Someone on here always complains that not enough women post on these threads, and I'm usually too busy with the baby these days to help fix that, so let me just take this opportunity to state my opinion for the record. I recently completed one extremely planned and desired pregnancy and hope there will eventually be more. For a pregnancy, it was relatively smooth; I would guess at least half of pregnant women experience more related physical suffering than I did. I am wildly, indescribably happy with how everything turned out. But. To force an unwilling person to experience what I did to my body by free and enthusiastic choice? That would be, in my eyes, the act of a fucking psychopath.
100%. In the same boat with a comparatively easy and wanted pregnancy. It still changed my body and health in permanent ways. And pushing a 10 lb 6 oz human out of a fairly small hole was an experience. Even more than the pregnancy, the exhaustion of parenting a baby or the pain of giving up a child for adoption seem even bigger asks of someone else who knows they aren't ready for either.
Hard agree and thank you for this comment. I went into both my pregnancies fully aware of the many risks to my body and my health - including death. For me, the chance to have my children was well-worth those risks. No one should be forced to risk their life without the chance to weigh those costs for themselves.
Also, as a developmentalist by training, the anti-abortion talking points that risks and complications are rare drives me nuts. Human development is not like making a recipe or pressing "start" on a computer program; it's a complex mix of biology, environment, and randomness. Things go wrong All. The. Time. Much more often than most realize. Some of the strength of recent pro-choice messaging in my opinion has been to highlight the normalcy of those complications and start to break down the it-can't-happen-to-you myth.
Ah, I tried to put my finger on why I didn't feel I fit in the comment section here, and there is the answer staring me in the face...lol
Edit to add...the conversations, while not beyond my abilities are often just way too technical and complicated for me, I don't have time for those kind of long missives
I'm really glad that Matt has mentioned salience here, because I think it’s a key piece that needs to be factored into the concept of popularism. A position such as "Chocolate is good" is ridiculously popular, but not salient because chocolate is abundant, and no one is seriously threatening to change this. Whether abortion rights, now even more popular than ever as Matt demonstrates, will in increase in salience as more and more people feel threatened by the loss of such rights, is good to explore and good for Democrats to exploit to its maximum, whatever that is.
Was talking to Josh Kalla about this the other day. He asked if I thought Democrats should moderate on late-term abortions to maximize votes; I said that given the salience of the issue we don’t really need to, and the best path is to run with the hold Catholic Democrat “as a matter of my faith I have some issues with this but I don’t think the government should be involved” message or some version of “safe, legal, and rare” with an emphasis on birth control access.
It's notable that you come to a "don't really need to" conclusion on late team abortions but not on the safe/legal/rare framework, because Matt recently took some grief on the latter (which is odd because he's consistently favored abortion rights his whole career) by some who thought that even that wasn't needed.
SLR is divisive within the party (for I think stupid reasons) which is one reason people don’t want to talk about it. The other is that it came about in the 1990s when Democrats were playing defense on abortion; the issue is different now because we’re on offense against extreme, anti-freedom, out-of-touch GOP bans. So I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze on SLR for intracoalitional politics reasons. Why divide your own side when you have a winning issue on your hands?
When your opponent is drowning do what you can to help him by throwing him an anchor.
Democrats tend to have a bias for wanting to say what their policy is. Don't! Maybe say "codify Roe" but leave it at that. Otherwise, just point and yell at the Republicans. Don't muddy the waters and split your coalition.
I’m well aware of this but some things are more important than politics imo. If I was working on a campaign I might argue otherwise but this is a discussion forum where intellectual rigour and honesty is also important.
Having said that, I’m not at all sure that a maximalist pro choice-position on abortion is the best one from a purely political point of view. Moderation attracts swing voters even if they are few, and the more extreme pro-choice voters will not abandon Democrats when there will be a national abortion ban with Republicans in power.
"Why doesn't anyone trust politicians or governmental figures anymore?" asks political consultant who says winning the next election is the only thing that matters.
Because you can still lose elections even on issues where people agree with you if they think your party is run by a bunch of crazy activists who don't talk like normal people do?
SLR actually reflects many people's moral qualms about abortion. There's still a lot of people out there who want it legal and don't think it's good, and their votes matter a lot more in elections than people in Blue States who prefer "shout your abortion".
I also think it is actually a more accurately pro-choice position. Our abortion rates are way above those of other Western states who have safe, legal and very accessible abortions. There are probably a lot of reasons for this including access to birth control and sex ed, better prenatal health care, stronger safety nets, etc. But in any event it would seem highly likely that if women had a meaningful overall choice in whether they got pregnant and whether they could afford to parent, abortion would actually be more rare.
Of course! And that's the stupidity of the activist class on this! If you do your sex/reproduction policy right, yes, abortions are legal, and yes they happen, and yes they are an option and an important one, but they are rarer and they aren't the preferred option and you can even recognize the moral and religious concerns some people have about them! Which is basically how it works in most of Europe.
I think part of the problem here is the Democratic activist class is obsessed with stigma. You see this in a lot of different areas-- disability rights, trans stuff, etc. But you can't just erase the fact that there are actual moral debates about abortion and that the pro-choice position is much stronger when it encompasses the people who want it legal but have moral concerns, rather than driving them away with "how dare anyone think that a fetus has any moral status whatsoever?".
All elections are multi-causal, and you can always make the argument that nothing really matters. ("Everything bagels", indeed.)
The issue is to what extent does abandoning "safe legal and rare" cost us votes that matter on the margins. And the answer is-- well, there's a lot of people who want abortion to be legal but don't agree with the Left/feminist line that the issue contains no moral valence at all and that all of the concerns about fetal life are BS. And those tend to be swing voters.
Meanwhile the "intra-coalition" people you are concerned with are overwhelmingly people who live in Blue States and whose votes, even if you assumed they might possibly refuse to vote for a candidate over "safe legal and rare", are irrelevant to the presidential election.
Basically, Matt's written about this but maybe not in as strong terms as I am about to say, but you should very liberally try and piss off your base on language issues. Bill Clinton was great at that-- not only safe legal and rare but also Sister Souljah. Obama did it too on a lot of "Black respectability politics" issues and on affirmative action. Who cares if you lose 5% of the vote in New York City? But if you can get some on the fence Catholics in Ohio who don't want abortion to be illegal but do think its immoral, it's totally worth it.
The idea of compromising on late-term abortions, I think shows the limits of popularism. To me popularism means taking a more moderate position to win votes and prioritizing what you care most about.
The issue of second-trimester abortions doesn't fit this mold as well as other issues. Even before Dobbs, most people said that they supported the legality of these abortions if they met certain criteria. As it turns out, the GOP has much much stricter criteria than most voters. When expressing acceptance of restrictions, most voters probably either didn't understand the reasons for women having abortions at this stage, or thought doctors wouldn't be boxed in by intentionally vague rules. The well is poisoned. Many voters view Republicans the way that many pro-gun people see Democrats who just want a few "reasonable gun regulations."
This is an issue where raising the salience is probably a better vote getter than appealing to a mushy middle ground on the issue. Yes, the 2024 electorate is different, but that is the strategy used since Dobbs. In these elections, it seems to help.
I understand that you are talking about the politics and optics of what would be good, so I'm mostly not responding to you but to the thread in the Sunday comments on why Democrats can't "claim Jesus" and it's mostly stuff like this.
The Catholic Democrat position is pretty straightforwardly contrary to the Church's teaching on the matter. The church teaches that abortion is a grave moral evil not something one "has some issues with." The CDF's 1978 Declaration on Procured Abortion states "It must in any case be clearly understood that whatever may be laid down by civil law in this matter, man can never obey a law which is in itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the liceity of abortion. Nor can he take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it. Moreover, he may not collaborate in its application." This reiterated in Evangelium Vitae as well.
So I have no idea how this would come up in a political campaign, but I do wonder if popular argument on abortion in America will invoke a broader discussion of fully post-Christian ethics. It's not crazy to imagine a smart conservative writer bringing up the implications for mainstreaming euthanasia. The idea that the therapeutic self-killing of young adults with drug addictions or mental illness ends suffering (bad for util) and maximizes personal autonomy is a mainstream current of thought among the educated center-left in less socially conservative countries (see Canada, Netherlands.) Do we want to become more like those countries? Will ending the abortion debate on entirely liberal autonomy + suffering reduction terms get us there quicker than we can currently imagine?
Post-Christian ethics is also a topic that I ponder, and this is an interesting point. I tend to think the abortion issue is a newcomer to Christian doctrine: ideas about when a soul enters a fetus have differed throughout the ages. I suspect that many women's communities throughout the history of humanity have always been quietly tolerant of terminating unwanted pregnancies due to the risk of death in childbirth and the difficulties of being responsible for children (let alone bonding with them) in circumstances like war, famine and poverty.
But there are deeper ethical foundations that need to be replaced in post-Christian ethics. The idea that "all humans are created in the image of God", or even in the idea that everyone has a soul, need some humanitarian basis for the essential equality of all humans. Concepts and rituals around sin, atonement, forgiveness etc, help us resist dehumanizing and hating others because of what they believe or think. The default in the secular world seems to be justification by works alone.
Factually I don't think you're right about abortion being a newcomer to Christian doctrine, and is probably actually one of the oldest moral teachings of the followers of Christ. The Didache, an early Catechism which most scholars date to the first century (i.e. within at most a couple decades of Christs' crucifixion) explicitly bans the practice. Augustine and Aquinas may have had different ideas on when the soul entered the body than the present view of "life starts at conception" that I and many other Christians believe today, but both still saw it as immoral and sinful.
Post-Christian ethics are terrifying though. I really hope the country doesn't totally abandon God. Only modern attempts I've seen at systemizing ethics recently are EA which seems to be more of a system of accounting once you accept a utilitarian/consequentialist ethic than anything that has it's own solid philosophical claims and E/acc which is just revolting. I suspect (/hope) someone can give me some more encouraging alternatives, but I haven't seen any that pass any sort of muster to my eyes
Fortunately, most American Christians aren’t Catholics, and even a lot of the ones who are Catholics will selectively depart from church doctrine in practice when they disagree with it.
Excluding the word "fortunately", I agree with everything you said.
My point re the religion thing, which I made in yesterday's thread is that there's little room to win people to the Democrat side on religious grounds because for large swaths of the public their moral priors guide both their politics and their religion already so the two are already largely one in the same, and thus there aren't a lot of people who have firm religious convictions largely at odds with their politics, and for everyone else who does have such things, their is a belief in strict adherence to confessionals/traditional biblical exegesis/explicit church teachings which Democrats often clash fairly head-on with, with this being an example of the latter point
I think a lot of Democratic Catholics square this by saying they would never have an abortion (and frequently walking that talk) but that they also don't think the State should be making that choice for people and/or people with different values will still make that choice regardless and keeping those people safe is also respecting life.
My point is that the Church's teaching on the matter actually explicitly forbids even that, at least as I read it. "Nor can he take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it" seems to pretty clearly restricted the pro-choice campaigning and voting that Democratic politicians frequently do, and in Evangelium Vitae (admittedly on the part about cooperation with such laws) Pope Saint John Paul II writes that "This cooperation can never be justified either by invoking respect for the freedom of others or by appealing to the fact that civil law permits it or requires it."
I agree! I would love to see Catholic politicians follow the Church's authoritative teaching and outlaw the death penalty. The teaching on the present impermissibility of the death penalty (distinct from always being a grave moral evil like abortion) presents a different moral challenge to Catholics than when a politician supports Abortion. In the words of Cardinal Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI):
"Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia."
To be clear and not hide the ball, this was from before the changes to the Catechism that Pope Francis made re the death penalty, so I think there is now and even stronger obligation to accept the teaching of the church on the death penalty's present inadmissibility, but the broader point stands
It’s enough with one such case to make the ”abortion on demand at any stage of pregnacy” position untenable from a moral point of view. It doesn’t have to be a common incidence.
Lot's of places. Usually it is because of not knowing one is pregnant until very late or not having the financial resources to procure the abortion sooner. If you want to see it very directly, here is the 2022 Arizona abortion report in which there are 25 reported post 20th week abortions, 0 of which involve Maternal or Fetal medical conditions, which you can see from the tables on PDF pages (not the page numbers) 18, 19, and 21. They release this report I believe every year and the data always shows it to be a significant minority of cases.
We also have clinic level studies, this (pretty transparently pro-choice) study explicitly excluded women with such cases but in their introduction cites one such study I don't have access to anymore, summarizing "The body of research on women who have dealt with fetal anomalies or life endangerment during pregnancy describes their stories as narratives of pregnancy wantedness and tragic circumstances. We do not know how accurately these narratives characterize the circumstances of women who seek later abortions for reasons other than fetal anomaly or life endangerment. But data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment."
It's so well established a fact that the Clinton campaign in a response to factcheck.org in 2015 insisted that it never meant to say that most late term abortions were responding to medical factors.
If you took seriously the idea that abortion is murder you wouldn’t find it any more objectionable with state enforced protection for fetuses than for people who are already born.
For the record, I don’t believe that fetuses (at least in earlier stages of pregnancy) are persons, hence I’m pro-choice. But the issue hinges on the question of personhood, not on some blanket statement about the right to choose or defining-away-the-issue arguments about ”health care decisions”. If it’s murder then the state has a legitimate role to stop it.
I wonder if the head of the Alabama Supreme Court actually believes that frozen IVF embryos are people and that their disposal is murder. Sure, he says it, and rules on that basis. But in his personal life, would he, say, pay $10,000 for a full-blown funeral for said embryo, like he would for the death of his five year old child? Would all his family and friends gather and sob with him during that funeral? Would he be racked with grief and feel that grief for months if not years (a la that five year old child)?
I've always found the discussion of personhood beside the point. "Murder" is a crime defined by society. We don't need to decide when a human embryo becomes a human being; we need to decide when that human--whatever we call it--is entitled to society's protection. From my perspective, a human does not, in a sense, belong to society until it is no longer inside a woman's body.
I don't think it hinges on personhood. Personhood seems like a distraction when the real question is bodily autonomy. The right to life is forfeit if the life in question depends on someone else's body. No person has a right to someone else's body.
I think that since the question of when personhood begins is so completely subjective that society has a duty to answer it in a utilitarian way - certainly at no point before viability, of course, though you can make arguments for after viability in the case of severe birth defects or risk to mama
I’m not a woman and it’s not my body is a silly way to end an argument. Seems almost like an ad hominem fallacy. Who cares, if there’s a moral issues you don’t have to qualify to argue it based on identity.
Reading comprehension is very important. He asked for my view and I gave it. The moral issue is one of bodily autonomy; and since I’m not getting pregnant I don’t think it’s for me to decide how women who might should make these decisions.
By this logic you also shouldn’t vote in favor of non-restriction of abortions but just abstain entirely! (As should all other males, but good luck with that.)
Disclaiming that fetuses have any interests to weigh against the bodily autonomy interests of their mother is arguably an intellectually consistent position, but it’s also not going to be politically persuasive to people nit already on your side (nor does it have obvious rejoinders to points like Joachim that the moral patiency of the fetus in and of itself doesn’t appear to undergo a step change on the day before vs. day after birth)
"Whatever issues I have shouldn’t dictate government policy because I’m not a woman and it’s not my body"
vs.
"Here, in trollish fashion, is why my personal desires militate in favor of supporting the following policy on abortion and I will be voting accordingly."
Part of the difficulty is that the Republicans - as a group - haven't staked out a single firm position and Trump is generally more pro-abortion than his supporters as he seems to realize that a hard-core anti-abortion message is a political loser. That makes it more difficult for Democrats to draw a clear contrast, at least at this stage of the election.
I think the correct tactical answer is just to highlight Congressional Republicans’ positions and say that Trump is lying when he claims to moderate on the issue (pointing to his personal responsibility for Roe getting overturned as evidence.)
Salience is a tricky thing. How do you find the line between raising salience and hysteria that alienates the middle while energizing the extremes? How defensible is it to promote actual crazy people in the opposition on the theory they're easier to run against? In this article, for example, I'd say the depicted prominence of the crackpot theory of 14th amendment fetal personhood is probably verging on nut picking. The "legal right" federalist society judicial types are probably significantly less inclined towards it than the house R loons and the chances of it ever coming down from SCOTUS are less than zero percent.
Right but people who believe in that interpretation of the 14th amendment will be appointed to key regulatory positions at e.g., the FDA should Trump win the White House and I bet you it will inform their decision making.
I think that might be true now that Trump is listening to the Heritage foundation instead of the federalist society, but it absolutely wasn't true about Trump admin 1's record, so it's a bit more speculative than I think how Matt presents it.
Also: Whoever replaces McConnell matters a lot on this. Probably more than Trump.
Yes. Matthew Kacsmaryk is an incredible hack. At the same time, the 3 Trump admin appointed SCOTUS justices are laughing that shit out of court. It's all still a thousand miles away from fetal personhood under the 14th amendment.
I think a Fourteenth Amendment personhood argument would have a shot with both Gorsuch and Barrett. Not with Kavanaugh though and he is the median vote. The mifepristone case has other issues.
Yes because when Trump was president the first time Roe v. Wade was still on the books and so the primary goal was to get it overturned, which they did, opening the door to this regulatory stuff.
I think that pointing to the rral life examples as Matt did in the article is a solid way to do this. Matt didn't exaggerated or speak colorfully about what happened, and the examples were all horrific and made worse by the GOP lashing out at their victims.
Yep, GOP has been scoring nothing but own goals on this since Dobbs. Pointing to the own goals is good. It's when the own goals aren't coming that people tend to reach for more speculative/polarized manifestations of the issue.
I'm also glad that Matt mentioned the proverbial dog that caught the car, because I've been thinking about that same analogy with the anti-abortion movement for a while. Another movement I've been thinking about in comparison is Prohibition. It was a movement that relentlessly fought for many decades, finally won, but then when it was actually put into action, the unintended consequences were revealed, and the whole movement failed, to the point where it never even became an opinion seriously held by more than a very few, irrelevant slice of the population.
Now, the comparison is far from perfect: for one, Prohibition was way more popular than banning abortion has even been--to the point where it became a constitutional amendment! But I do wonder that if maximal abortion restrictions are imposed in some places, whether the movement behind them could also evaporate if unintended consequences are exposed. I guess we'll find out.
Also mifepristone is (for now) widely available, even in red states with telehealth and the postal service. The kinds of 2nd trimester abortions that prevent the horror stories that JM and Milan are talking about, were logistically much more difficult, even before Dobbs. There's a smaller supply of facilities that can perform these abortions, travel with conditions is harder, and I imagine that timing is actually more critical. So even if we don't see much change in actual abortions (and I wonder how much of that is women seeing early warning signs of complications and getting an early abortion instead of waiting) there is likely a disproportionate effect on later-term ones.
Washington State Public Health has been working to expand our abortion capacity since we were already one of the top locations people travel to get abortions that are logistically difficult to get in their home states. Even before Roe got overturned almost half the abortions performed in Washington State were for residents of Alaska, Idaho and Oregon. Now we are getting people flying all over. But the ability to travel isn't within everyone's capacity.
I once read a suggestion that abortion clinics be set up inside airports, which seems like a neat idea: it's a way to maximize convenience for women travelling for abortions, and vastly reduces the risk of protestors.
I am not sure how practical it would be to get all the equipment needed past security.
