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New Abortion Laws are Splitting the Right, Too
Compared to many of you, I’m new to the abortion discussion and am self-conscious about taking positions on it. I have never been pregnant nor have I had an abortion. Until about 15 years ago, I was pro-choice. Gradually I have found myself soundly in the pro-life position. Yet the arguments that are occurring, even among those on the Right, have caused me to take a closer look at my
beliefs. I thought our having that discussion here about the abortion laws might help many of us learn from each other and clarify our views.
First, there are many states that have decided, with exceptions and no exceptions, to ban abortion. There are a whole range of criteria for whether abortions should be banned and when and how abortions might be legal:
Multiple states such as Kentucky and Georgia have passed bills that ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected, around six weeks of pregnancy, while Alabama recently passed the strictest abortion law in the country, banning the procedure with few exceptions.
Several other states are considering “trigger” laws that go into effect to ban abortion should Roe v. Wade be overturned, while other states like New York have passed bills that enshrine abortion rights.
In most of the states that have passed legislation regarding abortion, those laws will go into effect in the next month or two; in many cases, legal actions, particularly by the ACLU, have already been issued. And several other states are in the process of reviewing the status of abortion in their states to determine whether to take action.
The most intense controversy seems to be whether or not exceptions have been included in these laws for rape, incest, or the health of the mother. The Alabama Senate wrestled with this issue:
The Republican-majority chamber adjourned in dramatic fashion when leaders tried to strip a committee amendment that would have added an exception for cases of rape or incest. Sponsors insist they wanted to limit exceptions because the bill is designed to push the idea that a fetus is a person with rights, in a direct challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision that established a woman’s right to abortion.
Whether this approach would have the intended impact at the Supreme Court is difficult to discern.
The controversy rising among those on the Right is how to address exceptions to these bills:
Reporters on Capitol Hill have peppered Republican lawmakers with demands to know whether they agree with Alabama’s law, which forgoes the rape and incest exceptions.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said that for him personally, the Alabama law goes too far and that his position is in line with the views held by both President Trump and former President Ronald Reagan, who favored the exceptions. But Minority Whip Steve Scalise said that when he was in the Louisiana legislature, he supported anti-abortion legislation that only had exceptions for when the life of the mother was in danger.
‘I am strongly pro-life and I do believe we ought to try to protect life at every stage and that is why protecting the life of the mother was an exception I’ve always supported,’ he said.
There are some people who feel that after the horrendous experience of a rape or incest, a woman should not have to carry a baby to term; if her life is at risk, how does one decide which life to save? In some cases, the woman’s health at risk has included her mental health.
On the other hand, no matter how the baby was conceived, the baby is a human being, too. It didn’t choose to be conceived by rape or incest. It doesn’t bear responsibility for causing the mother’s health to be at risk.
And finally, if both lives are to be considered, should the mother be expected to carry the baby to term and take the option to relinquish him or her through adoption? Wouldn’t this choice be the most moral and fair for both?
A number of questions can be gleaned from this discussion—
*What criteria should be included in an abortion ban law, in your opinion?
* Should the potential impact on the Supreme Court be a consideration?
*What are your thoughts about exceptions to be made?
Published in Culture
You entire comment is excellent, @oldbathos. You hit on the dilemmas for both sides. But your comment I copied here is so typical of the Republicans. Period. No guts.
Yes! This is what I’m getting at. It’s a binary proposition. Either the more powerful, more able bodied get to decide whether the weaker, more vulnerable live or die, or the state protects the right to life (to not be intentionally killed) from conception to natural death. It is fundamental logic and ethics. Pro-lifers need to man-up, be consistent, and take our hits on behalf of the unborn. Who knows if there will ever be a better moment?
Perhaps, though we may all be misreading Chief Justice Roberts. I believe his real agenda is to ratchet down the hyper-partisan nature of the modern Supreme Court, where every confirmation is a knife fight and the Court is a sort of super-legislature. I think he wants to return divisive social issues to the legislature (where they belong) rather than decide them in the courts.
In the Obamacare case, this meant he didn’t want the Court to strike down a massive, complex law passed by Congress and supported by roughly half the population, he wanted the issue to be settled by the next election and the actions of the next Congress.
The same agenda might lead him to support overturning Roe, in order to return the fight over abortion to the state legislatures. Abortion is the single biggest issue that led to and sustains the politicization of SCOTUS nominations, so perhaps he sees overturning Roe as a way to remove the Court from the center of every abortion debate.
