Paul Tuns:
There is a scene near the end of Billy Madison in which the title character played by Adam Sandler compares the Industrial Revolution to a puppy. Astonished at the vacuity of the answer, the principal who posed the question said: “What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
That scene came to mind while watching the June 27 presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump as the two answered a question about abortion. Both were egregiously flawed and incoherent in their answers.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked the former president if he “would block abortion medication” – the abortion pill. Trump took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade by appointing three justices to join Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to rid the country of the five-decade old constitutional blemish – credit he deserves (although any Republican president could reasonably be assumed to have appointed three similar anti-Roe justices).
However, since leaving office, Trump has hardly been a champion of the pro-life cause, stating that the issue must be left to the states while opposing state-level restrictions that begin early in the first trimester and supporting exceptions in cases of rape, incest, and to save the health of the mother, positions he downplayed during the debate. Trump then misrepresented the Supreme Court’s decision earlier that month, saying it “just approved the abortion pill,” when, in fact, it threw out a specific challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval for mifepristone. Regardless, he said he supported the “approval” of the abortion pill, which now accounts for the majority of abortions in the U.S.
Trump suggested that the pro-life movement achieved all its goals when Roe was overturned, rather than recognizing it as a precondition for the legal protection for the preborn that the movement seeks at either the state or federal level. Instead, Trump focused on Roe, saying “every legal scholar, throughout the world … wanted it (the abortion issue) brought back to the states. I did that.” Not every constitutional scholar thought that way although conservative legal experts were certainly unified in their opposition to Roe. Trump also claimed that returning the issue to the states was something “everybody wanted” and that now that it has been returned to the states, “the country is now coming together.” Polling shows that the country is as divided as ever on abortion; both the pro-abortion and pro-life movements are active at both the federal and state level trying to secure legislative victories or block the efforts of the opposing side.
Trump then went on the offensive – contradicting his previous statement about unifying the country — saying Democrats advocate late-term abortion: “they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth. After birth!”
The President denied the charge, saying, “It is simply not true. Roe v. Wade does not provide for that. That’s not the circumstance. Only when the woman’s life is in danger, if she’s going to die, that’s the only circumstance in which that can happen.” Biden ignored or seems unaware that Democrat-controlled states such as California, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, and New York permit abortion for any reason up to minute a child is born. In Congress, Democrats are pushing the Women’s Health Protection Act which has no restrictions on abortion at any point in pregnancy and overriding state late-term bans on abortion – a bill Biden has said he would sign into law.
When Biden was asked by CNN’s Bash if he supported “any legal limits on abortion” the President provided a word salad that, as the principal in Billy Madison said of the titular character’s answer about the Industrial Revolution, was rambling, incoherent, and made everyone dumber for having listened to it. Biden said: “I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters. First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’s be between the woman and the state.” Well, where does one begin?
Putting aside grammatical mistakes (Roe did not have trimesters, pregnancy does), the lack of clarity (first time, second time instead of first trimester, second trimester) and obvious loss of the plot (abortion being between “the doctor and an extreme situation” or “the woman and the state”), Biden did not accurately represent the trimester approach provided by Roe.
The 1973 Supreme Court decision permitted unrestricted abortion in the first trimester, which was accurately if poorly described by Biden. However, Biden implied that abortion was rare in the second trimester, permitted only in “extreme” cases. Roe suggested that the state was allowed to regulate abortion in the fourth to sixth month “in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health,” but in practice that changed over the 49 years Roe was in effect, and it did little to stop second trimester abortions, which were common in most states until the Dobbs decision in 2022.
When it came to the third trimester, Roe explicitly ruled that the state has a compelling interest in protecting the “potential life” of life inside the womb between seven and nine months when the Court said that the child could be viable outside the womb. However, the decision did not proscribe abortion in the third trimester, but rather left it to individual states or the federal government to decide whether to restrict late-term abortions. Few did. Biden oddly characterized this situation as “between the woman and the state” which implied serious legal obstacles to late-term abortion. The partial-birth abortion debates of the late 1990s and early 2000s are evidence that there were practically no limits on late-term abortions in which babies were almost fully born-alive before being killed by the medical instruments of an abortionist seconds before taking a breath. Biden was a senator for no less than four separate efforts to ban partial-birth abortion.
Neither candidate clothed themselves with coherent and principled positions on abortion, but Biden’s answer provided further fodder attesting to his unfitness for the presidency due to declining health and mental acuity, to say nothing of supporting the Roe regime that permitted abortion-on-demand. On abortion, the presidential debate provided much heat but little light, except to demonstrate how little each candidate knows about the most consequential Supreme Court decision of their lifetimes.