There is a planned parenthood in my neighborhood which some times has a small groups of protestors but more frequently has protective activists. It does mean we have a lot of graphic pro-life billboards though. That always confused my daughter because they were often right above street prostitution hot spots and she though shaming trafficked women about their abortions seemed an odd goal. I myself was always confused because I wondered who was going to planned parenthood to get an abortion. Access to abortion is so open in Washington State that it is offered by most GPs as an in-office visit and is required to be covered by health insurance. Everyone that I had ever known who had done a termination, including sex workers that I had served as an accompanying presence just got it done at a normal medical clinic, which for anyone medicaid qualified would be at UW Medicine or Kaiser where the State has their apple health contracts. I learned a few years ago that the Planned Parenthood is doing abortions almost exclusively for women coming from out of state who use it because they don't have Washington State GPs or Washington State health insurance.
Last I heard the state was looking to try to triple is abortion capacity in anticipation of receiving huge influxes of folks from out of state since Washington and Colorado are already tied for most out of state resident abortions. (It has something to do with our not having wait periods and allowing more procedures that allow you to fly less than 48 hours later.)
More generally, if it were easier to pass legislation (e.g. no filibuster), then parties would be able to implement more of their agendas, and then voters could actually experience these agendas and judge whether they like the results.
Good example. Also note the activist mindset behind both efforts. It wasn't enough for you not just not drink, or for your county or town to "go dry", alcohol being consumed anywhere, even (indeed especially!) working class Catholic or German communities where drinking beer after a 12 hour day was still totally unacceptable and had to be banned as well.
Moreover the Republicans who dominated national political in the 20's were never willing to do what was necessary to try and enforce prohibition like say raise taxes to pay for a giant national police force or send grandpa to prison for getting drunk on vanilla extract and milk or young people from well to do families have a grand old time out in Harlem speakeasies on a Saturday night. As one historian put it, prohibition transformed America from "a nation of drunkards" to a "nation of hypocrites". That might happen as well with abortion, or maybe not!
My guess is that amongst the strong anti-abortionists - a sizeable number well short of a majority- they will never change their opinion that it is murder no matter what the disastrous unintended consequences of this becoming the law of the land. I doubt the militant teetotalers were as numerous and committed as the militant pro-lifers are today. But I agree with you; "I guess we'll find out".
Yeah, Matt's take about having an "aggressive strategy" is good as long as the strategy ISN'T "ShOuT yOuR aBoRtIoNs!!11".
All that ambient shouting may have indeed helped change public opinion over the last couple decades. BUT it's not going to convince a bunch of mushy-middle voters to PrOtEcT oUr RiGhTs in the middle of a hotly contested election where the critical swing demographics (young men of color) are strongly averse to militant feminism.
The capitalization play itself is definitely content-free, regardless of the surrounding message. It's literally an attempt to do a "duhhh" sarcastic voice through type! That's obviously not going to have any content.
In the case of your specific comment there was also no content. "it's not going to convince a bunch of mushy-middle voters to PrOtEcT oUr RiGhTs"…how do we know? What are you basing that on?
I'm sorry to be critical but you've got tHiS tHinG three times in two comments and it's a pet peeve of mine, especially when you're usually very substantive.
Of course it does—it’s mockery! It has the same implication as the “duhh” voice it’s imitating, that the target is obviously beneath contempt and unworthy of a serious response. What it doesn’t tell me is *why* I should think that’s the case, especially since the pro-choice side is currently running the table in referenda! That doesn’t mean “shout your abortion” is working (I don’t even know how widely it’s being tried) but it suggests some convictions we’ve had about this debate in the past may be wrong.
I think you’re doing a bit of pundit’s fallacy here. As in, I know a lot of young nonwhite men, I happen to be one, and we don’t want to become fathers at this age.
Your criticism is valid, but only gets you so far. You're also getting an Ivy League education and racking up MaSsIvE gAiNzzzzz, not sitting in your mother's basement playing video games working a dead-end job and hating the fact that chicks won't date you.
I think that's pretty marginal. Like, sure, people soften their views on the first date, try to put their best foot forward if the issue even comes up. But appeals to popularity aren't much more than a marginal persuasion effect.
That is possible but I don't think anyone knows that yet. Trump talked shit about Hispanics, Hispanics moved towards him. Dem media world talked shit about moderate white suburbanites, those same people moved towards Dems. If some pop feminists talk shit about young male swing voters ... do we know for certain where they will go or if their turnout will change?
Young men are unreliable voters, and I think Trump's gains are more Hispanic millennial-to-Gen-X (need years of working to have nostalgia for the Trump economy), but nobody seems to know exactly how the social (religion, societal morals, cultural norms, etc) element of abortion politics will play out this year. The overall issue is obviously favored for the Dems, but beyond that, unclear.
My core underlying point is just that our overall strategy can’t afford any place for needlessly alienating ANY bloc of swing voters.
If The Groups think shouting their abortions will help win a couple swing districts in the Bay Area and Long Island suburbs, I’m happy to oblige them.
But we can’t let them go around policing the rest of the party’s messaging if that ends up meaning the difference between winning, say, Georgia, on the votes of 10,000 young Black men who might have voted for some modern formulation of “safe, legal, rare”, and that ends up being the straw that tips us over into authoritarianism.
I’m not trying to put the entire election on that one bloc; I’m just saying that since we can’t see the outcome beforehand, every last straw on the camel’s back *matters*, and therefore we have to fight The Groups on every single straw so that our own moderates have the space to win us the ballgame.
I understand the cringe that some people felt at the shout my abortion movement but the reality is that it create some space for folks to feel empowered to share their stories even stories that were more whispered through tears that shouted and I think a lot of people learned that people they love had experienced terminations for reasons they could understand and respect. I think that makes a difference. It is easy to say a hypothetical stranger is a murderer and should have access blocked. It is a bit harder to say you think your niece who got raped in college should got to jail for ending a pregnancy.
The "motte" version is that women should be candid about having had abortions rather than keeping it private/secret. The "bailey" version is expressing pride about what a positive experience your abortion was or how much better your life is because of having an abortion.
It’s not popular enough to be a clear winner. As much as I personally abhor abortion and The Groups, I would happily concede it was the correct strategy if it WERE such a winner.
But if it’s not popular enough, then the cringe makes it a liability without enough upside.
I’m not totally sure! I think there are many cases where Matt has pointed out that increasing salience of an issue is a good thing, if your party is preferable on that issue, even if you increase salience by drawing attention to awkward aspects. (I think he has said this before in terms of republicans with kids in cages.)
In the “kids in cages” example, the benefit was the free publicity of there being a migrant crisis. It hardened Trump’s own supporters, and maybe won him a handful of erstwhile squishes who were angry about the crisis and kind of had a “what do you expect him to do when none of the options are great?” response to it all.
In the abortion-shouting case, it mostly serves to let normie squishes know that some tiny (or perhaps not so tiny!) slice of women out there in the least sympathetic circumstances are completely proud of their abortions, which is not merely abhorrent, but horriFYING to them.
It’d be one thing if we did a “shout your abortion if you were raped as a teen” thing, and we swore the rest of The Groups to an _omerta_ vow of silence about less sympathetic cases. Shit, that would be a PR *coup*! And in all fairness, that’s kind of where the whole sub-movement actually *started*. But context creep/collapse reared its ugly head, and we ended up in a world where today, The Groups would view any behind-the-scenes effort to coordinate such a sane “omerta” strategy as the perfect opportunity to one-up the DNC and gin up some more donor dollars by outing the effort and purporting to claim the moral high ground against anyone who would dare "silence women shouting their abortions", free of that concept's original context.
That may have been what it originally was, and as I told Kenny, that’s a perfectly sane strategy.
The problem was when less sympathetic cases shouted out as well, and it started backfiring and morphing into an overall strategy to normalize all abortions.
Personally I'd rather have lots more (early-stage) abortions, if it limits the number of unwanted kids born into poverty. Probably good for the moms' health too. Ejecting a small mass of cells has zero moral concern for me.
But I know that's an unpopular position in this religious (spiritual?) country.
I think if you look at it in terms of strictly raising birth rates. Yeah, it doesn't look like Sweden's hyper-generous family packages. But when measuring how it lifts children out of poverty, family-centered policy interventions are helpful.
Raising kids is costly and now women have fairly high opportunity costs. If we want fertility to increase substantially then we need to have work arrangements that are more flexible, greater sharing of parental responsibilities, and find ways to keep parents engaged with the work while caring for children. The programs would need to be on the scale of public pensions.
I think it’s interesting that a lot of progressives actually probably want abortions to be rare. They’d want that through something like iuds and vasectomies and long lasting reversible birth control.
But like saying rare does seem to really trigger a slut shaming moralistic framework that gives right wing ick legal standing that imperils a lot more than abortion.
I.e. common sense. Tends to work well both practically and politically. Unfortunately none of the two parties are consistently pushing it (Republicans more or less never these days, Democrats sometimes when the activist base allows them).
This both sides argument really doesn’t work when one side is trying to take away constitutional rights half the country has had for 50 years and the other has gone undefeated in ballot referenda on this subject in even very red states.
I agree that the Republican position is extreme (and wrong), but I’m not sure that legalizing late term elective abortions is popular either, if people realize what it means in practice. This would be the position of those who oppose the ”safe, legal and rare” framing presumably.
"Safe, legal, and rare" isn't controversial because of second- or third-trimester abortions but because it suggests that abortion in general is a matter of moral concern. If you don't think (say, first-trimester) abortions are matters of moral concern then why do you care whether they are rare or not? That's the intra-coalition controversy: some pro-choice people think all or at least most abortions pose no moral issue (note, for example, NYZack's view near this comment) and other pro-choice people think that there's a moral issue that just gets overridden by other considerations (like the autonomy and well-being of the pregnant person). The first view is in tension with "safe, legal, and rare" and the second view isn't.
Yeah my muddled, incoherent, and commonly-held opinion is that abortions are of moral concern, that concern increases the later you go in the pregnancy, there is less moral concern about aborting a fetus with birth defects than one that is completely healthly, and infringing upon womens rights is also morally fraught.
It's incoherent and messy and probably pretty close to the median voter.
Indeed. My fear is that the activists will do their usual move of psyching themselves up about their predominant view (the first one) and decide that this is the only acceptable strategy for the entire party. And that they'll also convince themselves that this principle is worth making a courageous stand on.
The only reason this sort of thing worked for Republicans to get them Dobbs is because that party relentlessly focuses on the pursuit of power, even when they're standing on principle. Democrats... don't. It's a whole party full of people each standing on their own principle that they think is *too important*. Which is fine during normal times, but shit for a must-win election.
I think it's actually the other way around; Republicans pursued overturning Roe for the long haul of decades because they convinced everyone in the party this is the right thing to do on constitutional if not pro-life principle.
By contrast, you seem to be saying that if you're a moderate Democrat, you need to think how you'd avoid repeating the Summer 2020 anti-anti-riot stance that got James Bennet, David Shor, and a couple others fired from places in the Democratic party's orbit AFTER clearly having the upper hand in the criminal justice reform issue to the point Donald Trump was convinced to sign the First Step Act. BLM was polling positively too! What went wrong?
One answer is radicalism, but Democrats are by definition the party *without* the broad activist base Republicans both fear, love, and march to the median voter from. So they live in fear that one of the ten groups will damage another group or their performance with median voters. But because they have like ten groups, it's harder to coordinate against this possibility ahead of time the way Trump *clearly is* on abortion by running to the left of his opponents in the 2024 GOP primary.
Another answer is nothing went wrong, Biden narrowly won the election with enough young voters and then his surrogates immediately began castigating activists exactly one day after the last ballot came in. I think you're right this is a risk, but like Ezra Klein walking to and from his open convention idea in the course of weeks, I think you'll unfortunately find you have no clear alternative answer to what the party is doing now. Gotta wait and see.
So The Groups railed at Biden for talking about "reproductive freedom" in the SOTU and not saying "abortion" outright. Their complaints have had zero effect so far that I can tell.
I have more trust in the intelligence of our leaders to know how to communicate with the voters than apparently many others on this site do.
The leader of the GOP is floating a 15-week national ban and the leader of the Democrats is suggesting a return to Roe v Wade, which coexisted with tons of red state restrictions on abortion clinics and procedures.
I don't think there is a political party on all 50 state ballots whose leader is pushing a maximalist position on this ... has anybody checked the Green or Libertarian party planks recently?
Trump has of course been muddled and confused on this so who knows what he means, but I see no reason to believe he would push for a 15 week *floor* on abortions. It's far more likely than not that he would mean it as a *ceiling* so that Texas, Alabama etc can do six week or no week bans to their heart's content.
As far as I'm concerned, that's a maximalist position.
My read of this is the maximalist positions would be "all abortions federally allowed" and "zero abortions federally allowed." Neither candidate is running on this, so I think people analyzing the election should inform readers of that.
Well, those are certainly maximalist positions. Many positions short of that are fairly maximalist as well, as I wouldn't yet exclude Trump from that designation.
Is it possible that a large number of voters think abortion should be illegal--because they think it's wrong and they want the government to make a statement--but also think that the laws shouldn't be seriously enforced and that people shouldn't go to jail?
It seems to me that might explain some of the historical polling incoherence on this issue.
And it's not a ridiculous position, although I don't agree with it. Matt himself is the original "laws need law enforcement" guy and even so, I think he said this was more or less his view about prostitution.
One of my regular takes around here is that it's extremely bad to have laws on the books that aren't plausibly going to be consistently enforced. The kind of legal deterrence without actual enforcement that most abortion laws are going for is a perfect example.
I think there are two major factors contributing to it. One is just the general ignorance and laziness of the average American voter (which applies to any number of policy issues). The other is a desire to officially frown upon something or another, maybe reasonably so, without really appreciating that doing it this way means literally sending in the SWAT team.
That's a really good point. I think laws about Marijuana and other drugs were in large part about that. I feel like very few people actually want drug users to go to jail for simple possessions that does not involve dealing or involving anyone else. However, what a lot of people want is for anyone using drugs to be ashamed of it, do it in their house out of sight, buy it secretly, etc, so the rest of society can ignore it. I think when you visualize that it explains a lot about the war on drugs.
Degree of enforcement suggests that it often doesn't literally mean that in practice, though. A benefit of widespread legal compliance is that you don't usually have to invoke the coercive enforcement that undergirds it. Also, like, no one was ever actually in jail for possession alone.
Sports gambling or speeding seem like good examples of where the official imprimatur does as much or more legwork in keeping things from getting too out of hand (or did, when it came to gambling) than in drawing hard and fast rigidly enforced boundaries.
Maybe Matt should write a piece about why he thinks prostitution is the only case where "banning things but not really enforcing the ban" is the right policy.
I hope I'm not misremembering his comments on that topic, which didn't go into a lot of detail. But I thought I had a hunch about what he meant.
The issue is that prostitution is not only illegal but also socially stigmatized. If you remove the legal ban it's likely that the stigma will eventually disappear as well, maybe after a delay of a few decades. I don't think many people have thought vividly about what that would entail.
Social conservatives used to predict that if homosexuality were destigmatized, there would be huge indirect effects on society. Those turned out to be modest and mostly very positive, but destigmatizing payment for sex--making it a live option at all times between any two consenting adults--would be very different. It would have enormous game-theoretic consequences and although some categories of people would be made better off, others would be permanently worse off. And it might also change our understanding of the meaning of sex in a way that made almost everyone worse off.
If maintaining the symbolic legal ban is a way of putting a finger in the dike, it might seem like the least bad option.
But don't a number of other developed countries have a famously relaxed view about prostitution? As I understand it there's varying degrees of legality in countries like Germany, then in the UK and maybe Canada (?) they have some weak laws on the books that they supposedly don't enforce. Like in Britain supposedly you're not allowed to advertise prostitution or run a brothel, other than that the cops are (I've heard) not interested. Plus prostitution in the US is actually legal, in like 1 or 2 counties in Nevada
Sex work is legal and regulated in Australia, and has been for several decades.
The level of political controversy about the topic is extremely low. The churches don’t like it and they are occasionally joined by radical feminists pushing the Swedish model (prosecute the johns, not the workers), but there is essentially zero political interest in revisiting the issue.
There have been issues with illegal immigrants working in unregistered brothels, but in the main legalised sex work doesn’t seem to be causing nearly as much social harm as criminalising it did - not least because it’s no longer a big cause of police corruption.
I don’t have polling data to hand to back this up, but frankly there is far, far more concern in Australia that our laws on gambling are too permissive, than about the sex industry.
That's true, but there's still an element of stigma attached to paid sex in those countries as well. In the conditions of modernity, I think it's possible that this isn't a stable social norm.
I think most people feel a certain amount of disgust at the idea of being paid to have sex with someone they don't find attractive. And many people in some cultures (not all) feel shame at the idea of paying to have sex with someone who otherwise wouldn't be interested.
It's easy to assume that the disgust and shame are hard-wired reactions, but I think they probably aren't. They're internalized reproductions of the stigma that society applies to people who engage in paid sex... and the social stigma in turn is partly held up (in some jurisdictions) by a legal prohibition.
I think the whole thing could potentially unravel. The highest-entropy state might be a culture in which, when you proposition someone in a bar and they say they're not interested, your first response is to offer them money--and in which, when you're propositioned in a bar by someone you don't find attractive, your first response is to ask them for money. There's definitely a minority of people who would find that arousing but for everyone else, it might feel like dystopia.
I just don't think sex-positive liberals are using their imaginations here. They assume that their goal of legal, non-stigmatized sex work means: we won't judge the tiny minority of people who will continue to make a living by selling sex, and we also won't judge the somewhat larger group of people who will continue to pay for sex once in a while. (I suspect they're thinking of traditional societies in which prostitution was legal or nearly legal, even though sexual mores were very conservative in other respects, and assuming that things would work the same way under more liberal conditions.)
If you really and truly got rid of all the stigma, including internalized stigma, I don't think the effects would be so easily contained. They might be much broader and more corrosive, with a large share of non-committed sexual encounters becoming marketized.
I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but you can see why many societies would hesitate to try this experiment.
Isn’t “people having sex that’s at least somewhat conditioned by material transfers” fairly common even under the current legal regime, though? (And even more common in places and times where prostitution was illegal, but women had less wealth and fewer economic options?)
Yes, there are absolutely a lot of sexual customs that can be interpreted that way. But those customs exist *because* of the strong social norm against trading sex for money. It's the same reason people buy each other Christmas presents instead of sending a Venmo.
An MBA would look at all these taboos and traditions and say "this is irrational/inefficient, why not just let people do the thing". But human psychology almost certainly isn't optimized for that level of social explicitness.
Abortion can never be like prostitution because abortions are performed by doctors and doctors are licensed professionals who can make plenty of money without breaking the law and therefore want to keep their licenses.
I think that's right. But I also think some voters must have the vague idea that their ideal future abortion laws would be like current prostitution laws: rarely enforced, constantly violated and creating only a moderate inconvenience to getting what you want. As you say, the problem is that abortion laws couldn't work like that.
The public wanting something to be illegal but not seriously enforced is pretty common, and dangerous. I teach a criminal justice class, and I always try to highlight to my students that all laws are, on some level, backed by the potential use of force. Now, many times, we are fine setting limits on the nature and extent of force being used (like police not chasing people who flee from stops or Graham v Conor, which lays out a number of limitations). However, there is almost always some coercive element to a law that can, and given a sufficient base rate of occurrence will result in force eventually. Even if cops are excellently trained, always stay calm, and make very few mistakes...give enough at-bats, one will strike out (and lots of cops are not excellently trained and do not always stay calm).
