OPINION:
CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday asked a simple question: When does life begin? Montana Gov. Steve Bullock dodged, his right knee pumping as if in a bicycle race.
The “State of the Union” host pushed.
The Democratic presidential hopeful finally answered: “I would say that life begins at viability.”
But, added the governor, it’s not for him to decide when it is moral to perform an abortion. Rather, he argued, it’s up to a woman and her doctor.
Mr. Bullock is one of what I estimate as some 90 million registered Democrats in the United States, all of whom apparently are running for their party’s 2020 presidential nomination.
With the bar 6 millimeters above the ground, all 90 million Democrats in America seem about equally qualified.
Except for Mr. Bullock.
He stands out because he won election as governor on the same day Donald Trump won Montana in the 2016 presidential elections
I’m not sure about every one of the other Democrats seeking the nomination next year, but I know Mr. Bullock is not ready for prime time. Or even to be the warmup act for Beto O’Rourke, who himself isn’t ready to be warmup act for Kamala Harris’ presidential wannabe shtick.
Mr. Bullock was full of his name’s first syllable in saying the moral question of when it’s acceptable to end a human life is answered by saying only a woman and a doctor can decide the answer.
It’s pure bull to pander to self-absorbed, abortion-on-demand voters while posing as a serious, thinking, adult presidential aspirant.
Although it’s not a line of reasoning with which people who say abortion-is-murder will agree, a serious moral argument can be made for ending a pregnancy so long as it is done early and under explicitly defined circumstances.
To save the mother’s life comes to mind.
Those who maintain that abortion is murder do, however, ineluctably occupy the moral high ground.
And with the exception, for now at least, of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, the rest of the Democratic pack is a bit hard to take on the subject.
Mr. O’Rourke says abortion bans are “a radical attack on women,” and abortions even in the final three months of pregnancy are “about women making decisions about their own body.”
If a third-term fetus is indisputably, scientifically viable, then Mr. O’Rourke is saying it’s up to a physician and a pregnant woman to decide to end a viable life in the womb.
In other words, morality is not at issue.
That’s sheer intellectual idiocy and moral bankruptcy.
Sen. Cory Booker, out to take the zany-reasoning prize among the Dems, said in a GQ Magazine opinion piece that it’s men’s responsibility to “speak out and to take action … because women are people.”
Calling women “people” is a blatant tautology —”Women are people too” — in service to Mr. Booker’s equally blatant pandering.
Although Mr. Biden spouts the standard “choice should remain between a woman and her doctor” line, he is a cut above the rest of the field. He has voted to prohibit late-term abortions and to ban federal dollars for abortion except in the case of rape, incest or the life of the mother.
But for how long will he hold onto that position?
How soon before he declared that Saturn has no rings after all and that banning abortion for any reason no longer has a place in his belief system?
As that pugnacious right-to-lifer Mr. Trump likes to say, “We’ll see.”
The big disappointment for abortion opponents came Sunday with Fox News town-hall meeting with Pete Buttigieg as the South Bend, Indiana, mayor resorted to the same doctor-woman line that the rest of the pack spouts to justify abortion for any reason at any time.
Mr. Buttigieg could have separated himself from the field by taking the Biden position. But that would have siphoned off some of Joe’s voters and made the Great Delaware Miscommunicator less of a threat to the other nomination chasers.
(As noted in a previous column, the aging — he looks 30 years older than the 77 he’ll be this November — means that Mr. Biden’s front-runner status probably won’t last through this fall.)
Whether various websites refer to what’s inside the womb as an embryo, fetus or baby, there’s unanimity as to what science has discovered about when a heartbeat is first detectable.
According to Thomas Moore, described as a maternal fetal medicine specialist at BabyCenter.com, “the baby’s heart starts to beat at around 5 weeks. You may be able to hear — and see — your baby’s heartbeat for the first time when you’re about eight weeks pregnant if you have an early ultrasound exam.”
Otherwise, Dr. Moore says, “you’ll probably first hear it with a fetal Doppler at a regular prenatal care visit. The baby’s heart starts to beat at around five weeks.”
And here’s something from an organization that abortion foes love to hate and that should be of more than passing interest to Democrats with visions of the Oval Office dancing in their heads. Planned Parenthood, often and understandably thought of as a subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee, says: “We now offer first trimester ultrasound to date your pregnancy [and to] assess the presence of a heartbeat.”
That “heartbeat” acknowledgment poses a threat to the abortion-on-demand cause.
Where there’s a heart beating, there’s a person living, no matter how tiny.
If that’s not the heart of the matter, there is no matter.
If there’s no matter, there’s no one, no you, sitting around and reading this. But there is and you are. The first hint of the birth of the voluntary abortion of abortion?
As the man says, “We’ll see.”
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