Don’t care if it led to the GOP suffering in this election
overturning Roe was worth it, if for no other reason than preventing libs from getting away with reading the Constitution that way. A right to an abortion is simply not enshrined in the constitution
"Don’t care if it led to the GOP suffering in this election."
I'll take it a step further and suggest that it didn't lead to that much long-term political suffering for the GOP at all. Did it blunt the red wave? Yes, probably to some extent. However, the Republicans still control the House, which neuters the Dems worst ideas and essentially sends Washington into good ole fashioned gridlock for two years.
But, now that the white woman temper tantrum has exhausted itself, the issue seems largely resolved. We will see the normalization of states passing their own laws without every single one having to be adjudicated by SCOTUS. You probably aren't going to hear about most abortion laws from now on because they've stopped being knock-down, drag-out, 5-4 Supreme Court death matches of national importance. The sun will continue to rise.
So what about these midterms? Honestly, who cares? The Dems pretty much immediately failed the marshmallow test and opted for quick, cheap gratification, stupidly claiming a "win" only because they didn't lose so badly. Okay, cool. Have fun with that when the economy craters in the next two years. They cannot even come back to their old trick of blaming a Republican Congress for everything. They've already claimed the win and, therefore, all the subsequent blame.
The timing of this SCOTUS decision (which was proper and good) couldn't have been better. The heat is turned down on abortion for 2024 when it matters. The concept of a conservative SCOTUS has become normalized and mundane (notice how Dems don't give a damn about stacking the court anymore?) and the GOP still comes out of this with significant power in DC through their House majority.
A GOP Senate would have been nice, but the big fish is 2024. I won't even bother getting into the fact that a GOP Senate might never have been possible anyway (given factors like candidate quality, Dems turning elections into corrupt gong shows, and the GOP establishment's complete inability to articulate a counter-vision of governance that actually works for the middle class).
Uhmm, hello? It is 9:53PM EST on 11/10/22 and control of the Senate HAS NOT been decided yet. You might want to cool your jets and let it play out. Corrupt as it is...
But, it could be....if Congress had the balls. Leaving the issue up to individual states is really quite ridiculous given women exist all over the country.
Congress (if they had guts) could pass a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing the right to privacy and autonomy regarding pregnancies up to 16 weeks or so. Then, we could move on from this personal and private issue and deal with the many very pressing problems that face the whole country.
Incorrect, they avoid it like the plague. Neither party wants to tangle with it in Congress because THEY BOTH see it as a losing *political* proposition.
Several SCOTUS Justices have previously said in interviews that some of the cases that come before them would not if Congress would engage in debate and pass legislation about those issues. Reproductive choice is one of them.
Yes, a losing political proposition because people would vote them out for it. That's how politics works. It's not about balls, it's about representing what people want their government to do, and they don't want that. I don't understand your position here.
The legislative branch's inaction on hot-button issues -- in practice, ceding ground to the executive and judicial branches -- is definitely a very real thing. But we could debate the precise list of causes.
I think the biggest factor is that it's beneficial for politicians to be slippery, which can be seen in the fact that they famously *are* slippery. It's usually to your electoral benefit to be ambiguous to some degree on the matter of a hot-button issue. A firm, precise stand, including drawing up specific legislation, will upset more people on both my flanks (some saying I went too far, some saying I went not far enough) than it will please those who agree with me, and that makes it easier for my opponent to outflank me next election. Some good ambiguous rhetoric, by contrast, will ideally convince most people that I'm not far from their position and still leave me the ability to accuse my opponent of being a radical zealot while I support only the most reasonable, common-sense measures.
One reason non-culture-war legislation gets passed much more easily is because it's too complicated for anyone to understand and is packed with special interest carveouts that are invisible to the average voter but that the special interests love. They're not going to punish you for not going far enough in getting them some beloved pork -- they'll understand your position and take what they can get.
95% of abortions happen before week 16. Legal with no restrictions at all up until week 15 & then after that only being legal if a doctor agrees its in the interest of the mothers physical / psychological health would be agreeable to the majority of Dems in congress.
Fascinating that you believe you can speak for the majority of Dems; I'd never make such a claim about a huge group myself. Especially considering the VAST majority of those in either party are massively under-informed about the realities of reproduction in general and about abortion issues specifically. We have a country full of ignoramuses regarding these matters. They need plenty of education first.
Neither do Repubs want Congressional legislation about it. Because they know, since polls have looonnng been clear, that most Americans support legal abortion access with gestational limits.
But if there is a silver lining for Right-wingers for whom abortion is not a big deal, it's that Roe was genuinely terrible jurisprudence, and striking it down was the right thing to do for that reason. That it's had an undeniable electoral cost is unfortunate, but it still had to be done.
For those concerned with democracy, indeed, this is how it should be working: abortion law is now subject to the democratic, legislative process, as the ballot initiatives in many states are showing.
The comments so far confirm your view. People who are anti-abortion don't care how unpopular that stance is, myself included. But as you frequently hear people like Yglesias say this to the left, now it is time for the right to hear it. If you really care about abortion, then you need to elect republicans. if you want to elect republicans, you need to stop talking about it.
The success of the left on this issue has been in their ability to frame it as a purely religious issue. The question of who counts as a human being and when you are allowed to destroy them is obviously relevant to atheists just as much as it is Christians. The conservative (and correct) viewpoint will do better if and when it can properly frame the issue around those questions. As to how they should go about doing that, I admit I'm not sure. You are unfortunately correct in that most people would rather just not think about the issue.
As someone who believes that abortion is murder of the unborn, I will say that I don't care how many elections Republicans lose over the issue. In my opinion, it shouldn't be up for a vote. "Just let people murder the unborn" is unacceptable, period. If advocating for the unborn's right to life leads to Democrats running everything, frankly I would consider that a serious indictment of liberal democracy and our society as a whole.
"Let people die." "Force people to bring pregnancies to term."
See, you are participating in the framing of the left right there, with those phrases. So of course you think conservatives should just let the issue go. I mean, if we just "let some people die," is it really that big of a deal? Shouldn't we stay focused on the big issues, like cutting taxes again?
Yes, it is a big deal. Killing children is a Big Deal. You would think this would be obvious to people. Failing to understand why people are highly motivated to prevent the murder of children (unborn children--but children nonetheless) shows that you really aren't taking the pro-life position very seriously. I mean, maybe you think that we are wrong, but if you can just try and put yourself in our shoes for two seconds, I don't think it's that hard to understand why we are so adamant.
And the use of the phrase "you let people die all the time" shows the importance of framing, because you are granting in that statement that abortion involves someone dying. The left's framing succeeds because they do not grant this premise or even talk about it. They stay laser focused on religion and "women's bodies" and the like. How long do you think their position would last if they were saying "well, we let people die all the time" as their defense of abortion?
Jorgeson - "well, we let people die all the time" as their defense of abortion?"
It's not about being a defense of abortion, it's about the God-awful hypocrisy of the supposedly "pro-life" crowd. They pick and choose which 'life' they seems to care about which is pretty disgusting. We send young adults (LIVING people not potential ones) off to die or get horribly maimed in wars for profit and conquest. Where are all the pro-lifers?
Everyday in the USA, we allow people to willfully act to let family members die if proper, prior legal documents were signed by the one they are letting die. Do you think those situations are clear and obvious? You would be completely wrong about that. They are merely a judgment call based on potentially fallible Doctors, faulty testing, exhausted and distraught family members or ones who have difficulty weighing all the factors at the best of times and potential inheritance. Talk about a very complicated dynamic! I've been in that circumstance and realize that people are woefully under-informed about how VAGUE the circumstances are. Where are the "pro-lifers" on that important issue?
I think most people aren't nearly prepared to hear about what goes in the organ donation world. And, I'm talking about in legitimate hospitals and with regular Doctors....not back alley stuff. It is nothing short of horrendous and it's way past time for people to wake up about that. "Pro-lifers" , you are needed there!
