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The latest abortion kerfuffle is decently well in the past now, and we've had a number of good threads on it in various places. I think it's a reasonable time to ask here:
Have you changed your personal opinion or political position on abortion access at all over the course of the last year or so? If so, to what, and based on what?
Was a moderate on the issue fine with some restrictions but changed to total pro-choice over the last year. I was ok with "safe, legal and rare" but unfortunately pro-life activists got greedy and broke that compromise, instead going for broke with overturning Roe v Wade, total bans and taking the mask off with closing exemptions and targeting contraception. Given that I want abortion available as an option, and that past talk of exemptions and the like proved to just be the equivalent of the gun control cake slicing meme, I started donating to pro-choice efforts and voted accordingly to swing the pendulum in the other direction.
Same thing also independently caused a bunch of my friends (Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.
Banning abortion might be popular in the pulpits of some dwindling denominations and internet forums, but it is highly unpopular outside of specific geographic and religious bubbles that are way out of touch with most Americans. Those in favor of banning abortion punch above their weight in primaries and state house compositions due to unrepresentative political systems, but they were BTFO when it was a straight up popular vote even in Kansas, Michigan, Kentucky, and Montana.
I find your post interesting because we probably have the same actual positions on abortion and directly related issues, but I've mostly taken the opposite conclusion from what happened with the overturning.
My impression overall is that the bottom line is that pro-life leaning people are roughly 50% of the population (including 50%-ish of women by the way). The Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendments, Supreme Court, all of that stuff, is meant to cover things we have more like 90% agreement with as a society. In this view, Roe v Wade was always an ugly hack. There's nothing about it in the Constitution and it's ridiculously stunted reasoning by abortion activists to get their preferred point of view enacted as court precedent and thus immune to legislative processes. Keeping it in place only serves to ensure we are constantly fighting Holy Wars over Supreme Court nominees over whether they will or won't swear to keep the ridiculous charade in place at all costs.
The Constitutional Amendment process is very tough for a reason - only things that we have very broad and long-lasting agreement on in our society should end up enshrined at that level and protected by court rulings. If we desire to have abortion granted that level of protection, it should be done right - by passing an explicit Constitutional Amendment about it. If there isn't the support level needed to do that, then abortion doesn't belong there and issues around it should be resolved by state and federal legislation, the way it was intended to be. That's why I think this is a good thing - states where pro-life is strong will now be able to pass and enforce the legislation they wanted to, hopefully without bothering people outside their state much. States where pro-choice is string will continue to be able to have abortion on-demand. People with strong positions on the wrong side of one of those lines will be able to move somewhere that their preferred policy is in place. Democracy in action!
Bottom line, pro-life is a solid segment of our population and they aren't going away. If your political position is that their policy preference must be absolutely suppressed at all costs, then what you're advocating for is not Democracy.
I lean red overall politically, and I am aware that this may have cost red team / Republicans some degree of the gains they would have expected in the recent midterms. I think that's a reasonable price to pay to get this issue off of the national stage. Let the states make their preferred laws, let them sneer at each other, and keep the courts for things we aspirationally have broader agreement on.
I mean, the reality is, with the advent of mass media, people will only put up with what they see as people within their coalition being hurt by people outside of their coalition, and being told they can't stop it because of some lines on a map. That started, at least in the US, w/ Uncle Tom's Cabin, and has only expanded with the advent of radio, TV, and now social media. People at least get nations are nations - the argument over state's rights was shot in Appotomax, and then put into the ground at Selma.
Not to bring Civil Right's into it, do you honestly think the 60's and 70's would've gone better if interracial marriage stated illegal until the early-to-mid 80's, which is when it crossed 50% approval in Gallup polling?
We're a representative democracy bounded by a Constitution that guarantees rights - we've never been, and nobody close to power has ever really advocated for total legislative supremacy or direct democracy.
I get your first point, though I suppose that's something that all movements of any sort will have to live with in the modern age.
On the second, I don't think I agree. I'm saying we need to make a reasonably good-faith effort to follow our constitutional processes in the intended ways. As far as I know, nothing that could reasonably be described as that took place with respect to the civil rights conflicts. I think Roe v Wade is pretty far from that.
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Safe legal and rare was never a compromise, though, because there never was a compromise. There’s been one side imposing its values on the other for 50 years, sometimes with more moderate rhetoric.
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Who is this supposed to endear these people to? Racism and 4chan originated conspiracy theory adherence are vices that the pro-life religious group puts up with to get the policy they think will end the baby holocaust, not the other way around. To the degree that these people vote against pro-life measures they are not allies of the pro-life movement.
It's a description, not a personal endorsement of racism or that Qanon conspiracy stuff. Those individuals are separate from people I'd count as friends, though I realize now the wording was somewhat ambiguous.
The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.
https://civiqs.com/results/abortion_legal?annotations=true&uncertainty=true&zoomIn=true&choice=Illegal%20in%20all%20cases&party=Republican
Right, and the point here is that (speaking as a pro-life person) if a condition of us getting their vote is that we don't do anything to ban abortion, we don't want it. So if you are arguing that we should moderate (in the sense of giving up on making abortion generally illegal) because of this, my response is no. If you are arguing that as a descriptive matter we'll have a harder time winning because of this, that may be right, but the alternative is a hollow victory that doesn't accomplish enough of our goals to make it worth it for us, so it's worth the risk.
If the proposal is a less stringent ban that actually gets us a lot of what we want but not all of it, like a total ban but with certain specific exceptions, then I think a lot of people would be open to considering that. But safe legal and rare isn't good enough.
It's not advice, it's a description of the recent votes having unusual line crossing.
