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Not really. Because the level of discourse is just too stupid. The average person doesn't know anything about the Constitution, how the government works, etc... They just want more (or fewer) abortions because other team bad.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure this issue is quite the slam dunk the Democrats think it is. The number of Americans who are pro-choice is not a large majority, only a narrow one. At times in the not-so-distant past, pro-life has been the majority.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/225975/share-of-americans-who-are-pro-life-or-pro-choice/
Donald Trump's position on abortion is much closer to the median voter's than Kamala Harris. Al Gore's "safe, legal, rare" was a good formulation. But the current Democratic party positively celebrates abortion. They refuse to denounce horrific late-term abortions. Things like having an abortion truck at the DNC come off as vampiric. It's not a good look. Which is why they lie about Trump's position rather than defend their own.
The thing is, Trump's personal opinions on abortion don't matter. Trump isn't proposing any changes to federal law, and in fact the justices he appointed ensured that he can't. His opposition to Florida's actions are all talk, and given he's on the campaign trail there's no reason to believe he'll put any public pressure on future actions if he wins the election.
Trump's effective policy on abortion is ending Roe v. Wade, which opened the floodgates on states banning abortion. But aside from a few extremely principled libertarians, that's not the policy anybody actually wants. Whichever side of the abortion debate people are on, their beliefs are strong enough that they probably want those beliefs to apply nationwide. And given he's running as a Republican, Trump is still on team "wants to stop virtually all abortion."
You're misunderestimating Trump. He has fully captured the Republican party. He forced them to remove anti-abortion language from the platform.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-backed-republican-platform-tempers-language-abortion-2024-07-08/
Kamala is a product of the machine. Trump is its master. His personal opinions on abortion matter a lot.
I actually don't think so.
Probably like 25% of the population are pro-life absolutists. And maybe 5% or 10% are pro-choice absolutists. But most people support abortions in some cases but not others (and miniature American flags for everyone). And lots of people don't care about the issue a lot either way.
My personal interpretation of Trump is I don't think he would take any real action in any direction on abortion once he's in office. I think he's more interested in being President because of the prestige of being President more than for any policy reasons. And because of that I don't think he would do much if they returned to that policy after the election.
But to tie it back to the point about Kamala vs. Trump's debates, I think she can simply ignore what you said and concentrate on him being largely responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade. I expect lots of talk about Texas.
Let's clarify some language here. I was trying to do so in my first response but let's confirm if we're on the same page here.
When it comes to marijuana legalization, you might have an opinion one way or another but if the state next to you decided to legalize or criminalize marijuana, you might say it's none of your business. If the state next to you decided to legalize murder you would probably say "What the hell?! Change it back!" It likely will not affect you but it still offends your sense of right and wrong. Most people are not pro-life absolutists in that they might make exceptions under X weeks or in the case of child rape, etc. But I do think whatever criteria they think is right, they generally think is right everywhere and should apply everywhere, rather than being decided on a state by state basis.
Which, surprisingly, is congruent with what he says he'll do.
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I'm convinced that unless one has strong philosophical priors related to either the sanctity of life (life begins at conception) or bodily autonomy (woman's right to choose), the intuitive moral answer is one that you almost aren't allowed to say in public: there are capital-G Good abortions, there are bad abortions, and there are meh abortions. There are times when it is close to murder, there are times when it is a mitzvah, and there are times I don't really care one way or the other. And there are a hundred virtually unprovable factors that go into that determination.
But by altering what kind of abortion you are talking about, you rapidly change people's opinions on abortion.
But we have numbers!
Everything below comes from this link from Guttmacher. Guttmacher is rabidly pro-choice.
You can piece through the crosstabs as you like, but I focus on these numbers:
Here's another Guttmacher link - " About half of all U.S. women having an abortion have had one previously."
What does all of this mean?
Your categorization of good/bad/meh abortions is good and useful. The raw numbers, however, show that even if "bad" abortions make up a very small minority of all abortions, we're talking about (probably) somewhere on the order of 100,000s of cases of what a lot of reasonable people would probably view as infanticide.