So, when you want to treat all life ^^^ as valid, including the pregnant women, then we can have a realistic conversation.
>We send young adults (LIVING people not potential ones) off to die or get horribly maimed in wars for profit and conquest. Where are all the pro-lifers?
I don't support that either?
>Everyday in the USA, we allow people to willfully act to let family members die if proper, prior legal documents were signed by the one they are letting die.
Not sure what this is referring to.
>So, when you want to treat all life ^^^ as valid, including the pregnant women, then we can have a realistic conversation.
Only one side here has decided that certain lives don't actually count as lives. It isn't the pro-life camp.
"I don't support that either?" -- But, you don't actually take a major stand on it...anywhere...do you?
"Not sure what this is referring to." -- Yes, this is the problem, Will. Far too many minimally-informed people in the USA. I was addressing Living Wills and giving the right to someone else to decide whether you continue to live or not. It is a very dicey proposition and, no doubt, POOR decisions are made in that regard frequently (see above reasons). But, where are the "pro-lifers"? I've heard absolute crickets from them about not providing life support or removing it. What's with that selectivity?
The bottom line is that people do not actually care about the pregnancies of strangers - there are other reasons they have their extreme stance and it's related to *themselves*.
>"I don't support that either?" -- But, you don't actually take a major stand on it...anywhere...do you?
I mean, if Hanania wrote an article defending America's foreign misadventures over the past 20 years, I'd probably write a comment criticizing him for that.
>"Not sure what this is referring to." -- Yes, this is the problem, Will. Far too many minimally-informed people in the USA. I was addressing Living Wills and giving the right to someone else to decide whether you continue to live or not.
Okay, well, if you signed away your right to life to someone else, fair enough. Fetuses obviously can't do that. Don't see your point.
>The bottom line is that people do not actually care about the pregnancies of strangers - there are other reasons they have their extreme stance and it's related to *themselves*.
If a stranger gets murdered, I will never know about it and it won't affect me. I still think murder should be illegal.
What's the point of winning elections if you don't enact anything you want? Overturning Roe and winning House by a small margin is much, much better than winning the house by 200 seats or something and the only policy "victory" being lowering taxes by 0.69420%.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Obviously it would be better for Republicans if they get to overturn Roe AND win the house by an overwhelming majority. That would signal widespread disapproval of the general Democrat agenda, and approval of alternatives put forward by Republicans. That is not what we are seeing now. We're seeing some disapproval of Biden's agenda, but given the kind of circumstances (inflation, immigration crisis, war in Ukraine, people getting tired of wokeness) we could have expected a lot more from the Republicans. It seems clear that voters don't really see the Republicans as a much better alternative at this point.
I think this could also indicate that our country is too polarized now and unlikely to swing wildly from one party to another. This has been the trend for a while. Each midterm the opposition seems to win less seats than the one before. Remember even in 2020, during the height of COVID, economic uncertainty and after 4 years of media campaign against Trump, Republicans still won 213 seats in the House and 50 seats in the Senate. It's seems to me that going forward both parties are guaranteed 200+ seats in the House and 48 seats in the Senate.
Yes, exactly. I think if we could dig into the details, we would find that the ELECTIONS in those states (FL, GA, TX) were handled more legitimately and, therefore, more accurately represent the will and interest of voters.
I mean, c'mon, look at Arizona....their election is being managed by one of the Governor candidates!! Can you say, "massive conflict of interest"?
What exactly do you think they are doing in Arizona? Given that the 2020 election in Arizona was audited several times and they found absolutely no issues, I don't see any reason to doubt that this is being handled well. It's the same argument Stacey Abrams made against Kemp in Georgia back in 2018. "Kemp controls the elections, so it must be rigged!", but without any actual evidence of anything occurring, it's just baseless accusations.
Nonsense. There were MANY election irregularities found in the AZ 2020 election. As there have been in many other states. You are deeply under-informed.
Kemp didn't handle the 2020 election, the SoS did, Raffensberger. In AZ the SoS overseeing the 2022 election IS Katie Hobbs, a candidate for Gov.
I meant Kemp in 2018, when Stacey Abrams ran. He was SoS then, and Abrams cried foul for no reason and with no evidence.
And I do not think I am uninformed. The Republicans audited those results, and found no major irregularities. If you have links that say otherwise, please provide them, but everything I can read about their audits mentions no major issues discovered by those audits.
You got the vibe just from reading the comments on your last post that this would end up happening. A lot of centrists who have voted D their entire life are completely fed up with the incompetence of the party along with the insanity on the fringes, with the latter feeding into the former. A lot of people saying they would definitely vote republican if not for the absolute insanity on abortion. If R’s even had a tiny bit of nuance here (12 weeks for example), it would have been an easy W. But the fact that you have a non-0 chance of a national ban INCLUDING cases of rape is just too extreme, and on a much more personal level than the fringes of the left. I would rather get fired from my job for using the wrong pronouns than my daughter have to bear the child of her rapist, personally, and I think most would agree. And that’s not even getting into the talk of banning plan B and other types of contraception. So a lot of us either reluctantly pulled the lever for dems, or in my case decided to just stay home.
I don’t see a way out here since there is a subset of republicans that ONLY vote based on abortion, and they are among the most motivated special interests in all of politics. We’ll see if they soften their stance now that the damage is done, but I don’t think they will.
God awful candidates like Herschel Walker didn’t help the case either. With all politics being national, candidates like him reflected badly on republicans across the country. With DeSantis winning as he did, I feel like trumpism could finally be weakening. He has his cult followers, but with all of the serious issues facing the world, I think people are going to gravitate towards DeSantis when they see how competent he is.
Your comparison of Oz vs. Fetterman made me chuckle, but what makes me doubt it is that exit polls are showing even more of a gender divide in Fetterman vs. Oz than Biden vs. Trump, while we should naturally expect the "relatable ugly guy" schtick to work much better on men than women.
Of course those were governors. National policy like what Oz or Walker might have voted for is something different. My theory is that TX FL and GA simply have more conservatives (big C, small c, classical liberal or classical conservative, whatever) than PA.
Wait, Saving lives of the most vulnerable human beings is Racist ??? LOL I thought you were suppose to be one of the intelligent progressive guys out there, and you come with if you dont let me kill a baby, you are racist like affirmative action. You are missing the big picture here about the Democrat Massive win yesterday despite all against them:
The candidate doesn’t matter, the issue doesn’t matter.
Only Harvesting votes and voting early matters. Election day is Obsolete.
Democrats are Professionals in this new game. Harvest and you will Win Massive.
One thing I take away is that voters respond strongly to a threat that they believe is aimed at them, personally. What I think happened here, is that a lot of women who might think extreme abortion acts are monstrous and would never commit them against their own children, would still rather permit other women to do monstrous things to their own children than to create a 1-in-1000 gray-area situation in which pro-life laws put them, personally, in a bind.
I'm pro-life and believe that, ideally, abortion should be entirely illegal. I'm involved with and donate a few percentage points of my paycheck to our local crisis pregnancy center, which I believe does good work and saves lives. But I suppose, in my heart-of-hearts, I'm about 1000x more alarmed about all the ways that the Democrats aspire to target my children, my family, and my church than I am about a woman somewhere being legally permitted to kill her own children, even after they're born (as is apparently now enshrined in Montana law). So although I don't vote the same way as them, I think I get where these women are coming from.
We Christians need to internalize the idea of being a minority group, which is something Aaron Renn has discussed intelligently. As a minority group, our political focus needs to be on looking out for our own rights and freedoms, not trying to use politics to make the majority behave like us, against its will.
"We Christians." Do you believe that only Christians can oppose abortion, and that there is no reason for a secular person to abhor the practice?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Christian and pro-life. It's obviously not a coincidence that God happens to have the right position on this issue. But it's not that it's wrong because God told us so; God told us not to do it because it's wrong. When you grant the left's premise that this is purely a matter of religious dogma, then yes, they win.
