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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31033 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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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 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.

Some on the pro-choice side took the mask off about rare before that:

Despite the Democratic Party dropping “safe, legal, and rare” from the party platform in 2012, politicians are still repeating it nearly a decade later to signal their moral superiority and supposedly commonsense position on abortion. Even Hillary Clinton, who, along with her husband President Bill Clinton, is credited with popularizing the phrase, eventually stopped saying it, opting for “safe and legal” during her 2016 presidential campaign. Yet some pro-choice politicians can’t let it go.

...Demanding abortion be “rare” is stigmatizing at its core; it posits that having an abortion is a bad decision and one that a pregnant person shouldn’t have to make, and if they do, it must be in the direst of circumstances. This messaging tells those of us who’ve had abortions that we did something wrong to need an abortion, and we shouldn’t do it again. It unfairly stigmatizes people who will have more than one abortion, which is nearly half of abortion patients.

Hillary gets mentioned here as well:

Clinton used this language in her 2008 presidential campaign; Bill Clinton, meanwhile, had introduced it into Democratic politics back in 1992. The language was likely meant to appeal to people who supported the right to an abortion in principle but still felt morally conflicted about the procedure — a large group, according to some polling. But many abortion rights advocates argued that calling for the procedure to be “rare” placed stigma on people who seek it.

“There’s a fundamental notion of bodily autonomy that we’ve been fighting for as advocates and activists on this issue for years,” Destiny Lopez, co-director of the All* Above All Action Fund, a nonprofit that works to expand abortion access, told Vox. Saying abortion should be rare “completely negates all the work that we’ve done to really make this about the ability to decide what’s best for your body, for your family, for your community,” she said.

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