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Ohio Republicans' Inexplicable & Baffling Abortion Blunder
I support expansive abortion access purely as a matter of practical considerations because of how legal prohibitions encourage horrific black market alternatives. I part ways with the pro-choice crowd when they respond to a difficult morality question with flippant dismissal. So at least from that standpoint, I sympathize with the earnest pro-life crowd because they're helplessly witnessing what is (by their definitions) a massive genocide made worse by the fact that it's legally-sanctioned.
So if you're in that unenviable position, what are your options? The major practical problem is that abortion restrictions have been and continue to be extremely politically unpopular. The Dobbs decision generated a lot of what basically amounted to legislative reshuffling at the state level. Some states had trigger laws banning abortions, that awakened from their long slumber only for courts, legislatures, or voter referendums to strike them back down to sleep.
Ohio's law banning abortions when a fetus heartbeat could be detected (typically occurs within 6-7 weeks of pregnancy) was struck down by a court last year, and so currently abortions there are legal up until "viability" (typically understood to be 22 weeks). On top of that, a referendum was set to be voted on this upcoming November election which would solidly enshrine abortion access within the Ohio state constitution (worth noting that this is the only referendum on the ballot). Given where public opinion is at on this issue, the amendment is virtually guaranteed to be approved by voters. What can you do to stop this train?
Ohio Republicans responded in a very bizarre and inexplicable manner (part of a pattern it seems). Apparently aware that the November referendum was going to be a shoe-in, they organized a whole special election in August as a preemptive maneuver to increase various thresholds for constitutional amendments, including raising the passing percentage from 50% to a 60% supermajority. That measure failed in the special election held yesterday, with 57% of voters against it.
Where to start? First, asking voters to vote against themselves was always going to be a challenge, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes the rhetoric supporters of Issue 1 had to resort to:
Some of the TV ads the supporters ran were so incoherent. I don't know how representative this particular example is but the 30-second spot avoids saying anything at all about abortion and instead argues that voting yes on Issue 1 would somehow...protect kids from trans drag queens in schools? The fuck? I guess they knew that "vote yes on Issue 1 to keep abortion restricted" wasn't going to be a winning message so this tangent was the only option.
Even if somehow Issue 1 had anything to do with gender identity indoctrination in schools or whatever (if anyone can explain this please do!) it bears repeating that the only referendum on the ballot in November was about enshrining abortion access. Voters are dumb but they're not that dumb.
Just this last January Ohio Republicans passed HB 458 which eliminated almost all August special elections, but then they insisted on passing another law walking that back specifically to make sure Issue 1 got its very own election. The gambit apparently was to help its chances by leveraging low voter turnout in special elections. This too is baffling, because the timing gimmick very likely energized the "Democrats' highly educated neurotic base" as my boy Yglesias so eloquently put it. Also, the type of voter that is willing to show up to a special election is not going to be the type that is inclined to wrest control away!
None of these decisions made any sense. By investing into a preemptive referendum to raise the threshold, they loudly advertised they knew their issue was going to lose in November. By carving out an exception for an August election, they demonstrated they knew they couldn't win unless they act like a Turkish ice cream man with voters. By conspicuously avoiding talking about abortion, they're acknowledging their policy position's unpopularity.
I'm again acknowledging that the pro-life crowd faces an unenviable challenge in advocating for their position, and clearly their attempts at persuasion over the last several decades have not been panning out. But who actually thought the blatant gimmickry described above was actually going to work? All it did was showcase how weak they must be if the only tool in their arsenal was comically inept subterfuge.
The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control. Most people on the left already want this, so it shouldn't be hard to get bipartisan support. Then way more people will use it, way fewer accidental pregnancies occur, and actual abortion rates plummet regardless of whether it's legal or illegal.
This might have the bonus affect of making it much easier to pass restrictions on abortion afterwards. If fewer people have needed one or known someone who has needed one, and the only people who ever get abortions are morons who forgot to take their free birth control, people in general will be less sympathetic. Lazy people just using abortion as birth control will have cheaper alternatives and so care less. People worried about being forced to give birth to an unwanted child in some hypothetical future will be less worried because they can just use their free state-provided birth control. And the messaging that pro-life people just want to enslave women as breeders forced to give birth against their will just dissolves away because we're actively trying to prevent them from getting pregnant.
But even if nothing else changes legislatively, even if the silly pollitical warmakers would consider this a loss because the pro-choice get everything they want, this would be a massive win for pro-life and effective altruism. I don't think people trying to have tons of promiscuous sex "deserve" to have their degenerate lifestyles subsidized by my tax dollars, but I'm going to offer it anyway because "deserves" matter less than saving lives.
Is lack of access to birth control a factor in American abortion? As far as I know there is functionally no one in the US who lacks access to contraceptives.