Basic human intuition would lead us to conclude that later-stage abortions are monstrous. We know they're monstrous because the visual image of one is enough to make anyone's skin crawl, if he has warm blood in his veins. But when it comes to first-trimester (or pre-quickening) abortions, or matters like rape and incest, fallen human intuition isn't so great a guide. In these cases, in order to persuade seculars to save another woman's children against her own will you have to get philosophical, and while I don't fault people for attempting this fight, I don't really have a mind for it, and I'm skeptical of what it can accomplish.
Well, I don't think you necessarily have to get philosophical. If conservatives controlled and wielded the instruments of government, media, education, etc., instead of the left, people could easily be swayed to pro-life assumptions instead of anti-life ones. But that is not the world we live in, so yes, if you are going to confront someone who already holds the anti-life view, you will have to "get philosophical."
If we are granting that we can indeed make this a matter of "philosophy" rather than religious dogma, then don't we have an obligation to make the effort? We are talking about people killing their own children here. Sure, maybe it's an uphill battle, but it seems to me that we should at least *try*.
"We are talking about people killing their own children here". That's what YOU are talking about, but many (most) people don't see it that way, since for most people a fetus is not the same as a child, at least up until a certain number of weeks gestation. Of course different people draw the line in different places.
Well, I'm certainly not telling you not to try. I think it's all well and good to make an effort, but I think the way you get real results as an unpopular minority is by convincing mothers to choose life, not convincing people who don't care about other people's unborn children that they need to care more about those children than their own mothers. So the former is the part of the pro-life cause I've been supporting with my tangible efforts.
I also think that, for my part, if I'm going to invest a lot of energy in evangelizing to a hostile audience, I'd rather be evangelizing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not the Gospel of Abortion Laws.
>convincing people who don't care about other people's unborn children that they need to care more about those children than their own mothers
This implies that abortion is only ever a threat to "mothers," and never to the unborn that it kills. You are granting the leftist premise with that. Shouldn't people be more concerned with not letting their relatives be party to the murder of an unborn child? I can't imagine how I'd feel if one of my family members committed this act. It would be difficult for me to speak to that person again.
>I also think that, for my part, if I'm going to invest a lot of energy in evangelizing to a hostile audience, I'd rather be evangelizing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not the Gospel of Abortion Laws.
If accepting the "Gospel of Jesus Christ" requires that you abhor abortion (which it does), people are gonna ask about that, and you should be ready to tell them the truth about it.
On your first point, you misunderstood me, because in no way did I mean to imply that mothers are the primary victims of abortion. I think maybe my sentence was unclear. It should read:
"convincing people who don't care about other people's unborn children that they need to care more about those children than the children's own mothers DO"
In other words, I think the crux of the challenge is you need to convince someone to care more about the unborn than that child's own mother does. That's a tall order; motherly love is a powerful force, which is one reason why the persuasion that reaches potential mothers is dramatically more impactful than pro-life political campaigning.
Most people have a natural bias towards subsidiarity, not wanting to interfere with other families. People might see bad parenting and shake their heads or gossip about it, but the median person is prepared to allow a very wide scope of bad parenting in his neighbors before saying "Those kids need to be taken away from them." Similarly, I think there is a wide scope for people to disapprove of abortion without feeling strongly about implementing more pro-life laws -- particularly once you get beyond banning the especially gross and shocking example of later stage abortions.
Why would abortion be wrong? The only possible answer is because it is the willful taking of a life. If a fetus is not a person, then there is nothing wrong at all with "sluts using it as a form of birth control." Likewise, if abortion represents the murder of a child, it is not somehow okay in certain circumstances but not okay in others. We don't allow infanticide just because "having a kid is a really bad idea" for the parent(s). Although, as Hanania unfortunately and correctly pointed out, the leftie viewpoint might indeed end up there, if allowed to continue on its course.
Well that's what it comes down to in the end. There's really no objective measure that tells us if a fetus is a person or not, a child or not, or at what point it changes from fetus to something else. For the pro-life people, I guess fetus=child/person, either from the moment of conception or from the moment we can measure a heartbeat. For most people though, it's a somewhat grey area. Even most pro-abortion people agree that there should be limits, so even they would agree that at some point, the fetus has (morally speaking) become too much an actual person/child for abortion to be acceptable. But what point that is exactly is up for debate.
>For the pro-life people, I guess fetus=child/person, either from the moment of conception or from the moment we can measure a heartbeat.
From the moment of conception. This is the point in time at which a distinct, individual human being comes into existence. This is an obvious and undeniable physical reality. A fetus is a human being in an early stage of development. Any other attempt to "define" away personhood is coping/motivated reasoning, and typically leads to some pretty horrific implications. If we can start picking and choosing who counts as human, why not declare that the mentally handicapped no longer count? What about infants? It isn't a coincidence that the leftist view is trending towards legalization of infanticide. Etc.
>But what point that is exactly is up for debate.
Correction: It is up for people's kneejerk feelings about whatever makes them feel most comfortable. There is no actual compelling reason that anyone can give to draw lines at 12 weeks, or 14 weeks, or whenever. Such distinctions are completely arbitrary. Conception, as the distinction in time between when an individual does not yet exist and when they begin to exist, is the only measure that is not arbitrary. All others that I've seen are simply motivated by a desire to preserve the legality of abortion; people already have the assumption that some amount of abortion must be okay, so when forced to confront the question of who is a person or not, they make something up which conforms with their priors.
The Democrat position of allowance up until point of birth is much more coherent than the wishy-washy random week limit that "most people" will tend towards. It's wrong, but it makes more sense if you accept the premise that a fetus is not a person and that the mother's "bodily autonomy" is a more important concern and such.
A blastocyst is no more a "distinct, individual human being" than a cancerous growth - both have DNA different from its bearer (as cancer always implies mutations), both can develop into bigger and more complex structures unless removed, and yet both have no brain and thus no ability to think (or, in this case, suffer, for those who care about that). The position of "as soon as conception happened, the new human is there with all the implications" has all the signs of a "magic bullet" solution: it's simple, intuitive and wrong. So one possible source for week limit is "when the fetus develops its own brain" or "when the fetus's brain develops such-and-such structures we know to be associated with thinking".
As for implications - I'll bite the bullet: there are adult beings with largely human DNA whose mind is so irreparably broken they are no longer humans in any reasonable sense, who in some important sense, depending on the source of the condition, either "are already dead as humans" or "were never humans to begin with".
How do you feel about rape exceptions? I’m aware it’s only a tiny fraction of total abortions, but to me (and most people) that’s such an extreme and unreasonable position, along with literally the absolute worst fear of most women. I can’t help but feel like most (not all) Christians would feel differently in the situation if it was their daughter/sister etc.
Also do you feel as though you should be able to kill an intruder who breaks into your house? Anarcho capitalist writer Walter Block makes the clever argument that the fetus is a person, but just as you can kill and unwanted intruder on your property it is morally justified to kill an intruder in your body. I think it applies stronger to cases of rape than “at will” abortions, because accidental pregnancy through consensual sex you “invited” them in, but it can be applied both ways depending on interpretation.
As I suggested, I'm fine with political compromises if they are needed to make pro-life legislation happen. I'm opposed to making the perfect the enemy of the good.
To your point about intruders, Calvin wrote:
"If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a foetus in the womb before it has come to light."
If there's a moral right to self-defense here, it is held by the unborn against those who would snuff them out. They're certainly not intruders deserving of death for being in their mother's womb. They never made a choice to be where they are, so they hold no moral culpability.
Rather than a home break-in, I'd say an abortion is more like someone being shoved out of a helicopter, crashing through your roof, miraculously surviving but falling unconscious, and then you finishing them off with a shotgun because they're an inconvenience to you (plus they wrecked your roof!)
It would be difficult, I'm sure, to carry an undesired child of rape to term. But doing the right thing is often difficult, and sometimes the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Ideally, if we all shared the same values, we could agree that we would like the law to bolster us in doing the right thing. But it's because we don't share values that I'm more accepting of compromise here.
