This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1474518
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1474518
Never interrupt your enemy when he’s about to make a mistake. Let’s hope they cling to anti-abortion. America doen’t.
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"Murder’ of the mother by withdrawal of essential care not being a problem one must assume.
Theocrats and plutocrats often agree with each other when it comes to the kinds of politicians they like and the business of politics as it is practiced in the US gives them real teeth in getting those politicians elected and the laws they want those politicians to pass.
The reason right-wing enthusiasts like to focus on the “Right to Life” is that it allows them to cover up the Rights they are suppressing, like “Liberty” and “the Pursuit of Happiness” (privacy and choice).
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As has been said many times, for over 40 years the Republican Party has been buying power on a credit card promising to outlaw all abortions and now the credit card has come due. GOP success on this issue with voters was not just being against abortion but rather the radical stance it took on the issue that was in fact opposed by the majority. That is why the other options of not to outlaw all abortions and do so nationally, states rights and 15 week ban with exceptions, both result in allowing over 90% of abortions.
To the first option Republicans are trying to argue, “States Rights”, this merely turns woman’s healthcare into a class issue as any woman of some means can simply go visit a friend or relative in a “Blue” state. As 99%+ of all abortions are performed in the first 15 weeks or to end a pregnancy that has catastrophically gone wrong and threatens the life or serious health of the mother, what Republicans would be saying to those who supported them on this one issue for over 40 years that it was all about preventing less than 1% of all abortions.
Now to many it was never about abortion (how many times has it been said that the overwhelming support by White Evangelicals for Donald “grab her by the …Trump” proves “values” in front of the word voter was always code for race) but rather was about getting those who truly believe abortion is murder to support racist and other inhumane policies that have lead to among other things a return to great inequality. However, to a significant number of Republican voters it was about a radical and minority view on woman’s healthcare/abortion.
To these voters, unlike every other Republican, Donald Trump delivered so they are loyal Trump voters which gives Trump control of the GOP and why he will be their 2024 nominee. But it is not just abortion, it is Religious intolerance, White supremacy, Guns, Xenophobia, Misogyny, that has appealed to many “one issue” voters. That is voters for whom foreign and domestic policy do not matter. In fact in regard to domestic policy they would gladly turnover much of their wealth in exchange for just hearing support for their one issue.
On all these issues the GOP success and power have been based not so much on these single issue voters but rather the radical position on that issue single issue GOP voters take. However, the radical position on each single issue is a minority view of Americans. For example most single issue abortion voters support common sense gun control. Most White nationalists support abortion rights at least for themselves.
To woman’s healthcare/abortion itself, this is playing out with White woman 53% of whom in 2020 voted for Trump and other Republicans. If that number falls to below 50%, Republicans are doomed to be in the minority for the next 50 years.
But then the same can be said if Republicans lose the votes who truly believe abortion is murder, or guns have more rights than people, or who hate Blacks or think they are superior to women, without their votes Republicans will not win another national election baring some great calamity or serious screw up by Democrats.
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I have a hard time reading this, knowing that these people would have murdered my spouse if they had been in a position to do so. Luckily, we were in a blue state.
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Republican gerrymandering may keep your party in power, but it also guarantees you will only be primaried from your right. They have no choice (or counter-incentive) but to stay extreme until they are voted out of office.
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This is why antiabortion folks love Trump.
Death is not a problem, it is power and only power they seek.
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I have nothing but contempt for these people. I don’t care if the likes of Taylor Rehfeldt die from sepsis in the hospital parking lot.
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I couldn’t even get through the whole article. So these are my asks:
-Are the Right to Life groups in each state going step up and help pay for the care of severally disabled newly born infant? And that care would have to continue for the rest of the forced birthed one’s life?
-Are the Right to Life groups in each state ever going to send a woman to advocate to these males in state legislatures that they need to write the rules so that her life matters less then a clump of cells?
-Are these Right to Life groups ever going to have medical doctors testify that their number one priority is to save the child over the mother?
-Will these state legislatures clarify that a 9 y/o can be the legal guardian of the child they just birthed because they were raped?
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Exactly. That is why they are all absolutists on abortion, the only points debate how long to jail the women, and how to prevent them from going to another state to get one.
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trump thinks he’s going to be able to play these people again by coming out in favor of a 15-week ban or whatever to up his chances in the general. And I think he badly underestimates just how many of his voters really and truly think that’s a 15-week pass on baby murder.
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YES, to a great extent this is for me the most difficult part of this issue, how it not only diminishes but also demeans women. It almost reminds me House of Dragons, the prequel to “Game of Thrones”, where so desperate to have a son the King orders his wife be basically cut in half and the child pulled from her.
But just as bad as what it does to women, is what it says about women, that after being pregnant for 9 months and about to give birth they decide on a whim to end the pregnancy.
Between the way it puts others life and health over a woman’s and argues that women are not competent to make these own decisions it is hard not to want to throw my shoe at the TV or person making such noise.
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The Republican Party absolutely never wanted Roe to be overturned. The Repub establishment (see, e.g., Justice Roberts) liked the Casey framework where states could nip at abortion around the edges with shit like waiting periods, requiring pre-abortion ultrasounds, making abortion providers have hospital admitting privileges, etc. while making the pro-forced birth mob feel like Repubs had their back. Now the pro-forced birth mob will settle for nothing but total bans - the more draconian the better - and it is probably going to be the death of the Republican Party as a national party. IMHO, the sooner those MFers disappear the better. In the meantime, however, it is going to be a terrible ride for women in red states (see, e.g., Idaho where women may no longer be able to even get basic OB-GYN care because OB-GYNs are leaving the state en masse).
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Fuck this insanity. How the fuck are we allowing every jackass rancher or lawyer who gets his stupid hayseed ass elected to a state legislature make health care decisions they know nothing about? If you didn’t go to medical school, sit down and shut the fuck up. If you have no chance of ever getting pregnant, sit down and shut the fuck up. And if you’re some religious whack job fanatic putting women’s lives at risk because some con man preacher told you what was in a book of Bronze Age bullshit fairy tales, then you really need to sit down and shut the fuck up.
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Women don’t just decide to terminate normal pregnancies late in pregnancy. Almost all the late pregnancy terminations are of nonviable or severely damaged pregnancies or pregnancies carried by women whose life is in danger. The remainder are some of the saddest cases you can imagine: children who hid a pregnancy or did not know they were pregnant or who are carrying a rapist’s child who is also a relative. In your piece, you managed to get the realities wrong and show your underlying misogyny while pretending to support women.
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I think you’re misinterpreting his second paragraph.
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Yes, that’s part of it. But there is also the fact that if you can get the base of one of the two major parties to obsessively focus on abortion to the exclusion of everything else, they won’t be thinking about inconvenient things like income disparity, lack of affordable healthcare, or poor infrastructure.
Even if there were the most draconian abortion ban nationwide, it wouldn’t affect the rich. They could afford to fly their daughters to a foreign country for the procedure. Exactly in the same way that rich people don’t give a shit about crumbling infrastructure or poor local health care when they can avoid crumbling roads by flying their private (or chartered) jet to Mayo Clinic if they need a checkup.
I have long argued that ever since the Reagan administration, the wealthy have de facto seceded from America. They control it, but they are not a part of it.
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How many of these anti-choice lobbyists also opposed mask mandates and vaccines during lockdown?
And it’s a horrid commentary on our politics that politicians have to answer to lobbyists instead of their constituents.
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Yeas, but some of those constituents are poor or black or women or or immigrants or ex cons or unemployed or in poor health or homeless or mentally ill, and how can you expect a right wing sociopath to give a fuck about those losers?
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