‘Go beyond Roe’ means aborting viable fetuses

By Chris Powell

Fanaticism and extremism were unleashed when the U.S. Supreme Court returned the abortion issue to the states in 2022, reversing the court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which had discovered in the national Constitution a limited right to abortion, a right to abortion prior to the viability of the fetus. The Roe decision said government had a proper interest in regulating abortion after fetal viability — an interest like protecting the unborn.

When Roe was reversed, some Midwestern, Rocky Mountain, and Southern states reinstated restrictive abortion laws that had been blocked by Roe, enacted new limits on abortion, or prohibited abortion altogether.

But in Connecticut, which in 1990 put the Roe standard into its own abortion law, fanaticism and extremism are entirely on the pro-abortion side, as was demonstrated this week when the General Assembly’s Reproductive Rights Caucus gathered at the state Capitol to announce its plan to “go beyond Roe” with new legislation.

That is, some members of the caucus want to repeal state law’s ban on abortion of viable fetuses except to protect the life or health, physical or mental, of a pregnant woman, a ban that had been authorized by Roe. Some caucus members even want to amend the state Constitution to prohibit state regulation of abortion in any way. 

Last November voters in Ohio amended their Constitution to include an individual right “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” It’s not yet clear how the amendment will be construed in regard to Ohio’s laws restricting abortion.

But Connecticut’s prohibition of the abortion of viable fetuses is already largely a fiction, since any doctor and patient can contrive a mental health reason for an abortion at any stage of pregnancy, even if a woman is already in labor. This prohibition is only nominal, just a mechanism for pretending that in Connecticut crying babies fully capable of life outside the womb can’t be sliced up as they are removed and dropped in a trash can to bleed to death.

To the co-chair of the Reproductive Rights Caucus, state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, even the pretense of a restriction on abortion is objectionable. She would have Connecticut formally authorize live-birth abortion and thereby proclaim abortion to be the highest social good.

Most people in Connecticut probably do not consider abortion the highest social good. Most probably think that the Roe policy established in state law strikes the proper balance between the right of a woman to control her own body and the duty of society to respect innocent young life. Indeed, dubious as the Roe decision may have been as constitutional law, it became politically realistic, a workable compromise, and remains so.

In the face of the far-leftists who dominate the caucuses of the majority party, the Democrats, in the legislature, most people in Connecticut may be afraid of being called some awful name if they express concern about late-term abortion. So without some courage on the moderate side of the abortion issue, the fanatics may win.

Can the diminishing number of moderate Democrats in the legislature join with the Republican minority to preserve the Roe policy and its pretense of respect for life, the pretense the abortion extremists find so offensive?

To counter abortion extremism in the forthcoming session of the legislature, people who do not consider abortion to be the highest social good should press for a law requiring parental notification for minors seeking abortions, a proposition that usually has strong support in opinion polls.

There is little sentiment in Connecticut for outlawing abortion, but even two of the state’s liberal neighbors, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, have parental notification laws, which discourage the sexual exploitation of minors by predatory men. 

There is plenty of such exploitation in Connecticut as well, even as the abortion extremists seek to conceal it, lest exposure of abortions arranged for minors by men preying on them raise doubts about the policy the extremists pursue: all abortions all the time, no questions asked.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

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