A policy of strong arming sexually active teens into getting IUD’s affects the abortion rate, we know that. Seriously, that’s the study design for ‘giving out birth control reduces abortions’. But it doesn’t seem like this is an example of abortion because of lack of access to contraception, it seems like this is an example of teenagers being bad at calculating risk and condoms being disliked, neither of which tell us anything new.
If strong-arming them works to reduce abortions then do that. And quite a few adults are bad at calculating risk and dislike condoms, so strongarm them too. Somewhere around a million abortions happen each year, which means millions more are not using birth control. Whether that's from "access" or cost, or social acceptability, all of those are levers to push.
The point being, more birth control usage = fewer abortions = good, and most pro-life people are leaving hundred dollar bills on the floor by ignoring this avenue for solving the problem.
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The pro-life movement makes a lot more sense if you model the people behind it as being opposed to recreational sex (and an open/libertine approach to it) rather than abortion. Free birth control would be seen as signalling societal support for it in a way that might even exceed abortion access (which, despite the fierceness of its proponents, still is kept somewhat under wraps and considered a too sensitive topic to sell in convenience stores, advertise on TV and hand out for free to college freshers).
That model would predict that people would be equally opposed to all forms of birth control, which is not what we observe. You don't see people having angry protests outside condom manufacturers and calling them murderers the way you do at abortion clinics.
It makes more sense if you model pro-life as following directly from the personhood of fetuses, and this belief being highly correlated with religion, which in turn is correlated with a separate but lesser opposition to birth control. And also correlated with being deontologists and thus irrationally unwilling to tradeoff on a tacit endorsement for promiscuous sex that's already happening in exchange for solving the mass murder of millions of unborn babies.
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Pro-life people are likely to be deontologists. Deontologists don't use expected value in such situations.
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I have doubts that most people who don't use birth control today do not do so because it is too expensive. I suspect that even if you dropped a free crate of condoms right beside every bed in the country you wouldn't get a factor of two reduction in the rate of unprotected sex. People don't use protection largely because they don't want to, because they don't want the side effects, or just don't care in the moment, and so on. It's not like birth control is a good like uncontaminated water.
I'm also imagining this initiative crossed with policies to arrest crashing birthrates, like ever-more-subsidized parental leave, and can only picture a motorist driving with one foot pressing on the gas and the other simultaneously pressing on the brakes. It may make one feel more secure to be actively exerting control in all directions at all times, but that has its costs, to be sure.
We actually kind of did that already by making Plan B over the counter along with a strong anti-natalist campaign aimed at youth. The results have been stunning. Relative to Gen X, teen pregnancy has been all but wiped out.
IMO this is the oddest thing about Dobbs and its aftermath. Abortion rates had already dropped to pre Roe levels. In light of ubiquitous contraception availability and the internet probably having provided far more sex-ed than any high school class abortion is nearing obsolescence outside of lizardman constant cases or medical necessity.
Now we're stuck with the fun part, figuring out how to convinced 20-something women with career ambitions that having a kid isn't A. borderline trashy or B. a life-ruining event.
Isn't that a result of falling testosterone levels / dropping sperm counts / chemicals in the water that are turning the freaking frogs gay? I was under the impression Zoomers aren't even having sex that much to begin with.
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Yeah, I fully endorse this approach. This is why I added the "earnest" qualifier when I talk about the pro-life crowd, because I can't who exactly supports abortion restrictions because they genuinely believe it's akin to murder, and who supports it for other less defensible reasons such as wanting to discourage sexual promiscuity. The argument against promiscuity gets undercut severely the less risk sex has, and it's a big tell about the true motivation here given how much Christian groups opposed the HPV vaccine for example.
Promiscuity can't be bad and undesirable regardless of risk?
The promiscuous shouldn't be ashamed because they're syphilitic, they should be ashamed because they're whores. It's not the risk it's the depravity.
I didn't say it can't be bad, just that the argument against it gets cut severely. It's much more convincing to much more people to say "don't have sex because you'll get pregnant or get painful disfiguring warts" versus "don't have sex because it's depraved"
Sure, the whore is concerned with the negative impact of their behavior on them. I wouldn't expect them to be particularly moved by the argument that tolerance of the behavior is bad for everyone.
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Yes, I understand that. The problem is that the tension between the two issues will remain. If they somehow were presented with the hypothetical of eliminating all abortions but all women transform into insatiable sluts, I gather that some people will accept the bargain, but maybe for others it falls beyond their relative elasticity preference. I don't think either is an incoherent or inconsistent position to hold. But because of the correlation between "anti-abortion" and "anti-promiscuity", it also makes it hard to tell when specific objections are genuine and when they are just a pretext serving cover for the other.
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I think a related suggestion might be plausible, but there's a complication.
