Oh my god this consultant class will do anything - anything - to avoid talking about the issue that affects 99% of voters - economic inequality and the cost of living. These people are deluding themselves if they think abortion is going to be a more salient message than the rich should pay their fair share, we shouldn't have trillionaires when people are dying from lack of health care, etc. They have their own economic security, they have their donors bankrolling them, they will be just fine as long as we all collectively look the other way from the biggest issue this country is facing and which crosses the right/left divide - the inherent unfairness in this system they barely want to tinker with, much less change.
Thank you, Lauren. Your reporting and the comments for this piece are excellent. I have always been dismayed how the issue of reproductive freedom has been mired in hypocrisy: men pontificating about ANY part of it, supercilious controllers who think they have a direct link to the will of the Divinity for instructing the rest of us how to conduct our lives. The supreme irony is that “right-to-life” concern generally extends basically inutero. Before and after that, pre-natal and post-natal care, decent housing, living wages, actual respect for people, is scarcely of interest. And heaven forbid they should be expected to make any financial contribution for these no doubt lazy, shiftless and careless creatures.
While I agree with the points made, what does trouble me is the reliance on Democratic consultants. Please Democrats, stop the consultants and just speak to the issues from your heart. Be authentic on abortion and other issues and stop listening to consultants and Democratic aligned groups. Voters respond to authenticity, much less so to canned answers.
Preach. The consultant quotes in this piece should be exhibit A for how worthless they are and how the Democrats need to stop relying on them to tell their politicians what to believe in and say as they campaign. Until they ditch all the reliance on consultants and operatives, they will never stop coming across as utterly phony politicians who are focused solely on trying to win elections by crafting the perfectly bespoke message for this and only this particular election. Since they don’t actually believe in the consultant speak they’ve been fed they won’t deliver on any of it anyway, and they’ll get tossed out of office when they don’t deliver anything of importance and start the whole process of trying to triangulate once again. Ditch the consultants, find some conviction in what you believe, and lead, otherwise get out of the damn way for someone who can
Democrats can only win on abortion if they understand that a baby is a life too. The Clinton messaging worked on abortion because it was seen as humane respecting women while doing everything to reduce the number of abortions.
Jared Polis has been one of the best on this following in Barack Obama’s footsteps. Abortion is not the only option. Democrats can link access to abortion, promoting adoption as an alternative, and continuing to push for support so young mothers choose to keep their babies through the continuing of child tax credits and support programs like CHIP and other helpful programs.
The problem with the post 2018 messaging from the Democrats is it is hyper-focused on abortion and not the alternatives the party used to champion. As a result the political benefits were more energizing the already staunch Democrats when if messages better it could really actually swing the voters they need that just want to hear the issue spoken of in a humane way. You don’t have to be religious to understand that unborn babies deserve protections and abortion should only be a last resort.
An unborn baby has moral value as potential human life. It does not have rights, and the baby’s potential life is not and can never be treated by the state as more important or valuable than the actual life of the mother. None of those statements should be remotely controversial, and they were the bedrock underlying principles of abortion jurisprudence for years before Dobbs flipped that on its head by declaring that women had no relevant liberty interest or right at all, and that the state may subordinate them to an unborn child. Thats not prolife. It’s dystopian, as we have all seen in the aftermath of Dobbs.
If you want to be pro-life, and provide protections to the value and potential life of the unborn, and reduce the occurrence of elective abortions, then your policy solutions need to focus on ensuring access and availability of quality reproductive healthcare, and create a society with a culture of support for women, families, and young children. That would create a pro-life culture and society.
You claim that there is an alleged hyper focus by Democrats on abortion without regards for any alternatives and that swing voters need to hear democrats speak about the issue more humanely. I don’t think that is remotely true in reality, but the most problematic aspect of this framing is that it ignores just how inhumane, cruel, deadly and destructive the Republican response to Dobbs has been to women’s healthcare and pregnancy outcomes in this country.
The Republican imposition of draconian abortion bans with bureaucratic legal exceptions that require the establishment of legal proofs to the states satisfaction under threat of criminal penalties and professional ruin in the name of protecting the unborn has been an absolute disaster of public policy that can in no way be described as remotely pro-life. The inhumane and cruel zealotry of state legislatures and the anti-abortion groups that write that bans for them and slander any and all objections, criticisms, and warnings about what these bans will do show us exactly why that the state has no business intruding in healthcare issues in the name of restricting abortion.