Important to this topic is that the amount of force you can justify when considering a human life is pretty extreme. I think a lot of people get this in the case of abortion because once you imbue a fetus with personhood (again I am totally agnostic on when this happens...I am not a god or the God and have no idea), you can potentially argue for a lot of force to prevent an abortion. I suspect this is why support for increased legalization is increasing...the public sees the potential for some pretty horrendous outcomes and is willing to grant more latitude than it otherwise would to avoid those outcomes.
The other big lesson from the repeal of Roe is how codifying progressive issues as rights beyond the realm of politics can be really bad for progressive politics.
Progressive people, especially if they are lawyers, are not predisposed to think this, as they trust institutions and the idea that lawyers doing law stuff is a replacement for politics is appealing.
But hopefully this should prompt some reflection among voters and politicians about the dozens of NGL campaigns that call for a 'Right to X'.
These campaigns maybe serve the goals of their organisation, and there may be some lawyers who support it, but there will be times when it is a worse option than simply passing normal legislation that sets the law about a thing and challenging opponents to make arguments to overturn it.
I feel like the "[issue] is not political, it's a human right not up for debate" mindset is much worse among the activist set, and people who don't engage in the issues that much but feel viscerally triggered by the issue at hand. Lawyers at least know (or should know) how the political system is integral in enacting and enforcing laws.
That's partly it, but even "moral rights" can be "up for debate" in a sense.
If you strongly believe in fetal personhood, that moral belief might not be "up for debate" but _maybe_ you haven't considered the moral costs to women in some ways and you might be convinced that there are more moral competing rights than you first thought.
So some of it is still "ought" vs "is". The moral right of people not to be persecuted for being gay "ought" not to be up for debate but some people strongly believe it is a sin and aren't seeing the costs it imposes. _Most_ of the debate is legal, but you can sometimes convince people about the moral case.
That still doesn't make sense as a distinction -- moral rights are subject to debate in the same manner legal rights are, particularly given that they tend to substantially overlap.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. This is a tale as old as time (or rather as the 18th century). “We hold these truths to be self evident …” You talk about natural rights in order to establish them and protect them politically and institutionally. It’s possible the activists of today don’t get that, but the rhetoric in and of itself is ok?
It hinges on how you understand the term "beyond the realm of politics". If by that you mean "inalienable" "natural", etc. then it definitely affirms such ideas. Heck, the whole point about a *rights* based discourse is precisely that though it can be infringed it cannot be taken away stricto sensu. But of course that traditionally is a motivator for political action, and precisely what makes it political.
There was a brief moment when some weirdos were trying to promote a "right to sex" which for some goddamn reason is how they were phrasing "it should be legal for disabled people to hire sex workers, especially if they otherwise aren't able to have sex". I couldn't resist getting into arguments with person after person who didn't understand that that sounds like a literal Handmaid's Tale policy rather than an actually fairly compassionate thing for people with disabilities.
There's very little divide between men and women on views of abortion, but prostitution is a different story. Women consistently oppose it more than men ... pretty interesting!
That is because many women are more aware that demand exceeds willing supply in this "market" so that prostitution requires trafficking of unwilling women.
There's a probably a very interesting story to be told here about how we've shifted from thinking about rights as something the government cannot infringe upon but still requiring affirmative action on our part ("the right to bear arms") to something we expect the government to provide without any action on our part ("a right to housing").
That's very true. I read the above comment about the "right to sex" and was all "sure that sounds reasonable... wait do I as a taxpayer have to pay for the sexworker?" If so, this is just Doordash rights.
IMO the only rights that should be ”beyond the realm of politics” are those intrinsically connected to the democratic process, i.e. right to life, (political) speech, (political) association, vote etc. The rest are up for grabs and decided in the democratic process. (Yes, including the right to religious freedom, abortion and guns)
I'm not sure even _those_ rights should be beyond the realm of politics.
Should voting age (intrinsically connected to the democratic process) be "beyond the realm of politics"? How would you do that? Matt wants to lower it, I think that's a bad idea.
Neither of us is a bad faith actor (I'm not against lowering it because I think it helps my "tribe"/"party" more, and I don't think he's in favor of it for that reason either) - but it's an issue that would have to go to the ballot box (including the constitutional amendment ballot box).
Or are you considering constitutional amendments as "beyond the realm of politics" (separating "normal" politics from heavy-lift amendments)
If you have the framing that abortion is a mere ”health care decision” - much like removing one’s appendix, not involving any issues such as the right to life, personhood etc - then having no restrictions at all makes sense. I find that position is untenable however, and something that dogmatic progressives say because they haven’t properly thought through the issue but only want to maximally distance themselves from the dreaded right wing… If one thinks that aborting a 40 week old fetus on a whim is an unproblematic ”health care decision” and that noone has the right to think otherwise or ”come between the woman and her doctor” then I don’t know what to say… granted this is not a realistic example and not what usually happens, but more of a thought experiment to show how absurd the idea is that abortion can be reduced to a mere ”health care decision”.
As a 28 year old woman who wants children I find this frustrating. When people say it’s a “health care decision” they’re not saying it’s the same as getting your appendix removed. They’re not saying “an abortion at 8.5 months is good and fun actually.” They’re saying that they want lawmakers and random people to TRUST that whatever conversation the woman and her doctor had that resulted in whatever healthcare decision they made is sacrosanct. That those two people, who are closest to the issue and have the deepest emotional and scientific understanding of what is happening in that particular case, should be allowed to make whatever health care decision makes the most sense in that particular circumstance.
You bring up this concern of a 40 week pregnancy termination and then in the same breath dismiss it as something that rarely, if ever happens, and likely never happens for no reason at all. But because you fear it MIGHT happen, that some woman MIGHT be irresponsible, the state itself needs to intervene and get itself inserted into the medical exam room to help guide their decisions. I perceive this fear as a lack of trust, a belief that an individual woman can not or should not be allowed to simply make whatever decisions make the most sense for her and her family in privacy. A belief that on this issue, a woman might not be a good enough decision maker so it has to be overseen by the state.
In my opinion, the only human beings who know all the variables at play are the woman and her doctor, and therefore they are the only people who should decide whether or not an abortion should happen. And the state shouldn’t be too involved in overseeing it, the way it’s not particularly involved in overseeing end of life decisions for families of the elderly. They believe and trust that those families will make the right decisions for themselves at very hard times. When we say it’s a “health care decision” we’re not saying it doesn’t matter or that it’s as simple as getting rid of an appendix so much as asking for respect, privacy and trust that we are capable of making our own decisions.
The medical profession is not a libertarian free-for-all in which doctors and patients have zero restrictions in deciding what to do given a set of circumstances - and for good reason. We have learned through hard experience that no, you can't simply trust doctors and patients to do what's best and give them free reign, you need established standards of care, regulations, oversight and other mechanism to ensure doctors aren't practicing quackery and patients are getting the best information and treatments.
For what it's worth I think this framing is equally disingenuous. There is no unique lack of trust of women and their doctors at play here. All laws exist not to constrain the average person acting in good faith but because the state doesn't and shouldn't trust individuals to act in the interest of the common good (including the good of their children) in all cases so it proscribes certain behaviors that are generally infringements on the rights of others and perhaps allows exceptions for extenuating circumstances. We would never say that there shouldn't be child abuse laws because the government should TRUST fathers who have much more information than the state about any particular situation with their kids will know how to discipline their children correctly.
Child abuse laws protect children who are indisputably individuals with rights, so "the rights of others" applies. In the case of abortion, whether or not embryos are individuals with rights is the entire dispute and is also unresolvable by any empirical means. There's nothing disingenuous about saying that in such cases (in which the mother has made her decision based on the dictates of her conscience), a doctor's view of the mother's health is what matters, not a legislator's view of the moral question. That's not an irresistible position but it's a perfectly valid one.
As you point out, the question is obviously whether the unborn are individuals with rights that are deserving of legal protection. I agree with you on that. That's why all these other things about trust and healthcare are red herrings. To suggest that the laws are being passed on the basis of a unique mistrust of women and their doctors as opposed to the natural process of lawmaking wherein certain behaviors that most people wouldn't do indiscriminately anyways are proscribed so those who do undertake them can be held to account is a silly misdirect from the obviously central question of whether the unborn deserve legal protection.
"But because you fear it MIGHT happen...the state itself needs to intervene and get itself inserted..."
If you read his post carefully he's not saying he's against abortion. He's saying he thinks that particular framing is not wholly accurate. Whether you read it differently as "asking for respect, privacy and trust" is highly personal and not obvious to him or many other people.
I happen to think that's mostly fine, especially in the realm of politics, but I also take his point.
My understanding is that even in the most pro-choice jurisdictions it is extremely difficult to find a doctor that will perform a truly elective, no extenuating circumstances or health issues, abortion after around the 17 week mark. The very late term are usually arising from some sort of unexpected catastrophe and my guess is that when it happens it is among the worst days of the woman's life, having carried so far. However this suggests to me that there is a real medical ethics conversation to be had, though I am not sure it is possible now, and may never be.
In practice, elective late term abortions are extremely rare from what I understand. I might be slightly autistic, but the idea that abortion can be reduced to a health care decision really irks me, even if people only say that for strategic reasons. I dislike when people are intellectually dishonest for political or tribal reasons.
Oh I'm with you. I come down in a pro choice place. But I am also often frustrated by the seeming lack of seriousness with which so many approach an issue everyone seems to agree is pretty serious.
I agree, especially after having my own children, which is why "my body, my choice," has always made me uncomfortable, and why I can never run for office. I lean Progressive, and do not think abortion should be illegal because there are too many sticky cases balancing the mother's and fetus's/baby's health and life. But I can never fully embrace the "my body" rhetoric becasue it is definitely more than just my own body.
Ezra Klein had some good episodes where he and his guests grappled with the complex questions this issue brings up, but, alas, those are rarely addressed in politics.
Unfortunately yes. I have very little faith in voters and democracy, it’s simply the least bad option as Churchill supposedly said. But in a better world with smart, well informed voters political debates would be nuanced, honest and rational. Hopefully in the future…
I don't really believe much in the ability of humans to be rational when it comes to issues outside of the very hard sciences. A good politician recognizes this.
One thing I read from a Libertarian (I forget who now) a few years ago is the idea that once a fetus/baby becomes viable, a woman's right changes from a right of abortion to a right of eviction. It's her body, so she has the right no longer carry a viable baby to term, but she doesn't have a right to kill the baby once it is developed enough to live outside the womb.
I've always thought that's an interesting way to look at it, although it obviously comes with a lot of practical, legal and other moral issues and problems..
I don't think it's so easy to draw a bright line around when a fetus is 'viable' though. Hospitals tend to undertake heroic, extremely expensive measures to keep say a premature baby alive, so it's not like the kid would be crawling around on their own without $10 million dollars in advanced medical equipment. Are you 'viable' if you're only kept alive by a bunch of uber-sophisticated machines? Not sure
Not easy at all. I subsumed that and a lot more in the last sentence of my comment.
It's an interesting thought experiement, but I don't think it's practical except in circumstances that don't actually occur much, if ever, in the real world.
On the opposite end of the somewhat abstract views, at one point the philosopher Peter Singer argued that, under the same criteria we use for justifying killing animals for food, infanticide is justifiable until the child can take care of itself on its own.
Can you show me a single person who is actually promoting aborting a healthy fetus the day before birth? Third term abortions pre Dobbs were only possible when the mother could cite a medical problem that would threaten their life. There were literally four doctors in the US able to perform a third term abortions in 2009, there isn't a secret rash of thousands of them. Absolutely no one and I mean no one is promoting the killing of a viable fetus. The idea that someone would do that over getting a C-section has absolutely never been seen. We don't have that discussion because we are so far away from anyone even thinking of doing that, even when it hasn't been explicitly illegal.
In reality, pro choice advocates are getting stonewalled on abortions for nonviable pregnancies that etould kill the mother. If we actually care about ethics let's maybe talk about how those women deserve to be treated like humans before we start getting in to imagining late term abortions to get mad at.
"Can you show me a single person who is actually promoting aborting a healthy fetus the day before birth?"
"Promoting" is the trick word there. No one "promotes" it -- many people advocate for laws that permit it, however. (Caveat: I'm militantly pro-choice, but I'm intellectually honest about it.)
Absolutely, but “laws cannot technically allow bad things that nobody would ever do” is not a standard we typically enforce. It matters factually whether anyone would actually seek out those abortions.
Is it not the case that, at least at its origin and certainly in its deployment in popular debate, the entire idea of "late-term abortion" is, in substance, bad-faith, counter-factual framing by anti-choice activists? That is, in the real world, almost all "late-term abortions" are therapeutic interventions involving pregnant women who desperately want a child but are carrying a foetus with terrible defects discoverable only late-term, such that it will either be born dead or live only a few hours, and the choice is between termination and giving birth to a dead or fatally ill baby. This leads to the difference in analysis between red-state America and the European jurisdictions that purport to restrict late-term abortion, in that in the latter, medical-necessity approval is essentially automatic (for entirely good and sensible reasons), and doesn't get all tangled up in deliberately vaguely drafted restrictions that are at risk of application with an absolutist religion-based conception of what "mother's health" is deemed to mean.
I have no clue -- I'm opposed to such legislation as a matter of principle. I just find it bizarre to say, "'X' literally never happens," then someone proposes to ban "X," and the same person who previously said, "'X' literally never happens," declares, "It's a crisis if 'X' is banned."
To put it another way, I don't think unicorns exist. If the legislature passed a law stating that unicorns may only legally be kept on a minimum lot size of 40 acres, I would find that weird and wonder why the legislature was wasting their time on that, but I wouldn't protest against it.
The law allows for all types of activities that majority of people (including both liberals and conservatives) find unsavory, but don't think should carry the weight of legal sanction. Most people are against adultery, but don't think it should carry a prison sentence. Deciding not to jail everyone who does something we don't like doesn't mean we are borderline promoting it.
"If you have the framing that abortion is a mere 'health care decision' - much like removing one’s appendix, not involving any issues such as the right to life, personhood etc."
Choosing to withdraw life support from a vegetative family member is also a "mere 'health care decision'".
I think Luker's position, that positions on abortion can't be untangled from a bunch of other messy things like the role of women in society, sexual morality, the important of having children in life, the rights of the individual vs the group etc is the correct way to think about it here: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520055971/abortion-and-the-politics-of-motherhood
If US progressives looked to Scandinavia - which they are usually happy to do - they would see that these countries usually have a cut off point at 12-15 weeks and after that it’s only permissable in case of rape or if the woman’s life is in danger. Similarily, transgender surgery and puberty blockers for kids is severly restricted. Often what is seen as moderate in today’s American debate is usually pretty damm progressive in a global perspective and what US progressives push for is extreme.
The same goes for immigration policies btw. All parties in government in Scandinavian countries are now hard liners on asylum immigration, i.e. for strict limits that make integration possible (after having seen the problems overly liberal migration policies lead to).
You have to look at abortion laws as a whole policy regime. In most of Europe gestational cutoffs are sooner than under the Roe v. Wade standard (which was "viability," so around 24 weeks). But access to early-term abortions is much better, including public funding, which diminishes the need for later abortions (which often happen because of travel and cash needs). The exceptions after the gestational cutoff are also generally broad and can include fetal defects and risks to health (including mental health) that fall short of danger to life.
It's like people who push voter ID laws. Other countries make eay easier to get an ID if they require one to vote. They don't require an ID and then specifically make it harder for people of color to get IDs.
I didn't realize that the entirety of Scandinavian policy is our only trade space. I think I will trade the extremely progressive tax base and totally open borders with all of our non-russian neighbors for that 15 week ban.
Or is that not actually what you're saying? Are you just using the one example to tell people who care about the issue to try to negotiate with bad faith actors?
Calling people who sincerely believe abortion is murder “bad faith actors” is craven. You may disagree with them, but many of them are operating with the utmost good faith and out of the best motives.
But the people advocating for the 15 week bans are hiding the ball, deliberately. I've been in that movement and I know how they think; every incremental step is perceived as being towards an absolute ban.
That simply cannot be true. 15 week ban is a very moderate, even liberal, position and not everyone is a left wing or right wing radical. Unfortunately in today’s polarized environment people are pushed towards the extremes.
Republicans are not going to stop at 15 weeks. Case in point: Ron DeSantis signed a 15 week ban, then signed a 6 week one after he was re-elected governor.
There are always bad faith actors. It’s logical and politically prudent to advocate for a 15 week period and stand up for it against the extremes on the right and left. In the same way you can argue for increased border control without going full Nazi.
I agree with you, and I think that most would if this issue were as clean as fresh snow in politics. But it's not. Hardline abolitionists are in the driver's seat for one of the two major parties, and they have a 40 year history of using anti-democratic tools of power to accomplish whatever measures they can.
Yglasias is notably not framing the 12-ish week bans as a reasonable compromise. Which is to your point, they're not being made by people interested in compromise; if they believe that god tells them that every abortion is murder, all compromises are inherently made with murderers on behalf of murder.
If we had a cadre willing to compromise, then 12 weeks might be reasonable. If we had the Scandinavian approach to policy experiments, we might have a lot of things different, too.
I’m Scandinavian myself and wouldn’t want to suggest that the US should copy us :) I only mean to point out that US progressives tend to be highly selective when romanticizing Scandinavia - and also that they are both radical and wrong on immigration, transgender surgery/medication for kids and late term abortions but that is simply my personal opinion… a 15 week ban with the usual exceptions is a very reasonable position imo.
Scandinavia keeps popping up, in my experience, because anytime you have a question about a theoretical policy, there's a paper that says "well Sweden tried this in 2006 and..."
Pro-lifers have not been willing to compromise on an abolitionist stance. Republicans have tried to push back for electorally prudent reasons, but the movement has gained too much power within the coalition. The 'middle ground' on this matter, as Yglasias points out, will see itself increasingly hollowed out as, for example, Republican FDAs remove approval for mifepristone.
Let me put this another way. People want ideological compromise on this matter, but people are not going to get it, because there are a lot of policy compromises that Republicans can make in service of an absolutist ideology. Banning abortion drugs won't end all abortions, but it's what an abolitionist stance demands because it's all that can be done at any moment.
If US progressives offered the right a political deal whereby America gets (a) stricter abortion timeline regulations and (b) a tougher policy wrt migrants, in return for (c) social democracy, GOP/MAGA would tell us to drop dead.
Indeed. Why would a pro-life person be happy with a 12 or 15 week ban? The vast majority of abortions already occur in that time frame and this would just push the number higher. They would only do so as a temporary stopping point in order to pursue the DeSantis strategy of taking another bite as soon as they could.
I don’t know if “you usually like Scandinavian policy so you should like it here too” is a fallacy that has a Latin name but it’s definitely a fallacy.
This is quite misleading for the US context. Sure, you probably can't get an abortion willy nilly in Scandinavia in that time frame, but there are a number of criteria a woman can fulfill to get an abortion, if the powers to be determine that she needs one. The American states that have enacted these restrictions have a very different set of criteria, which often turn out to be, almost nothing short of the imminent death of the mother. I think that it goes without saying that women almost entirely get abortions around 15 weeks for different reasons than first trimester abortions. The mushy middle position of de jure 1st trimester abortions being legal (and widely accessible) and de facto legal 2nd trimester abortions (which is closer to the West European status quo than what you see in Red states) isn't a plausible endgame.
