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Not really. Because the level of discourse is just too stupid. The average person doesn't know anything about the Constitution, how the government works, etc... They just want more (or fewer) abortions because other team bad.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure this issue is quite the slam dunk the Democrats think it is. The number of Americans who are pro-choice is not a large majority, only a narrow one. At times in the not-so-distant past, pro-life has been the majority.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/225975/share-of-americans-who-are-pro-life-or-pro-choice/
Donald Trump's position on abortion is much closer to the median voter's than Kamala Harris. Al Gore's "safe, legal, rare" was a good formulation. But the current Democratic party positively celebrates abortion. They refuse to denounce horrific late-term abortions. Things like having an abortion truck at the DNC come off as vampiric. It's not a good look. Which is why they lie about Trump's position rather than defend their own.
I'm convinced that unless one has strong philosophical priors related to either the sanctity of life (life begins at conception) or bodily autonomy (woman's right to choose), the intuitive moral answer is one that you almost aren't allowed to say in public: there are capital-G Good abortions, there are bad abortions, and there are meh abortions. There are times when it is close to murder, there are times when it is a mitzvah, and there are times I don't really care one way or the other. And there are a hundred virtually unprovable factors that go into that determination.
But by altering what kind of abortion you are talking about, you rapidly change people's opinions on abortion.
But we have numbers!
Everything below comes from this link from Guttmacher. Guttmacher is rabidly pro-choice.
You can piece through the crosstabs as you like, but I focus on these numbers:
Here's another Guttmacher link - " About half of all U.S. women having an abortion have had one previously."
What does all of this mean?
Your categorization of good/bad/meh abortions is good and useful. The raw numbers, however, show that even if "bad" abortions make up a very small minority of all abortions, we're talking about (probably) somewhere on the order of 100,000s of cases of what a lot of reasonable people would probably view as infanticide.
Secondly, there's a bit of a hidden conclusion to drawn from the "Only 7% occur after 14 weeks" statistic. Some posters here like to point out how raising a r*tarded child is somehow beyond the pale for many humans (I think differently). Taken a little more charitably, it makes sense to consider that a fetus that has demonstrable physical or cognitive deformities could give would-be parents pause. But, if 45% of people are getting these abortions at six weeks or earlier, people aren't making these judgements based on particularly advanced fetus condition. At 6 weeks, an embryo is 6mm long, the size of a pea. Yes, there could be markers, indications, signs, what have you. But the often presented narrative of "We learned our baby would require 24/7 care forever" is far more rare than is presented in campaign narratives.
And that leads me back to the numbers. Democrats love to campaign on the the smaller proportion of abortions that would probably fall mostly into "meh" (and definitely into "good"). Pro-lifers see the plain fact that a lot of abortions are purely elective on the part of a mother than feels somehow "unready" to be a mother. We (I) think these are absolutely "bad" abortions, mostly the product of a sexual lack of discipline or a cavalier disregarding for what are very predictable outcomes of, you know, having sex.
While I don't doubt the sincerity of those emotions, there is no way they outweigh the fundamental right of an otherwise healthy baby to be born. Hypothetical future states about being "unloved" or "having a bad life" have to be thrown out. That's literally trading the truth of the present for an emotionally based forecast of the future. That's bad decision making 101.
Finally, regarding the fact that half of all women getting abortions have had one previously, I don't see how this is anything than stupid after-the-fact birth control. "Young girl makes mistake" is certainly an understandable situation for a single abortion. I do not see how it can be that common (50%!) unless it is viewed plainly as "no big deal"
You're discounting that gestational time plays into most people's moral calculus. Most people feel differently about six weeks than six months. Which is logical: miscarriage rates start dropping precipitously after six weeks, and are minuscule after ten weeks. Many people might be placing those abortions of fetuses the size of peas in the meh category automatically, as the probabilistic child isn't probable enough or present enough at that stage.
The problem is that this becomes the Sorites Paradox -- the paradox that asks the question "how many grains of sand make a heap?" (Worse, actually, because time is continuous). It's not resolvable.
@100ProofTollBooth
I'm not saying it doesn't present a philosophical illogicality. What I am saying is that philosophical consistency ends up requiring (for most people) taking counterintuitive actions in real life.
Taking a hard black-and-white stand at conception or at birth prevents you from ever facing inconsistency. But each requires biting the bullet and accepting some tough choices. The shift from people identifying as pro-life vs pro-choice is mostly capturing shifts in the perceived environment around those people, their actual beliefs resemble neither philosophically consistent position.
The polling is like asking people "Do you think we should paint things Blue?" Some small percentage of people will genuinely never tolerate anything blue, and some small percentage of penn state fans want everything blue. Most people will change their minds depending how many things are already blue.
I see what you're saying. This makes sense. And I appreciate the comment on philosophical consistency.
I'm not pro-life because of dogmatic adhere to religious teachings (although I do that in my spare time). I'm pro-life because I think philosophical consistency would push the more rabidly pro-choice into favoring eugenics.
To the extent that this is true, this would be an extremely positive development.
Just to be clear, you're an explicit eugenicist?
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