In the US, the bulk of the pro-life movement is religious, specifically Christian. There are certainly many individual exceptions, but the major organizing groups are either church-affiliated or formally secular but largely staffed by Christians. Where abortion is concerned, the Catholic part of the movement and the Evangelical Protestant part are entirely on the same page, but there is no similar agreement on birth control. Opposing birth control is part of Catholic dogma, while Evangelicals generally have no moral problem with contraceptives, so long as they are used within the context of otherwise proper sexual ethics.
That said, Evangelicals very much support the right of Catholics to follow their consciences on the issue, even if they differ on the object-level question. Catholic opposition to taxpayer-funded contraceptives is a given, and Evangelicals usually have other ideological reasons for opposing "free" stuff. So you'd likely have very minimal organized Christian support for taxpayer-funded contraceptives.
However, Evangelicals (and many American conservatives in general) have supported a related measure for pretty much the exact reasoning you lay out above--rescheduling oral contraceptives from prescription-based to over-the-counter. I would not expect Catholic support for this type of measure, but at least it doesn't raise the same conscience issues as direct subsidy.
I am not religious, and I understand the pro life movement completely. Hormonal birth control is just abortion by another means. Condoms will never work as a substitute for a semi-eugenic program of putting those implants into arms for most of the population getting abortions...and again, those are still abortions, just hormonally induced when the baby is like 64 cells.
I don't think this is true for standard birth control. I know it's true for the morning after pill but I think normal birth control stops ovulation
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There were several comments that made the starting assumption that the pro-life movement in the US was solidly against birth control generally as well. This is untrue, hence my explanation above.
Let me define a few terms more tightly, while recognizing that they are sometimes (IMO) misused.
"Birth control" covers all methods of preventing, interrupting, or otherwise regulating pregnancy. "Contraceptive" is any method that prevents conception--the union of sperm and egg into zygote. Condoms and other barrier methods are examples. "Abortifacient" is any method that ends a pregnancy after the zygote is formed, including any method that prevents implantation in the uterus.
I'm aware that some hormonal birth control operates as an abortifacient by preventing implantation (Plan B, etc.), but the most common types of regularly-administered hormones (via pills, patch, implant, etc.) prevent ovulation. This would be a contraceptive, not an abortifacient.
While the Prog-Est oral program primarily inhibits ovulation, it also affects implantation and other portions of development of a healthy early pregnancy.
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Yeah, Pope Francis would have to change longstanding Catholic doctrine. That only happens every couple of years.
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But if the Evangelicals unilaterally decided to support free birth control then, with bipartisan support from pro-choice people, it could get passed without requiring the Catholics to get on board. Maybe they'd perceive it as a betrayal or something, but they could still stand united on the abortion bad part.
I mean, evangelicals have lots of policy views that Catholics aren’t totally onboard with, so hitting defect just means they’ll get defected on.
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The evangelicals would only support it if it were only free to married couples. They don't want abortions but they don't want sex out of wedlock either.
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Why would Evangelicals support raising taxes and undermining freedom of conscience when a different policy choice is better? It's not about 'betraying allies'--though that's usually something to avoid when possible--but that Evangelicals actually have an array of moral and ideological preferences in addition to ending abortion, and should logically attempt to satisfy multiple preferences simultaneously first.
Yes, expanding access through OTC contraceptives is a more modest approach, but it should also accomplish much of the stated policy goal.
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Isn’t birth control effectively free with some small time effort?
Yes, but you're not supposed to notice because many of the pro-abortion arguments depend on this not being the case
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Why does birth control need to be free? Besides the pro-life movement opposes birth control. But it’s also like $10-20 a month for birth control. People are being ridiculous if that needs to be publicly funded.
That's precisely my point. It needs to change. A lot of people are lazy and stupid, or just poor, and those are the people most likely to also be too lazy to pull out or time when they have unprotected sex, or think about long term consequences like pregnancy. The pro-life movement needs to be on the forefront of not only providing and promoting free birth control, but pressuring people to use it. Don't shame people for having premarital sex, shame people for having unprotected premarital sex, because that's the kind that actually causes harm.
If you're a rational person who plans ahead, I don't think there's a large practical difference between $10-20 per month and just free, for something as impactful as birth control. But if you are lazy and impulsive there's a huge difference between not having condoms in your pocket and having sex anyway because you want to get laid, versus having a pile of condoms in your cabinets because the government and/or pro life movement keeps mailing them to you. Or maybe they just keep having sex all the time without condoms but all of the women have IUDs because those are free now and they got tired of people pressuring them to please get one. Or maybe it becomes a rite of passage for a girl to get one on her 18th birthday or something and it's just normal for everyone to have them until they actually want kids.
If people were smart and responsible, none of this would be necessary. But also the abortion rate would be near 0 already. The fact that it's not is pretty clear evidence that people are not smart and responsible.