Difficult seems like an understatement here. The idea of your very body reminding of you of what must be one of the most horrible moments of your life at every second of every day for nearly a year sounds like an absolute horror. Not to mention the actual birth, which can be traumatic in its own way as I've seen first hand.
Well, for one, I don't know that it has to be that bad, but I'm sure for some it is. People handle challenges and trauma differently.
But two, the silver lining is that the product of all of that is a baby, and babies are wonderful. If the mother doesn't delight in it, then an adoptive couple (of which there is no shortage) surely would. By choosing life, something good is able to come out of an awful event, instead of a final, brutal, ugly end to it all (that still doesn't erase the rape itself).
At the end of that recent movie The Last Duel (which I thought was very good, if not quite great), this woman, whom we watched suffer throughout the entire film, is able to unreservedly delight in her child, implied to be the result of her rape. I honestly thought the image was so pro-life that I couldn't believe it could still be included in a Hollywood film.
This is what happens when your politics is only lowering taxes so business can move in. Guess what, when California businesses move in, California voters move in too. Pro-business Republicans are literally digging their own graves.
Call me naive but pro-life has all the hallmarks of a "right side of history" kind of issue.
-Expands the moral circle
-Easier to explain to a child
-Becomes more tenable as societies get richer
And just anecdotally, I've observed the most random, secular blue-tribe women come out and decide to keep pregnancies that logically they should have aborted. There's *something* to anti-abortion weed that allows it to randomly spring up in blue-tribe gardens. (And sure, there are red-tribe women who get abortions, but that can easily be explained by "people can ditch morality when it runs against their self-interest".)
It's a good point about Blue Tribe women. One of the most doctrinaire leftists I've known in my life, coming from a middle-class background, got pregnant by a fling and decided to drop out of grad school and do the single mom thing. BUT, despite that, to this day she would still tell you that there is nothing in the world wrong with abortion up until the moment of birth -- it just wasn't the right choice for her. I think that's normally how it goes -- few blue-tribers who choose life are moved at all to the pro-life political position.
Pro-life goes against the arc of history in this way: generally, liberalism and social atomization have inculcated in people the idea that other people's business is none of their business. And along with it, the elevation of "non-judgmentalism" as a value. One of the right's most successful social issues has been the Second Amendment. One reason it's been successful is that it's one of the few issues in which the social conservative position is the "leave me alone to make my own choices" position.
So although I'm pro-life, I'm not optimistic about pro-life as a political position. But I am optimistic about our ability to convince individual mothers to choose life, as seen in the fact that even mothers deep in the Blue Tribe can be reached.
"People understand that there is a religiously-motivated base of voters within the Republican coalition that wants to ban all abortions, and will never be satisfied with intermediate steps. One can say something similar about the pro-choice side. "
I don't think you can. A less silly example to cite here would be immigration, where there are plenty of unironic "we should flood the country with foreigners without any regard to assimilation or cultural compatibility" libs. Likewise, you see plenty of backlash when liberals overplay their hand on immigration policy.
"pro-infanticide", on the other hand, is just a ridiculous caricature that describes basically no liberal.
Richard, I get your point but Roe had to be overturned. It set a horrible precedent for constitutional law. As you know, all it did was return the decision on abortion to the people. If "the people" don't like that, and would rather have an unelected body of 9 oligarchs running the country, then we're completely lost.
Liberals do have higher IQs than conservatives, cos (as you point out) the former is the creed of the uni grad class. This has *nothing* to do with their political tactics. Or indeed their political views. If they came to their opinions and tactics through deliberative thought, then sure, maybe their high IQ would help. But they don't arrive at it through thought. They arrive at it through status signalling and purity spirals on Twitter. Itself grounded in differentiating themselves from whatever the Republican position is. What's the proof? Lods of instances. But the best is probs the Defund the Police nonsense in the runup to the 2020 election. To say nothing about the excuse-making for riots. They didn't do this cos it's a sensible position, much less cos they thought it would help Biden with swing voters. They did this cos the most taboo thing in their social milieu is to be racist like those awful rednecks. And do they had a purity spiral to be as 'anti-racist' (anti poor white) as they could, and that's where it lead them. Pure performative indignation and post hoc rationalisation. It's through *sheer luck* that the in-group peacocking around abortion - which spurred the Dems to make that the most salient campaign point - happened to coincide with the v real fears of millions of normies and middle class swing voters.
I agree that the GOP had an unimpressive day and that many of its candidates were mediocre, at best. I am skeptical, however, that the results turned significantly on the abortion issue.
Rather, it seems, based on federal elections for the last 20 years or so, the U.S. electorate is simply evenly divided and that played itself out again yesterday. While the pre-game pundits went on about a coming "red wave", that never really appeared evident in the actual polling.
The GOP's main problem today, I think, is that it does not offer a coherent and attractive set of positions to voters. For example, you have a GOP that theoretically supports free markets and tax cuts while simultaneously supporting import tariffs and domestic corporate subsidies. And the positions the GOP should support -- limited government, free markets, individual liberty -- generally require much more than cute political sound bites to justify (e.g., the typical glib politician can easily posture on his support of "price gouging" laws, while his more economically literate opponent would struggle with a lesson in economics to show that such laws actually harm consumers).
Consequently, the GOP needs a fairly well-educated electorate, and that is an increasing problem in my view. Left-wing institutions, including the education system and most major media outlets, have been and continue to be effective at indoctrinating voters (and pre-voters). Your average voter today learns to reflexively respond to any societal problem (real or imagined) with the notion that government needs to "do something" rather than consider that the work of private individuals, institutions, and markets are generally much better alternatives. And how many voters today understand the importance of our federal government being one of limited and enumerated powers? When His Majesty Biden declared a canceling of student loans, I doubt those high IQ liberal college kids paused to consider whether this act was consistent with the Constitution's separation of powers.
I'm an atheist and extremely anti-abortion (relevant: raised Catholic). I think this is an entirely consistent humanist position. Abortion kills humans, hence I'm against it. And not just humans, completely innocent children.
I can distinguish this from being pro-euthanasia (which I'm mostly against, in fact), and being pro-death penalty (which I am very much in favor of). People being euthanized tend to be old and have already contributed most of what they will contribute, while criminals are criminals.
Preventing the murder of children is a value. IT IS A VALUE. If it's unpopular, I don't give a single fuck. People who are pro-child murder are wrong. If it leads to Republicans losing elections for a few cycles or even forever, that's regrettable but worthwhile. Even if Dobbs leads to more abortion extremism in deep blue states (unlikely but possible), it will still lead to less child murder overall. Abortion extremism, in general, is not popular and will never gain currency at a national level, or at least not until we escape the childbirth loop through machine-based surrogacy (~10-20 years) and/or cloning (~50-100 years).
There's a great Vox article by (I think) Kelsey Piper from a while ago; it was part of a big futurism feature they had at the time, and I cannot find it for the life of me. Anyway, she (or the article) made the point that in the relatively near future our abortion debate will be entirely irrelevant due to the emergence of new reproductive technologies like artificial wombs. Victories against abortion between then and now will set us up for a future so bright I can hardly imagine it. Two billion Americans.
"but my preferred explanation is that this is just another data point proving that liberals have higher IQs."
Sorry not buying this
a party that promotes LGBT lunacy, gives hormones to kids and babbles about not knowing what a woman is, has no business considering themselves as high IQ.
Their propaganda machine seems better, though.
and conservatives seem to be rather unbothered by affirmative action, as contrasting to liberals, that are willing to march in numbers for whatever they find annoying.
Don’t care if it led to the GOP suffering in this election
overturning Roe was worth it, if for no other reason than preventing libs from getting away with reading the Constitution that way. A right to an abortion is simply not enshrined in the constitution
"Don’t care if it led to the GOP suffering in this election."
I'll take it a step further and suggest that it didn't lead to that much long-term political suffering for the GOP at all. Did it blunt the red wave? Yes, probably to some extent. However, the Republicans still control the House, which neuters the Dems worst ideas and essentially sends Washington into good ole fashioned gridlock for two years.
