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I don't think there's the symmetry you think there is. Institutions on the right are specifically very keen on women in those circumstances carrying to term.
On the left, it's not so much the idea that women in the 40th week can and should and would just change their minds like that, but rather that in situations like, say, this one, having the heavy hand of the government involved will just make things worse. And that narrowly written exceptions don't actually help, given situations like this.
The idea is, if I understand correctly, that the heavy hand of the law will just make things worse, because the Shirley exception is not an actual usable piece of law.
I think that the first half of your post is the very charitable explanation that I think is false for the majority.
And that Shirley exception post is like, one of the worst examples of deceptive argumentation I've ever seen and is a rebuttal of an argument I've never seen.
Sorry, can you be clearer about what you think is "false for the majority"?
I understand that you may not have seen that precise argument... but it's in the quotes upthread. “You can’t get rid of it.” “I guess I thought that, you know, he would not do this, he would not take health insurance away knowing it would affect so many peoples lives." Surely this bad thing can't actually happen.
As it's written:
There absolutely is disbelief that awful things could actually happen; you see it everywhere. Surely it won't be that bad. Surely people will be reasonable. Surely it will work out for the best.
I think you're being overly narrow in what you think of as The Shirley Exception.
This. I think they just really like abortion and the idea that a woman can change her mind about child rearing at any time.
I dont encounter this in real life. This is just a weaponization of womans tears argument. People intrinsically know hurting some people is almost always going to happen for anytime you make an optimal policy. These tears are why destructive policies like medicare and medicaid almost never get dismantled. We operate in the opposite environment than "The Shirley Exception", we live in the tear win almost always world. Even though tears are almost always wrong.
Okay, but why do you think that? Yglesias is pointing to the stated positions of mainstream conservative interest groups. You're pointing to what, exactly?
You're referring to Richard Hanania's idea that women get what they want by pitifully crying so that men will look or feel like monsters by not acceding to their demands?
I understand that you're citing your own lived experience here, but maybe we can do better than that? "Woman's tears" didn't help the 13 year old who's now raising a baby. "Woman's tears" didn't make it so the woman carrying a corpse didn't have to fly halfway across the country and pay twenty-five thousand dollars to save her own life. But the people putting these policies in place were very clear that Shirley these things would not be allowed to happen. Or that Shirley, it would happen to someone else. (If you can stomach reading an advocate's view, here's Jill Filipovic explaining why abortion policy is so hard for precisely that reason.)
The world you're describing, where women can easily just cry to get whatever they want, does not appear to be the world in which we live, certainly not in terms of abortion policy.
Medical care for the indigent and elderly is an extraordinarily popular policy. While I'm curious about why you think it's "destructive", either way, I don't think you need an extra explanation about "women's tears" to explain why very popular policies are hard to dismantle.
I pointed to congressional votes.
Is this some sort of gish gallop of cases that maybe actually happened (almost certainly exaggerated in some area)? Because I've often tried fisking abortion related sob stories. They rarely are what the media first reported.
OTOH, we have the case of Kermit Gosnell, who is not even a 1 of 1. Many of the things that abortion activists feel are "onerous" regulations are simply reaction to his practice and the revelation that a serial murderer was able to operate for decades under the guise of a medical clinic because of abortion activists shielding the entire industry from the slightest of scrutiny.
This doesn't indicate what you think it does. Again, the started reason is that government involvement doesn't help and stated exceptions don't actually work. Which looks to be the case!
I don't think anyone out there with clout is stating that they want women to be able to abort at forty weeks on a whim the same way major organizations on the right say they want rape victims to be forced to carry to term.
These are the cases that I linked above; did you follow the links? I think I've described them pretty reasonably.
The position here, which makes sense to me, was that if you make abortion hard to access, women will go to less reputable providers, not that Kermit Gosnell was a great guy doing a good job.
These rules, which are somewhat obsolete in the wake of Dobbs since the point was to make abortion less accessible, date to well before Gosnell's crimes were discovered, and they go well beyond what would be required for safety.
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