The midterms’ shocking embrace of abortion extremism

In a poetic story that you just cannot make up, Josh Turek of Iowa became the first U.S. Senator with spina bifida, a congenital neural tube defect. Turek fills a seat held for three decades by Tom Harkin, the major sponsor of the culture-shifting Americans with Disabilities Act. Senator-elect Turek has flourished in nearly every way one can imagine, including by winning two gold medals in wheelchair basketball and playing in four different Paralympic Games.This wasn’t the future predicted for him, however. After he was born with spina bifida, Turek reports that his parents were told by his doctors that it would be “impossible for me to live a fulfilled life.”Ominous words, especially for a child born in 1979. Just three years later came the infamous case of Baby Doe, a child born with Down syndrome whose medical team recommended denying him routine life-saving surgery because of his disability. Turek was born only three years before the case of Baby Jane Doe, in which doctors and parents withheld surgery from a newborn specifically because she had spina bifida. In a forthcoming book, I highlight such infamous cases as marking a key moment in our cultural return to infanticide. Though some children are directly killed after birth, most instances involve what Pope Francis described as “throwaway culture”: the discarding of disabled newborns by refusing to care for them, a ubiquitous practice in ancient pagan Greece and Rome.It was the rise of Christianity in the early 4th century that led to the condemnation of infanticide, so it is not at all surprising to see it return as our culture repaganized.Especially in light of the Turek news, it is worth highlighting that children with spina bifida remain a particular target for this kind of medical violence, both before and after birth. Indeed, physicians very often pressure parents to kill such children when they are discovered before birth. In Europe, two out of every three such children have their lives ended via abortion, while in the United States it is about one out of every two. There are even documented cases where parents, after fending off medical teams attempting to convince them to abort, are explicitly told that they can still aim for the death of their disabled child by refusing to care for him after birth.The Netherlands even came up with something called the “Groningen Protocol”: an instrument used to assess whether a particular newborn could be marked for direct killing. And one can probably guess the disability shared by the overwhelming majority of the babies who were killed: spina bifida.Significantly, though some of us worried about the expansion of Dutch infanticide, the killings moved to an earlier point in the child’s life as technology used to diagnose spina bifida prenatally got much better. In both cases, however, the clear goal of the killing is the same: to end the life of a child with a disability because of ableist assumptions regarding who can live a “fulfilled life.”Even in a flood of midterm analysis, there hasn’t been enough, or hardly any, focus on the radical abortion extremism that came into view by electing many more Democrats beholden to a “virtually no limits” dogma, but also through the passing of radical ballot measures. Pro-lifers, once again dramatically outspent and facing an incurious dominant media in virtual lockstep with supporters of an unlimited right to abortion, suffered another series of bad defeats at the ballot box. Though a tiny group of voters in Idaho bravely and successfully resisted, Virginia’s pro-abortion amendment passed with 62.6%. Nevada’s passed with 63.5%. Missouri pro-lifers tried to repeal their own extremist amendment passed last cycle and lost by 10 points.Virginia’s new constitutional amendment is worth homing in on, especially given what we just learned above. The new law fits with recent trends in abortion extremism: the wide availability of third-trimester abortion. The Virginia Constitution now protects such radical abortions when a doctor says that continuing the pregnancy would “substantially and irremediably impair the mental or physical health of the woman.” Virginia law is silent on what this means, leaving it totally up to the doctor to decide. We know that certain doctors think that every single pregnancy presents such impairments — so the law, in effect, legalizes abortion for any reason through any time in pregnancy.But this amendment may also have set its sights on what some medical ethicists have called “after birth abortion.” The previous version of the law required that three doctors be involved in the case of a third-trimester abortion. This is done, in large measure, because such babies can sometimes be born alive during the abortion and someone needs to be there to advocate for the life of the newborn child.Revealingly, the new Virginia law reduces the number of doctors required from three down to one. That’s right: The same doctor responsible for killing the child prenatally will now be responsible for saving his or her life if she or he is accidentally delivered.Those who don’t follow these issues closely could understandably be skeptical about the implications here. Did Virginia really just act to defend infanticide? Could such a shocking thing actually be the case?Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of those who voted against language getting into the amendment that would have protected babies after birth. Pro-lifers tried to get a “born-alive” provision into the language that would have enshrined the right to medical care for such babies after birth. They failed.This fits a pattern we’ve seen in other states, which have also explicitly rolled back protections for newborns in these and other contexts. New York and Illinois did it in 2019. Minnesota did in 2023. And again, the major targets in these kinds of cases are babies with disabilities.I keep coming back to Pope Leo’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, especially for its anti-ableist, anti-eugenic, and anti-transhumanist vision of the dignity of the human person. It is a vision focused, in particular, on a Gospel that centers on those on the margins and the vulnerable example of Christ Himself. Leo claims that we flourish “not despite our limitations, but often through them.”Yes, it is important to try to reduce the suffering of people in this world, but to eliminate the sufferers themselves is morally grotesque. In many contexts, the magnificence and grandeur of humanity could not be realized without our limitations and suffering.It is out of such situations, insists Leo, that wisdom and a new sense of perspective on what really matters in life come. They also often produce compassion, generosity, and even profoundly spiritual experiences.Turek’s life is a classic example of this phenomenon. His doctors apparently had an ableist vision of the human person focused on productivity and efficiency. But his family, his caregivers, his schools and teachers, the Iowa state government and the federal government all rallied around his value as a person. A utilitarian may not have signed off on this particular use of resources here as maximally productive and efficient, but the beauty of this kind of love and compassion turns that kind of moral logic on its head.THE LET THEM EAT BALLROOMS ELECTIONIn light of these truths, let us state in the strongest possible terms that abortion and infanticide practices are morally horrific and unworthy of those who claim to care about vulnerable populations. They are a disgrace to everything at the heart of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They are a disgrace to the value of people’s lives like Turek. They are a disgrace to humanity itself.Here’s hoping the living example of a man wheeling himself throughout the Senate during the next six years will help call this nation to repentance over the horrific violence we regularly direct against the disabled.