But, now that the white woman temper tantrum has exhausted itself, the issue seems largely resolved. We will see the normalization of states passing their own laws without every single one having to be adjudicated by SCOTUS. You probably aren't going to hear about most abortion laws from now on because they've stopped being knock-down, drag-out, 5-4 Supreme Court death matches of national importance. The sun will continue to rise.
So what about these midterms? Honestly, who cares? The Dems pretty much immediately failed the marshmallow test and opted for quick, cheap gratification, stupidly claiming a "win" only because they didn't lose so badly. Okay, cool. Have fun with that when the economy craters in the next two years. They cannot even come back to their old trick of blaming a Republican Congress for everything. They've already claimed the win and, therefore, all the subsequent blame.
The timing of this SCOTUS decision (which was proper and good) couldn't have been better. The heat is turned down on abortion for 2024 when it matters. The concept of a conservative SCOTUS has become normalized and mundane (notice how Dems don't give a damn about stacking the court anymore?) and the GOP still comes out of this with significant power in DC through their House majority.
A GOP Senate would have been nice, but the big fish is 2024. I won't even bother getting into the fact that a GOP Senate might never have been possible anyway (given factors like candidate quality, Dems turning elections into corrupt gong shows, and the GOP establishment's complete inability to articulate a counter-vision of governance that actually works for the middle class).
Uhmm, hello? It is 9:53PM EST on 11/10/22 and control of the Senate HAS NOT been decided yet. You might want to cool your jets and let it play out. Corrupt as it is...
Wrong, it is now 2024 and women still care about not being forced to give birth against their will. Who could've guessed?
But, it could be....if Congress had the balls. Leaving the issue up to individual states is really quite ridiculous given women exist all over the country.
Congress (if they had guts) could pass a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing the right to privacy and autonomy regarding pregnancies up to 16 weeks or so. Then, we could move on from this personal and private issue and deal with the many very pressing problems that face the whole country.
"if Congress had the balls"? What does that mean? You think they're avoiding this because they're scared or something?
They don't do it because not enough people want it. It's as simple as that. This is how democracy works, it doesn't have anything to do with courage.
Incorrect, they avoid it like the plague. Neither party wants to tangle with it in Congress because THEY BOTH see it as a losing *political* proposition.
Several SCOTUS Justices have previously said in interviews that some of the cases that come before them would not if Congress would engage in debate and pass legislation about those issues. Reproductive choice is one of them.
Yes, a losing political proposition because people would vote them out for it. That's how politics works. It's not about balls, it's about representing what people want their government to do, and they don't want that. I don't understand your position here.
The legislative branch's inaction on hot-button issues -- in practice, ceding ground to the executive and judicial branches -- is definitely a very real thing. But we could debate the precise list of causes.
I think the biggest factor is that it's beneficial for politicians to be slippery, which can be seen in the fact that they famously *are* slippery. It's usually to your electoral benefit to be ambiguous to some degree on the matter of a hot-button issue. A firm, precise stand, including drawing up specific legislation, will upset more people on both my flanks (some saying I went too far, some saying I went not far enough) than it will please those who agree with me, and that makes it easier for my opponent to outflank me next election. Some good ambiguous rhetoric, by contrast, will ideally convince most people that I'm not far from their position and still leave me the ability to accuse my opponent of being a radical zealot while I support only the most reasonable, common-sense measures.
One reason non-culture-war legislation gets passed much more easily is because it's too complicated for anyone to understand and is packed with special interest carveouts that are invisible to the average voter but that the special interests love. They're not going to punish you for not going far enough in getting them some beloved pork -- they'll understand your position and take what they can get.
They would need to extend that to everything medical, and not just women and abortion.
95% of abortions happen before week 16. Legal with no restrictions at all up until week 15 & then after that only being legal if a doctor agrees its in the interest of the mothers physical / psychological health would be agreeable to the majority of Dems in congress.
Fascinating that you believe you can speak for the majority of Dems; I'd never make such a claim about a huge group myself. Especially considering the VAST majority of those in either party are massively under-informed about the realities of reproduction in general and about abortion issues specifically. We have a country full of ignoramuses regarding these matters. They need plenty of education first.
You're splitting hairs, I made a valid point that it *could be* a Constitutional Amendment. Framework and restrictions to be debated as it should be.
Neither do Repubs want Congressional legislation about it. Because they know, since polls have looonnng been clear, that most Americans support legal abortion access with gestational limits.
That's an important and mostly overlooked point.
Excellent post.
But if there is a silver lining for Right-wingers for whom abortion is not a big deal, it's that Roe was genuinely terrible jurisprudence, and striking it down was the right thing to do for that reason. That it's had an undeniable electoral cost is unfortunate, but it still had to be done.
For those concerned with democracy, indeed, this is how it should be working: abortion law is now subject to the democratic, legislative process, as the ballot initiatives in many states are showing.
Dobbs means the democrats still have this tool and the republicans have lost it entirely.
The comments so far confirm your view. People who are anti-abortion don't care how unpopular that stance is, myself included. But as you frequently hear people like Yglesias say this to the left, now it is time for the right to hear it. If you really care about abortion, then you need to elect republicans. if you want to elect republicans, you need to stop talking about it.
The success of the left on this issue has been in their ability to frame it as a purely religious issue. The question of who counts as a human being and when you are allowed to destroy them is obviously relevant to atheists just as much as it is Christians. The conservative (and correct) viewpoint will do better if and when it can properly frame the issue around those questions. As to how they should go about doing that, I admit I'm not sure. You are unfortunately correct in that most people would rather just not think about the issue.
As someone who believes that abortion is murder of the unborn, I will say that I don't care how many elections Republicans lose over the issue. In my opinion, it shouldn't be up for a vote. "Just let people murder the unborn" is unacceptable, period. If advocating for the unborn's right to life leads to Democrats running everything, frankly I would consider that a serious indictment of liberal democracy and our society as a whole.
"Let people die." "Force people to bring pregnancies to term."
See, you are participating in the framing of the left right there, with those phrases. So of course you think conservatives should just let the issue go. I mean, if we just "let some people die," is it really that big of a deal? Shouldn't we stay focused on the big issues, like cutting taxes again?
Yes, it is a big deal. Killing children is a Big Deal. You would think this would be obvious to people. Failing to understand why people are highly motivated to prevent the murder of children (unborn children--but children nonetheless) shows that you really aren't taking the pro-life position very seriously. I mean, maybe you think that we are wrong, but if you can just try and put yourself in our shoes for two seconds, I don't think it's that hard to understand why we are so adamant.
And the use of the phrase "you let people die all the time" shows the importance of framing, because you are granting in that statement that abortion involves someone dying. The left's framing succeeds because they do not grant this premise or even talk about it. They stay laser focused on religion and "women's bodies" and the like. How long do you think their position would last if they were saying "well, we let people die all the time" as their defense of abortion?
Jorgeson - "well, we let people die all the time" as their defense of abortion?"
It's not about being a defense of abortion, it's about the God-awful hypocrisy of the supposedly "pro-life" crowd. They pick and choose which 'life' they seems to care about which is pretty disgusting. We send young adults (LIVING people not potential ones) off to die or get horribly maimed in wars for profit and conquest. Where are all the pro-lifers?
Everyday in the USA, we allow people to willfully act to let family members die if proper, prior legal documents were signed by the one they are letting die. Do you think those situations are clear and obvious? You would be completely wrong about that. They are merely a judgment call based on potentially fallible Doctors, faulty testing, exhausted and distraught family members or ones who have difficulty weighing all the factors at the best of times and potential inheritance. Talk about a very complicated dynamic! I've been in that circumstance and realize that people are woefully under-informed about how VAGUE the circumstances are. Where are the "pro-lifers" on that important issue?
I think most people aren't nearly prepared to hear about what goes in the organ donation world. And, I'm talking about in legitimate hospitals and with regular Doctors....not back alley stuff. It is nothing short of horrendous and it's way past time for people to wake up about that. "Pro-lifers" , you are needed there!
