While there are many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic that appear unprecedented to most, it is also true that what we are seeing is a torquing of existing trends. Many have seen the pandemic as an opportunity to secure political goals they have long sought. Abortion activists, for example, want to make feticide even more widely available by removing all regulations and allowing women to have abortions via pill at home, without in-person medical consultation, and without anyone having to visit a clinic.
It is obvious why they want this. In the U.S., clinics have become a key battleground in the war over abortion access, with pro-life groups successfully shutting down abortion facilities across the country—in a half dozen states, only a single clinic remains in operation. If women no longer need to go to clinics for early abortions—which is the majority of them—then abortion activists will have done a successful end-run around a key obstacle and neutralized an effective anti-abortion strategy.
While the U.S. has seen a slight rise in the abortion rate in 2020, in the United Kingdom there has been a staggering spike. Last year, the U.K. hit a record high of 210,860 babies killed by abortion, with 47% of these abortions taking place at home, with pills. Horror stories of women being rushed to hospital hemorrhaging, murder investigations being initiated as women attempted to kill much older babies with pills, and the shock of some women when they came face to face with the child they had expelled, have been almost entirely ignored by the abortion activists.
In fact, abortion activists who once trumpeted the “safe, legal, and rare” mantra are now claiming that an abortion rate approaching a quarter of a million is actually good news rather than bad news. Phoebe Arslanagić-Wakefield, for example, penned an analysis this week concluding that “Abortion numbers are at an all-time high-it means abortion reforms are working.” Of course, there were no “abortion reforms” — there were temporary pandemic measures. But activists, having successfully expanded abortion access during a pandemic, are now pushing to make these measures permanent.