Condoms are outside of the capability of most abortion-getters to use. Hormonal birth control is just early abortion.
Which kind? There are kinds that make you miscarriage after the egg has been fertilized, in which case I'm inclined to agree with you. But there are kinds that prevent ovulation in the first place, in which case it's no different from abstinence or condom use, at least as far as life is concerned, since no child is conceived in the first place which could then die.
Most prevent implantation, not ovulation. IDK the ones that even prevent ovulation.
Are you talking about like the morning after pill? Because those are bad, but I'm referring to the ones that prevent women from ovulating during pregnancy so they don't just keep conceiving babies month after month while already pregnant. I know they make IUDs that do that, but there might be pills for it to.
I actually am not super familiar with the habits of promiscuous people and their typical birth control preferences, so "most" might not be the right phrase to use here. But if it turns out that most forms of birth control are abortive, but some aren't, that just increases the potential benefit of a pro-life promotion and subsidization of the ethical ones. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $20 for non-conceiving hormones, and they don't think fetuses are people, they're likely to take the abortion pills. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $0 for non-conceiving hormones because the government and/or pro-life charities pay the $20, then no child gets conceived in the first place, and thus none die. Assuming that the goal is actually to prevent the conception and subsequent deaths of fetuses because they die, and not just to increase the number of childbirths, this seems like a massive win to me.
Now maybe it would be healthier for society and relationships for people to just not have promiscuous sex in the first place, but that ship has sailed, pragmatically there's nothing we can do to fix that, and it seems much less of a priority to me than the millions of deaths at stake that free non-abortive birth control could prevent.
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But from first principles then they wouldn’t be pro-life. Might as well just support abortion if they adopt your beliefs. Like I wouldn’t oppose abortion or euthanasia or a host of things if I didn’t also not believe in birth control.
I don’t think lower Iq or poor people are unable to not have sex. If anything promoting religion would give them simple ideas on abstinence and why they are doing it.
Simple first principles:
(1): Human lives are inherently valuable for their own sake, not just as instrumental value towards some economic or political end.
(2): Human fetuses are human and alive in physical form in a way that satisfies the criteria for (1).
(3): Imaginary hypothetical humans who do not exist in any physical form are not inherently valuable unless and until they come into being
All of these are axiomatically independent: you could form a coherent belief structure out of any combination of them. (1)+(2) implies pro-life. (3) makes abortion meaningfully distinct from preventative birth control. I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of people across political and religious beliefs agree with (3) in practice, which is why they don't advocate that celibate people be treated the same as serial killers. Even religious fundamentalists who are adamantly against birth control and in favor of having lots of children don't think that failing to procreate is literally equivalent to murder. Only weird straw-utilitarians who want to tile the universe with hedonium or literally maximize the number of living humans to the exclusion of all else would reject (3).
So then, conditional on people accepting (3), we can broadly categorize "pro life" people as accepting both (1) and (2), and "pro choice" people as rejecting one or both. Theoretically you could find weird exceptions where someone rejects (2) but is pro life anyway because they want to mysogynistically control women's bodies, or someone who accepts all three but only a weak version of 1 such that the right to bodily autonomy outweighs millions of valuable fetus lives. But in practice most of the contention is in (2): pro-choice people reject the premise that fetuses are meaningfully human in a way that makes them valuable and gives them rights. And to a lesser extent they contest (1), a lot of atheists think that human rights are derived from the State and not inherent to personhood thus non-citizens who the State chooses not to protect and can't advocate for themselves do not have inherent rights, while more religious people think that rights are inherent, inalienable, and God-given. Although the existence of God is neither necessary nor sufficient for human rights to be inherent and inalienable, the beliefs do tend to be strongly correlated, as postulating an objective morality without a higher authority to define it requires some epicycles and philosophical justification.
All this to say... murder and abstinence are incredibly different, and nobody treats them the same, not even you. That's why you aren't panicking about not having unprotected sex right now the same way you would be if you were accidentally killing someone right now.
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Why?
The reason they oppose both didn't. It just doesn't align with your utilitarian conception. It's not about "harm" for them and it never has been. You're not going to convince people to change their strategy by retrofitting somebody else's ethics to what they're doing.
This is silly, you might as well tell Kantians they should lie in ways that make more people reasonable.
Maybe I should clarify my position as someone who is both pro-life and utilitarian. It is about "harm" for me, and a non-negligible proportion of pro-life people I have encountered. Human fetuses are human and alive, human life is good, death is bad. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Of course for a different non-negligible proportion of "pro-life" people it's about punishing people for their sins and forcing people to bear the consequences of their premarital sex.
I just wish my... subfaction? were more influential than the latter so we had more control over the movement and its messaging.
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