Secondly, there's a bit of a hidden conclusion to drawn from the "Only 7% occur after 14 weeks" statistic. Some posters here like to point out how raising a r*tarded child is somehow beyond the pale for many humans (I think differently). Taken a little more charitably, it makes sense to consider that a fetus that has demonstrable physical or cognitive deformities could give would-be parents pause. But, if 45% of people are getting these abortions at six weeks or earlier, people aren't making these judgements based on particularly advanced fetus condition. At 6 weeks, an embryo is 6mm long, the size of a pea. Yes, there could be markers, indications, signs, what have you. But the often presented narrative of "We learned our baby would require 24/7 care forever" is far more rare than is presented in campaign narratives.
And that leads me back to the numbers. Democrats love to campaign on the the smaller proportion of abortions that would probably fall mostly into "meh" (and definitely into "good"). Pro-lifers see the plain fact that a lot of abortions are purely elective on the part of a mother than feels somehow "unready" to be a mother. We (I) think these are absolutely "bad" abortions, mostly the product of a sexual lack of discipline or a cavalier disregarding for what are very predictable outcomes of, you know, having sex.
While I don't doubt the sincerity of those emotions, there is no way they outweigh the fundamental right of an otherwise healthy baby to be born. Hypothetical future states about being "unloved" or "having a bad life" have to be thrown out. That's literally trading the truth of the present for an emotionally based forecast of the future. That's bad decision making 101.
Finally, regarding the fact that half of all women getting abortions have had one previously, I don't see how this is anything than stupid after-the-fact birth control. "Young girl makes mistake" is certainly an understandable situation for a single abortion. I do not see how it can be that common (50%!) unless it is viewed plainly as "no big deal"
Infanticide was a large part of the human condition for hundreds of thousands of years. With no real access to abortion and no way to tell if a child would be deformed at birth it was a very common practice.
"Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Pre-Islamic Arabia, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskan"
Killing actual living babies and not just a small pile of cells with no consciousness is a time honored human tradition, back when HARD TIMES™ made HARD MEN.
Abortion seems like a big step up in humanitarian behavior.
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You're discounting that gestational time plays into most people's moral calculus. Most people feel differently about six weeks than six months. Which is logical: miscarriage rates start dropping precipitously after six weeks, and are minuscule after ten weeks. Many people might be placing those abortions of fetuses the size of peas in the meh category automatically, as the probabilistic child isn't probable enough or present enough at that stage.
To piggyback off of what @The_Nybbler said. This comes down to a bright line definition of when life starts. And an honest debate about abortion would have that at its center.
It's funny, we've all heard the joke about it being impossible to be "a little bit pregnant" - you are or you aren't. It seems, however, you can be pregnant with something that is only "a little bit human."
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The problem is that this becomes the Sorites Paradox -- the paradox that asks the question "how many grains of sand make a heap?" (Worse, actually, because time is continuous). It's not resolvable.
@100ProofTollBooth
I'm not saying it doesn't present a philosophical illogicality. What I am saying is that philosophical consistency ends up requiring (for most people) taking counterintuitive actions in real life.
Taking a hard black-and-white stand at conception or at birth prevents you from ever facing inconsistency. But each requires biting the bullet and accepting some tough choices. The shift from people identifying as pro-life vs pro-choice is mostly capturing shifts in the perceived environment around those people, their actual beliefs resemble neither philosophically consistent position.
The polling is like asking people "Do you think we should paint things Blue?" Some small percentage of people will genuinely never tolerate anything blue, and some small percentage of penn state fans want everything blue. Most people will change their minds depending how many things are already blue.
I see what you're saying. This makes sense. And I appreciate the comment on philosophical consistency.
I'm not pro-life because of dogmatic adhere to religious teachings (although I do that in my spare time). I'm pro-life because I think philosophical consistency would push the more rabidly pro-choice into favoring eugenics.
To the extent that this is true, this would be an extremely positive development.
Just to be clear, you're an explicit eugenicist?
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Two questions:
Can you point to an example of intentional, explicit eugenics delivering clear benefits?/
Do you support price controls?
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Right, I would be aghast if my sister got an abortion. But some crack whore getting an abortion? Yes, please, do everyone a favor! Or someone who will resent that child for the rest of its life due to the circumstances of its conception? By all means, save that poor kid the trouble. And of course that’s not even touching all the health-related stuff, both when it comes to the baby and to the mother.
I would be aghast if my sister got an abortion because she just didn't want a third child. Or if she had an abortion because she didn't want another boy. I would be aghast if my sister chose not to abort a down's syndrome kid, or a pregnancy that threatened her life.
