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Notes -
Abortion is in my mind due to the debate last night which has led me to this article:
https://thedispatch.com/article/claims-about-children-born-alive-after-abortion-attempts-in-minnesota-are-true/
The gist is: in Minnesota, if a baby was born you were required to care for it to keep it alive. Sometimes an abortion would result in a living baby being born, and doctors were required to give that baby supportive care (they were likely premature, so wouldn’t necessarily survive, although premature babies born wrong 23 weeks survive frequently, that said none of the cited instances of this led to a baby surviving).
In 2019 this was changed to allow doctors to let a baby sit there until it just dies on its own.
Here’s some thoughts about this:
At the point where this is even a question, you’re clearly talking about a living human being.
Simply ignoring a baby until they die is the way that infanticide (usually killing baby girls) is done all over the world
This is another instance of “conservative politician says something that gets immediately ‘fact checked’, but it turns out is at least directionally and likely just literally true.
We should be caring for living human babies whether the mother wants to kill them or not. “Oops I meant to kill it before I could see it out here in the world” is not a valid excuse.
If anything the fact that there were so many cases of this in a single state in such a small period of time moves my needle even further towards being aggressively anti abortion, up to jailing the doctors doing this and charging them with murder.
Abortion is probably the major break between the "dissident" right and the traditional mainstream socially conservative/fundamentalist right. Despite considerable overlap on most other policy positions, abortion is a serious wedge issue. My take is that abortion is almost universally eugenic: even outside obvious cases like screened-for genetic diseases, you can just look at abortion rates by race. (From Vox: Out of 629,898 abortions reported to the CDC for 2019, Black women accounted for 38.4 percent of them. By comparison, white women made up 33.4 percent of those abortions.) What percent of aborted children would ever become net taxpayers, had they not been aborted? Given that abortions are correlated with low socioeconomic status, promiscuity, high time preference, and a whole slate of other negative things, many of which are heritable, my suspicion is the number is quite low.
When your political enemies are sacrificing their children to Baal, I don't know that trying to stop them is a winning long-term strategy. Ironically this particular savior complex pattern matches well to the self-destructive white guilt that characterizes much of the left. Any moral system that insists you have some obligation to black crack babies across the country is trivially extendible to cover unfortunates all across the world and I suspect there's cognitive dissonance in not doing so.
At this point I am tired of right-wingers bringing up abortion. My attitude is, they should stop talking about it so much and they should do it now. Even if you legitimately view it as murder, the fact is, if you bring it up so often that it makes you lose elections, you're not going to be in a position to stop it anyway. I mean, what are you going to do? Blow up abortion clinics? That has been tried, and it did not even put a dent in how many abortions are performed.
The right-wing fixation with talking about abortion is politically suicidal. If some right-winger personally thinks that abortion is evil, then by all means, fight against it. But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signalling. What would help is to win some fucking elections. Trump did more for anti-abortion activists by winning in 2016 and nominating those Supreme Court judges than almost anyone else, and one thing he did was, he didn't talk about abortion all the time.
The right needs female voters. The 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed magically. You need female voters, so you need to talk about issues where there is not such a gigantic disparity between the average man and the average woman's views.*
I say this as someone who is agnostic on the whole question of whether abortion is or is not murder. I do not think there is any actually rational answer to that question, it is a matter of perspective. I am not so unempathic that I am incapable of feeling bad for aborted fetuses, but at the same time, I also have to think about actually winning against the left. I know it seems obvious, but it does not seem obvious to some people for whatever reason. If you really care about the well-being of fetuses, losing elections by talking about abortion the way the right currently all too often does is not going to help them.
*Edit: I just looked at the statistics, and the gap between men and women's attitudes on abortion is actually smaller than I thought it was.
Full credit for noting this - I think it's an important observation. For all that abortion is presented as a women's issue, and much of the rhetoric around it seems to presume a gender gap (men shouldn't tell women what to do, if men could get pregnant abortion would be legal instantly, etc.), historically trends have been pretty much the same. It's generally around half-and-half irrespective of gender. There's recently been a spike in the female pro-choice rate specifically, likely attributable to Dobbs and its immediate aftermath, but I'd bet that this isn't a permanent realignment and it will even out again given time.
I believe the people who feel the most strongly about abortion, both pro- and anti-, are women. I feel strongly about it, and even my feelings don't compare to the female pro-life activists.
And that's not surprising -- the sides in the abortion debate can be summarized as "get your hands off my uterus!" and "save the babies!" which both seem rather female-coded.
But also, any man who expresses a pro-life opinion gets shouted down by "you misogynistic rapist pig, get your hands off my uterus!" So pro-life women, who can't get shouted down like that (though they can get shouted down with "you've internalized misogyny"), are more vocal and willing to stand up for their values. It's the same with, for instance, opposition to casual sex -- a man does that, he gets labeled an incel, a woman does that, she doesn't get hated as much.
I'm inclined to agree - there's a kind of reservation of certain issues to the female realm, whether for better or for worse, which is almost bipartisan. I don't think it's as simple as saying that choices that exclusively or disproportionately affect female bodies are reserved to women, since that in itself involves a questionable judgement about male involvement in sex and reproduction, and a decision to minimise that involvement, but certainly those choices, around sex, birth, child-rearing, etc., have been moved into that realm. So even though there are just as many pro-life men as women, the pro-life movement has made the probably correct tactical decision to make women its most visible leaders.
Although... the problem they sometimes run into is that the pro-life movement is heavily Catholic, and the leadership class of the Catholic Church is predominantly male. They can't just set aside Evangelium Vitae or something, which is unavoidably by a male pope, so they have to face this accusation. I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".
One of those convenient sticks to hit the dog with. Of course the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics have married priests (and even some widower Bishops with adult children, at least in the Orthodox church) and are just as pro-life, which somehow doesn't come up. (And you can find plenty of pro-life Evangelicals even in the squishier groups that ordain women.)
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