I wonder if the Casey decision might be overturned instead. Several cases after Roe eliminated the trimester concept. The Doe case was actually broader in sweep than Roe. I believe they establish an absolute right to terminate a pregnancy, which is extreme. This means abortion could occur during labor on a full-term, viable infant. This is not popular, even among most democrats and apolitical people.
I’ve already explained my view on heartbeat viability. It’s a solid position, and would likely reduce the number of abortions overall. I am aware that is not absolutely pro-life, and I do not care. As you say, people tend to want some middle ground.
Perhaps, though if they go that route I’ll be fascinated to see what tangled web of legal fictions they weave to justify the decision. Let’s not forget that Roe was one of the worst SCOTUS decisions ever from an originalist perspective and pushed the concept of legislating from the bench into the stratosphere. No one seriously believes that the Founders intended their new Constitution to protect the “right” to certain types of abortion procedures during the 2nd trimester, but not during the 3rd, etc.
Roberts is creative, I’ll give him that, but if he can justify overturning Doe but not Roe on originalist grounds he deserves to win a Hugo.
Update: Further reporting indicates the school decided to return his money (per his own demands) 4 days before his comments related to the AL abortion law. He was essentially trying to run the law school and control staffing decisions.
Still institutional opposition, but not directly because of benefactor’s calling for boycotting of Univ of Alabama due to AL abortion law. I imagine, however, that his derision of AL law (and the state university’s law college dean and professors) in a 5/29 article made it an easier decision for Board of Trustees to formally ex-communicate him and his money from their law school 6/7/19.
https://www.al.com/news/2019/06/ua-emails-show-decision-to-return-funds-to-culverhouse-preceded-abortion-comments.html
It only takes a few seconds of looking at the images of abortion for a rational human to come down on the pro-life without exception side. Those who can look at these [warning graphic images] and continue defending abortion are simply disturbed individuals, and morally bankrupt. It’s an issue so clear that my children marvel how any adult can defend it. So do I.
Is it not pathetic that issues as important as this are decided behind closed doors by a couple of unelected judges playing scholastic games?
How the hell did we get here?
This is why the left goes nuts if someone dares to show those images to a pregnant woman. Just like the furor over “violating a woman” by requiring an ultrasound before an abortion. Many when faced with that image on a screen will not go through with the murder.
In the movie Unplanned (based upon the book and true story of Abby Johnson’s heroic journey to leave Planned Parenthood), there is a scene where a very real P.O.C. room exists in a PP facility. The acronym is euphemistically intended to be a sterile ‘products of conception’, but all of the nurses know what it is and call it the pieces of children room. They are so numbed, anesthetized and deadened to reality that this elicits awkward laughter amongst them in the scene.
I think there are many horrors, not just regarding abortion, where we’ve become hardened and disinterested.
According to a 2018 Pew survey, 36% of Republicans believe, as I do, that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
We are certainly a quiet minority within the ranks. Why? You get shunned, vilified, and ignored. Politically it’s a non-starter, for now. Luckily for the GOP in the age of Trump, there is so much else we agree on, and the Democrats are pushing us away much harder on all of that. Anyway, Susan, thanks for asking and conducting a civil discussion on the issue.
To answer your questions directly:
So back to the question which interests me. Will the Republican Party (and the chat class where it counts like talk radio) try harder to be inclusive of the 36% or so favoring abortion rights?
If not, you may see an indie political movement open to much of the Trump agenda (smaller government; pro-business and pro-worker; fiscally sensitive foreign policy) with lifestyle issues optional. Such a political force could form from the growing ranks of ex-Democrats, especially if Republicans continue to be exclusively committed to religion-inspired doctrine on abortion. Secularism is rising among the young.
Republicans should be careful going into 2020. For working women and singles of both genders, the right to time the if-and-when of parenting is a major voting issue.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment, @jimkearney. I will not shun, vilify or ignore you, and I want to know more about your thinking.
So here are my questions, and I ask them sincerely–
I believe this is already happening, primarily from Republicans. What are your suggestions for more directly or effectively discouraging these actions, besides what is already being done? (I have to admit that I’m getting cynical enough that calling us a civilized society causes me to roll my eyes.)
Again, do you have thoughts on how to take this path? It seems like we are already doing this, from birth control to adoption. Unless we take away something from the potential mothers, like providing them with resources to help them keep the baby, I don’t know what else we could be doing. I don’t think we’ll get any help from the Dems and pro-choice folks.
It may not change, but it is not just a private matter, it affects our civilized society. I think one can oppose abortion without being secular. So would you mind sharing your thoughts?
