Meet the extremists: 3 Arizona Democrats make a sharp left turn on abortion

In Arizona elections, Democratic candidates have spent a lot of time attacking the radicalism of their Republican opponents.

Their allies in the media and even 60 former journalists have warned that democracy is in the balance with MAGA candidates on the ballot.

Election denial. Insurrection. Civil-war era abortion law.

Republican excess has been on the front burner in 2022. Now let’s talk about Democratic excess.

These Democrats are on the abortion fringe

Meet the extremists: Three Democratic candidates for important offices who say when it comes to abortion, the larger public may have a different opinion, but they can sit on it.

Poll after poll shows Americans are moderate on abortion. They want abortion that is safe and legal, but also regulated. And they truly despise partial-birth abortion. They want it outlawed and by overwhelming majorities.

In a Harvard-Harris Poll in June, only 10% of Americans surveyed said they support abortion through 9 months, up until a baby is delivered.

To Democrats Katie Hobbs, Kris Mayes and Julie Gunnigle, none of that matters.

They are abortion maximalists. Any abortion that can happen will happen. Public opinion be damned.

In fact, two candidates, Mayes, who is running for attorney general, and Gunnigle, running for Maricopa County attorney, say they will not prosecute women or their doctors. Ever.

They'll use their discretion to ignore the law

That sounds good in slogan.

But what if, per se, the Arizona Legislature crafts new law in the post-Roe era that enshrines the mainstream compromise on abortion and outlaws late-term and partial-birth abortion?

Abortion, economy:These are top issues many Arizona women voters

These two, apparently, would not enforce the law. Mayes has said she would also recommend all county prosecutors not enforce abortion laws.

Both say they will use their prosecutorial discretion to ensure abortion is always legal and never criminalized, they said.

CNN’s Dana Bash pinned down Katie Hobbs, Democratic candidate for governor, with this question:

“So there should be no limits in the law? It should only be decided in the medical office?”

Hobbs responded, “Government making these kinds of mandates interferes with the care doctors need to provide to their decisions.”

On Friday, Hobbs doubled down in a tweet: “The decision to have an abortion should be between a woman and her doctor. End of story.”

Yes, it’s end of story if you see the world in black and white. Extremists do, you know.

Abortion is simple only in slogans

But abortion law is hard, because abortion is ambiguous and morally complex. It made 50 years of Roe a wrenching exercise in balancing the rights of women with the rights of the emerging life that grows within them.

Making this even more complicated has been medical science, which has reduced the number of weeks at which a fetus is considered viable. The earliest premature infant is believed to be Curtis Means, who was born in Alabama in July 2020 at 21 weeks and a day. He weighed 14.8 ounces, reports the Washington Post.

Even that old liberal Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion on Roe v. Wade, recognized there is a state interest in protecting developing life in the womb.

Here’s what he wrote in 1973:

“With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb. State regulation protective of fetal life after viability thus has both logical and biological justifications. If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.”

What happened to 'safe, legal and rare'? 

In 2019, the blue states of New York and Virginia began writing the fetus entirely out of the protective shield of the state, crafting some of the most “lenient abortion policies in the country,” wrote Alexandra DeSanctis in The Atlantic.

They were moving with other Democratic leaders to normalize abortion, not as something to discourage, but to promote. The party long ago broke with Bill Clinton’s classic formulation of safe, legal and rare.

“This fits with the general tenor of high-profile abortion-rights groups, such as the Women’s March and Planned Parenthood, that not only seek to erase limits on abortion but also portray it as routine health care and glorify it as a social good,” writes DeSanctis, a conservative who also writes for National Review.

Thus, we were treated with the spectacle of then New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo lighting up “the city’s Freedom Tower in pink after signing his bill, celebrating the legal right to abort fetuses that could survive outside the womb,” wrote DeSanctis.

Kris Mayes has argued there is an express right to privacy in the Arizona Constitution that makes abortion a woman's choice. She also argues that late-term and partial-birth abortion are red herrings, in that they are rare and usually done for extraordinary reasons.

The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that abortions after 21 weeks represent 1% of all abortions in the U.S.

In 2020 there were 930,160 abortions nationwide, according to the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute.

If you rounded that off to 1 million, that would mean we are performing 10,000 late-term abortions annually. A dilemma given that many Americans believe that aborting a viable fetus is a moral wrong.

This is a giant mistake for Democrats

Democrats have made a huge mistake going down this road on abortion, writes Kat Rosenfield, a feminist writer in Unherd.

  ... Without a course correction, the Left will soon back itself into a corner, not unlike the Nineties Republican reactionaries who adopted radically unpopular ideas rather than make common cause with their opponents, only worse. Not only are we at war with the Right, we’re also at war with ourselves, with the memory of what the pro-choice movement used to be. It’s a battle that is poorly conceived and ultimately unwinnable in its refusal to acknowledge the truth: that abortion access is vital and necessary, but abortion itself is not a good thing.

No woman sets out to have an abortion; nobody wants one on its own merits. Like most medical procedures, abortion is a solution to a problem – either an unwanted pregnancy, or a desired pregnancy gone awry. In an ideal world, abortion would not only be rare, but entirely unnecessary. It is because we don’t live in an ideal world, and never will, that the right to choose must be preserved.

There’s a good reason we debate the dimensions of abortion and the viability of the fetus. Society is civilized when it protects the powerless (the fetus) from the powerful (the woman).

Grow too comfortable in stripping all protections from the powerless and you can start going down roads that were once forbidden.

What other issues is it 'my way or the highway'?

We saw this in Virginia in 2019 when then Gov. Ralph Northam defended his state’s bill with what seemed a slide toward infanticide. His staff later denied that’s where he was going. But you be the judge. Here’s what he said:

“The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

When you grow comfortable removing protections from the powerless you get drift, and pretty soon you have a society in which might makes right – power is all that matters. Such societies have a track record. And they generally don’t work out well for women.

If Katie Hobbs, Kris Mayes and Julie Gunnigle are this extreme on abortion, it’s a fair question to ask if we’ll see their extremism emerge on other issues.

In what other matters of state will they say it’s my way or the highway?

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.