With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
I think the abortion issue turned out to be very interesting this cycle.
Since the rollback of Roe was a fait acompli, all abortion related stuff ended up down ballot (where it belongs, IMO). Dems tried to tie the issue to Trump but I don't think it landed. If the Florida GOP bans it, why should I care in Maryland? What does that have to do with Trump?
I understand the arguments that this affects some women in some places negatively (it also affect some embryos in some places negatively--just sayin') and I would love it if every state had a sensible middle-of-the-road abortion policy. But the fact that we can now run 50 different simulations on what the sensible policy actually should be maybe In a few more generations we can put this issue to rest forever.
I'm not anti-abortion but I was VERY anti abortion as a single voter issue since 1973. For the first time I can remember, it feels like actual progress in our elections happened. All of the air has escaped that particular balloon and I wonder what will be next. I can imagine immigration getting somewhat solved. Any other single-issue voter concerns on the chopping block?
Personally, the Republicans have lost a lot of goodwill from me by acting like the pro-life mission was accomplished with the end of Roe. Oh, you think the issue should be left up to the states? We tried that with slavery, too, it didn't work, and abortion is at least as morally abominable; it's outright Old Testament-style ritual child sacrifice, and it's entrenched in our society as an institution that something like half of the population (or more) equates with freedom, catharsis, and womanhood. There's so much doublethink about it; fetuses are treated as human or nonhuman per current convenience. It fully corrupts the parent/child relationship; every member of our society learns when they grow up that their mother once had the fully legitimized option to have them slaughtered, and depending on her social environment and character she may well have seriously considered it. It's a horror lurking in our collective unconscious which we willfully repress, in much the same way that we repress our own mortality by avoiding the thought of hospitals and old folks' homes, keeping them sterile, out of the way, antimemetic. But the dull suit put on abortion is something more willful and evil; it's Nazi death camp shit, but without a geopolitical crisis to put an end to it. We are ashamed of it as a society and we should be. Roe v Wade was just the Dred Scott v Sandford equivalent; getting rid of it is good but it's a band-aid on a decapitation.
We should avoid civil war if at all possible, but if there was anything to do it over, it would be abortion; if our country was salvageable, Republicans would collectively be courageous enough to run on a platform of hanging abortionists and their biggest enablers and cheerleaders from lampposts, and they would win and implement it. I have no intent to throw my life away pursuing this purge of our society on my own (or with some kind of FBI-bait terror cell); it's hard to say how much of this is personal cowardice and how much is observation that it hasn't worked to fix the issue in the past. But contrarian Confederate apologia aside, there's a reason that we still celebrate John Brown today, even if we wouldn't ourselves have done the same thing if we'd been born in his time, even if it took some legitimate unhingedness on his part to do what he did, and even if his actions ultimately decreased the world's utility instead of increasing it. He was driven crazy by something that should drive people crazy. You should feel sick and guilty for not feeling pushed to action to the same extent he was; we all should. Our country is in a terrible decline which it has thoroughly shown that it deserves, and if we are suddenly and violently annihilated soon by some terrible external calamity like a nuclear war of extermination, which seems likely, we will collectively deserve that as well. Obviously many innocents would die as well, and I would hope to forestall it as long as possible - out of self-interest and concern for the people close to me if nothing else - but if you believe in God, you should be terrified; God's justice is terrible and does not wait forever on matters like this. If you don't believe in God, you should at least feel like you've been living in a version of Nazi Germany that's survived peacefully in a position of dominance over the world for many decades. It's terrible. Our current world is terrible. If it's the best it's ever been it's still terrible.
Paul Hill's body lies a-mouldering in the grave. His soul is marching on.
I think abortion is out of the bag. To revert it, you would have to convince people that pregnancy and childbirth are the inevitable consequences of and the primary reasons for having sex. You'll have as much success convincing people to have less sex as you'll have convincing them to eat less to lose weight. They'll blame lithium, seed oils, PFAS, but will accept only Ozempic and gastric bypasses as legitimate solutions.
There are already multiple normalized things that divorce sex from pregnancy. Condoms, the pill, the morning-after pill, oral sex, anal sex... hell, even pulling out works until it doesn't and reinforces the idea that you can have parenthood-free sex.
People are already willing to make an exception for rape, incest, Down syndrome, etc. If you are working from the "abortion is murder" standpoint, then these exceptions are not defensible. If you are willing to compromise on them, there's no Schelling point for you there.
Something like 24 weeks is probably the best middle ground that can hope to achieve bipartisan support.
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