"after that it’s only permissable in case of rape"
I don't understand the reasoning behind this exception. If you think abortion in a particular case is murder, then why does it matter whether the parents loved each other etc.? If you don't think it's murder, then why is the abortion illegal when it wasn't rape?
For the same reason we don't charge SWAT team members with murder or even negligent homicide if a hostage is killed while they are dealing with a standoff with an armed robber?
In principle, the SWAT team is part of punishing the armed robber (in the sense that they haul them into jail and then court), and preventing the theft (in the sense that the robber can't take hide their ill-gotten gains for later use). I'd say I'm not sure how the abortion punishes the rapist or prevents the rape…but there probably are rapists who get off on the idea of impregnating someone. Fair enough.
Tbh a very underrated difference is America's decentralized federal structure allows all kinds of moral causes and reform movements to try things piece by piece. Hence marijuana prohibition, immigration enforcement, private firearm ownership, the trans kid phenomenon, and now abortion bans (prefaced by the pre-Roe clinic regulations) really do vary state by state before you even get to who is running the executive branch.
Some trans rights activists refer to the UK as "TERF Island", but it's unclear the UK is uniquely more traditional on family authority than the US. What is unique is the UK literally had one clinic (Tavistock) run by the government healthcare service for things to go from 0 to 100 to 0 in a clear story for the British public. I would prefer we did less federalism, but it's obviously a way we let lots of social disagreements play out state by state right now. It makes comparing to the UK or Scandinavia a bit apples and oranges before you even get to the actual social views; first one must understand the weakness of the central state in America and the long tradition of anti-statism that runs along it. Of course, I think Republicans mistake federalism as the main way to reign in the state (it's actually public aversion to federal taxes), but that's another story.
One thing I think about is how some positions coded as “progressive” are actually small government deregulatory positions. This is one, upzoning/banning single occupancy is another, allowing smaller vehicles (e-bikes to kei trucks) is a third.
This is definitely a thing— mostly because “increasing the size and regulatory power of the government” usually isn’t a terminal value even for people who generally tilt toward it.
Generally it seems like if people try to tie "freedom" too closely to the Right *or* the Left, things start to fall apart on closer inspection. Would the Left embrace the freedom of people to buy guns, send their kids to charter schools, and buy more-powerful-but-less-efficient dishwashers?
The thing is at a certain point freedoms bump in to each other. Letting businesses pollute kills people, completely removing their freedom. Regulating the insurance market gives millions of people way more options in how to live their life without a lifetime of medical debt. All of the policies you cited are attempts to give more choice to people now or in the future (even if we can argue the effectiveness of any of them).
Also, if you tie a value like "freedom" or "free speech" (or a generally good thing like "vaccines", for that matter) too closely to one political side, the other side might well decide that they're against that value or that good thing.
This will be lost, I’m sure, given that it’s 12:10 mountain time, but what I haven’t seen yet in these comments is:
Functionally, term- or time-based abortion restrictions are just a fiction to make some people feel better.
Those who feel abortion is murder believe that whether it’s one week or 30 weeks in.
Those who believe there are acceptable circumstances, like for the life or safety of the mother, are functionally but not explicitly saying they trust the doctor and the mother to be reasonable.
The idea that women are regularly getting 35 week abortions because they decided they don’t want to have a baby after all is just…a fantasy. By and large, any 35 week abortion is a tragic decision made by a woman who was ready to give birth in 5 weeks but something went terribly wrong all of a sudden.
So whether we agree on “up to 15 weeks and then afterward only in X cases” or “no restrictions”, I doubt there will be much difference in the number and kind of abortion performed.
I think there are a lot of people (myself probably among them) who think a medical abortion at 6 weeks is lightyears away from murder but euthanizing a viable fetus at 35 weeks is... awfully close to it.
The counter is that there are very few abortions like that. And that's right. But it doesn't strike me as a reason to oppose a ban (with appropriate exceptions)--the principle really is important.
I think if it is a perfectly healthy fetus that is euthanized at 35 weeks than it does make me uncomfortable. My understanding though is that almost all of these cases are fetuses with serious defects or where the mothers health is on the line. If a fetus is going to be born in 5 weeks only to scream in pain and terror for a few days before dying under harsh, clinical hospital lighting then I would say that fate is much, much worse.
I think it is empirically hard to evaluate how many third-trimester abortions are for fetal conditions incompatible with life versus other reasons. The one study I've found on this (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1363/psrh.12190) had cases where women experienced barriers to getting care earlier and where pregnancy was discovered late. But it's not a statistically representative sample (and "third trimester" also includes earlier times than 35 weeks).
Whatever the percentage is, though, the absolute number is very low.
I have a comment elsewhere in this thread (if you search for Arizona you should find it) that has more data though not much. Broadly the answer seems to be post 20th week abortions are very very rarely for fetal anomalies or maternal health but we lack good data later in pregnancy
There is much more data about 20-24 week abortions which are more common and more broadly legal. But you can't extrapolate to later abortions which are legal in fewer places, more expensive, more medically complicated, and performed by fewer practitioners.
As long as a voter like you includes exceptions for abortions outside of 15 weeks or whatever, I am perfectly happy with legislation that signals that abortion after that point is more fraught without banning it in medically necessary circumstances.
I see no reason to make a couple dealing with probably the saddest moment of their life to jump through more hoops to appease the worries of other people. Because that's all late term bans do, unless you don't trust doctors and women.
It's one thing to say this about paternalistic legislation but if you take seriously the premise that there is another being with weighty rights involved (which I think is definitely true at 35 weeks), the law has a role to play notwithstanding trust. We trust parents a lot but it's not absolute trust.
I think this is a very common position, and about the one I take.
Early abortions don't seem bad, and the ability to basically give people a do-over or enable reproductive medical treatments seems to far outweigh any negatives.
Late abortions seem really serious, so they should be reserved for extreme cases.
Well, whether they use the word “murder” or not, I think the opinion that all abortion is wrong and tantamount to murder is actually pretty common, even if far from a majority of voters or republicans even.
there really is a spectrum of opinion, which is why Democrats would do well to find some particularly hideous abortions to ban. Of course, they might cave to disability activists and ban eugenic abortions, which I think are the best kind.
Exactly. You either trust women to make decisions with their doctors about their own bodies or you don’t and think the state legislature should be involved.
And if you believe life begins at conception then I don’t think you are placated by a ban at x weeks.
I think a lot of people struggle to imagine what could possibly necessitate a later term abortion, but faced with an actual example—like the woman Matt cited—they usually say, Well of course that’s an exception.
The thing is—basically all later term abortion are that kind of exception. They’re rare, they’re unique, they are exceptional by definition.
So I’m fine with a 16 weeks plus exceptions, knowing full well that the exception are many and necessary, and knowing that it eases the average voter’s mind that there’s no willy-nilly 38 week abortions being provided for women who’ve “changed their mind” or whatever.
I've joked before that a reasonable person could get a room of 10 pro-life people to agree with 10 straight late-term abortions, and could also get a room of 10 pro-choice people to agree that, "well, I wouldn't make that choice."
I agree. From a philosophical perspective, I don’t think the government should be involved in the decisions, which means that I basically think it should be legal entirely. A 38 week abortion of a healthy baby seems icky to me, but I would be shocked if any doctor would do it/if any women would want it. In practice, I understand that basically all late term abortions are extreme and very specific circumstances so something like a 16 week ban with exceptions basically covers all the use cases that I find acceptable.
But then of course I come back to, what does it matter if I find it acceptable or not? It’s not my pregnancy.
" I understand that basically all late term abortions are extreme and very specific circumstances so something like a 16 week ban with exceptions basically covers all the use cases that I find acceptable."
This is basically the actual European laws conservatives try to paint as what they're trying to do in the US against the radical pro-abortion extreme, but any Republican who actually put forth say, French or German abortion law outside of a deep blue state would lose in a primary in 9.5 seconds.
Well, I guess I don’t begrudge people for having strong opinions in either direction. And for those who believe it’s tantamount to murder, they’re allowed to think that.
My hope is always that the rest of us can form a large majority who agree that it’s: not murder, medically necessary in some cases, and a genuine net good for society to have it available in the early weeks.
Whether people’s moral opinions *should* matter or not, I think it’s clear they *do* matter, and so legislation and activism that caters somewhat to those moral qualms is likely the straightest forward path to securing good abortion rights.
What about it seems icky though? If it's not another being with rights then what's wrong with killing it? And if it is obviously the government has an interest in protecting its rights regardless of whose pregnancy it is, no?
I think I just struggle with the language and concept of personhood as it applies to a fetus. A 12 week fetus doesn’t seem like a person to me, a 38 week fetus does. I’m not really sure where that changes for me. 20 weeks? 24? 32? I don’t think there’s a clean distinction. And I’ve birthed two babies. I’m ok with not knowing, and honestly I’m a little annoyed at the assuredness that other people have on this. It’s clearly a grey area. That’s why we all fight about it.
To relate this to another comment I made, I think that you have to consider whether the rights to life trump the rights to personal liberty. I don’t think the government should be able to commandeer my body to save the life of another person. I may believe it is the right thing to do to donate my liver/kidney to save another person, but the government mandating I should do so strikes me as an infringement of my rights and bodily autonomy, even if I would choose to of my own volition.
I agree with your bodily autonomy point but it's a lot less compelling late in pregnancy, where preventing a live birth becomes an objective of the procedure; it's not just about terminating the pregnancy.
It depends how you're defining later term, but for the 1% of abortions that happen at 21+ weeks we know that very very few are the kind of exception you cite. It's far more often someone who wasn't able to or chose not to get one earlier. In Arizona's abortion report from 2022 for example 0 of the 25 21+ week abortions were for fetal anomalies or maternal health.
1) The most restrictive laws are poorly written on purpose in order to create ambiguity which, in turn, causes providers to err on the side of caution. Alabama's recent IFV issue is a good example of this. Do we really think the people drafting the initial law knew nothing about IVF? That they somehow forgot a whole bunch of people were suddenly going to be unable to access fertility treatments which they'd been used to having access to? The ambiguity of the laws has a chilling effect, and lawmakers understand and intend this effect to some extent when they draft bans in broad, non-specific language (but see #2 and 3).
2) The ambiguity of the laws also has possibly unintended knock-on effects to medical care. In the first order, doctors are put in the position of having to allow a pregnancy to become life-threatening to the patient before they can intervene even though in many cases it's clear that the pregnancy is non-viable and that continuing the pregnancy will create deadly risks. Even when laws create an exception for the life of the mother, doctors, hospital systems, and their lawyers have interpreted this to mean not intervening until the worst-case outcome is almost unavoidable because the laws don't establish any clear guidance for making the decision. Doctors don't want to go to jail for acting to save a patient's life. Patients don't want to be forced to reach the point of maximum risk before their doctors can act. These cases are also gaining national attention and the public seems unhappy about it. While I think lawmakers could have foreseen some of this stuff had they taken more care and done more research when drafting abortion bans, some of it may be too technical and medical for these mere politicians to understand.
3) There are second order effects too. In one example publicized recently by the Atlantic, some Oncologists and Cardiologists in Tennessee have been refusing to take on pregnant patients because they don't want to risk being held criminally responsible if something should happen to the patient's pregnancy. Even when that patient's OBGYN has cleared the patient for their care and offered to coordinate with those specialists, some still refuse flat out. Yet, pregnancy can often cause heart problems that need a cardiologist's management! There are cancer treatments available to pregnant women! But because the laws are so ambiguous providers do not want to risk their careers and livelihoods. Again, was this what the people drafting abortion bans intended? Probably not! I doubt they thought that far down the road.
Why should any member of the public put trust in their state legislatures to institute an abortion ban with any degree of intelligence and safety when this is the mess they've created so far? Maybe they would prefer some kind of moderate ban, 16 weeks or whatever, but if they can't trust their political leaders to implement it without potentially endangering any pregnant woman, isn't the better position to just allow abortion and leave it up to the discretion of patients and their doctors?
"Why should any member of the public put trust in their state legislatures to institute an abortion ban with any degree of intelligence and safety when this is the mess they've created so far?"
You could say a similar thing about American support for passenger rail, which is also a mess. But Matt's usual response to that argument is that we should rationalize Amtrak's governance, not eliminate it.
I agree we can’t be complacent but I understand that young people tend to be relatively liberal and low propensity voters. Access to abortion really resonates with them as it has obvious relevance to their lives. I would be extremely surprised if the well-funded and intelligently staffed Democrat campaign didn’t strive mightily to raise this issue in political advertising.
I suggest the anti-abortion position of the Republicans could very well be a long acting poison for them for many years to come. The activist Republican base is overwhelming in favour of it and will remain so for the foreseeable future. It may well be electoral suicide for a Republican to express pro-choice sentiments in Republican primaries for decades to come. In that time cohort after cohort of young people who are pro-choice will enter the voting electorate and be primed to be anti-Republican because of this issue. Perhaps they will grow more conservative with age, but my guess is that early voting habits will act as an anchor that will drag against any winds blowing them in a more conservative direction. At the very least the Republican position on abortion is going to solidify – probably for decades-it’s losing numbers in the 50% of voters who have ovaries. That’s a serious electoral handicap.
The Republicans tried to overturn Roe for 50 years. If people think that the backlash will be isolated to one midterm cycle only, well, I have a bridge to sell you.
It might be that Republicans moderate on abortion and that the hard core fundamentalist part of their base simply stops voting in national elections, taking the Benedict option seriously (isolating themselves in religious groups and turning their attention inwards and/or away from worldly matters).
I rather think the hard core fundamantalists prefer the option of inflicting their postion on others and will need to experience a lot of failures before reverting to withdrawing into hyper-sprituality.
Matt reads too much into the polling data on whether a woman “should be able to get an abortion for any reason.”. First, the wording is pretty vague. Many people believe a woman should be able to get an abortion “for any reason” early in a pregnancy, but cringe at the thought of a woman aborting a healthy 22 week old fetus because she broke up with her boyfriend. I certainly do. Second, only a bare majority endorsed this position, not more than 55%. In pretty sure a majority of Americans would disagree with the statement “a woman should be able to get an abortion at any time in her pregnancy for any reason.”
Then there is opposition to 15 week abortion bans. I certainly oppose blanket prohibitions on abortions after 15 weeks. Mid term abortions should be allowed for eugenic reasons and when a mothers health is in danger. But, again, that doesn’t justify aborting a healthy fetus after a breakup.
There are a small number of really ugly abortions I’m keen to prevent. I don’t believe in forced birth, but I also don’t see that big a difference between a healthy 22 week old fetus and an infant. The 22-week old fetus looks like a baby human, has eyes and hands a a beating heart and deserves to be wanted.
I'd be cautious in guessing what the majority of Americans would agree/disagree with, David, on a politically loaded question in the absence of polling data. The 'not more than 55%' comment ignores the fact that it is at least a 55/45% split and that makes it a winning political issue - especially when the 'don't knows/undecideds' are factored in. You also seem to discount the fact that 'vague wording' aside (and it seems pretty clear to me) there is a strong trend over time for this opinion to grow stronger in the community.
Annoying reminder to everyone: the main division over abortion isn't about gender, but rather partisanship and religiosity. A lot of bad takes on the issue stem from the author not grappling with this fact (indeed while the leadership of the pro-life movement is largely male most of the "organizing muscle" of the movement, is and has been historically, made up of women.)
Someone on here always complains that not enough women post on these threads, and I'm usually too busy with the baby these days to help fix that, so let me just take this opportunity to state my opinion for the record. I recently completed one extremely planned and desired pregnancy and hope there will eventually be more. For a pregnancy, it was relatively smooth; I would guess at least half of pregnant women experience more related physical suffering than I did. I am wildly, indescribably happy with how everything turned out. But. To force an unwilling person to experience what I did to my body by free and enthusiastic choice? That would be, in my eyes, the act of a fucking psychopath.
Thank you for sharing, and congratulations on the baby!
Thank you!!! Best wishes to you and your baby. I too had an easy, uncomplicated pregnancy and I agree that no one should be forced into it.
100%. In the same boat with a comparatively easy and wanted pregnancy. It still changed my body and health in permanent ways. And pushing a 10 lb 6 oz human out of a fairly small hole was an experience. Even more than the pregnancy, the exhaustion of parenting a baby or the pain of giving up a child for adoption seem even bigger asks of someone else who knows they aren't ready for either.
Neither you nor I know, truly, what we are ready for. You would be amazed.
Hard agree and thank you for this comment. I went into both my pregnancies fully aware of the many risks to my body and my health - including death. For me, the chance to have my children was well-worth those risks. No one should be forced to risk their life without the chance to weigh those costs for themselves.
Also, as a developmentalist by training, the anti-abortion talking points that risks and complications are rare drives me nuts. Human development is not like making a recipe or pressing "start" on a computer program; it's a complex mix of biology, environment, and randomness. Things go wrong All. The. Time. Much more often than most realize. Some of the strength of recent pro-choice messaging in my opinion has been to highlight the normalcy of those complications and start to break down the it-can't-happen-to-you myth.
Ah, I tried to put my finger on why I didn't feel I fit in the comment section here, and there is the answer staring me in the face...lol
Edit to add...the conversations, while not beyond my abilities are often just way too technical and complicated for me, I don't have time for those kind of long missives
Congrats!!
So glad for your joy in your new baby. But, you are not a F...... P........... just because you believe a baby is a baby from conception.
Extremely disingenuous response. OP didn't say that holding this belief makes someone a psychopath.
Congrats on your baby!
And Amen! to your post.
I'm really glad that Matt has mentioned salience here, because I think it’s a key piece that needs to be factored into the concept of popularism. A position such as "Chocolate is good" is ridiculously popular, but not salient because chocolate is abundant, and no one is seriously threatening to change this. Whether abortion rights, now even more popular than ever as Matt demonstrates, will in increase in salience as more and more people feel threatened by the loss of such rights, is good to explore and good for Democrats to exploit to its maximum, whatever that is.
Was talking to Josh Kalla about this the other day. He asked if I thought Democrats should moderate on late-term abortions to maximize votes; I said that given the salience of the issue we don’t really need to, and the best path is to run with the hold Catholic Democrat “as a matter of my faith I have some issues with this but I don’t think the government should be involved” message or some version of “safe, legal, and rare” with an emphasis on birth control access.
It's notable that you come to a "don't really need to" conclusion on late team abortions but not on the safe/legal/rare framework, because Matt recently took some grief on the latter (which is odd because he's consistently favored abortion rights his whole career) by some who thought that even that wasn't needed.
SLR is divisive within the party (for I think stupid reasons) which is one reason people don’t want to talk about it. The other is that it came about in the 1990s when Democrats were playing defense on abortion; the issue is different now because we’re on offense against extreme, anti-freedom, out-of-touch GOP bans. So I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze on SLR for intracoalitional politics reasons. Why divide your own side when you have a winning issue on your hands?
Because moderation, reasonableness and intellectual honesty is good for its own sake, regardless of the politics.
Yeah that’s not how political campaigns work dude
Well said, Milan.
When your opponent is drowning do what you can to help him by throwing him an anchor.
Democrats tend to have a bias for wanting to say what their policy is. Don't! Maybe say "codify Roe" but leave it at that. Otherwise, just point and yell at the Republicans. Don't muddy the waters and split your coalition.
