Wednesday should have been cartoon day!

When is “late term”? Well, it’s when you have a “partial-birth abortion.” It is, in other words, a foggy expression that intentionally conflates the second trimester of pregnancy, when according to Roe v. Wade, abortion can be regulated before viability only to safeguard the woman’s health, and the third trimester, when abortion can legally be banned except to preserve the woman’s life or health. By this sleight of hand, “late term” suggests that most second-trimester fetuses are viable (although they almost never are, except at the very end) and paints “partial-birth abortions” as legal infanticide. Thus the anti-choicers reframe themselves as the commonsensical moderates and pro-choicers as the callous extremists.

Going after “partial-birth abortion” is a brilliant tactic. The phrase doesn’t insult the pregnant woman the way “convenience abortion,” “abortion as birth control” and “abortion as murder” do, implying that women get pregnant out of laziness and kill on a whim; and a ban appears to affect only the kind of abortion a woman can have, not whether she gets to have one at all. But the smoke and mirrors of “partial-birth abortion” language may be used to limit many common abortion procedures.