Good luck explaining your abortion vote high-fives to your constituents, senators Why can’t Democrats vote with the American people on this issue, even when their stance has failed to deliver real results to the party?

Ashley McGuire | Opinion contributor

When I think of high fives, I usually think of things that are good. Like acing a test. Or winning a race. Or getting an award. Not dismembering late-term babies.

That’s just me. But apparently that’s not Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., or Senator Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D. In a clip memorialized for eternity, C-SPAN captured the two with their hands locked in an extended high five after Heitkamp cast her vote against a proposed bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of gestation.

When abortion is eventually abolished, people will look back at moments such as those and marvel that not only did our nation tolerate such barbarism, but that some lawmakers actually viewed keeping it legal as a moment for jubilation on the floor of the Senate chamber. But for now, it’s just another moment that points us straight to the Democrats’ extremism on one of the most divisive issues of our day.

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Kentucky Republican Majority Leader McConnell was wise to hold a vote on the bill despite its dim prospects of success. Nearly every Democrat in the Senate voted against something that an overwhelming majority of Americans, including millennial women such as myself, want. And now, almost every single vulnerable Democrat heading into the 2018 midterms is on record opposing commonsense protections against brutality and violence for babies that can live outside the womb and feel pain.

Take Senator Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.: While she wasn’t doling out high fives for late term abortion like her pro-choice gal pal Heidi (that we could see, anyways), she now has to return to a state that voted for Donald Trump by 20 points and defend her indefensible refusal to protect the most defenseless humans alive. And Heidi? She gets to do the same in a state that Trump won by 36 points. Good luck with that.

Democrats were so thoroughly trounced in the last election in large part because their party is completely out of step with average Americans. And is there any issue in American politics that highlights this more than abortion? A recent Marist poll showed three-fourths of Americans want to see more restrictions on abortion. That includes 63% of Americans who support a ban on abortion after 20 weeks. This polling reflects what the American people have done on the state level through their elected representatives — 20 states have enacted legislation that bans nearly all abortion after 20 weeks.

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Opposition to late-term abortion is so widespread and mainstream in America that Gallup refers to it as “common ground” between self-described pro-choicers and pro-lifers. Their findings show a majority of pro-choicers want to see abortion banned in the second trimester (which begins well before 20 weeks), and a stunning 79% want it banned in the third. To repeat, these are people who consider themselves pro-choice.

So why can’t Democrats vote with the American people on this issue? Why is the abortion lobby’s grip on the party so strong when their extremism on the issue doesn’t resonate with voters clustered around the center and when it has failed, election after election, to deliver real results to the party?

The party is running out of time to answer the question. Polling shows that voters in my generation, those pesky millennials, don’t support abortion after 20 weeks by a solid majority. In a headline for a story written on the poll just after the failed vote, The Washington Post called the results “surprising.”

Why it is “surprising” that a generation raised looking at ultrasound pictures, including those of our own children, would not support the killing of viable babies just because they have the misfortune of being inside the womb and not out is beyond me. We are the generation of science and social justice, after all.

And you can be assured that we will be holding our high fives for the day when every child in this country has a chance at life, when no more women are sent to the slaughterhouses, and when lawmakers who celebrate the violent deaths of innocents are tossed from their seats of power for good.

Ashley McGuire is a senior fellow with The Catholic Association, and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female.