The Democratic Party’s stance on abortion is a global outlier

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that politicizing abortion is “something uniquely American.” Perhaps that is because the Democratic Party’s obsession with abortion is also uniquely American.

The abortion restrictions that Democrats so fervently fight to strike down would be normal throughout Europe. Mississippi’s abortion law, which would restrict abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy and has been dragged into court by liberal pro-abortion groups, is actually more lenient than the abortion laws in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, and Spain. Even in liberal Canada, women seeking an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy are referred to clinics in the United States.

But Democrats are not content with that abortion exceptionalism. Congressional Democrats, with just a handful of holdouts, steadfastly opposed a national ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in 2015 and again in 2018. Nearly all Democratic politicians have been unable to name a single abortion restriction that they support.

Democrats want to cement this extreme position in federal law. They have already effectively legalized abortion up to the moment of birth in New York. The Democratic bill to codify Roe v. Wade would do precisely that nationally. Granted, this would not make abortion up to birth a “uniquely American” position — it would effectively put the U.S. in the esteemed company of North Korea, Vietnam, and China.

Pelosi is upset that her country-club Catholicism was called out by the archbishop of San Francisco, so she wants to pretend it’s her critics who are being unreasonable. But the Democratic Party’s abortion cheerleading implies that most of the civilized world is anti-woman and anti-choice. The extreme politicization of abortion in the U.S. is a result of the Democratic Party’s extreme stance on the issue, and no amount of deflection can change that.