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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 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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