These red state bans have resulted in a wealth of data on maternal mortality rates, infant mortality rates, and pregnancy outcome statistics, that portray the policy outcomes of these as more akin to a death cult than a movement that has any business calling itself prolife. And this is made worse by the fact that those in charge of drafting, implementing, and enforcing these bans and the systems they create can often be seen reveling in their cruelty, inhumanity, and disregard for the life of pregnant women and their babies in the event of pregnancy complications and outcomes that challenge the assumptions underlying their anti-abortion zealotry or where they were accurately warned about such consequences. When they refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for their policy outcomes and instead try to blame the people who warned them for staging awful outcomes like some false flag driven by our dedication to killing babies, it just adds an exclamation point to their unhinged, inhumane cruelty and zealotry.
These people, and by extension the government they control, need to get the hell out of the doctors office and stay out of women’s healthcare as they have quickly proven how little they care about women or their babies and how much they cannot be trusted. So please, skip me with the need for humanity pep talk when every GOP controlled state government is fanatically dedicated to controlling, subjugating, and killing their women without regard for the babies they allegedly exist to protect
It's not a baby, it is a bunch of cells with the potential to become a child. Not everyone wants to bear a child and then put it up for adoption. That is traumatic for the woman and the child. Women who are not ready to bear a child need more than just child tax credits and CHIPS. I teach in prison and see the result of what happens when women bear children and are unprepared. It creates a lifetime of scars. When a woman is pregnant, it should be her decision alone on how to proceed. Not yours and not a politician.
He goes too far to be sure, but an unborn baby is more than a clump of cells and has real moral value. He is right that rejecting this entirely is a mistake, but he’s also wrong to suggest this should empower the state to violate a woman’s liberty in the name of banning or directly restricting the availability of abortion. Whatever the value of potential human life of an unborn child, it cannot override the value of the actual human life of the mother, and the government has no legitimate business intruding in that relationship to elevate the value of the unborn child over the mother, as Alito expressly does in Dobbs.
We can all agree that we should want to build a society in which women experience few unplanned pregnancies and are supported in the community, family, and society with enough healthcare, services, and resources that limits the instance of elective abortions as much as possible in the front end, while we also reject the legitimacy of any attempt by the state to restrict or ban abortion on the back end for all the destructive consequences it unleashes
All reasons voiced by cultural and religious conservatives are based on there christian beliefs. the 1st of the 1st amendments states very clearly that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion " .This should be clear enough for the low intellect Justices to comprehend. The decision should be between a woman and her doctor. even if it is late term. A fetus is not viable until 32 weeks without increasingly intensive medical intervention. The Founding generation had witnessed first had the evil when any religion became involved in governance. It is always a tyranny to be destroyed.
Jesus Christ the consultant class is exhausting. Stop triangulating, stop trying to craft the perfectly bespoke message every election cycle. Voters are tired of being managed by phony sounding politicians, they want someone to lead. That is not something the feckless consultant class and political operatives who spend all this time arguing over how much Democrats should center abortion are even capable of doing. We need people who have the conviction of their beliefs and are then guided by those convictions, not people who believe nothing except whatever they think they need to say and the correct way to say it to get elected. You want an abortion message, it’s very simple.
Get the government, lawyers, bureaucrats, zealot, and ideologues out of the ER, the delivery room, and women’s bodies. Leave women and their doctors the fuck alone and stop threatening to prosecute healthcare providers, women, and their friends and family members for murder over miscarriages and pregnancy outcomes that don’t check a bunch of boxes to the states satisfaction. Mind your own fucking business.
This isn’t some academic moralist issue that requires careful messaging. It’s literal state sponsored terror and tyranny in the name of religious and moral zealotry and the misogynistic control and submission of women, and it’s destroying the availability and quality of reproductive healthcare and obstetrics in this country. And getting women killed.
Great reporting as always. It is frustrating that the Democratic party is run by consultants who are afraid of their own shadows. It was telling that a lot of the conventional wisdom of 2025 was to "moderate" and sacrifice women's ability to make their own healthcare decisions for some phantom voters. It was a cruel and unnecessary. Anyone watching red states enact cruel bans could make the case that pointing out Republican's extremism might be sound politics. Remember that the "Weird" attacks DID work in 2024 but that the consultants were uncomfortable so a successful attack was abandoned. Glad the consultants have woken up to the idea that protecting women's rights is good politics and moral to boot.
