What the Cave Boys teach us about abortion
TWELVE boys and their adult coach trapped in a dank, oxygen-deprived cave in Thailand riveted the world’s attention for two weeks. Why, people ask at times like this, are we so focused on these individuals when half a million Rohingya refugee children are in danger of starving on the Bangladesh border, or when 400,000 Yemeni children are severely undernourished?
The answer is drama. We saw images of these particular boys crouched in that cave. We learned of the long odds against a successful rescue — their debilitated health after so many days without food and water, the sharp rocks, narrow passages and nearly complete darkness of the cave, and waters that challenged even experienced divers (as the death of a Thai Navy SEAL underscored). Some of the boys didn’t even know how to swim, far less scuba dive.
As for the thousands of abused, terrorized and starving children in the world, they remain mostly an abstraction. That is, for better or worse, the way our brains operate. We saw those boys as individuals, and thus our sympathy was engaged.
Something similar is happening with regard to the way we see unborn babies. When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, ultrasound technology was not in common use. By the end of the 20th century, most pregnant women were having at least one scan. Malcolm Nicolson, author of a history of ultrasound, told LiveScience, “Overwhelmingly, pregnant women expect to be scanned, and are moved and excited by seeing the fetus.” And some women report not feeling pregnant until they’ve seen the ultrasound image.
Once grainy and hard to interpret for non-experts, ultrasound images are now clear and unambiguous. They reveal that fetuses as young as 16 weeks old will
sometime in the next several years (a big if), individual states will be forced to confront the morality of terminating pregnancies instead of hiding behind the Supreme Court to manage our most fraught controversies.
Some Republican lawmakers who have been fundraising and campaigning on opposition to Roe will doubtless be revealed
confronted. Despite recent hyperventilating about politicians’ enslavement to donors or “special interests,” the pedestrian reality is that they are much more in thrall to public
polling analyst Karlyn Bowman has pointed out, the same Americans will say that they believe abortion to be murder, that it should be a personal choice made by a woman and her doctor.
Most Americans favor restrictions on abortion such as parental or spousal consent and limits late-term abortions. They also favor exceptions in cases of rape or incest.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, four states have laws on the books that would outlaw abortion if Roe were overturned. Another 10 retain their pre-Roe abortion bans, obviously unenforced, on