I’m well aware of this but some things are more important than politics imo. If I was working on a campaign I might argue otherwise but this is a discussion forum where intellectual rigour and honesty is also important.
Having said that, I’m not at all sure that a maximalist pro choice-position on abortion is the best one from a purely political point of view. Moderation attracts swing voters even if they are few, and the more extreme pro-choice voters will not abandon Democrats when there will be a national abortion ban with Republicans in power.
"Why doesn't anyone trust politicians or governmental figures anymore?" asks political consultant who says winning the next election is the only thing that matters.
Because you can still lose elections even on issues where people agree with you if they think your party is run by a bunch of crazy activists who don't talk like normal people do?
SLR actually reflects many people's moral qualms about abortion. There's still a lot of people out there who want it legal and don't think it's good, and their votes matter a lot more in elections than people in Blue States who prefer "shout your abortion".
I also think it is actually a more accurately pro-choice position. Our abortion rates are way above those of other Western states who have safe, legal and very accessible abortions. There are probably a lot of reasons for this including access to birth control and sex ed, better prenatal health care, stronger safety nets, etc. But in any event it would seem highly likely that if women had a meaningful overall choice in whether they got pregnant and whether they could afford to parent, abortion would actually be more rare.
Of course! And that's the stupidity of the activist class on this! If you do your sex/reproduction policy right, yes, abortions are legal, and yes they happen, and yes they are an option and an important one, but they are rarer and they aren't the preferred option and you can even recognize the moral and religious concerns some people have about them! Which is basically how it works in most of Europe.
I think part of the problem here is the Democratic activist class is obsessed with stigma. You see this in a lot of different areas-- disability rights, trans stuff, etc. But you can't just erase the fact that there are actual moral debates about abortion and that the pro-choice position is much stronger when it encompasses the people who want it legal but have moral concerns, rather than driving them away with "how dare anyone think that a fetus has any moral status whatsoever?".
Which recent elections have we lost because of abortion though?
All elections are multi-causal, and you can always make the argument that nothing really matters. ("Everything bagels", indeed.)
The issue is to what extent does abandoning "safe legal and rare" cost us votes that matter on the margins. And the answer is-- well, there's a lot of people who want abortion to be legal but don't agree with the Left/feminist line that the issue contains no moral valence at all and that all of the concerns about fetal life are BS. And those tend to be swing voters.
Meanwhile the "intra-coalition" people you are concerned with are overwhelmingly people who live in Blue States and whose votes, even if you assumed they might possibly refuse to vote for a candidate over "safe legal and rare", are irrelevant to the presidential election.
Basically, Matt's written about this but maybe not in as strong terms as I am about to say, but you should very liberally try and piss off your base on language issues. Bill Clinton was great at that-- not only safe legal and rare but also Sister Souljah. Obama did it too on a lot of "Black respectability politics" issues and on affirmative action. Who cares if you lose 5% of the vote in New York City? But if you can get some on the fence Catholics in Ohio who don't want abortion to be illegal but do think its immoral, it's totally worth it.
The idea of compromising on late-term abortions, I think shows the limits of popularism. To me popularism means taking a more moderate position to win votes and prioritizing what you care most about.
The issue of second-trimester abortions doesn't fit this mold as well as other issues. Even before Dobbs, most people said that they supported the legality of these abortions if they met certain criteria. As it turns out, the GOP has much much stricter criteria than most voters. When expressing acceptance of restrictions, most voters probably either didn't understand the reasons for women having abortions at this stage, or thought doctors wouldn't be boxed in by intentionally vague rules. The well is poisoned. Many voters view Republicans the way that many pro-gun people see Democrats who just want a few "reasonable gun regulations."
This is an issue where raising the salience is probably a better vote getter than appealing to a mushy middle ground on the issue. Yes, the 2024 electorate is different, but that is the strategy used since Dobbs. In these elections, it seems to help.
One thing you can do is literally run on how phony GOP exceptions are.
I understand that you are talking about the politics and optics of what would be good, so I'm mostly not responding to you but to the thread in the Sunday comments on why Democrats can't "claim Jesus" and it's mostly stuff like this.
The Catholic Democrat position is pretty straightforwardly contrary to the Church's teaching on the matter. The church teaches that abortion is a grave moral evil not something one "has some issues with." The CDF's 1978 Declaration on Procured Abortion states "It must in any case be clearly understood that whatever may be laid down by civil law in this matter, man can never obey a law which is in itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the liceity of abortion. Nor can he take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it. Moreover, he may not collaborate in its application." This reiterated in Evangelium Vitae as well.
So I have no idea how this would come up in a political campaign, but I do wonder if popular argument on abortion in America will invoke a broader discussion of fully post-Christian ethics. It's not crazy to imagine a smart conservative writer bringing up the implications for mainstreaming euthanasia. The idea that the therapeutic self-killing of young adults with drug addictions or mental illness ends suffering (bad for util) and maximizes personal autonomy is a mainstream current of thought among the educated center-left in less socially conservative countries (see Canada, Netherlands.) Do we want to become more like those countries? Will ending the abortion debate on entirely liberal autonomy + suffering reduction terms get us there quicker than we can currently imagine?
Post-Christian ethics is also a topic that I ponder, and this is an interesting point. I tend to think the abortion issue is a newcomer to Christian doctrine: ideas about when a soul enters a fetus have differed throughout the ages. I suspect that many women's communities throughout the history of humanity have always been quietly tolerant of terminating unwanted pregnancies due to the risk of death in childbirth and the difficulties of being responsible for children (let alone bonding with them) in circumstances like war, famine and poverty.
But there are deeper ethical foundations that need to be replaced in post-Christian ethics. The idea that "all humans are created in the image of God", or even in the idea that everyone has a soul, need some humanitarian basis for the essential equality of all humans. Concepts and rituals around sin, atonement, forgiveness etc, help us resist dehumanizing and hating others because of what they believe or think. The default in the secular world seems to be justification by works alone.
Factually I don't think you're right about abortion being a newcomer to Christian doctrine, and is probably actually one of the oldest moral teachings of the followers of Christ. The Didache, an early Catechism which most scholars date to the first century (i.e. within at most a couple decades of Christs' crucifixion) explicitly bans the practice. Augustine and Aquinas may have had different ideas on when the soul entered the body than the present view of "life starts at conception" that I and many other Christians believe today, but both still saw it as immoral and sinful.
Post-Christian ethics are terrifying though. I really hope the country doesn't totally abandon God. Only modern attempts I've seen at systemizing ethics recently are EA which seems to be more of a system of accounting once you accept a utilitarian/consequentialist ethic than anything that has it's own solid philosophical claims and E/acc which is just revolting. I suspect (/hope) someone can give me some more encouraging alternatives, but I haven't seen any that pass any sort of muster to my eyes
Have you ever met a Republican? Obviously not created in the image of God. But they do meet the condition of total depravity
Fortunately, most American Christians aren’t Catholics, and even a lot of the ones who are Catholics will selectively depart from church doctrine in practice when they disagree with it.
Excluding the word "fortunately", I agree with everything you said.
My point re the religion thing, which I made in yesterday's thread is that there's little room to win people to the Democrat side on religious grounds because for large swaths of the public their moral priors guide both their politics and their religion already so the two are already largely one in the same, and thus there aren't a lot of people who have firm religious convictions largely at odds with their politics, and for everyone else who does have such things, their is a belief in strict adherence to confessionals/traditional biblical exegesis/explicit church teachings which Democrats often clash fairly head-on with, with this being an example of the latter point
I think a lot of Democratic Catholics square this by saying they would never have an abortion (and frequently walking that talk) but that they also don't think the State should be making that choice for people and/or people with different values will still make that choice regardless and keeping those people safe is also respecting life.
My point is that the Church's teaching on the matter actually explicitly forbids even that, at least as I read it. "Nor can he take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it" seems to pretty clearly restricted the pro-choice campaigning and voting that Democratic politicians frequently do, and in Evangelium Vitae (admittedly on the part about cooperation with such laws) Pope Saint John Paul II writes that "This cooperation can never be justified either by invoking respect for the freedom of others or by appealing to the fact that civil law permits it or requires it."
The Church also explicitly forbids the death penalty, as I understand it…don’t see that having much effect on US policy.
The death penalty is outlawed in 23 states, and de facto not practiced in others. That's more banned than abortion is.
I agree! I would love to see Catholic politicians follow the Church's authoritative teaching and outlaw the death penalty. The teaching on the present impermissibility of the death penalty (distinct from always being a grave moral evil like abortion) presents a different moral challenge to Catholics than when a politician supports Abortion. In the words of Cardinal Ratzinger (who became Pope Benedict XVI):
"Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia."
To be clear and not hide the ball, this was from before the changes to the Catechism that Pope Francis made re the death penalty, so I think there is now and even stronger obligation to accept the teaching of the church on the death penalty's present inadmissibility, but the broader point stands
How late term? Presumably you have an issue with aborting 40 week old fetuses if there are no health issues (or rape) involved?
What a straw man. There are no 40 week abortions. Late term abortions are well before then and are almost always accompanied by serious complications.
It’s enough with one such case to make the ”abortion on demand at any stage of pregnacy” position untenable from a moral point of view. It doesn’t have to be a common incidence.
> almost always accompanied by serious complications
This is not true. In fact the data we have on the matter suggests it's actually a minority of cases
A minority of late term abortions involve complications? Where do we see that?
Lot's of places. Usually it is because of not knowing one is pregnant until very late or not having the financial resources to procure the abortion sooner. If you want to see it very directly, here is the 2022 Arizona abortion report in which there are 25 reported post 20th week abortions, 0 of which involve Maternal or Fetal medical conditions, which you can see from the tables on PDF pages (not the page numbers) 18, 19, and 21. They release this report I believe every year and the data always shows it to be a significant minority of cases.
https://www.azdhs.gov/documents/preparedness/public-health-statistics/abortions/2022-arizona-abortion-report.pdf
We also have clinic level studies, this (pretty transparently pro-choice) study explicitly excluded women with such cases but in their introduction cites one such study I don't have access to anymore, summarizing "The body of research on women who have dealt with fetal anomalies or life endangerment during pregnancy describes their stories as narratives of pregnancy wantedness and tragic circumstances. We do not know how accurately these narratives characterize the circumstances of women who seek later abortions for reasons other than fetal anomaly or life endangerment. But data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1363/4521013
It's so well established a fact that the Clinton campaign in a response to factcheck.org in 2015 insisted that it never meant to say that most late term abortions were responding to medical factors.
https://factcheck.org/2015/09/clinton-off-on-late-term-abortions/
Whatever issues I have shouldn’t dictate government policy because I’m not a woman and it’s not my body
If you took seriously the idea that abortion is murder you wouldn’t find it any more objectionable with state enforced protection for fetuses than for people who are already born.
For the record, I don’t believe that fetuses (at least in earlier stages of pregnancy) are persons, hence I’m pro-choice. But the issue hinges on the question of personhood, not on some blanket statement about the right to choose or defining-away-the-issue arguments about ”health care decisions”. If it’s murder then the state has a legitimate role to stop it.
Yes if I believed incorrect things I would have different policy preferences but I don’t.
I wonder if the head of the Alabama Supreme Court actually believes that frozen IVF embryos are people and that their disposal is murder. Sure, he says it, and rules on that basis. But in his personal life, would he, say, pay $10,000 for a full-blown funeral for said embryo, like he would for the death of his five year old child? Would all his family and friends gather and sob with him during that funeral? Would he be racked with grief and feel that grief for months if not years (a la that five year old child)?
In short, I don't believe these people.
I've always found the discussion of personhood beside the point. "Murder" is a crime defined by society. We don't need to decide when a human embryo becomes a human being; we need to decide when that human--whatever we call it--is entitled to society's protection. From my perspective, a human does not, in a sense, belong to society until it is no longer inside a woman's body.
I don't think it hinges on personhood. Personhood seems like a distraction when the real question is bodily autonomy. The right to life is forfeit if the life in question depends on someone else's body. No person has a right to someone else's body.
I think that since the question of when personhood begins is so completely subjective that society has a duty to answer it in a utilitarian way - certainly at no point before viability, of course, though you can make arguments for after viability in the case of severe birth defects or risk to mama
Things always go great when society decides who’s allowed to be killed in a utilitarian way…
I’m not a woman and it’s not my body is a silly way to end an argument. Seems almost like an ad hominem fallacy. Who cares, if there’s a moral issues you don’t have to qualify to argue it based on identity.
Reading comprehension is very important. He asked for my view and I gave it. The moral issue is one of bodily autonomy; and since I’m not getting pregnant I don’t think it’s for me to decide how women who might should make these decisions.
Well, there are abstract arguments and there are visceral arguments.
I'm Jewish and I don't expect arguments about the Holocaust to hit home with non-Jews as they might with me.
Yes, but when you try to educate people or explain the importance of the Holocaust - "I'm a Jew, trust me it was very bad" doesn't work.
By this logic you also shouldn’t vote in favor of non-restriction of abortions but just abstain entirely! (As should all other males, but good luck with that.)
Disclaiming that fetuses have any interests to weigh against the bodily autonomy interests of their mother is arguably an intellectually consistent position, but it’s also not going to be politically persuasive to people nit already on your side (nor does it have obvious rejoinders to points like Joachim that the moral patiency of the fetus in and of itself doesn’t appear to undergo a step change on the day before vs. day after birth)
Sorry not going to abstain on account of enjoying sex with pretty girls. You guys feel free to do that though!
"Whatever issues I have shouldn’t dictate government policy because I’m not a woman and it’s not my body"
vs.
"Here, in trollish fashion, is why my personal desires militate in favor of supporting the following policy on abortion and I will be voting accordingly."
Glibness is not a virtue, man.
I usually appreciate your comments, Milan. This is a bit of an embarrassing exchange for you though.
That reminds me of my friends bumper sticker in college: “just say NO to sex with pro-lifers”
After substitute teaching, I’m for abortion up to age 18
Part of the difficulty is that the Republicans - as a group - haven't staked out a single firm position and Trump is generally more pro-abortion than his supporters as he seems to realize that a hard-core anti-abortion message is a political loser. That makes it more difficult for Democrats to draw a clear contrast, at least at this stage of the election.
I think the correct tactical answer is just to highlight Congressional Republicans’ positions and say that Trump is lying when he claims to moderate on the issue (pointing to his personal responsibility for Roe getting overturned as evidence.)
That probably works for now, and then can be adjusted as the campgaign evolves. It's still early days.
Salience is a tricky thing. How do you find the line between raising salience and hysteria that alienates the middle while energizing the extremes? How defensible is it to promote actual crazy people in the opposition on the theory they're easier to run against? In this article, for example, I'd say the depicted prominence of the crackpot theory of 14th amendment fetal personhood is probably verging on nut picking. The "legal right" federalist society judicial types are probably significantly less inclined towards it than the house R loons and the chances of it ever coming down from SCOTUS are less than zero percent.
Scalia was well known for rejecting 14A legal personhood as a part of his longstanding argument that the Constitution says nothing about abortion.
Clarence Thomas is more likely to talk the majority into reembracing Lochner era privileges and immunities than into buying fetal personhood.
Correct.
Right but people who believe in that interpretation of the 14th amendment will be appointed to key regulatory positions at e.g., the FDA should Trump win the White House and I bet you it will inform their decision making.
I think that might be true now that Trump is listening to the Heritage foundation instead of the federalist society, but it absolutely wasn't true about Trump admin 1's record, so it's a bit more speculative than I think how Matt presents it.
Also: Whoever replaces McConnell matters a lot on this. Probably more than Trump.
The reason the ludicrous mifepristone case is at the Supreme Court is because Trump-appointed judges put it there.
Yes. Matthew Kacsmaryk is an incredible hack. At the same time, the 3 Trump admin appointed SCOTUS justices are laughing that shit out of court. It's all still a thousand miles away from fetal personhood under the 14th amendment.
Kacsmaryk was upheld, in part, by the Fifth Circuit.
I think a Fourteenth Amendment personhood argument would have a shot with both Gorsuch and Barrett. Not with Kavanaugh though and he is the median vote. The mifepristone case has other issues.
Yes because when Trump was president the first time Roe v. Wade was still on the books and so the primary goal was to get it overturned, which they did, opening the door to this regulatory stuff.
I think that pointing to the rral life examples as Matt did in the article is a solid way to do this. Matt didn't exaggerated or speak colorfully about what happened, and the examples were all horrific and made worse by the GOP lashing out at their victims.
Yep, GOP has been scoring nothing but own goals on this since Dobbs. Pointing to the own goals is good. It's when the own goals aren't coming that people tend to reach for more speculative/polarized manifestations of the issue.
I think when laws are being proposed by major political factions it’s not “nutpicking.”
Why is it nut picking? There's a lot of support for it among large swathes of Republican leadership. Seems like fair game to me.
I'm also glad that Matt mentioned the proverbial dog that caught the car, because I've been thinking about that same analogy with the anti-abortion movement for a while. Another movement I've been thinking about in comparison is Prohibition. It was a movement that relentlessly fought for many decades, finally won, but then when it was actually put into action, the unintended consequences were revealed, and the whole movement failed, to the point where it never even became an opinion seriously held by more than a very few, irrelevant slice of the population.
Now, the comparison is far from perfect: for one, Prohibition was way more popular than banning abortion has even been--to the point where it became a constitutional amendment! But I do wonder that if maximal abortion restrictions are imposed in some places, whether the movement behind them could also evaporate if unintended consequences are exposed. I guess we'll find out.
Texas is big enough and poor enough that there will be horror stories. Houston is a long way from New Mexico or Kansas
Posted this in another comment so sorry for the repost but also see this photo essay: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/03/health/texas-abortion-law-mother-cnnphotos/
Also mifepristone is (for now) widely available, even in red states with telehealth and the postal service. The kinds of 2nd trimester abortions that prevent the horror stories that JM and Milan are talking about, were logistically much more difficult, even before Dobbs. There's a smaller supply of facilities that can perform these abortions, travel with conditions is harder, and I imagine that timing is actually more critical. So even if we don't see much change in actual abortions (and I wonder how much of that is women seeing early warning signs of complications and getting an early abortion instead of waiting) there is likely a disproportionate effect on later-term ones.
See https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/11/texas-abortion-law-texas-abortion-ban-nonviable-pregnancies/
Washington State Public Health has been working to expand our abortion capacity since we were already one of the top locations people travel to get abortions that are logistically difficult to get in their home states. Even before Roe got overturned almost half the abortions performed in Washington State were for residents of Alaska, Idaho and Oregon. Now we are getting people flying all over. But the ability to travel isn't within everyone's capacity.
I once read a suggestion that abortion clinics be set up inside airports, which seems like a neat idea: it's a way to maximize convenience for women travelling for abortions, and vastly reduces the risk of protestors.
I am not sure how practical it would be to get all the equipment needed past security.
There is a planned parenthood in my neighborhood which some times has a small groups of protestors but more frequently has protective activists. It does mean we have a lot of graphic pro-life billboards though. That always confused my daughter because they were often right above street prostitution hot spots and she though shaming trafficked women about their abortions seemed an odd goal. I myself was always confused because I wondered who was going to planned parenthood to get an abortion. Access to abortion is so open in Washington State that it is offered by most GPs as an in-office visit and is required to be covered by health insurance. Everyone that I had ever known who had done a termination, including sex workers that I had served as an accompanying presence just got it done at a normal medical clinic, which for anyone medicaid qualified would be at UW Medicine or Kaiser where the State has their apple health contracts. I learned a few years ago that the Planned Parenthood is doing abortions almost exclusively for women coming from out of state who use it because they don't have Washington State GPs or Washington State health insurance.
