Christie does here. Often, support for these exceptions is couched in language about the fact that the exceptions are politically necessary to get pro-life legislation passed.  One does not often say, as Christie does, that these exceptions “should be” there as a matter of moral fact.  (Romney paid dearly for doing so.) Moreover, to my knowledge, Christie is the first candidate this cycle — and the first Catholic candidate in Republican history — to actually attack another candidate for being more pro-life than he is.

The problem for Christie is that his Church condemns all direct abortions, without exception, in the strongest possible terms, and — significantly — positively requires that lawmakers prohibit them:

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.  “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you…” (Jer 1:5)

Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law…

Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae,” “by the very commission of the offense,” and subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law. The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.

The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation:

“The inalienable rights of the person must be recognized and respected by civil society and the political authority. These human rights depend neither on single individuals nor on parents; nor do they represent a concession made by society and the state; they belong to human nature and are inherent in the person by virtue of the creative act from which the person took his origin. Among such fundamental rights one should mention in this regard every human being’s right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death.”

“The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined. . . . As a consequence of the respect and protection which must be ensured for the unborn child from the moment of conception, the law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of the child’s rights.”

-Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2270-2273

A Catholic legislator who publicly rejects this position and promotes laws to the contrary, even just for some unborn babies (“rights for some, death for others!”), commits a grave sin in the eyes of the Church.  For this reason, Gov. Christie must not present himself for communion:

Can.  916 A person who is conscious of grave sin is not to celebrate Mass or receive the body of the Lord without previous sacramental confession unless there is agrave reason and there is no opportunity to confess. -Code of Canon Law

For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord.  -1 Cor 11:29

Canon 916, sadly, is frequently disobeyed, even by politicians. Foreseeing this, the Church includes additional safeguard against sacrilege and scandal in the form of Canon 915:

Can.  915 Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.

When a sin is both manifest (that is, public and notorious), grave (and supporting abortion rights is certainly grave, as established above) and obstinate (Christie has passively held this position for years, but today’s comments mark an important shift toward actively promoting it), then Canon 915 demands that those responsible for distributing Holy Communion (that is, the bishops, as well as the priests and ministers who operate under them) positively refuse the sinner admission to Holy Communion, until the sin is repented.  This is not a mere enforcement option; the bishops do not enjoy a vague discretion about whether to apply it or not.  It is a positive duty to deny Chris Christie communion.  Canonist Ed Peters writes extensively on these very subjects, in very similar cases, in two articles I recommend: “Fencing the Altar” and “Denial of the Eucharist to Pro-Abortion Catholic Politicians.”  (Hopefully, the very sober Mr. Peters agrees with my application of these principles in the Christie case!)

This has come up occasionally in political contexts before.  Several bishops refused communion to John Kerry in 2004, because Kerry was both Catholic and a major supporter of abortion rights.  Kathleen Sebelius has been denied communion for more nearly a decade now, for similar reasons.  Nancy Pelosi faced similar scrutiny in… well, every year since I’ve been politically conscious, actually, though her local bishop has failed to carry out his duty in her case.  In each case, Democrats cried out that this was a partisan political persecution — that conservative bishops were opportunistically attacking Democrats in order to improve Republicans’ standing in the eyes of the faithful.

Well, here’s a Republican, a nationally prominent, somewhat popular one who is currently running for president, and he is now in violation of Canon 915 just as much as those other guys.  It is time for him to face the appropriate sanctions. Archbishop Myers of Newark should condemn Christie’s comments and instruct him to refrain from communion for as long as he obstinately holds this destructive position on human life.  I know they’re friends, and they can certainly continue to be, but Gov. Christie must not continue to receive communion.  This isn’t about partisan politics; it’s about the protection of the faithful, not to mention the Sacrament.

I single out Gov. Christie because he so clearly violates Catholic teaching here.  He does not just endorse a gravely sinful position, but openly attacks another Catholic for refusing to follow him down that road to Hell. Some of the other Republican Catholic candidates might arguably be seen as violating canon 915, but this is not clear-cut to me. Mr. Bush’s support for rape and incest exceptions may just be a political compromise rather than a moral position, and, even if it isn’t, it isn’t clear to me that he holds it “obstinately”. Mr. Rubio’s support for a “life of the mother” exception may actually be 100% compatible in sync with Catholic teaching, depending on the details, since Catholicism permits so-called “indirect abortions” in cases where necessary to save the mother’s life, under the principle of double effect.  (This is mentioned obliquely in the Catechism passage quoted above, but I’ve written more about it here.)  The three other Catholic Republican candidates (Jindal, Pataki, and Santorum) have all dropped out, so I’ll leave them out of this. This lack of clarity matters a great deal: according to Canon 18, we must follow a “strict interpretation” of Canon 915, which means the individual gets the benefit of every reasonable doubt.  Christie’s case is unique because, as of at least this morning, there can be no reasonable doubt that he is on the wrong side of Canon 915.

As a president, Chris Christie is, in my mind, a better option than Hillary Clinton.  He may be an evil, but the lesser of two evils can be an acceptable option for Catholics under certain circumstances, at least when it comes to the right not to be murdered. Sadly, that’s an option we’ve had to exercise many, many times before. I would likely vote for Christie in a general election.  Heck, if my only choices in the primary were Trump and Christie, I’d probably vote Christie there, too.  However, in a Republican primary that still features a number of other genuinely pro-life candidates, I do believe this should disqualify Gov. Christie in the eyes of Catholic voters.  (In lieu of an argument, I’ll link that article again.)  But that’s just politics.

As a Catholic, Gov. Christie’s soul is imperiled by his refusal to accept the teaching of Jesus Christ through the Church on an issue affecting tens of thousands of undefended human lives. Worse, his decision, as a prominent Catholic, to promote those gravely evil views, to even attack another man for being more virtuous than he, is a national scandal that imperils many other souls as well. It is the responsibility of his bishop to sternly admonish this crime against unborn children and against the body of Christ, and, furthermore, to enforce the prescribed canonical penalties against him until such time as Gov. Christie repents.