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The specific problem that conservatives are deriding is when a woman has a late-term abortion but the child is still alive after the procedure. Is this a common occurrence? I don't think anyone argues for that. (Though "Most clinicians (69%) who report performing D&Es at 18 weeks last menstrual period or greater do not routinely induce fetal demise preoperatively." apparently, which changes my mind a little towards "this could be happening more often than I would guess.")
The important things to note are that:
It does happen occasionally. Dr. Willard Cates, then-director of abortion surveillance at the CDC, estimated “that 400 to 500 abortion live births” occurred every year in the United States.
Melissa Ohden is famously a survivor of a Saline Abortion at 31 weeks. She was saved by a nurse who heard her crying as she lay among medical waste at a US hospital. Not only does it happen, it happens to neonates who might be able to survive, if provided the same level of care that a wanted child of X gestational weeks would receive as a matter of course.
It seems like an obvious area where Liberals and Conservatives could come together and agree on what is right and wrong. "My body, my choice," OK, maybe Liberals really believe that. But once the child's out of the body, then it's not the mother's choice, is it? Why wouldn't such children be provided the same level of care that neonates receive in every NICU across the country?
But yet there is no agreement from the left of the aisle on this. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act has faced fierce partisan opposition. Why is this?
Much the same reason that there is resistance to efforts to require anesthetic for aborted babies when the abortion is done at a late enough stage for the baby to feel pain, or resistance to efforts to make the killing of an unborn baby by e.g. a drunk driver a criminal offence. That is, defenders of abortion recognise the political danger of giving an inch.
Once you concede the baby has any rights, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify why this but not that. Once you start saying that it's right to save the life of a born child who is dying from an incomplete abortion, well, people might question whether it was right to try to kill it in the first place.
The left engages in MMA, the right engages in WWE.
For those of us who aren't into televised fighting, what does this mean?
I think WWE is scripted/fake, and MMA is an actual sport, correct? How does that apply here?
My best guess: the left's decisions seem directed towards the goal of winning: do not give an inch. The right's decisions seem directed towards pleasing an audience: the base?
It seems to me that "winning" in the case of the left is really just pleasing the base's preferences: wanting to get abortions. Are you saying the right's base has silly preferences or something?
The funny thing is, as one of the resident left-leaning people, both sides think the other side are genius political actors, racking up win after win, while their side is useless, weak, and being rolled over.
I think part of it is that in a 50/50 political world, and with enough states under strong Dem and GOP control, there are overreaches on both sides to make it seem like either side is running over things, based on your own views, while thinking your side is unable to fight.
What are the main losses that you'd point to? The Supreme court, sure. Elon buying twitter. What else?
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There's nothing funny about it, they're both pointing at something real. I don't know how you can look at the sudden repudiation of colorblindness in favor of esoteric racialism, or redefining basic terms as "woman" and "mother" as per the OP, the turning of neutral institutions into enforcers of the new dogma, and tools for censorship etc., etc., etc., and not come to the conclusion that whoever is responsible for that are genius political actor scoring win after win.
Sure, an earnest left winger might point out that their ideals about helping the common man, not draping Goldman Sachs offices trans flags. They might also point out that it's also a mark of political genius to use left wing social causes as a front for redirecting more and more power to the rich.
They're both right. My issue with the earnest left winger is that he doesn't actually want to get rid of the political geniuses that are reshaping the world to their liking, he just wants them to also implement his economic agenda.
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Despite the well-known Roman disregard for fetal and infant life, they established that a "nasciturus" posseses certain legal rights, particularly concerning inheritance, as if it was already born.
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