Last I heard the state was looking to try to triple is abortion capacity in anticipation of receiving huge influxes of folks from out of state since Washington and Colorado are already tied for most out of state resident abortions. (It has something to do with our not having wait periods and allowing more procedures that allow you to fly less than 48 hours later.)
More generally, if it were easier to pass legislation (e.g. no filibuster), then parties would be able to implement more of their agendas, and then voters could actually experience these agendas and judge whether they like the results.
Good example. Also note the activist mindset behind both efforts. It wasn't enough for you not just not drink, or for your county or town to "go dry", alcohol being consumed anywhere, even (indeed especially!) working class Catholic or German communities where drinking beer after a 12 hour day was still totally unacceptable and had to be banned as well.
Moreover the Republicans who dominated national political in the 20's were never willing to do what was necessary to try and enforce prohibition like say raise taxes to pay for a giant national police force or send grandpa to prison for getting drunk on vanilla extract and milk or young people from well to do families have a grand old time out in Harlem speakeasies on a Saturday night. As one historian put it, prohibition transformed America from "a nation of drunkards" to a "nation of hypocrites". That might happen as well with abortion, or maybe not!
My guess is that amongst the strong anti-abortionists - a sizeable number well short of a majority- they will never change their opinion that it is murder no matter what the disastrous unintended consequences of this becoming the law of the land. I doubt the militant teetotalers were as numerous and committed as the militant pro-lifers are today. But I agree with you; "I guess we'll find out".
Seems like the passe opinion that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare is both electorally strong and good on the merits.
Yeah, Matt's take about having an "aggressive strategy" is good as long as the strategy ISN'T "ShOuT yOuR aBoRtIoNs!!11".
All that ambient shouting may have indeed helped change public opinion over the last couple decades. BUT it's not going to convince a bunch of mushy-middle voters to PrOtEcT oUr RiGhTs in the middle of a hotly contested election where the critical swing demographics (young men of color) are strongly averse to militant feminism.
Would you agree that tHiS sTyLe of ConTenT-FrEe MoCkerY is kind of tired?
nO? (Especially if use of the R-word is deemed unacceptable!)
I think it's of equal value as that word, in terms of what it adds to the discussion.
"ropiness" is an incredibly valuable word, thank you very much.
Meh. Depends on if it's actually content-free.
The capitalization play itself is definitely content-free, regardless of the surrounding message. It's literally an attempt to do a "duhhh" sarcastic voice through type! That's obviously not going to have any content.
In the case of your specific comment there was also no content. "it's not going to convince a bunch of mushy-middle voters to PrOtEcT oUr RiGhTs"…how do we know? What are you basing that on?
I'm sorry to be critical but you've got tHiS tHinG three times in two comments and it's a pet peeve of mine, especially when you're usually very substantive.
I apologize for annoying you. But to me, the style itself carries a lot of implications ABOUT substance.
Of course it does—it’s mockery! It has the same implication as the “duhh” voice it’s imitating, that the target is obviously beneath contempt and unworthy of a serious response. What it doesn’t tell me is *why* I should think that’s the case, especially since the pro-choice side is currently running the table in referenda! That doesn’t mean “shout your abortion” is working (I don’t even know how widely it’s being tried) but it suggests some convictions we’ve had about this debate in the past may be wrong.
I think you’re doing a bit of pundit’s fallacy here. As in, I know a lot of young nonwhite men, I happen to be one, and we don’t want to become fathers at this age.
Your criticism is valid, but only gets you so far. You're also getting an Ivy League education and racking up MaSsIvE gAiNzzzzz, not sitting in your mother's basement playing video games working a dead-end job and hating the fact that chicks won't date you.
If anything being single is a bigger motivator to be pro-choice, given how young women feel about this issue.
I think that's pretty marginal. Like, sure, people soften their views on the first date, try to put their best foot forward if the issue even comes up. But appeals to popularity aren't much more than a marginal persuasion effect.
David I am going to ask you to trust that I have more experience dating Gen Z women than you do!
That is possible but I don't think anyone knows that yet. Trump talked shit about Hispanics, Hispanics moved towards him. Dem media world talked shit about moderate white suburbanites, those same people moved towards Dems. If some pop feminists talk shit about young male swing voters ... do we know for certain where they will go or if their turnout will change?
Young men are unreliable voters, and I think Trump's gains are more Hispanic millennial-to-Gen-X (need years of working to have nostalgia for the Trump economy), but nobody seems to know exactly how the social (religion, societal morals, cultural norms, etc) element of abortion politics will play out this year. The overall issue is obviously favored for the Dems, but beyond that, unclear.
My core underlying point is just that our overall strategy can’t afford any place for needlessly alienating ANY bloc of swing voters.
If The Groups think shouting their abortions will help win a couple swing districts in the Bay Area and Long Island suburbs, I’m happy to oblige them.
But we can’t let them go around policing the rest of the party’s messaging if that ends up meaning the difference between winning, say, Georgia, on the votes of 10,000 young Black men who might have voted for some modern formulation of “safe, legal, rare”, and that ends up being the straw that tips us over into authoritarianism.
I’m not trying to put the entire election on that one bloc; I’m just saying that since we can’t see the outcome beforehand, every last straw on the camel’s back *matters*, and therefore we have to fight The Groups on every single straw so that our own moderates have the space to win us the ballgame.
I understand the cringe that some people felt at the shout my abortion movement but the reality is that it create some space for folks to feel empowered to share their stories even stories that were more whispered through tears that shouted and I think a lot of people learned that people they love had experienced terminations for reasons they could understand and respect. I think that makes a difference. It is easy to say a hypothetical stranger is a murderer and should have access blocked. It is a bit harder to say you think your niece who got raped in college should got to jail for ending a pregnancy.
I know a lot of people think “shout your abortion” is cringe, but is it actually unpopular?
I hesitate to ask, but what is "shout your abortion"?
The "motte" version is that women should be candid about having had abortions rather than keeping it private/secret. The "bailey" version is expressing pride about what a positive experience your abortion was or how much better your life is because of having an abortion.
It’s not popular enough to be a clear winner. As much as I personally abhor abortion and The Groups, I would happily concede it was the correct strategy if it WERE such a winner.
But if it’s not popular enough, then the cringe makes it a liability without enough upside.
I’m not totally sure! I think there are many cases where Matt has pointed out that increasing salience of an issue is a good thing, if your party is preferable on that issue, even if you increase salience by drawing attention to awkward aspects. (I think he has said this before in terms of republicans with kids in cages.)
In the “kids in cages” example, the benefit was the free publicity of there being a migrant crisis. It hardened Trump’s own supporters, and maybe won him a handful of erstwhile squishes who were angry about the crisis and kind of had a “what do you expect him to do when none of the options are great?” response to it all.
In the abortion-shouting case, it mostly serves to let normie squishes know that some tiny (or perhaps not so tiny!) slice of women out there in the least sympathetic circumstances are completely proud of their abortions, which is not merely abhorrent, but horriFYING to them.
It’d be one thing if we did a “shout your abortion if you were raped as a teen” thing, and we swore the rest of The Groups to an _omerta_ vow of silence about less sympathetic cases. Shit, that would be a PR *coup*! And in all fairness, that’s kind of where the whole sub-movement actually *started*. But context creep/collapse reared its ugly head, and we ended up in a world where today, The Groups would view any behind-the-scenes effort to coordinate such a sane “omerta” strategy as the perfect opportunity to one-up the DNC and gin up some more donor dollars by outing the effort and purporting to claim the moral high ground against anyone who would dare "silence women shouting their abortions", free of that concept's original context.
No, the strategy is more like "shout your horror story"
That may have been what it originally was, and as I told Kenny, that’s a perfectly sane strategy.
The problem was when less sympathetic cases shouted out as well, and it started backfiring and morphing into an overall strategy to normalize all abortions.
I would call it aggressive defense.
Personally I'd rather have lots more (early-stage) abortions, if it limits the number of unwanted kids born into poverty. Probably good for the moms' health too. Ejecting a small mass of cells has zero moral concern for me.
But I know that's an unpopular position in this religious (spiritual?) country.
I mean, also just have a generous EITC so that more people have the financial freedom to have kids.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the worldwide track record of pro-natality government payments fairly poor?
I think if you look at it in terms of strictly raising birth rates. Yeah, it doesn't look like Sweden's hyper-generous family packages. But when measuring how it lifts children out of poverty, family-centered policy interventions are helpful.
Raising kids is costly and now women have fairly high opportunity costs. If we want fertility to increase substantially then we need to have work arrangements that are more flexible, greater sharing of parental responsibilities, and find ways to keep parents engaged with the work while caring for children. The programs would need to be on the scale of public pensions.
They work. It’s just the amount of money necessary to actually get fertility rates back up to replacement are much more costly.
You basically need to restructure work and childcare substantially.
I think it’s interesting that a lot of progressives actually probably want abortions to be rare. They’d want that through something like iuds and vasectomies and long lasting reversible birth control.
But like saying rare does seem to really trigger a slut shaming moralistic framework that gives right wing ick legal standing that imperils a lot more than abortion.
I think avoiding surgical procedures is always a good thing.
I, personally, want root canals to be safe, legal and rare. Having done it once, that's enough, thank you very much.
Really nice parallel. I want it to be rare that people are in a situation where this seems like the best choice.
I.e. common sense. Tends to work well both practically and politically. Unfortunately none of the two parties are consistently pushing it (Republicans more or less never these days, Democrats sometimes when the activist base allows them).
This both sides argument really doesn’t work when one side is trying to take away constitutional rights half the country has had for 50 years and the other has gone undefeated in ballot referenda on this subject in even very red states.
I agree that the Republican position is extreme (and wrong), but I’m not sure that legalizing late term elective abortions is popular either, if people realize what it means in practice. This would be the position of those who oppose the ”safe, legal and rare” framing presumably.
"Safe, legal, and rare" isn't controversial because of second- or third-trimester abortions but because it suggests that abortion in general is a matter of moral concern. If you don't think (say, first-trimester) abortions are matters of moral concern then why do you care whether they are rare or not? That's the intra-coalition controversy: some pro-choice people think all or at least most abortions pose no moral issue (note, for example, NYZack's view near this comment) and other pro-choice people think that there's a moral issue that just gets overridden by other considerations (like the autonomy and well-being of the pregnant person). The first view is in tension with "safe, legal, and rare" and the second view isn't.
Yeah my muddled, incoherent, and commonly-held opinion is that abortions are of moral concern, that concern increases the later you go in the pregnancy, there is less moral concern about aborting a fetus with birth defects than one that is completely healthly, and infringing upon womens rights is also morally fraught.
It's incoherent and messy and probably pretty close to the median voter.
Indeed. My fear is that the activists will do their usual move of psyching themselves up about their predominant view (the first one) and decide that this is the only acceptable strategy for the entire party. And that they'll also convince themselves that this principle is worth making a courageous stand on.
The only reason this sort of thing worked for Republicans to get them Dobbs is because that party relentlessly focuses on the pursuit of power, even when they're standing on principle. Democrats... don't. It's a whole party full of people each standing on their own principle that they think is *too important*. Which is fine during normal times, but shit for a must-win election.
I think it's actually the other way around; Republicans pursued overturning Roe for the long haul of decades because they convinced everyone in the party this is the right thing to do on constitutional if not pro-life principle.
By contrast, you seem to be saying that if you're a moderate Democrat, you need to think how you'd avoid repeating the Summer 2020 anti-anti-riot stance that got James Bennet, David Shor, and a couple others fired from places in the Democratic party's orbit AFTER clearly having the upper hand in the criminal justice reform issue to the point Donald Trump was convinced to sign the First Step Act. BLM was polling positively too! What went wrong?
One answer is radicalism, but Democrats are by definition the party *without* the broad activist base Republicans both fear, love, and march to the median voter from. So they live in fear that one of the ten groups will damage another group or their performance with median voters. But because they have like ten groups, it's harder to coordinate against this possibility ahead of time the way Trump *clearly is* on abortion by running to the left of his opponents in the 2024 GOP primary.
Another answer is nothing went wrong, Biden narrowly won the election with enough young voters and then his surrogates immediately began castigating activists exactly one day after the last ballot came in. I think you're right this is a risk, but like Ezra Klein walking to and from his open convention idea in the course of weeks, I think you'll unfortunately find you have no clear alternative answer to what the party is doing now. Gotta wait and see.
So The Groups railed at Biden for talking about "reproductive freedom" in the SOTU and not saying "abortion" outright. Their complaints have had zero effect so far that I can tell.
I have more trust in the intelligence of our leaders to know how to communicate with the voters than apparently many others on this site do.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/08/us/elections/results-montana-legislative-referendum-131-born-alive-infants-regulation.html
The leader of the GOP is floating a 15-week national ban and the leader of the Democrats is suggesting a return to Roe v Wade, which coexisted with tons of red state restrictions on abortion clinics and procedures.
I don't think there is a political party on all 50 state ballots whose leader is pushing a maximalist position on this ... has anybody checked the Green or Libertarian party planks recently?
Trump has of course been muddled and confused on this so who knows what he means, but I see no reason to believe he would push for a 15 week *floor* on abortions. It's far more likely than not that he would mean it as a *ceiling* so that Texas, Alabama etc can do six week or no week bans to their heart's content.
As far as I'm concerned, that's a maximalist position.
My read of this is the maximalist positions would be "all abortions federally allowed" and "zero abortions federally allowed." Neither candidate is running on this, so I think people analyzing the election should inform readers of that.
“Abortions for all!”
“Boo!”
“Abortions for none!”
“Boo!”
“Abortions for some, and tiny American flags for all!”
“Yayyy!”
Well, those are certainly maximalist positions. Many positions short of that are fairly maximalist as well, as I wouldn't yet exclude Trump from that designation.
Is it possible that a large number of voters think abortion should be illegal--because they think it's wrong and they want the government to make a statement--but also think that the laws shouldn't be seriously enforced and that people shouldn't go to jail?
It seems to me that might explain some of the historical polling incoherence on this issue.
And it's not a ridiculous position, although I don't agree with it. Matt himself is the original "laws need law enforcement" guy and even so, I think he said this was more or less his view about prostitution.
One of my regular takes around here is that it's extremely bad to have laws on the books that aren't plausibly going to be consistently enforced. The kind of legal deterrence without actual enforcement that most abortion laws are going for is a perfect example.
I think there are two major factors contributing to it. One is just the general ignorance and laziness of the average American voter (which applies to any number of policy issues). The other is a desire to officially frown upon something or another, maybe reasonably so, without really appreciating that doing it this way means literally sending in the SWAT team.
That's a really good point. I think laws about Marijuana and other drugs were in large part about that. I feel like very few people actually want drug users to go to jail for simple possessions that does not involve dealing or involving anyone else. However, what a lot of people want is for anyone using drugs to be ashamed of it, do it in their house out of sight, buy it secretly, etc, so the rest of society can ignore it. I think when you visualize that it explains a lot about the war on drugs.
Degree of enforcement suggests that it often doesn't literally mean that in practice, though. A benefit of widespread legal compliance is that you don't usually have to invoke the coercive enforcement that undergirds it. Also, like, no one was ever actually in jail for possession alone.
Sports gambling or speeding seem like good examples of where the official imprimatur does as much or more legwork in keeping things from getting too out of hand (or did, when it came to gambling) than in drawing hard and fast rigidly enforced boundaries.
Maybe Matt should write a piece about why he thinks prostitution is the only case where "banning things but not really enforcing the ban" is the right policy.
I hope I'm not misremembering his comments on that topic, which didn't go into a lot of detail. But I thought I had a hunch about what he meant.
The issue is that prostitution is not only illegal but also socially stigmatized. If you remove the legal ban it's likely that the stigma will eventually disappear as well, maybe after a delay of a few decades. I don't think many people have thought vividly about what that would entail.
Social conservatives used to predict that if homosexuality were destigmatized, there would be huge indirect effects on society. Those turned out to be modest and mostly very positive, but destigmatizing payment for sex--making it a live option at all times between any two consenting adults--would be very different. It would have enormous game-theoretic consequences and although some categories of people would be made better off, others would be permanently worse off. And it might also change our understanding of the meaning of sex in a way that made almost everyone worse off.
If maintaining the symbolic legal ban is a way of putting a finger in the dike, it might seem like the least bad option.
But don't a number of other developed countries have a famously relaxed view about prostitution? As I understand it there's varying degrees of legality in countries like Germany, then in the UK and maybe Canada (?) they have some weak laws on the books that they supposedly don't enforce. Like in Britain supposedly you're not allowed to advertise prostitution or run a brothel, other than that the cops are (I've heard) not interested. Plus prostitution in the US is actually legal, in like 1 or 2 counties in Nevada
Sex work is legal and regulated in Australia, and has been for several decades.
The level of political controversy about the topic is extremely low. The churches don’t like it and they are occasionally joined by radical feminists pushing the Swedish model (prosecute the johns, not the workers), but there is essentially zero political interest in revisiting the issue.
There have been issues with illegal immigrants working in unregistered brothels, but in the main legalised sex work doesn’t seem to be causing nearly as much social harm as criminalising it did - not least because it’s no longer a big cause of police corruption.
I don’t have polling data to hand to back this up, but frankly there is far, far more concern in Australia that our laws on gambling are too permissive, than about the sex industry.
That's true, but there's still an element of stigma attached to paid sex in those countries as well. In the conditions of modernity, I think it's possible that this isn't a stable social norm.
I think most people feel a certain amount of disgust at the idea of being paid to have sex with someone they don't find attractive. And many people in some cultures (not all) feel shame at the idea of paying to have sex with someone who otherwise wouldn't be interested.
It's easy to assume that the disgust and shame are hard-wired reactions, but I think they probably aren't. They're internalized reproductions of the stigma that society applies to people who engage in paid sex... and the social stigma in turn is partly held up (in some jurisdictions) by a legal prohibition.
I think the whole thing could potentially unravel. The highest-entropy state might be a culture in which, when you proposition someone in a bar and they say they're not interested, your first response is to offer them money--and in which, when you're propositioned in a bar by someone you don't find attractive, your first response is to ask them for money. There's definitely a minority of people who would find that arousing but for everyone else, it might feel like dystopia.
I guess I'm rather skeptical that the world's oldest profession is not a 'stable social norm'
I just don't think sex-positive liberals are using their imaginations here. They assume that their goal of legal, non-stigmatized sex work means: we won't judge the tiny minority of people who will continue to make a living by selling sex, and we also won't judge the somewhat larger group of people who will continue to pay for sex once in a while. (I suspect they're thinking of traditional societies in which prostitution was legal or nearly legal, even though sexual mores were very conservative in other respects, and assuming that things would work the same way under more liberal conditions.)
If you really and truly got rid of all the stigma, including internalized stigma, I don't think the effects would be so easily contained. They might be much broader and more corrosive, with a large share of non-committed sexual encounters becoming marketized.
I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but you can see why many societies would hesitate to try this experiment.
Isn’t “people having sex that’s at least somewhat conditioned by material transfers” fairly common even under the current legal regime, though? (And even more common in places and times where prostitution was illegal, but women had less wealth and fewer economic options?)
