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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Up until 2023, Minnesota statutes restricted abortion under the viability standard, generally understood to be 20-28 weeks, with a not-especially-clear exception for health-and-life-of-mother. There was actually some weird legal status for the law due to an older federal court decision floating around, but the official story is that abortion providers weren't doing those types of abortions and the state enforcement pointedly wasn't going to go asking about it.

In January 2023, the PRO Act was passed. While this did not overturn the previous law on abortion, it did create a statutory right to terminate pregnancies that prohibited enforcement of any restrictions outside of that specific section. I don't know if anyone's been able to litigate the difference in court, but my understanding is that this has largely been understood to effectively allow abortion regardless of trimester.

A separate law passed in May 2023 did... a lot of random things, some abortion-related, including formally repealing the older abortion restrictions; after this point there are no situations where abortion itself was banned. It also modified an older born-alive statute:

Recognition; medical care.

A born alive An infant as a result of an abortion who is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to preserve the life and health of the born alive infant care for the infant who is born alive.

Ostensibly, this was meant to remove some politically loaded text -- the born alive statutes were very much a pro-life slogan -- but the strict reading removes a lot of requirements for medical practitioners to actively keep the infant alive, rather than ameliorating pain. But to social conservatives, that's basically just letting the child die of exposure: while the mother may (often) be no more interested in keeping the child, all the safety and medical concerns for the mother are kinda done with by that point, and no small portion are within (and sometimes well within) the ability of modern medicine to keep alive.

There's a perspective where the point of abortion is more about whether a mother is stuck having had a child, where someone who has an elective abortion in the late-third or early-second trimester wants to kill the fetus when it turns out to just keep on living, but... uh, it's generally one seen as politically suicidal to spell it out. (And a highly social conservative framing).

The prevalence of third-trimester (and late second-trimester) abortions that do not involve a nonviable infant or a dire threat to the life of the mother are... controversial. There's a lot of progressives that claim it literally never happens, but that's pretty clearly absolutely not true. Social cons often point to the Guttmacher Institute-driven research that said "... data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment", but this includes a lot of late-second-trimester abortions and Guttmacher is really not great about allowing general access to anonymized data to narrow it down further. It's rare as a total of all abortion, but depending on source and where you split the categories you can get anywhere from a substantial minority to a slim majority of late-term abortions.