There is one issue with the emotional appeal of turning some into single-issue voters. Abortion has been a divisive issue for as long as I can remember, and I’m old. As one without a direct interest in the controversy, I’d like to try to take some emotion out of the conflict and inject some inconvenient facts into the discussion.

In my April post “Three Storylines Revisited,” I acknowledged the near impossibility of banning abortions in the first trimester since most are by pill. All we’d accomplish is a black market run by bad people. Further, we get wrapped up in the argument about when life begins.

The second trimester is a different story. We don’t use the pill after eleven months. We routinely perform ultrasounds at 10-13 weeks. Shortly after, we start testing the little one. Increasingly sophisticated, we’re learning all sorts of things about the baby. Aided by AI, we’ll know a lot more in the future.

Already, we’re identifying conditions, some life-threatening, that are correctable in the womb. While we can endlessly argue about when life begins, at this point, there is no contesting that the baby is alive. You can’t perform lifesaving procedures on something that isn’t alive.

We’ve all heard “Born that way,” to describe those on the Autistic Spectrum, members of the LBGTQ+ community, and many others. We have no reason to doubt these assertions, but people are “born that way ” for a reason. Some combination of DNA, enzymes, and other inputs determines these outcomes. Aided by AI, we will know the mix, probably shortly. Parents have a right to test results, so there is no keeping secrets.