![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2019\/08\/NICU_infant_6978.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The following is a speech I offer to Sen. Amy Klobuchar as she tries to build on her New Hampshire momentum:<\/em><\/p>\n Earlier this week, I reached out to the leadership of the Democrats for Life of America and asked for an opportunity to speak with some of their members here in the beautiful state of [fill in the blank].\u00a0 And I\u2019m here to ask for your vote \u2014 and to explain myself and to tell you that, well, I get it.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think you hate women.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think you want women barefoot and pregnant.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t believe you\u2019re motivated by the desire to control women\u2019s sex lives.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think you\u2019re trying to put your rosaries on my ovaries, or to force your religion on the rest of us.<\/p>\n Most of all, I don\u2019t think that you care about fetuses until birth and no longer.<\/p>\n I understand and acknowledge and applaud the fact that pro-life Democrats support efforts to fight poverty and to help poor women struggling with the cost of childcare for their children, and efforts to fight against discrimination against pregnant women and mothers, so that they don\u2019t need to sacrifice their professional lives.\u00a0 I reject, as you do, the notion that women need to be able to have abortions when they fall unintentionally pregnant, to have successful careers and fulfilling lives.\u00a0 Whenever it appears that this is the case, we need to fight harder to fix the system that makes it appear that this is the only choice they face.<\/p>\n I even acknowledge that there are others in the pro-life community, with whom we disagree on the role of government intervention, who help pregnant women and help the poor in their personal volunteer work or donations.<\/p>\n At the same time, yes, I am pro-choice.\u00a0 And yes, we who are pro-choice use words like \u201ctrusting women,\u201d and \u201ccontrolling our bodies\u201d and some of us become so convinced of the rightness of our politics we say very off-putting things like \u201cthe fetus is just a clump of cells\u201d or, worse, a \u201cparasite\u201d or an \u201cinvader.\u201d<\/p>\n But I want you to understand that fundamentally, I am pro-choice because I am human.<\/p>\n Like you, I believe that it is wrong to take human life.\u00a0 Like you, I would agree that it\u2019s wrong to take that basic formulation that lies at the core of our moral beliefs and water it down by saying that one sort of person or another isn\u2019t \u201creally human.\u201d\u00a0 It was wrong when defenders of slavery deemed the people who they owned as if property to be \u201cnot human.\u201d\u00a0 It was wrong when Nazis declared Jews to be something other than human, urging Germans to get past their sympathy for them by saying that however much they might look like us, they really weren\u2019t, so that those Germans inclined to sympathy should get past it.<\/p>\n But when we speak of the period early in pregnancy, the developing embryo and fetus before a woman has felt the baby kick, before she\u2019s visibly pregnant, sooner in many cases than women know they\u2019re pregnant if they\u2019re not tracking closely, at that point when, let\u2019s face it, the ultrasounds and the photographs and the drawings don\u2019t provoke profound awe but more than a little skepticism \u2014 however much we might intellectually know that, from the moment that this life begins to grow, all through its development in the uterus, there is no magical moment at which this entity becomes human, or becomes more human than it wasn\u2019t the minute before \u2014 however much this is true,\u00a0 when it\u2019s all said and done, we are human and that makes it all a muddle.<\/p>\n Perhaps it is a moral failing on my part that I don\u2019t have the ability to truly see that early embryo or fetus as worthy of protection when women don\u2019t wish to be pregnant.\u00a0 Perhaps a deeper level of moral clarity would mean I\u2019d be out there at the same rallies as you.\u00a0 But however sympathetic I am with your ideals in general, I can\u2019t see what you see.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t see the goal of preserving human life as outweighing the challenges a women might face who is unintentionally pregnant.\u00a0 And I say that as someone who has been pregnant, who knows what it\u2019s like to give birth.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be honest that there is a limit to our common ground, that I don\u2019t object to abortion, at least in the early months.<\/p>\n At the same time, I do want to speak openly about late-term abortion.<\/p>\n In the first place, of course, that\u2019s a label that has been used with a wide range of definitions \u2014 is a late-term abortion one that occurs in the last moments of pregnancy, in the third trimester, in the period after viability, in that period after what was traditionally called quickening, when the baby is developed enough to kick in a way that the mother would feel?<\/p>\n Increasingly often lately, my fellow Democrats and I have shut down all this discussion with the pronouncement that no abortion after this point ever occurs without there being some dire necessity.\u00a0 We point to cases in which ultrasounds revealed the sort of medical conditions which would mean certain death before even a first breath, or a child so disabled as to be unable to ever move or communicate, or to a mother\u2019s life-threatening medical condition requiring ending the pregnancy whether or not the fetus is viable.\u00a0 And those cases do exist.<\/p>\n But we know that not all post-viability abortions are for these dire reasons.\u00a0 In preparing this speech, I asked my staff to verify the accuracy of this talking point.\u00a0 Instead they pointed me to a different set of facts: that, just last [week\/month], an Ohio couple<\/a> was accused of procuring abortion pills to abort a 28-week baby then standing by after the baby died upon being born prematurely, and burying the child in a shoebox.\u00a0 That an article in Teen Vogue<\/em><\/a> back a year ago shared the author\u2019s story of getting an abortion at 28 weeks, not because of a dire fetal anomoly or her own serious health condition, but simply because, due to PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) she didn\u2019t find out she was pregnant until then.\u00a0 Other research<\/a>\u00a0reports that women seeking second\u2010trimester abortions often simply didn\u2019t find out they were pregnant earlier due to obesity or other reasons.\u00a0 Some women seek late abortions because they\u2019ve been abandoned by the child\u2019s father, or because they initially hide the pregnancy but are pressured by family only after they are visibly pregnant.<\/p>\n I get it.\u00a0 I won\u2019t try to hide behind the fiction that the only late abortions are due to dire reasons, and I won\u2019t claim that we need to \u201ctrust women\u201d to make the right choice.\u00a0 I acknowledge that it is in the very nature of our criminal justice system that we can\u2019t trust people in cases of potential crimes, because we need to provide protection to those at risk.<\/p>\n