Why? If it’s purely a private medical decision between a woman and her doctor, why should “civilized society” encourage or discourage any particular outcome?
My opposition to abortion is purely scientific. My horror that people can look at the science and shrug their shoulders is a different matter altogether. I humbly suggest it may be time for you to reexamine the data.
Talk radio in the late 1990s, Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy mostly, is a big reason that I switched from squishy pro-choice, i.e., personally against it but think it should be allowed, to staunchly pro-life. Years of discussing the value of life and the gruesomeness of abortion procedures helped me reexamine my position. They do a good job of defending life and can be persuasive.
And there is some evidence that such scientific facts are indeed resonating with the “young” …
https://studentsforlife.org/2019/01/15/only-7-of-millennials-agree-with-the-democratic-party-on-abortion/
If by ‘inclusive’ you mean a lack of gatekeeping, and a tolerance for dissenting opinion, then sure. While I consider myself pro-life (others may disagree), like most everyone else I have enough heterodox opinions on a variety of issues that encouraging strict litmus tests would not be in my interest.
If you mean abandoning the pro-life position or voting for openly pro-choice politicians in districts and states where pro-life politicians could realistically win, and their stance would ever be pertinent in the pursuit of their duties, then no. With Republicans for whom the abortion issue is among their priorities, that would mean losing even if their coalition won.
As I’ve said elsewhere, it ultimately comes down to what one is willing to tolerate in pursuit of one’s priorities; that is true even on issues where an electorally significant minority influences Party positions, much less a strong majority (and your position on abortion is a minority position even among Democrats, requiring intense hardline support to remain part of the Democrat Party agenda).
Let doctors explain the medical difficulties of later terminations, which necessitates early interventions, and encouraging and supporting more widely available early term medically induced terminations. Instead of throwing money at politicians, the pro-choice side should be putting ads for medical terminations in media viewed by at risk young women.
Give up fighting Roe, and Democrats will welcome Republicans to join their efforts to saturate the market with birth control technologies and family planning education. I believe some other countries may be doing this more successfully. Liberals need to stop promoting out-of-wedlock parenting, and start being more judgmental about poor choices made by people not yet suited for parental responsibilities.
But no kind of shaming will work if it comes from mouths which also speak out against reproductive rights.
It affects society, alright, when taxpayers underwrite years of social services because of an epidemic of out-of-wedlock births among the poor. The high abortion rates in poor urban areas tell us that people are not going to give up careless sex. Society’s interest is in figuring out how to motivate people to double or triple up on precautions; discover longer lasting, easier forms of birth control; and maybe incentivize successful use of all forms of family planning.
I/we, the majority, and the courts insist pregnancy and what to do about it is indeed a private choice in the first trimester. The early embryo/fetus belongs to the woman bearing it. If you can’t accept privacy rights, put it on property rights, or whatever argument works best for you. As a man, maybe it’s easier for me to say it’s not my business, it’s hers.
The earlier a termination can be initiated, the less persuasive the false argument for fetal rights. Medical advances are beginning to make the trauma of surgical abortion less often necessary. But regardless of how quickly a pregnant girl or woman makes her choice, no one has the right to intervene and prevent her from controlling her own life, or the course and timing of her career and family life.
You’re not hearing any of this for the first time, of course. Thanks for listening.
My main point is that other Republicans and conservatives need to realize the very large number of people voting with you now who will defect in meaningful numbers if it ever looks like there’s a real threat to women’s right to reproductive choice.
Google first trimester abortion images. I think we should know what we’re doing and a picture is worth a thousand words.
Or take it from one who knows. Abortion doctors know full well they’re killing a human being:
When Rush was first recommended to me by the guy fixing my garage door in 1990, I asked if Rush would go on about abortion, because I didn’t want to hear it. The guy explained, no, Rush wasn’t like that. He was a pro-lifer but he talked mostly about other issues. To this day I’m a huge fan, even though I respectfully disagree with him about the issue and he seems to understand that his audience base includes not only people like me, but many Democrats.
I don’t know how long Rush will be at it — Cousin Brucie (age 83) is still doing a show on SiriusXM, and I listened to him on WABC in the early 1960’s — but I’d like to see some fresh young arms throwing in the talk radio bullpen. And maybe one of them will emerge from a more libertarian dynamic.
Hardly. I very much disapprove of the extremists favoring new legislation to legalize partial birth and even post birth procedures. I just wouldn’t favor any type of new legislation restricting abortion rights, and most Democrats and a significant swath of GOP voters agree with me. Most people don’t want to hear about the subject at all.