So, when you want to treat all life ^^^ as valid, including the pregnant women, then we can have a realistic conversation.
>We send young adults (LIVING people not potential ones) off to die or get horribly maimed in wars for profit and conquest. Where are all the pro-lifers?
I don't support that either?
>Everyday in the USA, we allow people to willfully act to let family members die if proper, prior legal documents were signed by the one they are letting die.
Not sure what this is referring to.
>So, when you want to treat all life ^^^ as valid, including the pregnant women, then we can have a realistic conversation.
Only one side here has decided that certain lives don't actually count as lives. It isn't the pro-life camp.
"I don't support that either?" -- But, you don't actually take a major stand on it...anywhere...do you?
"Not sure what this is referring to." -- Yes, this is the problem, Will. Far too many minimally-informed people in the USA. I was addressing Living Wills and giving the right to someone else to decide whether you continue to live or not. It is a very dicey proposition and, no doubt, POOR decisions are made in that regard frequently (see above reasons). But, where are the "pro-lifers"? I've heard absolute crickets from them about not providing life support or removing it. What's with that selectivity?
The bottom line is that people do not actually care about the pregnancies of strangers - there are other reasons they have their extreme stance and it's related to *themselves*.
>"I don't support that either?" -- But, you don't actually take a major stand on it...anywhere...do you?
I mean, if Hanania wrote an article defending America's foreign misadventures over the past 20 years, I'd probably write a comment criticizing him for that.
>"Not sure what this is referring to." -- Yes, this is the problem, Will. Far too many minimally-informed people in the USA. I was addressing Living Wills and giving the right to someone else to decide whether you continue to live or not.
Okay, well, if you signed away your right to life to someone else, fair enough. Fetuses obviously can't do that. Don't see your point.
>The bottom line is that people do not actually care about the pregnancies of strangers - there are other reasons they have their extreme stance and it's related to *themselves*.
If a stranger gets murdered, I will never know about it and it won't affect me. I still think murder should be illegal.
What's the point of winning elections if you don't enact anything you want? Overturning Roe and winning House by a small margin is much, much better than winning the house by 200 seats or something and the only policy "victory" being lowering taxes by 0.69420%.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Obviously it would be better for Republicans if they get to overturn Roe AND win the house by an overwhelming majority. That would signal widespread disapproval of the general Democrat agenda, and approval of alternatives put forward by Republicans. That is not what we are seeing now. We're seeing some disapproval of Biden's agenda, but given the kind of circumstances (inflation, immigration crisis, war in Ukraine, people getting tired of wokeness) we could have expected a lot more from the Republicans. It seems clear that voters don't really see the Republicans as a much better alternative at this point.
I think this could also indicate that our country is too polarized now and unlikely to swing wildly from one party to another. This has been the trend for a while. Each midterm the opposition seems to win less seats than the one before. Remember even in 2020, during the height of COVID, economic uncertainty and after 4 years of media campaign against Trump, Republicans still won 213 seats in the House and 50 seats in the Senate. It's seems to me that going forward both parties are guaranteed 200+ seats in the House and 48 seats in the Senate.
Yes, exactly. I think if we could dig into the details, we would find that the ELECTIONS in those states (FL, GA, TX) were handled more legitimately and, therefore, more accurately represent the will and interest of voters.
I mean, c'mon, look at Arizona....their election is being managed by one of the Governor candidates!! Can you say, "massive conflict of interest"?
What exactly do you think they are doing in Arizona? Given that the 2020 election in Arizona was audited several times and they found absolutely no issues, I don't see any reason to doubt that this is being handled well. It's the same argument Stacey Abrams made against Kemp in Georgia back in 2018. "Kemp controls the elections, so it must be rigged!", but without any actual evidence of anything occurring, it's just baseless accusations.
Nonsense. There were MANY election irregularities found in the AZ 2020 election. As there have been in many other states. You are deeply under-informed.
Kemp didn't handle the 2020 election, the SoS did, Raffensberger. In AZ the SoS overseeing the 2022 election IS Katie Hobbs, a candidate for Gov.
A MASSIVE conflict of interest.
I meant Kemp in 2018, when Stacey Abrams ran. He was SoS then, and Abrams cried foul for no reason and with no evidence.
And I do not think I am uninformed. The Republicans audited those results, and found no major irregularities. If you have links that say otherwise, please provide them, but everything I can read about their audits mentions no major issues discovered by those audits.
You got the vibe just from reading the comments on your last post that this would end up happening. A lot of centrists who have voted D their entire life are completely fed up with the incompetence of the party along with the insanity on the fringes, with the latter feeding into the former. A lot of people saying they would definitely vote republican if not for the absolute insanity on abortion. If R’s even had a tiny bit of nuance here (12 weeks for example), it would have been an easy W. But the fact that you have a non-0 chance of a national ban INCLUDING cases of rape is just too extreme, and on a much more personal level than the fringes of the left. I would rather get fired from my job for using the wrong pronouns than my daughter have to bear the child of her rapist, personally, and I think most would agree. And that’s not even getting into the talk of banning plan B and other types of contraception. So a lot of us either reluctantly pulled the lever for dems, or in my case decided to just stay home.
I don’t see a way out here since there is a subset of republicans that ONLY vote based on abortion, and they are among the most motivated special interests in all of politics. We’ll see if they soften their stance now that the damage is done, but I don’t think they will.
God awful candidates like Herschel Walker didn’t help the case either. With all politics being national, candidates like him reflected badly on republicans across the country. With DeSantis winning as he did, I feel like trumpism could finally be weakening. He has his cult followers, but with all of the serious issues facing the world, I think people are going to gravitate towards DeSantis when they see how competent he is.
Your comparison of Oz vs. Fetterman made me chuckle, but what makes me doubt it is that exit polls are showing even more of a gender divide in Fetterman vs. Oz than Biden vs. Trump, while we should naturally expect the "relatable ugly guy" schtick to work much better on men than women.
Of course those were governors. National policy like what Oz or Walker might have voted for is something different. My theory is that TX FL and GA simply have more conservatives (big C, small c, classical liberal or classical conservative, whatever) than PA.
And as for state policy that becomes irrelevant if federal policy gets made in the same area. Supremacy clause
Yes. I would bet that small c conservative Latinos (who are now big C Conservatives) made the difference in Florida.
Wait, Saving lives of the most vulnerable human beings is Racist ??? LOL I thought you were suppose to be one of the intelligent progressive guys out there, and you come with if you dont let me kill a baby, you are racist like affirmative action. You are missing the big picture here about the Democrat Massive win yesterday despite all against them:
The candidate doesn’t matter, the issue doesn’t matter.
Only Harvesting votes and voting early matters. Election day is Obsolete.
Democrats are Professionals in this new game. Harvest and you will Win Massive.
One thing I take away is that voters respond strongly to a threat that they believe is aimed at them, personally. What I think happened here, is that a lot of women who might think extreme abortion acts are monstrous and would never commit them against their own children, would still rather permit other women to do monstrous things to their own children than to create a 1-in-1000 gray-area situation in which pro-life laws put them, personally, in a bind.
I'm pro-life and believe that, ideally, abortion should be entirely illegal. I'm involved with and donate a few percentage points of my paycheck to our local crisis pregnancy center, which I believe does good work and saves lives. But I suppose, in my heart-of-hearts, I'm about 1000x more alarmed about all the ways that the Democrats aspire to target my children, my family, and my church than I am about a woman somewhere being legally permitted to kill her own children, even after they're born (as is apparently now enshrined in Montana law). So although I don't vote the same way as them, I think I get where these women are coming from.
We Christians need to internalize the idea of being a minority group, which is something Aaron Renn has discussed intelligently. As a minority group, our political focus needs to be on looking out for our own rights and freedoms, not trying to use politics to make the majority behave like us, against its will.
