Laura Hermer inhabits a strange universe, one in which establishing an absolute right to an abortion is somehow “a clear legal solution that should satisfy all sides” in the abortion debate. Worse, in her world, killing a child is “pro-child.” 
Hermer, a Minnesota law professor, wrote in MinnPost that:
Pro-life advocates presumably want viable pregnancies to yield babies who are loved and given the best start possible. Pro-choice advocates do, too. What sense does it make to knowingly doom babies to a life of poverty and neglect in the absence of effective programs to support mothers and infants?
Doom them? This side of the pro-abortion argument really hasn’t advanced since the days of Margaret Sanger. It’s still about eugenics, in this case a social eugenics.Imperfect family and social arrangements, just like imperfect genetic development, can and should be headed off with abortion.
Hermer cited the Turnaway Study, “which compares long-term outcomes in families with babies born to women who were denied an abortion versus those who were able to obtain one.” It found “poor maternal bonding” financial hardship and other problems for unwanted babies. But, as LifeNews.com’s Micaiah Bilger pointed out, it also found that “96 percent of women who were denied abortions later no longer wished that they had had one.”
That’s inconvenient, but Hermer doesn’t mention that part of the study. It would complicate her rush to the real point of her argument:
The only person who should be permitted to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy is the person who will bear primary responsibility to love, raise, and care for the resulting child. That is the pregnant person. No activist, religious institution, court, or state can make such a consequential decision for a competent adult.
That, Hermer says, and a raft of government programs, is the best way to “ensure that babies have loving homes and do not suffer from undue emotional or economic deprivation.” She doesn’t mention adoption. It’s got to be all one thing or all another. A child is either “wanted” or he or she is better off dead.
Someone who was really “pro-child” would find another way.
