South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg speaks during the Democratic primary debate at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif., December 19, 2019. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

Both Ramesh and I posted on the Corner yesterday afternoon, pointing out some issues with Pete Buttigieg’s response to a question about abortion policy that he received during his Fox News town hall on Sunday evening.

A further thought occurred to me as I reflected on the way Buttigieg continues to handle the abortion question. I noted yesterday that he relies on one particular response whenever he’s asked about his position on the issue: insisting that, while people of good faith can disagree on how to draw lines limiting abortion, the real question is “Who decides?” In his view, of course, the answer is the pregnant woman.

Here’s what he said to this effect on Sunday: “The best I can offer is that if we can’t agree on where to draw the line, the next best thing we can do is agree on who should draw the line. And in my view, it’s the woman who’s faced with that decision in her own life.”

And here’s a similar comment Buttigieg made in an earlier town hall:

Chris Wallace: Do you believe, at any point in pregnancy, whether it’s at six weeks or eight weeks or 24 weeks or whenever, that there should be any limit on a woman’s right to abortion? Buttigieg: I think the dialogue has gotten so caught up in when you draw the line that we’ve gotten away from the fundamental question of who gets to draw the line. And I trust women to draw the line.

When I pointed this out yesterday, several people defended the mayor’s framing, suggesting that he’s right to emphasize the necessity of trusting women to “control their own bodies and their own health care.” In this framing, the controversy over abortion is a controversy over whether women are autonomous and equal. This is equivalent to the charge that pro-life Americans oppose abortion because they want to “control women.”


This illustrates precisely how Buttigieg manages to be so effective at sounding moderate on abortion. By reframing the question as one of autonomy and choice, he deftly sidesteps the central contention of abortion opponents: The unborn are living, distinct human beings, and by virtue of their humanity they have the intrinsic right to life.


“Who decides?” is an insufficient question when it comes to abortion policy because it ignores the fundamental premise of the pro-life case. If we enter a public-policy debate over abortion with the premise that abortion isn’t killing, then of course it makes sense to consider the issue as a matter of a pregnant woman’s individual freedom. But if exercising the “freedom” in question involves killing innocent human beings, our discussion of the appropriate policy response obviously needs to focus on that fact.