How does one “moderate” on this issue? These idiots do not think any of these things through, as legislative bans with conditions and exceptions or any kind all create and lead to the exact same problems, which is the delay, withholding, and chilling of standard of care reproductive healthcare because doctors are worried about being criminally prosecuted or professionally ruined and need to consult with a lawyer or administrator before providing care for their patients.
Either way, women will be traumatized, injured, and die. Children will be orphaned. Husbands widowed. Families destroyed. All while the consultants triangulate over the perfect message to win an election, thus showing how little they actually care about the real people affected.
Women should not die or be traumatized by pregnancy complications because the state is sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong and interfering with their healthcare. End of story.
More attention should be paid to Article VI of the Constitution that prohibits religious tests as a qualification to hold public office. Meaning that self-proclaimed "pro-lifers" can't require that of candidates they support for office.
Dobbs created the circumstances for inequality. Because of Dobbs the rights of girls and women flicker on and off like faulty light bulbs purely as a function of which side of a state line one happens to be on (some zealots are trying to make sure those rights flicker off even in states that are attempting to protect them).
Tens of thousands of doctors--most, but by no means all, specialists in OB/GYN and related fields--are leaving the Republican states that enacted draconian bans following Dobbs. Applications for medical residencies in red state hospitals are measurably down. There's a real brain drain going on.
Clinics and maternity wards have closed as a direct consequence of Dobbs. This is having a negative impact on women experiencing complex pregnancies as well as on women who want abortions.
Dobbs has created quite the mess, in short. Politicians should be talking about the mess the Roberts Six have caused---the stupidity and wastefulness and unintended consequences, the harm done to women's health, to public health and to the economies of red states---rather than reviving the old, noisy debate about abortion itself.
People know how they feel about abortion. But people are now beginning to learn that how they feel about abortion may matter less than how they feel about effective, equitable governance.
It did a lot worse than that. Roe and its progeny were all based on the notion that women have a liberty interest that restrains the state from intruding into their bodies. All of the abortion case law between Roe and Dobbs was about the precise scope of that liberty interest and the outer contours of permissible intrusions. Dobbs erased the idea that women have any liberty interest that restrains the state in its entirety. This is critical, bc the difference across state lines isn’t about rights and liberty. It’s really just about outcomes, which are better in Blue states that protect women under state law and provide better healthcare. As far as women’s rights and liberty interests are concerned Dobbs applies equally across state lines. Red state or blue, Dobbs says women have none. If the federal government ever came after abortion access or reproductive healthcare in blue states, Dobbs would be the precedent relied upon to establish that no women in this country anywhere has the basic rights and liberty interests to be free from government tyranny their entire lives. And let there be no question, they would do it in a second if they had the political power to pull it off.
A major problem with the right to lifers abortion bans is that maternal mortality rates have increased because forced births with no prenatal care kills mothers.
The anti abortion people don’t give a damn about women enough to prevent avoidable deaths of mothers. Another inflicted conservative cruelty.
May be more effective to argue that Dobbs allowed the States to impose a specific religious doctrine on women, thereby confusing the supposed separation of church and state. Arguing that the decision doesn't make sense and is based on cherry-picked data falls on deaf ears. Arguing that "originalism" is utter nonsense is too difficult for many people to comprehend. Easier just to explain that the consequence of Dobbs is arbitrary and capricious... Alternatively, it would be strikingly honest just to acknowledge that women have been aborting fetuses for centuries and will continue to do so for self-preservation.
A presidential candidate who is able to get their message out almost exclusively about abortion and being against Trump probably will not do well. A candidate in a much lower-turnout election in a state where abortion rights are actually at stake can make the election about abortion and will do well. There may be some R+20 places where a candidate not being doctrinaire pro-abortion is necessary for the electorate to even consider them but the party should remember that abortion rights have almost never lost when they have actually been put to voters in a referendum.
I appreciate you interviewing Mini. she would probably use the word “anti-choice”rather than “pro life.” I think Democratic candidates saying they are “personally” against abortion is giving ammunition to the other side.
I think it’s simply enough to say that the government has no business intruding in the ER, delivery room, and doctors offices. What I am personally for or against or would do or advise and support a family member to do is irrelevant. I don’t think the state has any business injecting itself in the doctor patient relationship or making decisions about a women’s healthcare options
Oh my god this consultant class will do anything - anything - to avoid talking about the issue that affects 99% of voters - economic inequality and the cost of living. These people are deluding themselves if they think abortion is going to be a more salient message than the rich should pay their fair share, we shouldn't have trillionaires when people are dying from lack of health care, etc. They have their own economic security, they have their donors bankrolling them, they will be just fine as long as we all collectively look the other way from the biggest issue this country is facing and which crosses the right/left divide - the inherent unfairness in this system they barely want to tinker with, much less change.
Thank you, Lauren. Your reporting and the comments for this piece are excellent. I have always been dismayed how the issue of reproductive freedom has been mired in hypocrisy: men pontificating about ANY part of it, supercilious controllers who think they have a direct link to the will of the Divinity for instructing the rest of us how to conduct our lives. The supreme irony is that “right-to-life” concern generally extends basically inutero. Before and after that, pre-natal and post-natal care, decent housing, living wages, actual respect for people, is scarcely of interest. And heaven forbid they should be expected to make any financial contribution for these no doubt lazy, shiftless and careless creatures.
While I agree with the points made, what does trouble me is the reliance on Democratic consultants. Please Democrats, stop the consultants and just speak to the issues from your heart. Be authentic on abortion and other issues and stop listening to consultants and Democratic aligned groups. Voters respond to authenticity, much less so to canned answers.
Preach. The consultant quotes in this piece should be exhibit A for how worthless they are and how the Democrats need to stop relying on them to tell their politicians what to believe in and say as they campaign. Until they ditch all the reliance on consultants and operatives, they will never stop coming across as utterly phony politicians who are focused solely on trying to win elections by crafting the perfectly bespoke message for this and only this particular election. Since they don’t actually believe in the consultant speak they’ve been fed they won’t deliver on any of it anyway, and they’ll get tossed out of office when they don’t deliver anything of importance and start the whole process of trying to triangulate once again. Ditch the consultants, find some conviction in what you believe, and lead, otherwise get out of the damn way for someone who can
Democrats can only win on abortion if they understand that a baby is a life too. The Clinton messaging worked on abortion because it was seen as humane respecting women while doing everything to reduce the number of abortions.
Jared Polis has been one of the best on this following in Barack Obama’s footsteps. Abortion is not the only option. Democrats can link access to abortion, promoting adoption as an alternative, and continuing to push for support so young mothers choose to keep their babies through the continuing of child tax credits and support programs like CHIP and other helpful programs.
The problem with the post 2018 messaging from the Democrats is it is hyper-focused on abortion and not the alternatives the party used to champion. As a result the political benefits were more energizing the already staunch Democrats when if messages better it could really actually swing the voters they need that just want to hear the issue spoken of in a humane way. You don’t have to be religious to understand that unborn babies deserve protections and abortion should only be a last resort.
An unborn baby has moral value as potential human life. It does not have rights, and the baby’s potential life is not and can never be treated by the state as more important or valuable than the actual life of the mother. None of those statements should be remotely controversial, and they were the bedrock underlying principles of abortion jurisprudence for years before Dobbs flipped that on its head by declaring that women had no relevant liberty interest or right at all, and that the state may subordinate them to an unborn child. Thats not prolife. It’s dystopian, as we have all seen in the aftermath of Dobbs.
If you want to be pro-life, and provide protections to the value and potential life of the unborn, and reduce the occurrence of elective abortions, then your policy solutions need to focus on ensuring access and availability of quality reproductive healthcare, and create a society with a culture of support for women, families, and young children. That would create a pro-life culture and society.
You claim that there is an alleged hyper focus by Democrats on abortion without regards for any alternatives and that swing voters need to hear democrats speak about the issue more humanely. I don’t think that is remotely true in reality, but the most problematic aspect of this framing is that it ignores just how inhumane, cruel, deadly and destructive the Republican response to Dobbs has been to women’s healthcare and pregnancy outcomes in this country.
The Republican imposition of draconian abortion bans with bureaucratic legal exceptions that require the establishment of legal proofs to the states satisfaction under threat of criminal penalties and professional ruin in the name of protecting the unborn has been an absolute disaster of public policy that can in no way be described as remotely pro-life. The inhumane and cruel zealotry of state legislatures and the anti-abortion groups that write that bans for them and slander any and all objections, criticisms, and warnings about what these bans will do show us exactly why that the state has no business intruding in healthcare issues in the name of restricting abortion.
