If Republicans want to "crack the code" on abortion, here's a hint: remember when John McCain got criticized for putting air quotes around "health of the mother"? That has a lot to do with what's happening here.
People often point to polls showing that Americans aren't too comfortable with abortion past the first trimester. And it's easy …
If Republicans want to "crack the code" on abortion, here's a hint: remember when John McCain got criticized for putting air quotes around "health of the mother"? That has a lot to do with what's happening here.
People often point to polls showing that Americans aren't too comfortable with abortion past the first trimester. And it's easy to say in a poll that second trimester abortions should be "illegal in most cases". But Americans still overwhelmingly support exceptions for the health of the mother at this point in a pregnancy.
The problem then, comes when you really start to think about how this would be implemented. As McCain's tone-deaf gaffe indicated, the pro-life movement is averse to unqualified health of the mother exceptions, because they know that these sorts of things can and will be interpreted broadly, as they are in many other countries that have legal time limits on abortions. That's why even though these countries tend to get used as examples from people who advocate for things like 15-week bans, people who understand the American pro-life movement know that such laws would hardly assuage them.
Yet it's not hard to see that placing further qualifications on "health of the mother" would be disastrous for women's health during pregnancy. For doctors to not have complete authority to make such decisions, to have to conform to the strictures authored by some anti-abortion lobbyist, under potential penalty of *murder*, would induce an understandable paranoia in practitioners that would lead to them simply refusing to perform abortions past the allowable limit. And mothers would bear the cost of this, some of them paying with their lives.
The Republicans can't "crack the code" because they won't like the answer. Which is to tell the pro-life movement that attempting to curtail abortion through coercive laws is futile, because people tend to realize how fraught and dangerous they are when they really think about it. That if they really want to reduce abortion, they're going about it all wrong. That they need to focus on persuading people,
which means supporting young and single mothers whose motivations for abortion are primarily poor finances and a lack of resources.
That won't stop all abortions – nothing will. And that's the problem, because the pro-life movement is committed to the delusion that they can drop the number of abortions to zero. To admit otherwise would be to admit that fifty years of struggle have been for naught. That the course of action they would need to embark upon by changing tactics now is something they could have been doing already, something they utterly ignored for half a century as they became fixated on judgemental condemnation as a substitute for actually valuing life. The sunk cost fallacy on steroids.
And since the Republican party clearly has no interest these days in short-term pain for long-term gain, by alienating the core of their base in hopes of someday building a politically healthier constituency, they will do nothing. And (hopefully) continue reaping the electoral consequences until the old guard of American evangelicalism all but dies out, crushed under the weight of its own increasing irrelevance.
If Republicans want to "crack the code" on abortion, here's a hint: remember when John McCain got criticized for putting air quotes around "health of the mother"? That has a lot to do with what's happening here.
People often point to polls showing that Americans aren't too comfortable with abortion past the first trimester. And it's easy to say in a poll that second trimester abortions should be "illegal in most cases". But Americans still overwhelmingly support exceptions for the health of the mother at this point in a pregnancy.
The problem then, comes when you really start to think about how this would be implemented. As McCain's tone-deaf gaffe indicated, the pro-life movement is averse to unqualified health of the mother exceptions, because they know that these sorts of things can and will be interpreted broadly, as they are in many other countries that have legal time limits on abortions. That's why even though these countries tend to get used as examples from people who advocate for things like 15-week bans, people who understand the American pro-life movement know that such laws would hardly assuage them.
Yet it's not hard to see that placing further qualifications on "health of the mother" would be disastrous for women's health during pregnancy. For doctors to not have complete authority to make such decisions, to have to conform to the strictures authored by some anti-abortion lobbyist, under potential penalty of *murder*, would induce an understandable paranoia in practitioners that would lead to them simply refusing to perform abortions past the allowable limit. And mothers would bear the cost of this, some of them paying with their lives.
The Republicans can't "crack the code" because they won't like the answer. Which is to tell the pro-life movement that attempting to curtail abortion through coercive laws is futile, because people tend to realize how fraught and dangerous they are when they really think about it. That if they really want to reduce abortion, they're going about it all wrong. That they need to focus on persuading people,
which means supporting young and single mothers whose motivations for abortion are primarily poor finances and a lack of resources.
That won't stop all abortions – nothing will. And that's the problem, because the pro-life movement is committed to the delusion that they can drop the number of abortions to zero. To admit otherwise would be to admit that fifty years of struggle have been for naught. That the course of action they would need to embark upon by changing tactics now is something they could have been doing already, something they utterly ignored for half a century as they became fixated on judgemental condemnation as a substitute for actually valuing life. The sunk cost fallacy on steroids.
And since the Republican party clearly has no interest these days in short-term pain for long-term gain, by alienating the core of their base in hopes of someday building a politically healthier constituency, they will do nothing. And (hopefully) continue reaping the electoral consequences until the old guard of American evangelicalism all but dies out, crushed under the weight of its own increasing irrelevance.
So be it.
I hope this eventually leads to dethroning the outsize influence of a minority (Evangelical voters).