"We Christians." Do you believe that only Christians can oppose abortion, and that there is no reason for a secular person to abhor the practice?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Christian and pro-life. It's obviously not a coincidence that God happens to have the right position on this issue. But it's not that it's wrong because God told us so; God told us not to do it because it's wrong. When you grant the left's premise that this is purely a matter of religious dogma, then yes, they win.
Basic human intuition would lead us to conclude that later-stage abortions are monstrous. We know they're monstrous because the visual image of one is enough to make anyone's skin crawl, if he has warm blood in his veins. But when it comes to first-trimester (or pre-quickening) abortions, or matters like rape and incest, fallen human intuition isn't so great a guide. In these cases, in order to persuade seculars to save another woman's children against her own will you have to get philosophical, and while I don't fault people for attempting this fight, I don't really have a mind for it, and I'm skeptical of what it can accomplish.
Well, I don't think you necessarily have to get philosophical. If conservatives controlled and wielded the instruments of government, media, education, etc., instead of the left, people could easily be swayed to pro-life assumptions instead of anti-life ones. But that is not the world we live in, so yes, if you are going to confront someone who already holds the anti-life view, you will have to "get philosophical."
If we are granting that we can indeed make this a matter of "philosophy" rather than religious dogma, then don't we have an obligation to make the effort? We are talking about people killing their own children here. Sure, maybe it's an uphill battle, but it seems to me that we should at least *try*.
"We are talking about people killing their own children here". That's what YOU are talking about, but many (most) people don't see it that way, since for most people a fetus is not the same as a child, at least up until a certain number of weeks gestation. Of course different people draw the line in different places.
Well, I'm certainly not telling you not to try. I think it's all well and good to make an effort, but I think the way you get real results as an unpopular minority is by convincing mothers to choose life, not convincing people who don't care about other people's unborn children that they need to care more about those children than their own mothers. So the former is the part of the pro-life cause I've been supporting with my tangible efforts.
I also think that, for my part, if I'm going to invest a lot of energy in evangelizing to a hostile audience, I'd rather be evangelizing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not the Gospel of Abortion Laws.
>convincing people who don't care about other people's unborn children that they need to care more about those children than their own mothers
This implies that abortion is only ever a threat to "mothers," and never to the unborn that it kills. You are granting the leftist premise with that. Shouldn't people be more concerned with not letting their relatives be party to the murder of an unborn child? I can't imagine how I'd feel if one of my family members committed this act. It would be difficult for me to speak to that person again.
>I also think that, for my part, if I'm going to invest a lot of energy in evangelizing to a hostile audience, I'd rather be evangelizing the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not the Gospel of Abortion Laws.
If accepting the "Gospel of Jesus Christ" requires that you abhor abortion (which it does), people are gonna ask about that, and you should be ready to tell them the truth about it.
On your first point, you misunderstood me, because in no way did I mean to imply that mothers are the primary victims of abortion. I think maybe my sentence was unclear. It should read:
"convincing people who don't care about other people's unborn children that they need to care more about those children than the children's own mothers DO"
In other words, I think the crux of the challenge is you need to convince someone to care more about the unborn than that child's own mother does. That's a tall order; motherly love is a powerful force, which is one reason why the persuasion that reaches potential mothers is dramatically more impactful than pro-life political campaigning.
Most people have a natural bias towards subsidiarity, not wanting to interfere with other families. People might see bad parenting and shake their heads or gossip about it, but the median person is prepared to allow a very wide scope of bad parenting in his neighbors before saying "Those kids need to be taken away from them." Similarly, I think there is a wide scope for people to disapprove of abortion without feeling strongly about implementing more pro-life laws -- particularly once you get beyond banning the especially gross and shocking example of later stage abortions.
Why would abortion be wrong? The only possible answer is because it is the willful taking of a life. If a fetus is not a person, then there is nothing wrong at all with "sluts using it as a form of birth control." Likewise, if abortion represents the murder of a child, it is not somehow okay in certain circumstances but not okay in others. We don't allow infanticide just because "having a kid is a really bad idea" for the parent(s). Although, as Hanania unfortunately and correctly pointed out, the leftie viewpoint might indeed end up there, if allowed to continue on its course.
Well that's what it comes down to in the end. There's really no objective measure that tells us if a fetus is a person or not, a child or not, or at what point it changes from fetus to something else. For the pro-life people, I guess fetus=child/person, either from the moment of conception or from the moment we can measure a heartbeat. For most people though, it's a somewhat grey area. Even most pro-abortion people agree that there should be limits, so even they would agree that at some point, the fetus has (morally speaking) become too much an actual person/child for abortion to be acceptable. But what point that is exactly is up for debate.
>For the pro-life people, I guess fetus=child/person, either from the moment of conception or from the moment we can measure a heartbeat.
From the moment of conception. This is the point in time at which a distinct, individual human being comes into existence. This is an obvious and undeniable physical reality. A fetus is a human being in an early stage of development. Any other attempt to "define" away personhood is coping/motivated reasoning, and typically leads to some pretty horrific implications. If we can start picking and choosing who counts as human, why not declare that the mentally handicapped no longer count? What about infants? It isn't a coincidence that the leftist view is trending towards legalization of infanticide. Etc.
>But what point that is exactly is up for debate.
Correction: It is up for people's kneejerk feelings about whatever makes them feel most comfortable. There is no actual compelling reason that anyone can give to draw lines at 12 weeks, or 14 weeks, or whenever. Such distinctions are completely arbitrary. Conception, as the distinction in time between when an individual does not yet exist and when they begin to exist, is the only measure that is not arbitrary. All others that I've seen are simply motivated by a desire to preserve the legality of abortion; people already have the assumption that some amount of abortion must be okay, so when forced to confront the question of who is a person or not, they make something up which conforms with their priors.
The Democrat position of allowance up until point of birth is much more coherent than the wishy-washy random week limit that "most people" will tend towards. It's wrong, but it makes more sense if you accept the premise that a fetus is not a person and that the mother's "bodily autonomy" is a more important concern and such.
A blastocyst is no more a "distinct, individual human being" than a cancerous growth - both have DNA different from its bearer (as cancer always implies mutations), both can develop into bigger and more complex structures unless removed, and yet both have no brain and thus no ability to think (or, in this case, suffer, for those who care about that). The position of "as soon as conception happened, the new human is there with all the implications" has all the signs of a "magic bullet" solution: it's simple, intuitive and wrong. So one possible source for week limit is "when the fetus develops its own brain" or "when the fetus's brain develops such-and-such structures we know to be associated with thinking".
As for implications - I'll bite the bullet: there are adult beings with largely human DNA whose mind is so irreparably broken they are no longer humans in any reasonable sense, who in some important sense, depending on the source of the condition, either "are already dead as humans" or "were never humans to begin with".
How do you feel about rape exceptions? I’m aware it’s only a tiny fraction of total abortions, but to me (and most people) that’s such an extreme and unreasonable position, along with literally the absolute worst fear of most women. I can’t help but feel like most (not all) Christians would feel differently in the situation if it was their daughter/sister etc.
Also do you feel as though you should be able to kill an intruder who breaks into your house? Anarcho capitalist writer Walter Block makes the clever argument that the fetus is a person, but just as you can kill and unwanted intruder on your property it is morally justified to kill an intruder in your body. I think it applies stronger to cases of rape than “at will” abortions, because accidental pregnancy through consensual sex you “invited” them in, but it can be applied both ways depending on interpretation.
As I suggested, I'm fine with political compromises if they are needed to make pro-life legislation happen. I'm opposed to making the perfect the enemy of the good.
To your point about intruders, Calvin wrote:
"If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a foetus in the womb before it has come to light."
If there's a moral right to self-defense here, it is held by the unborn against those who would snuff them out. They're certainly not intruders deserving of death for being in their mother's womb. They never made a choice to be where they are, so they hold no moral culpability.
Rather than a home break-in, I'd say an abortion is more like someone being shoved out of a helicopter, crashing through your roof, miraculously surviving but falling unconscious, and then you finishing them off with a shotgun because they're an inconvenience to you (plus they wrecked your roof!)
