"Worst. Bar graph. Ever."

Via John Althouse Cohen.

"Sen. Marco Rubio said Saturday that he doesn’t believe a pregnant woman infected with the Zika virus should have the right to an abortion..."

"... even if she had reason to believe the child would be born with severe microcephaly."

"I understand a lot of people disagree with my view – but I believe that all human life is worthy of protection of our laws. And when you present it in the context of Zika or any prenatal condition, it’s a difficult question and a hard one," Rubio told POLITICO.

"But if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life."

If I’m going to err...

That "I" suggests the better answer: Do your own moral reasoning. It's a difficult decision. How do you make it? Erring on the side of life is one idea, and when it is your decision to make, you can embrace it. But to decide for someone else's family that they must continue in a pregnancy that they know will produce a child with severe microencephaly, rather than to have a chance to begin again and produce a different child... that is mind-bending intrusion into their suffering. I find it hard to believe Rubio actually wants a law that imposes his answer on those who face this decision. I assume he simply finds himself committed to a political position that requires purity at the abstract level, and he's trying to say that as nicely as possible.

I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life.

That can be understood in different ways, one of which is: If I’m going to err politically, I’m going to err on the side of the pro-life politically forces, because that's way I've leveraged my career. 

"The diagnosis [of microcephaly] usually comes halfway through pregnancy, if at all...."

"Families have very little time to have the necessary studies, get the results, process their thoughts and make a decision before they reach the legal limits of termination...."

Melissa and Peter Therrien, of Brewster, Mass., faced that choice when they learned that their daughter had a very small skull, after an ultrasound during Mrs. Therrien’s 24th week of pregnancy.

“I felt heartbroken,” Mrs. Therrien, 21, said. “The doctor gave me the option to terminate the pregnancy.” But, she said, “I couldn’t do that.”

Their daughter, Alainah, is now 15 months old, but her development is uncertain. She can walk, although doctors said she might not, and she is given to peals of laughter, Mrs. Therrien said. Yet Alainah speaks just three words: Mama, Papa and “aba,” which she uses to describe various objects. ... Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital will not know the extent of damage to her brain for nine months or so. She may still have seizures and profound disability.

“It’s just tough,” said Peter Therrien, 26. “There’s nothing we can do to fix it. We’ll pretty much be walking on eggshells for the rest of our lives.”

Here is a diagnosis that comes right around the point of "viability," the point where the constitutional right to have an abortion changes from free choice to an option available only where there is danger to the woman's own life or health. If the statutory law is as restrictive of abortion as the constitution permits, the parents are given virtually no time to absorb the terrible news before they must decide whether to reject a child they had wanted. I would think some parents would rush to have an abortion before the time window closes and then, perhaps, suffer horrible guilt for what they did so rashly. Other parents will feel called to step up to the moral challenge of continuing to love the child despite its imperfection and then, perhaps, later, too late, wish they had ended this ordeal and begun again, and in a life of what Peter Therrien called "walking on eggshells," they may long for that other child that never came into being. 

How much do you need to read about Zika virus before you scream "no" to the question "Would it be wrong to eradicate mosquitoes?"

"More than a million people, mostly from poorer nations, die each year from mosquito-borne diseases including malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever." For those affluent Americans who have processed that fact into the oblivion section of our mind, Zika has arrived to restore your conscience:

Some mosquitoes also carry the Zika virus, which was first thought to cause only mild fever and rashes. However, scientists are now worried it can damage babies in the womb. The Zika virus has been linked with a spike in microcephaly - where babies are born with smaller heads - in Brazil.

And:

US scientists have urged the World Health Organisation to take urgent action over the Zika virus, which they say has "explosive pandemic potential"....

"It's certainly a very significant risk," [said Professor Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity], "and if infection of the foetus does occur and microcephaly develops we have no ability to alter the outcome of that very bad disease which is sometimes fatal or leaves children mentally incapacitated for the remainder of their life."

Here are some photographs of children born with this birth defect. 

Here's a NYT article from 2003, pre-Zika awareness, by Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College in London, arguing for the complete extinction of 30 species of mosquito: