Pro-lifers are murdering babies
When a baby's life is at stake, it's not the thought that counts
My opinion on abortion has always been the same:
Keep it legal on demand up to the point of viability (or some similar threshold) and then ban it thereafter, with exceptions for rape, incest, and genetic health defects.
It seems obvious to me that abortion in the eighth month is no different from infanticide, just as it seems obvious that abortion in the first few weeks is completely different from infanticide.
My moral intuition says it would be equally wrong to permit elective abortion up to the point of birth (which actually does happen thanks to sickos like this) as it would be to prohibit abortion in the early stages of pregnancy (when the vast majority of terminations take place, most of which are socially necessary).
For a long time this reasonable and enlightened centrist position was also the opinion of the median American voter, and until today I had assumed that it was still the median view. But it turns out this is falseāI am now quite conservative on abortion, because the median voter has become a pro-choice maximalist. They now support an absolute right to abortion on demand up to the point of birth.
See that shift after Roe was overturned? For that you can thank GOP overreach at the state level and pathetically incompetent Republican messaging.
The GOP made no attempt to sell their views on abortion to the broader American electorate, and simply blind-sided us with restrictions out of step with actual preferences on the ground. This let the Dems take control of the narrative, and they wasted no time digging up pregnant preteen rape victims to make a cause cĆ©lĆØbre.
As a consequence, a sizeable cohort of marginal voters have abandoned my enlightened centrist position and instead have adopted pro choice maximalism. They are so disgusted with Republican extremism that theyāve begun the accept the theoretical murder of near-infants if it means stripping pro-lifers of power.
This is very obviously a complete and utter disaster, and the pro-life movement should be ashamed of itself. By pushing for overreaching restrictions on early abortions or birth control that could never be sustained and were obviously going to provoke a massive thermostatic backlash against them, pro-lifers have likely doomed tens of thousands of viable babies to death over the next few decades.
This was easily predictable and could have been avoided. John Roberts warned conservatives not to go down this path; he wanted to take Roe apart piecemeal, boiling the frog slowly over time, so inattentive and high time preference liberals wouldnāt catch on. That could have worked, but you fundamentalist chuds ruined the plan because you just *had* to impose your will on everyone *right this moment*. You couldnāt even wait to ensure the longevity of your own policy, and because of your impulsiveness the country is now a-okay with killing babies.
How the hell is anyone supposed to join a coalition with you fundies? How can we trust you to help other factions in the party achieve our goals when you canāt even exercise sufficient restraint and strategy to achieve your own?
You have blood on your hands, pro-lifers. Baby blood.
Shame on you.
I've always had a nuanced position on abortion that would piss off both the hard left and right: Roe v Wade was wrongly decided, that the issue should be solved through federalism via state to state elections, and that the way to go was by having open access to abortion in the first trimester and much stricter scrutiny later on. This is basically what almost all countries in Europe do. I try to empathize with the pro-life people... they see abortion at three months the same way I'd see abortion at nine months. And, look, having spent a few years in Brazil (that ostensibly bans abortion), I had a few friends that had they ahem been conceived in the US, likely wouldn't have made it to term. But where do you draw the line? The morning after pill? Using contraception or protection? Communist Romania trying to get people to have more kids through massive repression? Let alone that the people most able to evade the ban would do it, leaving you with the people you least want having kids having even more.
If I remember correctly, over 90% of abortions in the US are first trimester. So this is definately a case of the dog catching the car too quickly and something that could trip up the election and backfire.
Really salient point, and an underrated one; at the end of the day, it's much more difficult to induce the same sort of backlash to abortion maximalists than it is to pro-life fundamentalists. Progress won in the direction of choice tends to be lasting, whereas progress won in the direction of life is like the recent repeal of Roe: imposed from above and unlikely to persist, especially when delivered at the mandate of unpopular supreme court apparatchiks who nobody likes. Roe provided a happy medium where the issue was more or less squared, but then these stultifying geriatrics decided to pick at an old scab for no good reason at all.
For some reason, this has all led me to the rather perplexing conclusion that RBG might have been doing the right a favour on this particular issue. Politics is strange.