It would be difficult, I'm sure, to carry an undesired child of rape to term. But doing the right thing is often difficult, and sometimes the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Ideally, if we all shared the same values, we could agree that we would like the law to bolster us in doing the right thing. But it's because we don't share values that I'm more accepting of compromise here.
Difficult seems like an understatement here. The idea of your very body reminding of you of what must be one of the most horrible moments of your life at every second of every day for nearly a year sounds like an absolute horror. Not to mention the actual birth, which can be traumatic in its own way as I've seen first hand.
Well, for one, I don't know that it has to be that bad, but I'm sure for some it is. People handle challenges and trauma differently.
But two, the silver lining is that the product of all of that is a baby, and babies are wonderful. If the mother doesn't delight in it, then an adoptive couple (of which there is no shortage) surely would. By choosing life, something good is able to come out of an awful event, instead of a final, brutal, ugly end to it all (that still doesn't erase the rape itself).
At the end of that recent movie The Last Duel (which I thought was very good, if not quite great), this woman, whom we watched suffer throughout the entire film, is able to unreservedly delight in her child, implied to be the result of her rape. I honestly thought the image was so pro-life that I couldn't believe it could still be included in a Hollywood film.
I had to look up what you meant re: Montana. What...the...?
Montana is the next Colorado, apparently.
This is what happens when your politics is only lowering taxes so business can move in. Guess what, when California businesses move in, California voters move in too. Pro-business Republicans are literally digging their own graves.
Call me naive but pro-life has all the hallmarks of a "right side of history" kind of issue.
-Expands the moral circle
-Easier to explain to a child
-Becomes more tenable as societies get richer
And just anecdotally, I've observed the most random, secular blue-tribe women come out and decide to keep pregnancies that logically they should have aborted. There's *something* to anti-abortion weed that allows it to randomly spring up in blue-tribe gardens. (And sure, there are red-tribe women who get abortions, but that can easily be explained by "people can ditch morality when it runs against their self-interest".)
It's a good point about Blue Tribe women. One of the most doctrinaire leftists I've known in my life, coming from a middle-class background, got pregnant by a fling and decided to drop out of grad school and do the single mom thing. BUT, despite that, to this day she would still tell you that there is nothing in the world wrong with abortion up until the moment of birth -- it just wasn't the right choice for her. I think that's normally how it goes -- few blue-tribers who choose life are moved at all to the pro-life political position.
Pro-life goes against the arc of history in this way: generally, liberalism and social atomization have inculcated in people the idea that other people's business is none of their business. And along with it, the elevation of "non-judgmentalism" as a value. One of the right's most successful social issues has been the Second Amendment. One reason it's been successful is that it's one of the few issues in which the social conservative position is the "leave me alone to make my own choices" position.
So although I'm pro-life, I'm not optimistic about pro-life as a political position. But I am optimistic about our ability to convince individual mothers to choose life, as seen in the fact that even mothers deep in the Blue Tribe can be reached.
"People understand that there is a religiously-motivated base of voters within the Republican coalition that wants to ban all abortions, and will never be satisfied with intermediate steps. One can say something similar about the pro-choice side. "
I don't think you can. A less silly example to cite here would be immigration, where there are plenty of unironic "we should flood the country with foreigners without any regard to assimilation or cultural compatibility" libs. Likewise, you see plenty of backlash when liberals overplay their hand on immigration policy.
"pro-infanticide", on the other hand, is just a ridiculous caricature that describes basically no liberal.
Richard, I get your point but Roe had to be overturned. It set a horrible precedent for constitutional law. As you know, all it did was return the decision on abortion to the people. If "the people" don't like that, and would rather have an unelected body of 9 oligarchs running the country, then we're completely lost.
Liberals do have higher IQs than conservatives, cos (as you point out) the former is the creed of the uni grad class. This has *nothing* to do with their political tactics. Or indeed their political views. If they came to their opinions and tactics through deliberative thought, then sure, maybe their high IQ would help. But they don't arrive at it through thought. They arrive at it through status signalling and purity spirals on Twitter. Itself grounded in differentiating themselves from whatever the Republican position is. What's the proof? Lods of instances. But the best is probs the Defund the Police nonsense in the runup to the 2020 election. To say nothing about the excuse-making for riots. They didn't do this cos it's a sensible position, much less cos they thought it would help Biden with swing voters. They did this cos the most taboo thing in their social milieu is to be racist like those awful rednecks. And do they had a purity spiral to be as 'anti-racist' (anti poor white) as they could, and that's where it lead them. Pure performative indignation and post hoc rationalisation. It's through *sheer luck* that the in-group peacocking around abortion - which spurred the Dems to make that the most salient campaign point - happened to coincide with the v real fears of millions of normies and middle class swing voters.
I agree that the GOP had an unimpressive day and that many of its candidates were mediocre, at best. I am skeptical, however, that the results turned significantly on the abortion issue.
Rather, it seems, based on federal elections for the last 20 years or so, the U.S. electorate is simply evenly divided and that played itself out again yesterday. While the pre-game pundits went on about a coming "red wave", that never really appeared evident in the actual polling.
The GOP's main problem today, I think, is that it does not offer a coherent and attractive set of positions to voters. For example, you have a GOP that theoretically supports free markets and tax cuts while simultaneously supporting import tariffs and domestic corporate subsidies. And the positions the GOP should support -- limited government, free markets, individual liberty -- generally require much more than cute political sound bites to justify (e.g., the typical glib politician can easily posture on his support of "price gouging" laws, while his more economically literate opponent would struggle with a lesson in economics to show that such laws actually harm consumers).
Consequently, the GOP needs a fairly well-educated electorate, and that is an increasing problem in my view. Left-wing institutions, including the education system and most major media outlets, have been and continue to be effective at indoctrinating voters (and pre-voters). Your average voter today learns to reflexively respond to any societal problem (real or imagined) with the notion that government needs to "do something" rather than consider that the work of private individuals, institutions, and markets are generally much better alternatives. And how many voters today understand the importance of our federal government being one of limited and enumerated powers? When His Majesty Biden declared a canceling of student loans, I doubt those high IQ liberal college kids paused to consider whether this act was consistent with the Constitution's separation of powers.
Florida passed a 15 week restriction and R's did great there.
I'm an atheist and extremely anti-abortion (relevant: raised Catholic). I think this is an entirely consistent humanist position. Abortion kills humans, hence I'm against it. And not just humans, completely innocent children.
I can distinguish this from being pro-euthanasia (which I'm mostly against, in fact), and being pro-death penalty (which I am very much in favor of). People being euthanized tend to be old and have already contributed most of what they will contribute, while criminals are criminals.
Preventing the murder of children is a value. IT IS A VALUE. If it's unpopular, I don't give a single fuck. People who are pro-child murder are wrong. If it leads to Republicans losing elections for a few cycles or even forever, that's regrettable but worthwhile. Even if Dobbs leads to more abortion extremism in deep blue states (unlikely but possible), it will still lead to less child murder overall. Abortion extremism, in general, is not popular and will never gain currency at a national level, or at least not until we escape the childbirth loop through machine-based surrogacy (~10-20 years) and/or cloning (~50-100 years).
There's a great Vox article by (I think) Kelsey Piper from a while ago; it was part of a big futurism feature they had at the time, and I cannot find it for the life of me. Anyway, she (or the article) made the point that in the relatively near future our abortion debate will be entirely irrelevant due to the emergence of new reproductive technologies like artificial wombs. Victories against abortion between then and now will set us up for a future so bright I can hardly imagine it. Two billion Americans.
"but my preferred explanation is that this is just another data point proving that liberals have higher IQs."
Sorry not buying this
a party that promotes LGBT lunacy, gives hormones to kids and babbles about not knowing what a woman is, has no business considering themselves as high IQ.
Their propaganda machine seems better, though.
and conservatives seem to be rather unbothered by affirmative action, as contrasting to liberals, that are willing to march in numbers for whatever they find annoying.