Yes, there are absolutely a lot of sexual customs that can be interpreted that way. But those customs exist *because* of the strong social norm against trading sex for money. It's the same reason people buy each other Christmas presents instead of sending a Venmo.
An MBA would look at all these taboos and traditions and say "this is irrational/inefficient, why not just let people do the thing". But human psychology almost certainly isn't optimized for that level of social explicitness.
Abortion can never be like prostitution because abortions are performed by doctors and doctors are licensed professionals who can make plenty of money without breaking the law and therefore want to keep their licenses.
I think that's right. But I also think some voters must have the vague idea that their ideal future abortion laws would be like current prostitution laws: rarely enforced, constantly violated and creating only a moderate inconvenience to getting what you want. As you say, the problem is that abortion laws couldn't work like that.
If you make abortion illegal enough, then of course the type of person who performs abortions will change.
Possibly! There are some incoherent views you can see in public opinion here: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/rh76d
The consequence of that position is cases like Brittani Watts.
The public wanting something to be illegal but not seriously enforced is pretty common, and dangerous. I teach a criminal justice class, and I always try to highlight to my students that all laws are, on some level, backed by the potential use of force. Now, many times, we are fine setting limits on the nature and extent of force being used (like police not chasing people who flee from stops or Graham v Conor, which lays out a number of limitations). However, there is almost always some coercive element to a law that can, and given a sufficient base rate of occurrence will result in force eventually. Even if cops are excellently trained, always stay calm, and make very few mistakes...give enough at-bats, one will strike out (and lots of cops are not excellently trained and do not always stay calm).
Important to this topic is that the amount of force you can justify when considering a human life is pretty extreme. I think a lot of people get this in the case of abortion because once you imbue a fetus with personhood (again I am totally agnostic on when this happens...I am not a god or the God and have no idea), you can potentially argue for a lot of force to prevent an abortion. I suspect this is why support for increased legalization is increasing...the public sees the potential for some pretty horrendous outcomes and is willing to grant more latitude than it otherwise would to avoid those outcomes.
I think if you hold deep moral beliefs that most of society disagrees with you should think carefully about trying to impose those beliefs on society.
Clever threading the needle is probably not sustainable.
The other big lesson from the repeal of Roe is how codifying progressive issues as rights beyond the realm of politics can be really bad for progressive politics.
Progressive people, especially if they are lawyers, are not predisposed to think this, as they trust institutions and the idea that lawyers doing law stuff is a replacement for politics is appealing.
But hopefully this should prompt some reflection among voters and politicians about the dozens of NGL campaigns that call for a 'Right to X'.
These campaigns maybe serve the goals of their organisation, and there may be some lawyers who support it, but there will be times when it is a worse option than simply passing normal legislation that sets the law about a thing and challenging opponents to make arguments to overturn it.
I feel like the "[issue] is not political, it's a human right not up for debate" mindset is much worse among the activist set, and people who don't engage in the issues that much but feel viscerally triggered by the issue at hand. Lawyers at least know (or should know) how the political system is integral in enacting and enforcing laws.
It’s just people being unclear about whether they’re discussing moral or legal rights.
That's partly it, but even "moral rights" can be "up for debate" in a sense.
If you strongly believe in fetal personhood, that moral belief might not be "up for debate" but _maybe_ you haven't considered the moral costs to women in some ways and you might be convinced that there are more moral competing rights than you first thought.
So some of it is still "ought" vs "is". The moral right of people not to be persecuted for being gay "ought" not to be up for debate but some people strongly believe it is a sin and aren't seeing the costs it imposes. _Most_ of the debate is legal, but you can sometimes convince people about the moral case.
That still doesn't make sense as a distinction -- moral rights are subject to debate in the same manner legal rights are, particularly given that they tend to substantially overlap.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. This is a tale as old as time (or rather as the 18th century). “We hold these truths to be self evident …” You talk about natural rights in order to establish them and protect them politically and institutionally. It’s possible the activists of today don’t get that, but the rhetoric in and of itself is ok?
The Declaration sure did "[codify] progressive issues as rights", but did it codify them "as rights beyond the realm of politics"? I think not.
It hinges on how you understand the term "beyond the realm of politics". If by that you mean "inalienable" "natural", etc. then it definitely affirms such ideas. Heck, the whole point about a *rights* based discourse is precisely that though it can be infringed it cannot be taken away stricto sensu. But of course that traditionally is a motivator for political action, and precisely what makes it political.
There was a brief moment when some weirdos were trying to promote a "right to sex" which for some goddamn reason is how they were phrasing "it should be legal for disabled people to hire sex workers, especially if they otherwise aren't able to have sex". I couldn't resist getting into arguments with person after person who didn't understand that that sounds like a literal Handmaid's Tale policy rather than an actually fairly compassionate thing for people with disabilities.
There's very little divide between men and women on views of abortion, but prostitution is a different story. Women consistently oppose it more than men ... pretty interesting!
That is because many women are more aware that demand exceeds willing supply in this "market" so that prostitution requires trafficking of unwilling women.
There's a probably a very interesting story to be told here about how we've shifted from thinking about rights as something the government cannot infringe upon but still requiring affirmative action on our part ("the right to bear arms") to something we expect the government to provide without any action on our part ("a right to housing").
This is often referred to as sets of 'negative' (the State cannot) vs. 'positive' (the State must) rights.
That's very true. I read the above comment about the "right to sex" and was all "sure that sounds reasonable... wait do I as a taxpayer have to pay for the sexworker?" If so, this is just Doordash rights.
IMO the only rights that should be ”beyond the realm of politics” are those intrinsically connected to the democratic process, i.e. right to life, (political) speech, (political) association, vote etc. The rest are up for grabs and decided in the democratic process. (Yes, including the right to religious freedom, abortion and guns)
I'm not sure even _those_ rights should be beyond the realm of politics.
Should voting age (intrinsically connected to the democratic process) be "beyond the realm of politics"? How would you do that? Matt wants to lower it, I think that's a bad idea.
Neither of us is a bad faith actor (I'm not against lowering it because I think it helps my "tribe"/"party" more, and I don't think he's in favor of it for that reason either) - but it's an issue that would have to go to the ballot box (including the constitutional amendment ballot box).
Or are you considering constitutional amendments as "beyond the realm of politics" (separating "normal" politics from heavy-lift amendments)
*NGO
If you have the framing that abortion is a mere ”health care decision” - much like removing one’s appendix, not involving any issues such as the right to life, personhood etc - then having no restrictions at all makes sense. I find that position is untenable however, and something that dogmatic progressives say because they haven’t properly thought through the issue but only want to maximally distance themselves from the dreaded right wing… If one thinks that aborting a 40 week old fetus on a whim is an unproblematic ”health care decision” and that noone has the right to think otherwise or ”come between the woman and her doctor” then I don’t know what to say… granted this is not a realistic example and not what usually happens, but more of a thought experiment to show how absurd the idea is that abortion can be reduced to a mere ”health care decision”.
As a 28 year old woman who wants children I find this frustrating. When people say it’s a “health care decision” they’re not saying it’s the same as getting your appendix removed. They’re not saying “an abortion at 8.5 months is good and fun actually.” They’re saying that they want lawmakers and random people to TRUST that whatever conversation the woman and her doctor had that resulted in whatever healthcare decision they made is sacrosanct. That those two people, who are closest to the issue and have the deepest emotional and scientific understanding of what is happening in that particular case, should be allowed to make whatever health care decision makes the most sense in that particular circumstance.
You bring up this concern of a 40 week pregnancy termination and then in the same breath dismiss it as something that rarely, if ever happens, and likely never happens for no reason at all. But because you fear it MIGHT happen, that some woman MIGHT be irresponsible, the state itself needs to intervene and get itself inserted into the medical exam room to help guide their decisions. I perceive this fear as a lack of trust, a belief that an individual woman can not or should not be allowed to simply make whatever decisions make the most sense for her and her family in privacy. A belief that on this issue, a woman might not be a good enough decision maker so it has to be overseen by the state.
In my opinion, the only human beings who know all the variables at play are the woman and her doctor, and therefore they are the only people who should decide whether or not an abortion should happen. And the state shouldn’t be too involved in overseeing it, the way it’s not particularly involved in overseeing end of life decisions for families of the elderly. They believe and trust that those families will make the right decisions for themselves at very hard times. When we say it’s a “health care decision” we’re not saying it doesn’t matter or that it’s as simple as getting rid of an appendix so much as asking for respect, privacy and trust that we are capable of making our own decisions.
The medical profession is not a libertarian free-for-all in which doctors and patients have zero restrictions in deciding what to do given a set of circumstances - and for good reason. We have learned through hard experience that no, you can't simply trust doctors and patients to do what's best and give them free reign, you need established standards of care, regulations, oversight and other mechanism to ensure doctors aren't practicing quackery and patients are getting the best information and treatments.
Laws are a matter of trust. I, and I presume Apple-Jack, simply trust women who may need an abortion far more than Republican legislators.
For what it's worth I think this framing is equally disingenuous. There is no unique lack of trust of women and their doctors at play here. All laws exist not to constrain the average person acting in good faith but because the state doesn't and shouldn't trust individuals to act in the interest of the common good (including the good of their children) in all cases so it proscribes certain behaviors that are generally infringements on the rights of others and perhaps allows exceptions for extenuating circumstances. We would never say that there shouldn't be child abuse laws because the government should TRUST fathers who have much more information than the state about any particular situation with their kids will know how to discipline their children correctly.
Child abuse laws protect children who are indisputably individuals with rights, so "the rights of others" applies. In the case of abortion, whether or not embryos are individuals with rights is the entire dispute and is also unresolvable by any empirical means. There's nothing disingenuous about saying that in such cases (in which the mother has made her decision based on the dictates of her conscience), a doctor's view of the mother's health is what matters, not a legislator's view of the moral question. That's not an irresistible position but it's a perfectly valid one.
As you point out, the question is obviously whether the unborn are individuals with rights that are deserving of legal protection. I agree with you on that. That's why all these other things about trust and healthcare are red herrings. To suggest that the laws are being passed on the basis of a unique mistrust of women and their doctors as opposed to the natural process of lawmaking wherein certain behaviors that most people wouldn't do indiscriminately anyways are proscribed so those who do undertake them can be held to account is a silly misdirect from the obviously central question of whether the unborn deserve legal protection.
"But because you fear it MIGHT happen...the state itself needs to intervene and get itself inserted..."
If you read his post carefully he's not saying he's against abortion. He's saying he thinks that particular framing is not wholly accurate. Whether you read it differently as "asking for respect, privacy and trust" is highly personal and not obvious to him or many other people.
I happen to think that's mostly fine, especially in the realm of politics, but I also take his point.
Yes exactly what she said.
My understanding is that even in the most pro-choice jurisdictions it is extremely difficult to find a doctor that will perform a truly elective, no extenuating circumstances or health issues, abortion after around the 17 week mark. The very late term are usually arising from some sort of unexpected catastrophe and my guess is that when it happens it is among the worst days of the woman's life, having carried so far. However this suggests to me that there is a real medical ethics conversation to be had, though I am not sure it is possible now, and may never be.
In practice, elective late term abortions are extremely rare from what I understand. I might be slightly autistic, but the idea that abortion can be reduced to a health care decision really irks me, even if people only say that for strategic reasons. I dislike when people are intellectually dishonest for political or tribal reasons.
Oh I'm with you. I come down in a pro choice place. But I am also often frustrated by the seeming lack of seriousness with which so many approach an issue everyone seems to agree is pretty serious.
I agree, especially after having my own children, which is why "my body, my choice," has always made me uncomfortable, and why I can never run for office. I lean Progressive, and do not think abortion should be illegal because there are too many sticky cases balancing the mother's and fetus's/baby's health and life. But I can never fully embrace the "my body" rhetoric becasue it is definitely more than just my own body.
Ezra Klein had some good episodes where he and his guests grappled with the complex questions this issue brings up, but, alas, those are rarely addressed in politics.
This is the reason political philosophers make terrible politicians. Life is not a debate.
Unfortunately yes. I have very little faith in voters and democracy, it’s simply the least bad option as Churchill supposedly said. But in a better world with smart, well informed voters political debates would be nuanced, honest and rational. Hopefully in the future…
I don't really believe much in the ability of humans to be rational when it comes to issues outside of the very hard sciences. A good politician recognizes this.
One thing I read from a Libertarian (I forget who now) a few years ago is the idea that once a fetus/baby becomes viable, a woman's right changes from a right of abortion to a right of eviction. It's her body, so she has the right no longer carry a viable baby to term, but she doesn't have a right to kill the baby once it is developed enough to live outside the womb.
I've always thought that's an interesting way to look at it, although it obviously comes with a lot of practical, legal and other moral issues and problems..
I don't think it's so easy to draw a bright line around when a fetus is 'viable' though. Hospitals tend to undertake heroic, extremely expensive measures to keep say a premature baby alive, so it's not like the kid would be crawling around on their own without $10 million dollars in advanced medical equipment. Are you 'viable' if you're only kept alive by a bunch of uber-sophisticated machines? Not sure
Not easy at all. I subsumed that and a lot more in the last sentence of my comment.
It's an interesting thought experiement, but I don't think it's practical except in circumstances that don't actually occur much, if ever, in the real world.
On the opposite end of the somewhat abstract views, at one point the philosopher Peter Singer argued that, under the same criteria we use for justifying killing animals for food, infanticide is justifiable until the child can take care of itself on its own.
If I'm remembering my history correctly, that used to be a practical necessity. If there were too many mouths to feed....
Can you show me a single person who is actually promoting aborting a healthy fetus the day before birth? Third term abortions pre Dobbs were only possible when the mother could cite a medical problem that would threaten their life. There were literally four doctors in the US able to perform a third term abortions in 2009, there isn't a secret rash of thousands of them. Absolutely no one and I mean no one is promoting the killing of a viable fetus. The idea that someone would do that over getting a C-section has absolutely never been seen. We don't have that discussion because we are so far away from anyone even thinking of doing that, even when it hasn't been explicitly illegal.
In reality, pro choice advocates are getting stonewalled on abortions for nonviable pregnancies that etould kill the mother. If we actually care about ethics let's maybe talk about how those women deserve to be treated like humans before we start getting in to imagining late term abortions to get mad at.
"Can you show me a single person who is actually promoting aborting a healthy fetus the day before birth?"
"Promoting" is the trick word there. No one "promotes" it -- many people advocate for laws that permit it, however. (Caveat: I'm militantly pro-choice, but I'm intellectually honest about it.)
Absolutely, but “laws cannot technically allow bad things that nobody would ever do” is not a standard we typically enforce. It matters factually whether anyone would actually seek out those abortions.
Is it not the case that, at least at its origin and certainly in its deployment in popular debate, the entire idea of "late-term abortion" is, in substance, bad-faith, counter-factual framing by anti-choice activists? That is, in the real world, almost all "late-term abortions" are therapeutic interventions involving pregnant women who desperately want a child but are carrying a foetus with terrible defects discoverable only late-term, such that it will either be born dead or live only a few hours, and the choice is between termination and giving birth to a dead or fatally ill baby. This leads to the difference in analysis between red-state America and the European jurisdictions that purport to restrict late-term abortion, in that in the latter, medical-necessity approval is essentially automatic (for entirely good and sensible reasons), and doesn't get all tangled up in deliberately vaguely drafted restrictions that are at risk of application with an absolutist religion-based conception of what "mother's health" is deemed to mean.
I have no clue -- I'm opposed to such legislation as a matter of principle. I just find it bizarre to say, "'X' literally never happens," then someone proposes to ban "X," and the same person who previously said, "'X' literally never happens," declares, "It's a crisis if 'X' is banned."
To put it another way, I don't think unicorns exist. If the legislature passed a law stating that unicorns may only legally be kept on a minimum lot size of 40 acres, I would find that weird and wonder why the legislature was wasting their time on that, but I wouldn't protest against it.
The law allows for all types of activities that majority of people (including both liberals and conservatives) find unsavory, but don't think should carry the weight of legal sanction. Most people are against adultery, but don't think it should carry a prison sentence. Deciding not to jail everyone who does something we don't like doesn't mean we are borderline promoting it.
"If you have the framing that abortion is a mere 'health care decision' - much like removing one’s appendix, not involving any issues such as the right to life, personhood etc."
Choosing to withdraw life support from a vegetative family member is also a "mere 'health care decision'".
I think Luker's position, that positions on abortion can't be untangled from a bunch of other messy things like the role of women in society, sexual morality, the important of having children in life, the rights of the individual vs the group etc is the correct way to think about it here: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520055971/abortion-and-the-politics-of-motherhood
If US progressives looked to Scandinavia - which they are usually happy to do - they would see that these countries usually have a cut off point at 12-15 weeks and after that it’s only permissable in case of rape or if the woman’s life is in danger. Similarily, transgender surgery and puberty blockers for kids is severly restricted. Often what is seen as moderate in today’s American debate is usually pretty damm progressive in a global perspective and what US progressives push for is extreme.
The same goes for immigration policies btw. All parties in government in Scandinavian countries are now hard liners on asylum immigration, i.e. for strict limits that make integration possible (after having seen the problems overly liberal migration policies lead to).
You have to look at abortion laws as a whole policy regime. In most of Europe gestational cutoffs are sooner than under the Roe v. Wade standard (which was "viability," so around 24 weeks). But access to early-term abortions is much better, including public funding, which diminishes the need for later abortions (which often happen because of travel and cash needs). The exceptions after the gestational cutoff are also generally broad and can include fetal defects and risks to health (including mental health) that fall short of danger to life.
It's like people who push voter ID laws. Other countries make eay easier to get an ID if they require one to vote. They don't require an ID and then specifically make it harder for people of color to get IDs.
I didn't realize that the entirety of Scandinavian policy is our only trade space. I think I will trade the extremely progressive tax base and totally open borders with all of our non-russian neighbors for that 15 week ban.
Or is that not actually what you're saying? Are you just using the one example to tell people who care about the issue to try to negotiate with bad faith actors?
Calling people who sincerely believe abortion is murder “bad faith actors” is craven. You may disagree with them, but many of them are operating with the utmost good faith and out of the best motives.
But the people advocating for the 15 week bans are hiding the ball, deliberately. I've been in that movement and I know how they think; every incremental step is perceived as being towards an absolute ban.
That simply cannot be true. 15 week ban is a very moderate, even liberal, position and not everyone is a left wing or right wing radical. Unfortunately in today’s polarized environment people are pushed towards the extremes.
Republicans are not going to stop at 15 weeks. Case in point: Ron DeSantis signed a 15 week ban, then signed a 6 week one after he was re-elected governor.
There are always bad faith actors. It’s logical and politically prudent to advocate for a 15 week period and stand up for it against the extremes on the right and left. In the same way you can argue for increased border control without going full Nazi.
Is renewing your electoral mandate in between passing incremental steps towards your ultimate goal bad faith?
I agree with you, and I think that most would if this issue were as clean as fresh snow in politics. But it's not. Hardline abolitionists are in the driver's seat for one of the two major parties, and they have a 40 year history of using anti-democratic tools of power to accomplish whatever measures they can.
Does writing One Billion Americans make Matt a bad faith actor on immigration issues?
Yglasias is notably not framing the 12-ish week bans as a reasonable compromise. Which is to your point, they're not being made by people interested in compromise; if they believe that god tells them that every abortion is murder, all compromises are inherently made with murderers on behalf of murder.