These red state bans have resulted in a wealth of data on maternal mortality rates, infant mortality rates, and pregnancy outcome statistics, that portray the policy outcomes of these as more akin to a death cult than a movement that has any business calling itself prolife. And this is made worse by the fact that those in charge of drafting, implementing, and enforcing these bans and the systems they create can often be seen reveling in their cruelty, inhumanity, and disregard for the life of pregnant women and their babies in the event of pregnancy complications and outcomes that challenge the assumptions underlying their anti-abortion zealotry or where they were accurately warned about such consequences. When they refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for their policy outcomes and instead try to blame the people who warned them for staging awful outcomes like some false flag driven by our dedication to killing babies, it just adds an exclamation point to their unhinged, inhumane cruelty and zealotry.
These people, and by extension the government they control, need to get the hell out of the doctors office and stay out of women’s healthcare as they have quickly proven how little they care about women or their babies and how much they cannot be trusted. So please, skip me with the need for humanity pep talk when every GOP controlled state government is fanatically dedicated to controlling, subjugating, and killing their women without regard for the babies they allegedly exist to protect
It's not a baby, it is a bunch of cells with the potential to become a child. Not everyone wants to bear a child and then put it up for adoption. That is traumatic for the woman and the child. Women who are not ready to bear a child need more than just child tax credits and CHIPS. I teach in prison and see the result of what happens when women bear children and are unprepared. It creates a lifetime of scars. When a woman is pregnant, it should be her decision alone on how to proceed. Not yours and not a politician.
He goes too far to be sure, but an unborn baby is more than a clump of cells and has real moral value. He is right that rejecting this entirely is a mistake, but he’s also wrong to suggest this should empower the state to violate a woman’s liberty in the name of banning or directly restricting the availability of abortion. Whatever the value of potential human life of an unborn child, it cannot override the value of the actual human life of the mother, and the government has no legitimate business intruding in that relationship to elevate the value of the unborn child over the mother, as Alito expressly does in Dobbs.
We can all agree that we should want to build a society in which women experience few unplanned pregnancies and are supported in the community, family, and society with enough healthcare, services, and resources that limits the instance of elective abortions as much as possible in the front end, while we also reject the legitimacy of any attempt by the state to restrict or ban abortion on the back end for all the destructive consequences it unleashes
Democrats need to run on the 4 C's: Costs, Competence, Corruption, and Cruelty.
We know which category the abortion bans and draconian limits which endanger women's lives fall under.
All reasons voiced by cultural and religious conservatives are based on there christian beliefs. the 1st of the 1st amendments states very clearly that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion " .This should be clear enough for the low intellect Justices to comprehend. The decision should be between a woman and her doctor. even if it is late term. A fetus is not viable until 32 weeks without increasingly intensive medical intervention. The Founding generation had witnessed first had the evil when any religion became involved in governance. It is always a tyranny to be destroyed.
Jesus Christ the consultant class is exhausting. Stop triangulating, stop trying to craft the perfectly bespoke message every election cycle. Voters are tired of being managed by phony sounding politicians, they want someone to lead. That is not something the feckless consultant class and political operatives who spend all this time arguing over how much Democrats should center abortion are even capable of doing. We need people who have the conviction of their beliefs and are then guided by those convictions, not people who believe nothing except whatever they think they need to say and the correct way to say it to get elected. You want an abortion message, it’s very simple.
Get the government, lawyers, bureaucrats, zealot, and ideologues out of the ER, the delivery room, and women’s bodies. Leave women and their doctors the fuck alone and stop threatening to prosecute healthcare providers, women, and their friends and family members for murder over miscarriages and pregnancy outcomes that don’t check a bunch of boxes to the states satisfaction. Mind your own fucking business.
This isn’t some academic moralist issue that requires careful messaging. It’s literal state sponsored terror and tyranny in the name of religious and moral zealotry and the misogynistic control and submission of women, and it’s destroying the availability and quality of reproductive healthcare and obstetrics in this country. And getting women killed.
Great reporting as always. It is frustrating that the Democratic party is run by consultants who are afraid of their own shadows. It was telling that a lot of the conventional wisdom of 2025 was to "moderate" and sacrifice women's ability to make their own healthcare decisions for some phantom voters. It was a cruel and unnecessary. Anyone watching red states enact cruel bans could make the case that pointing out Republican's extremism might be sound politics. Remember that the "Weird" attacks DID work in 2024 but that the consultants were uncomfortable so a successful attack was abandoned. Glad the consultants have woken up to the idea that protecting women's rights is good politics and moral to boot.