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Some on the pro-choice side took the mask off about rare before that:
Hillary gets mentioned here as well:
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This is hard to believe that they would react so strongly to largely symbolic bans coming from a party that has been saying this is precisely what they want to do for decades. It would be like suddenly losing it and flipping republican because Democrats decide to give blacks some effectively symbolic reparations checks for $100 or something.
1.) People don't hurt parties for what they say they'll do - this is consistent. This annoys us lefties when the GOP consistently (outside of a small period when Trump initially won) want to privatize or radically cut Social Security or Medicare, and voters in focus groups literally don't believe it. For both sides, the voters only hurt them when they actually do things.
2.) There was a very decent chunk of what could be described as 'leave me the hell alone' voters to Trump - anti-immigration, pro-gun, but also pro-choice. Blue collar non-college educated non-religious voters who don't hate religious people, but also don't like God botherers sticking their nose into their business.
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With Roe v. Wade overturned, a guaranteed floor on abortion access that previously existed was removed and folks who voted Republican but did not favor hardcore pro-lifer bans now had real skin in the game and the opprotunity to vote directly on it in multiple states.
If it's "symbolic" because of varying state laws, I disagree. I would not consider NYC gun bans, mandatory registration and other impositions "symbolic" just because a New Yorker could hypothetically go to New Hampshire and buy an AR15 in cash from some guy outside Denny's. Additionally, pro-life factions are creating and promoting legislation to penalize people who travel out of state for abortions or those who assist in such.
Also the scenario you describe sounds pretty realistic to me. In this case though it's not total party flips, it's people voting contra most expectations on an issue when that issue is put before them directly.
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That scenario would totally happen, though.
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I think that's also quite plausible, perhaps because of the symbolic element: symbols can be precedents unto themselves, "making an example" of someone or something is effectively establishing that you could do the same thing to others, and overturning Roe was, in a sense, a reservation of the right to make impositions.
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1 in 6 of anything is in no way shape or form rare. There are about 6 million pregnancies per year in the US, about 1 million are aborted each year and about 1 million end naturally, with only 4 million ending in a live birth.
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I mean, we were never okay with that. So it seems like this is less about "mask off" and more that we just started winning for once, and then people who don't like that noticed and decided to react accordingly.
So from our perspective, we can either (1) do nothing and lose every battle, or (2) do something and win some battles but cause people who disagree with us to push back and potentially lose some or all of what we won.
2 seems strictly optimal in comparison with 1.
Ya I do not see the masks coming off it’s just that they won. And Roe let’s be honest was a constitutional issue which a lot of scholars on the left disagreeing with the reasoning. That wasn’t legislation.
If anything I think the Pro-life people have moderated since Roe ended. From memory the legislation they went for at the federal level was closer to the moderates position of having federal rules similar to the rules in Europe. I think the left just played the politics well to make you think they went extreme - when a lot of GOP politicians moderated their public positions after.
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The story of the parent poster does not sound like it is adequately summarised by "people who disagree with us push back"; these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them. Being able to offer a compromise and stand by it, rather than always trying to seize a bit more, seems to be an ability that is tragically lost on all sides of the culture war.
But this person says that "I want abortion available as an option". We don't. To the extent this is directional agreement, it seems quite weak and not really worth preserving at the expense of giving up on our actual policy goals. I guess you could say we might be alienating people who are willing to agree to a 20 week abortion ban or something, but not an earlier one, and sure, that's possible, but I'd just say the terms of that compromise are unacceptable to me so that's okay.
So, fair, my initial statement might have been a bit of an oversimplification.
He specifically mentions closing exemptions and having certain modes of contraception at all. There is a non-trivial of people who align with pro-life politics: no abortion.. Unless it's rape or incest. They're also basically normal people, insofar they don't want plan B or hormonal contraception banned. Pro-life activists getting both of these struck alienates these people, and taking note of this seems entirely valid.
And so is, yes, deciding you don't want these people on your side. That's fine too.
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Emergency contraception can work either by preventing ovulation or by preventing a fertilised egg implanting. In practice, the types that can be taken up to 3 days after unprotected sex work entirely by preventing ovulation, and the types that work up to 5 days after sex work using a combination of both methods. If you believe that life begins at fertilisation then intentionally preventing implantation is abortion, and using emergency contraception is at the very least taking a reckless risk of causing an abortion. I don't think this view makes sense given that nobody cares about the vast number of early miscarriages by non-implantation, but it is sincerely held by the people who hold it.
So the problem is that a subset of pro-lifers (including the people in charge of the movement, and the median voter in a non-Presidential Republican primary in a red state) have a genuine disagreement with everyone else about whether the meaning of the term "abortifacent" includes emergency contraception.
As a separate issue, mifepristone (which is undoubtedly an abortifacent) is marketed as emergency contraception in some countries (but not the US), so I imagine pro-lifers have slippery slope concerns about admitting a distinction between "emergency contraception" and "early medication abortion".
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The case I'm most familiar with is Louisiana. There may be others. Louisiana's proposed law on abortion was to prohibit the practice of it in every circumstance, to charge every single purveyor of it with murder, and to legally codify life as starting at fertilisation. This would make the sale of hormonal IUD's and plan B murder under Louisiana's law. Louisiana's legislature is full of people who would prefer not to be voted out immediately, so the fertilisation bit was struck - to the tune of much complaining from those who'd drafted the bill in the first place. This is not a motte of 'we just want to keep people twelve weeks in from aborting-by-pill', and I can very much see how moderate pro-life sorts might come to distrust the movement when their representatives try to pass laws like these.
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