Oh certainly, like I said, once you introduce serious health complications into the picture, my take is pretty much always, “Just get the abortion.”
Serious question, not trying to bait.
What if we have or develop a technology that gives you an early probability. You're 6 weeks pregnant and you get a report along the lines of "There's a 15% probability your baby will have xyz horrible disease or condition. We will know with 60% certainty at week 18, and 90% certainty at week 24"
What's the decision model look like then?
Right, so obviously I’m sure situations like this do come up, and I wouldn’t fault a woman for pretty much any decision she makes under that level of uncertainty. I would need to factor in things like: how much more difficult is the abortion going to be on her body the longer the decision is postponed?
I’m currently reading John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, and one of the early chapters in the book is about one of the characters becoming an abortionist in the late 19th century and the absolute horrors the women endured at that time; a lot of it dwells on how much more difficult and potentially fatal an abortion becomes the longer she is into the pregnancy. Now, obviously our medical technology is worlds better in the 21st century, but I would think that the likelihood of complications still increases substantially as the pregnancy progresses. I’m not a doctor and don’t want to speculate about what I would recommend for a woman in such a scenario. I hope to God I and my hypothetical future partner never have to make a decision like this.
For sake of argument, let's say the prenatal technology has advanced so far that there is effectively no difference in difficult for abortion at any stage. It's all an outpatient procedure.
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I think most would agree with this choice put in front of them, but the faith in the public health system generally is low enough that it might poll surprisingly poorly, especially if stories of (pro-choice) doctors handing out "totes serious health complications" notes for late-term abortions like prescriptions for emotional support animals. Witness the slippery slope that euthanasia in Canada has wrought.
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That is the logical take, there are many on this forum that think you should be forced to raise a retard and care for them until you die because all life is sacred. So sacrifice your life and your wife's to raise an unproductive person that would probably have died without modern medicine because God says so.
I mean, no.
Because I believe in it and think it's right - that's why I'd raise an "unproductive person" (BTW how do you feel about 100% disability war veterans, just asking)
Your model for a "worthwhile life" doesn't trump anyone else's model for a "worthwhile life."
The only way to discover if you can derive meaning in life is to live it.
Never allowing that life to start is certainly a way towards finality.
This is in no way the same as bringing someone you know has an extra chromosome or the like into the world. A veteran has contributed and sacrificed everything for a goal we all at least ostensibly believe in. A retarded child does the opposite and I've seen them swallow whole families with their needs.
Not just the family either, I've watched special needs kids ruin whole classrooms and cause endless distraction, assault and sexually assault other students, all at the low low price of like 100k a year for their Special Ed needs and minders. For what? So they can live with their parents until their parents die and then become wards of the state? Why are we sending them to public school to the detriment of all other children?
What's the rubric to qualify as minimally productive human in your eyes?
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I think this is the mainstream opinion too.
Therefore, the goal of each side is to make the other side defend their most extreme beliefs. Here's where Trump can win I think.
He can flat out say "I do not support an abortion ban. But my opponent supports ultra late-term abortions". Kamala will have a hard time denouncing late-term abortions because she is a product of a machine that highly values conformity.
I mean the question is whose extremists are going to inflict a cost on the candidate for having a philosophically squishy position.
Not really. Trump is willing to defy his extremists on this issue(and almost all of them will vote for him anyways); Kamala is not(and they'll never have to face the question).
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Trump can (and might) say that Harris supports abortions up to nine months, as he said about the Florida abortion referendum (after saying "we need more than six weeks", he said "At the same time, the Democrats are radical because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation" -- the MSM news blackout is such that I had to search specifically for Fox News to get this; other MSM just describe this as "Trump repeating lies about late-term abortions" or something similar). Of course the fact checkers will call this a lie (and it might be), but I don't think that matters at this point.
Yeah, it's a good point. More people will be exposed to heavily-filtered post debate coverage than the debate itself.
Honestly, the best bet for Trump is if Kamala shows up drunk or does something else that is too juicy too ignore. The debate won't be won or lost on policy.
Imagine the chaos if Trump says he can smell alcohol on Kamala’s breath.
Debate drinking game rules:
If Trumps says the words "wine aunt", everyone has to drink.
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