How does one “moderate” on this issue? These idiots do not think any of these things through, as legislative bans with conditions and exceptions or any kind all create and lead to the exact same problems, which is the delay, withholding, and chilling of standard of care reproductive healthcare because doctors are worried about being criminally prosecuted or professionally ruined and need to consult with a lawyer or administrator before providing care for their patients.
Either way, women will be traumatized, injured, and die. Children will be orphaned. Husbands widowed. Families destroyed. All while the consultants triangulate over the perfect message to win an election, thus showing how little they actually care about the real people affected.
Women should not die or be traumatized by pregnancy complications because the state is sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong and interfering with their healthcare. End of story.
More attention should be paid to Article VI of the Constitution that prohibits religious tests as a qualification to hold public office. Meaning that self-proclaimed "pro-lifers" can't require that of candidates they support for office.
Dobbs created the circumstances for inequality. Because of Dobbs the rights of girls and women flicker on and off like faulty light bulbs purely as a function of which side of a state line one happens to be on (some zealots are trying to make sure those rights flicker off even in states that are attempting to protect them).
Tens of thousands of doctors--most, but by no means all, specialists in OB/GYN and related fields--are leaving the Republican states that enacted draconian bans following Dobbs. Applications for medical residencies in red state hospitals are measurably down. There's a real brain drain going on.
Clinics and maternity wards have closed as a direct consequence of Dobbs. This is having a negative impact on women experiencing complex pregnancies as well as on women who want abortions.
Dobbs has created quite the mess, in short. Politicians should be talking about the mess the Roberts Six have caused---the stupidity and wastefulness and unintended consequences, the harm done to women's health, to public health and to the economies of red states---rather than reviving the old, noisy debate about abortion itself.
People know how they feel about abortion. But people are now beginning to learn that how they feel about abortion may matter less than how they feel about effective, equitable governance.
It did a lot worse than that. Roe and its progeny were all based on the notion that women have a liberty interest that restrains the state from intruding into their bodies. All of the abortion case law between Roe and Dobbs was about the precise scope of that liberty interest and the outer contours of permissible intrusions. Dobbs erased the idea that women have any liberty interest that restrains the state in its entirety. This is critical, bc the difference across state lines isn’t about rights and liberty. It’s really just about outcomes, which are better in Blue states that protect women under state law and provide better healthcare. As far as women’s rights and liberty interests are concerned Dobbs applies equally across state lines. Red state or blue, Dobbs says women have none. If the federal government ever came after abortion access or reproductive healthcare in blue states, Dobbs would be the precedent relied upon to establish that no women in this country anywhere has the basic rights and liberty interests to be free from government tyranny their entire lives. And let there be no question, they would do it in a second if they had the political power to pull it off.
A major problem with the right to lifers abortion bans is that maternal mortality rates have increased because forced births with no prenatal care kills mothers.
The anti abortion people don’t give a damn about women enough to prevent avoidable deaths of mothers. Another inflicted conservative cruelty.
Damn straight. There is nothing pro-life about the anti-abortion zealots and there never has been. It’s actually about control, and it always was.
I think the argument should be simple. The government (and religions) should mind their own damn business.
May be more effective to argue that Dobbs allowed the States to impose a specific religious doctrine on women, thereby confusing the supposed separation of church and state. Arguing that the decision doesn't make sense and is based on cherry-picked data falls on deaf ears. Arguing that "originalism" is utter nonsense is too difficult for many people to comprehend. Easier just to explain that the consequence of Dobbs is arbitrary and capricious... Alternatively, it would be strikingly honest just to acknowledge that women have been aborting fetuses for centuries and will continue to do so for self-preservation.
A presidential candidate who is able to get their message out almost exclusively about abortion and being against Trump probably will not do well. A candidate in a much lower-turnout election in a state where abortion rights are actually at stake can make the election about abortion and will do well. There may be some R+20 places where a candidate not being doctrinaire pro-abortion is necessary for the electorate to even consider them but the party should remember that abortion rights have almost never lost when they have actually been put to voters in a referendum.
And anyone who correctly points out that abortion is a religious freedom issue will warm my heart sufficiently that I may actually give them money.
I appreciate you interviewing Mini. she would probably use the word “anti-choice”rather than “pro life.” I think Democratic candidates saying they are “personally” against abortion is giving ammunition to the other side.
I think it’s simply enough to say that the government has no business intruding in the ER, delivery room, and doctors offices. What I am personally for or against or would do or advise and support a family member to do is irrelevant. I don’t think the state has any business injecting itself in the doctor patient relationship or making decisions about a women’s healthcare options