If we had a cadre willing to compromise, then 12 weeks might be reasonable. If we had the Scandinavian approach to policy experiments, we might have a lot of things different, too.
I’m Scandinavian myself and wouldn’t want to suggest that the US should copy us :) I only mean to point out that US progressives tend to be highly selective when romanticizing Scandinavia - and also that they are both radical and wrong on immigration, transgender surgery/medication for kids and late term abortions but that is simply my personal opinion… a 15 week ban with the usual exceptions is a very reasonable position imo.
Scandinavia keeps popping up, in my experience, because anytime you have a question about a theoretical policy, there's a paper that says "well Sweden tried this in 2006 and..."
Pro-lifers have not been willing to compromise on an abolitionist stance. Republicans have tried to push back for electorally prudent reasons, but the movement has gained too much power within the coalition. The 'middle ground' on this matter, as Yglasias points out, will see itself increasingly hollowed out as, for example, Republican FDAs remove approval for mifepristone.
Let me put this another way. People want ideological compromise on this matter, but people are not going to get it, because there are a lot of policy compromises that Republicans can make in service of an absolutist ideology. Banning abortion drugs won't end all abortions, but it's what an abolitionist stance demands because it's all that can be done at any moment.
If US progressives offered the right a political deal whereby America gets (a) stricter abortion timeline regulations and (b) a tougher policy wrt migrants, in return for (c) social democracy, GOP/MAGA would tell us to drop dead.
I would take that deal in a heartbeat
Indeed. Why would a pro-life person be happy with a 12 or 15 week ban? The vast majority of abortions already occur in that time frame and this would just push the number higher. They would only do so as a temporary stopping point in order to pursue the DeSantis strategy of taking another bite as soon as they could.
No doubt, the MAGA wing will stop at nothing short of Hungary, even if Russia is the ideal
I don’t know if “you usually like Scandinavian policy so you should like it here too” is a fallacy that has a Latin name but it’s definitely a fallacy.
Ad Scandia?
This is quite misleading for the US context. Sure, you probably can't get an abortion willy nilly in Scandinavia in that time frame, but there are a number of criteria a woman can fulfill to get an abortion, if the powers to be determine that she needs one. The American states that have enacted these restrictions have a very different set of criteria, which often turn out to be, almost nothing short of the imminent death of the mother. I think that it goes without saying that women almost entirely get abortions around 15 weeks for different reasons than first trimester abortions. The mushy middle position of de jure 1st trimester abortions being legal (and widely accessible) and de facto legal 2nd trimester abortions (which is closer to the West European status quo than what you see in Red states) isn't a plausible endgame.
"after that it’s only permissable in case of rape"
I don't understand the reasoning behind this exception. If you think abortion in a particular case is murder, then why does it matter whether the parents loved each other etc.? If you don't think it's murder, then why is the abortion illegal when it wasn't rape?
Especially for the late term! Why would rape be a relevant cause of a late term abortion? Did the person not realize it was rape until 15 weeks later?
They could be in an abusive relationship, that they just were able to leave.
For the same reason we don't charge SWAT team members with murder or even negligent homicide if a hostage is killed while they are dealing with a standoff with an armed robber?
In principle, the SWAT team is part of punishing the armed robber (in the sense that they haul them into jail and then court), and preventing the theft (in the sense that the robber can't take hide their ill-gotten gains for later use). I'd say I'm not sure how the abortion punishes the rapist or prevents the rape…but there probably are rapists who get off on the idea of impregnating someone. Fair enough.
Tbh a very underrated difference is America's decentralized federal structure allows all kinds of moral causes and reform movements to try things piece by piece. Hence marijuana prohibition, immigration enforcement, private firearm ownership, the trans kid phenomenon, and now abortion bans (prefaced by the pre-Roe clinic regulations) really do vary state by state before you even get to who is running the executive branch.
Some trans rights activists refer to the UK as "TERF Island", but it's unclear the UK is uniquely more traditional on family authority than the US. What is unique is the UK literally had one clinic (Tavistock) run by the government healthcare service for things to go from 0 to 100 to 0 in a clear story for the British public. I would prefer we did less federalism, but it's obviously a way we let lots of social disagreements play out state by state right now. It makes comparing to the UK or Scandinavia a bit apples and oranges before you even get to the actual social views; first one must understand the weakness of the central state in America and the long tradition of anti-statism that runs along it. Of course, I think Republicans mistake federalism as the main way to reign in the state (it's actually public aversion to federal taxes), but that's another story.
How do they handle eugenic abortions?
Looked it up now, risk of birth defects in the baby is also a valid legal reason for having a late term abortion.
One thing I think about is how some positions coded as “progressive” are actually small government deregulatory positions. This is one, upzoning/banning single occupancy is another, allowing smaller vehicles (e-bikes to kei trucks) is a third.
This is definitely a thing— mostly because “increasing the size and regulatory power of the government” usually isn’t a terminal value even for people who generally tilt toward it.
"Reclaiming Freedom as a Progressive Value" by an ex-Obama Comms Director
https://www.messageboxnews.com/p/reclaiming-freedom-as-a-progressive
Generally it seems like if people try to tie "freedom" too closely to the Right *or* the Left, things start to fall apart on closer inspection. Would the Left embrace the freedom of people to buy guns, send their kids to charter schools, and buy more-powerful-but-less-efficient dishwashers?
The thing is at a certain point freedoms bump in to each other. Letting businesses pollute kills people, completely removing their freedom. Regulating the insurance market gives millions of people way more options in how to live their life without a lifetime of medical debt. All of the policies you cited are attempts to give more choice to people now or in the future (even if we can argue the effectiveness of any of them).
Also, if you tie a value like "freedom" or "free speech" (or a generally good thing like "vaccines", for that matter) too closely to one political side, the other side might well decide that they're against that value or that good thing.
Wouldn't banning something via government count as regulatory, rather than deregulatory? Or did you mean SFH exlusionary zoning instead of SROs?
This beautiful photo essay spotlighting a mother in Texas who was forced to cary her baby with a fatal birth defect to term is the type of story which is reframing how normal people understand this issue. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2024/03/health/texas-abortion-law-mother-cnnphotos/
This will be lost, I’m sure, given that it’s 12:10 mountain time, but what I haven’t seen yet in these comments is:
Functionally, term- or time-based abortion restrictions are just a fiction to make some people feel better.
Those who feel abortion is murder believe that whether it’s one week or 30 weeks in.
Those who believe there are acceptable circumstances, like for the life or safety of the mother, are functionally but not explicitly saying they trust the doctor and the mother to be reasonable.
The idea that women are regularly getting 35 week abortions because they decided they don’t want to have a baby after all is just…a fantasy. By and large, any 35 week abortion is a tragic decision made by a woman who was ready to give birth in 5 weeks but something went terribly wrong all of a sudden.
So whether we agree on “up to 15 weeks and then afterward only in X cases” or “no restrictions”, I doubt there will be much difference in the number and kind of abortion performed.
I think there are a lot of people (myself probably among them) who think a medical abortion at 6 weeks is lightyears away from murder but euthanizing a viable fetus at 35 weeks is... awfully close to it.
The counter is that there are very few abortions like that. And that's right. But it doesn't strike me as a reason to oppose a ban (with appropriate exceptions)--the principle really is important.
I think if it is a perfectly healthy fetus that is euthanized at 35 weeks than it does make me uncomfortable. My understanding though is that almost all of these cases are fetuses with serious defects or where the mothers health is on the line. If a fetus is going to be born in 5 weeks only to scream in pain and terror for a few days before dying under harsh, clinical hospital lighting then I would say that fate is much, much worse.
I think it is empirically hard to evaluate how many third-trimester abortions are for fetal conditions incompatible with life versus other reasons. The one study I've found on this (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1363/psrh.12190) had cases where women experienced barriers to getting care earlier and where pregnancy was discovered late. But it's not a statistically representative sample (and "third trimester" also includes earlier times than 35 weeks).
Whatever the percentage is, though, the absolute number is very low.
I have a comment elsewhere in this thread (if you search for Arizona you should find it) that has more data though not much. Broadly the answer seems to be post 20th week abortions are very very rarely for fetal anomalies or maternal health but we lack good data later in pregnancy
There is much more data about 20-24 week abortions which are more common and more broadly legal. But you can't extrapolate to later abortions which are legal in fewer places, more expensive, more medically complicated, and performed by fewer practitioners.
As long as a voter like you includes exceptions for abortions outside of 15 weeks or whatever, I am perfectly happy with legislation that signals that abortion after that point is more fraught without banning it in medically necessary circumstances.
I see no reason to make a couple dealing with probably the saddest moment of their life to jump through more hoops to appease the worries of other people. Because that's all late term bans do, unless you don't trust doctors and women.
It's one thing to say this about paternalistic legislation but if you take seriously the premise that there is another being with weighty rights involved (which I think is definitely true at 35 weeks), the law has a role to play notwithstanding trust. We trust parents a lot but it's not absolute trust.
I think this is a very common position, and about the one I take.
Early abortions don't seem bad, and the ability to basically give people a do-over or enable reproductive medical treatments seems to far outweigh any negatives.
Late abortions seem really serious, so they should be reserved for extreme cases.
“All Abortion is murder” is not that common s view, it probably doesn’t even describe a majority of Republican voters.
Well, whether they use the word “murder” or not, I think the opinion that all abortion is wrong and tantamount to murder is actually pretty common, even if far from a majority of voters or republicans even.
there really is a spectrum of opinion, which is why Democrats would do well to find some particularly hideous abortions to ban. Of course, they might cave to disability activists and ban eugenic abortions, which I think are the best kind.
Exactly. You either trust women to make decisions with their doctors about their own bodies or you don’t and think the state legislature should be involved.
And if you believe life begins at conception then I don’t think you are placated by a ban at x weeks.
I think a lot of people struggle to imagine what could possibly necessitate a later term abortion, but faced with an actual example—like the woman Matt cited—they usually say, Well of course that’s an exception.
The thing is—basically all later term abortion are that kind of exception. They’re rare, they’re unique, they are exceptional by definition.
So I’m fine with a 16 weeks plus exceptions, knowing full well that the exception are many and necessary, and knowing that it eases the average voter’s mind that there’s no willy-nilly 38 week abortions being provided for women who’ve “changed their mind” or whatever.
I've joked before that a reasonable person could get a room of 10 pro-life people to agree with 10 straight late-term abortions, and could also get a room of 10 pro-choice people to agree that, "well, I wouldn't make that choice."
I agree. From a philosophical perspective, I don’t think the government should be involved in the decisions, which means that I basically think it should be legal entirely. A 38 week abortion of a healthy baby seems icky to me, but I would be shocked if any doctor would do it/if any women would want it. In practice, I understand that basically all late term abortions are extreme and very specific circumstances so something like a 16 week ban with exceptions basically covers all the use cases that I find acceptable.
But then of course I come back to, what does it matter if I find it acceptable or not? It’s not my pregnancy.
" I understand that basically all late term abortions are extreme and very specific circumstances so something like a 16 week ban with exceptions basically covers all the use cases that I find acceptable."
This is basically the actual European laws conservatives try to paint as what they're trying to do in the US against the radical pro-abortion extreme, but any Republican who actually put forth say, French or German abortion law outside of a deep blue state would lose in a primary in 9.5 seconds.
Well, I guess I don’t begrudge people for having strong opinions in either direction. And for those who believe it’s tantamount to murder, they’re allowed to think that.
My hope is always that the rest of us can form a large majority who agree that it’s: not murder, medically necessary in some cases, and a genuine net good for society to have it available in the early weeks.
Whether people’s moral opinions *should* matter or not, I think it’s clear they *do* matter, and so legislation and activism that caters somewhat to those moral qualms is likely the straightest forward path to securing good abortion rights.
What about it seems icky though? If it's not another being with rights then what's wrong with killing it? And if it is obviously the government has an interest in protecting its rights regardless of whose pregnancy it is, no?
I think I just struggle with the language and concept of personhood as it applies to a fetus. A 12 week fetus doesn’t seem like a person to me, a 38 week fetus does. I’m not really sure where that changes for me. 20 weeks? 24? 32? I don’t think there’s a clean distinction. And I’ve birthed two babies. I’m ok with not knowing, and honestly I’m a little annoyed at the assuredness that other people have on this. It’s clearly a grey area. That’s why we all fight about it.
To relate this to another comment I made, I think that you have to consider whether the rights to life trump the rights to personal liberty. I don’t think the government should be able to commandeer my body to save the life of another person. I may believe it is the right thing to do to donate my liver/kidney to save another person, but the government mandating I should do so strikes me as an infringement of my rights and bodily autonomy, even if I would choose to of my own volition.
I agree with your bodily autonomy point but it's a lot less compelling late in pregnancy, where preventing a live birth becomes an objective of the procedure; it's not just about terminating the pregnancy.
It depends how you're defining later term, but for the 1% of abortions that happen at 21+ weeks we know that very very few are the kind of exception you cite. It's far more often someone who wasn't able to or chose not to get one earlier. In Arizona's abortion report from 2022 for example 0 of the 25 21+ week abortions were for fetal anomalies or maternal health.
I'm just gonna drop this take here:
I don't say this often, but it's so much easier being gay. 🤣
It's an issue that disproportionately impacts the straight community.
Gay women get pregnant too. I think what you mean is “It’s easier being a man”
Not to be insufferable. Gay people have their own discriminatory issues, some people don’t identify as women but have uteruses, etc etc
Three related points:
1) The most restrictive laws are poorly written on purpose in order to create ambiguity which, in turn, causes providers to err on the side of caution. Alabama's recent IFV issue is a good example of this. Do we really think the people drafting the initial law knew nothing about IVF? That they somehow forgot a whole bunch of people were suddenly going to be unable to access fertility treatments which they'd been used to having access to? The ambiguity of the laws has a chilling effect, and lawmakers understand and intend this effect to some extent when they draft bans in broad, non-specific language (but see #2 and 3).
2) The ambiguity of the laws also has possibly unintended knock-on effects to medical care. In the first order, doctors are put in the position of having to allow a pregnancy to become life-threatening to the patient before they can intervene even though in many cases it's clear that the pregnancy is non-viable and that continuing the pregnancy will create deadly risks. Even when laws create an exception for the life of the mother, doctors, hospital systems, and their lawyers have interpreted this to mean not intervening until the worst-case outcome is almost unavoidable because the laws don't establish any clear guidance for making the decision. Doctors don't want to go to jail for acting to save a patient's life. Patients don't want to be forced to reach the point of maximum risk before their doctors can act. These cases are also gaining national attention and the public seems unhappy about it. While I think lawmakers could have foreseen some of this stuff had they taken more care and done more research when drafting abortion bans, some of it may be too technical and medical for these mere politicians to understand.
3) There are second order effects too. In one example publicized recently by the Atlantic, some Oncologists and Cardiologists in Tennessee have been refusing to take on pregnant patients because they don't want to risk being held criminally responsible if something should happen to the patient's pregnancy. Even when that patient's OBGYN has cleared the patient for their care and offered to coordinate with those specialists, some still refuse flat out. Yet, pregnancy can often cause heart problems that need a cardiologist's management! There are cancer treatments available to pregnant women! But because the laws are so ambiguous providers do not want to risk their careers and livelihoods. Again, was this what the people drafting abortion bans intended? Probably not! I doubt they thought that far down the road.
Why should any member of the public put trust in their state legislatures to institute an abortion ban with any degree of intelligence and safety when this is the mess they've created so far? Maybe they would prefer some kind of moderate ban, 16 weeks or whatever, but if they can't trust their political leaders to implement it without potentially endangering any pregnant woman, isn't the better position to just allow abortion and leave it up to the discretion of patients and their doctors?
"Why should any member of the public put trust in their state legislatures to institute an abortion ban with any degree of intelligence and safety when this is the mess they've created so far?"
You could say a similar thing about American support for passenger rail, which is also a mess. But Matt's usual response to that argument is that we should rationalize Amtrak's governance, not eliminate it.
I agree we can’t be complacent but I understand that young people tend to be relatively liberal and low propensity voters. Access to abortion really resonates with them as it has obvious relevance to their lives. I would be extremely surprised if the well-funded and intelligently staffed Democrat campaign didn’t strive mightily to raise this issue in political advertising.
I suggest the anti-abortion position of the Republicans could very well be a long acting poison for them for many years to come. The activist Republican base is overwhelming in favour of it and will remain so for the foreseeable future. It may well be electoral suicide for a Republican to express pro-choice sentiments in Republican primaries for decades to come. In that time cohort after cohort of young people who are pro-choice will enter the voting electorate and be primed to be anti-Republican because of this issue. Perhaps they will grow more conservative with age, but my guess is that early voting habits will act as an anchor that will drag against any winds blowing them in a more conservative direction. At the very least the Republican position on abortion is going to solidify – probably for decades-it’s losing numbers in the 50% of voters who have ovaries. That’s a serious electoral handicap.
The Republicans tried to overturn Roe for 50 years. If people think that the backlash will be isolated to one midterm cycle only, well, I have a bridge to sell you.
It might be that Republicans moderate on abortion and that the hard core fundamentalist part of their base simply stops voting in national elections, taking the Benedict option seriously (isolating themselves in religious groups and turning their attention inwards and/or away from worldly matters).
I rather think the hard core fundamantalists prefer the option of inflicting their postion on others and will need to experience a lot of failures before reverting to withdrawing into hyper-sprituality.
"it’s losing numbers in the 50% of voters who have ovaries"
In practice women have pretty similar views on abortion to men... maybe a few points more pro choice but nothing massive.
But it wouldn't surprise me if *strong* pro-choice opinions turn out to be more common among women.
Matt reads too much into the polling data on whether a woman “should be able to get an abortion for any reason.”. First, the wording is pretty vague. Many people believe a woman should be able to get an abortion “for any reason” early in a pregnancy, but cringe at the thought of a woman aborting a healthy 22 week old fetus because she broke up with her boyfriend. I certainly do. Second, only a bare majority endorsed this position, not more than 55%. In pretty sure a majority of Americans would disagree with the statement “a woman should be able to get an abortion at any time in her pregnancy for any reason.”
Then there is opposition to 15 week abortion bans. I certainly oppose blanket prohibitions on abortions after 15 weeks. Mid term abortions should be allowed for eugenic reasons and when a mothers health is in danger. But, again, that doesn’t justify aborting a healthy fetus after a breakup.
There are a small number of really ugly abortions I’m keen to prevent. I don’t believe in forced birth, but I also don’t see that big a difference between a healthy 22 week old fetus and an infant. The 22-week old fetus looks like a baby human, has eyes and hands a a beating heart and deserves to be wanted.
Check this out https://osf.io/preprints/osf/rh76d
I'd be cautious in guessing what the majority of Americans would agree/disagree with, David, on a politically loaded question in the absence of polling data. The 'not more than 55%' comment ignores the fact that it is at least a 55/45% split and that makes it a winning political issue - especially when the 'don't knows/undecideds' are factored in. You also seem to discount the fact that 'vague wording' aside (and it seems pretty clear to me) there is a strong trend over time for this opinion to grow stronger in the community.
Annoying reminder to everyone: the main division over abortion isn't about gender, but rather partisanship and religiosity. A lot of bad takes on the issue stem from the author not grappling with this fact (indeed while the leadership of the pro-life movement is largely male most of the "organizing muscle" of the movement, is and has been historically, made up of women.)