My view is that our side has already won in the courts, and the less said about it in big media, the better. This goes with another set of opinions I have about media, which you never hear on Fox. I think there’s too much yap about a whole bunch of things better left unsaid.
That list includes most illegally leaked documents; anything remotely connected to national security; solitary incidents exploiting race and/or private sexual matters; the political opinions of most celebrities; and fringe lunatics from Black Lives Matter to neo-Nazis. It also extends to questions about recent pop culture garbage on Jeopardy. Get off my lawn!
Not a “human being.” Fetal tissue.
Well, at least no one has said “baby killer” yet, at least in this thread.
If they start speaking across the aisle using simplistic parochial partisan rhetoric, know that the reaction, should you care, will be silence and an eye roll.
The pro-lifers believe those images are persuasive.
Yuck!, and you say you’re not invading a woman’s private space?
So go ahead, keep trying to get those posters in front of the occasional camera. You’re only grossing out the public and making your side out to be desperate fanatics.
But since you think this way, picture the earliest detectable hunk of cells from the time a woman gets a positive read on a pregnancy test. Better? Then consider she takes a pill, and goodbye problem. Maybe your side should focus on making that the standard method for the largest possible percentage of terminations.
Since we’re talking about medical science now, consider the future of adoption.
The laws, and the law of supply and demand today aren’t exactly adoption-friendly. Will advances in genome editing make it possible to “upgrade the product?” Wouldn’t it be interesting if any pregnancy could be given additional value? Picture pre-natal intervention guaranteeing a disease-resistant, high IQ, athletic-looking child in the offing. There need not be anti-abortion laws if in the future nobody wants an abortion.
@jimkearney, I’m going to assume that you aren’t using this post as a means to incite angry responses, as opposed to civilized conversation. Your rhetoric seems to be intentionally framed to antagonize people. Well, let me correct that–you are antagonizing me: “upgrading the product” is beyond the pale. I’m cautioning those reading your comments to not be triggered into personal attacks on you. That’s how incendiary I think they are.
I was with my husband in his office, and was 4 months pregnant. When I went to the bathroom, a sudden cramp and the baby with the placenta just slipped out. I started crying and called to hubby, about just losing the baby, then he found the baby, a perfect formed tiny baby boy. My husband cried as well. We really wanted that child. The baby/fetus was washed and wrapped in a clean cloth, all tissue placed in a small box and buried by a rose bush in our back yard.
My next pregnancy had the cervix stitched closed so the baby wouldn’t fall out.
It’s clear you’ve closed yourself off from the science. Even the abortionists aknowledge what they are killing, they merely justify it. But this is why we are winning this fight. We have fourty years of testimonials, evidence, images, videos, scientific discoveries, technological advances, documentation, and victims that prove how devastating abortion is for women and society. All they have left are repetitive rhetoric and Whoopie Goldberg holding a hangar.
Yes, of course there was no intent to incite anger and hostility (the definition of being “antagonized.”) “Incendiary” to you is just “irony” from me, @susanquinn.
I realize we’re not talking about pet adoption, but you must concede there is a kind of shopping involved. After spending a fortune giving nature a push with expensive fertility treatment, paying expenses+ to cooperative unwed mothers can be a sensible spend.
Even when money isn’t exchanged there is an adoption marketplace, caring wannabee parents, poor pregnant girls, and in some cases distant orphanages with beautiful but often tragically damaged children.
I’ve known several people who have adopted and in some cases paid. Some have been seriously burned, others successfully out-nurtured natural defects. Some prefer particular races, others screen first for early indicators of psychological damage.
So yes, looking at it without sentiment, in adoption there’s a “product” and a supply/demand marketplace. (By which logic, the fetus is the product in an earlier stage of its development cycle.) Being dispassionate and talking about it that way gets me to what happens to most products and industries these days, technological disruption.
Like it or not, gene editing is here. “Designer” children are on the runway. How could this not transform adoption? And if this development adds value to some fetal life … I thought you might actually like that part.
By speculating in this manner about the transformation coming in genomics, yes, I do so in an irreverent, ironic tone. It fits, because the changes coming to humanity have a surreal, Futurama-esque quality. Given the state of how we’ve evolved (devolved?) lately, I’m not certain these changes will be for the worse.
Anyhoo, hope no one is feeling “triggered” by all this. I’m no triggerer! The eye roll, the saunter away, waving, that’s me.