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At this point I am tired of right-wingers bringing up abortion. My attitude is, they should stop talking about it so much and they should do it now. Even if you legitimately view it as murder, the fact is, if you bring it up so often that it makes you lose elections, you're not going to be in a position to stop it anyway. I mean, what are you going to do? Blow up abortion clinics? That has been tried, and it did not even put a dent in how many abortions are performed.
The right-wing fixation with talking about abortion is politically suicidal. If some right-winger personally thinks that abortion is evil, then by all means, fight against it. But constantly talking about it on the national stage does not help. It is just virtue signalling. What would help is to win some fucking elections. Trump did more for anti-abortion activists by winning in 2016 and nominating those Supreme Court judges than almost anyone else, and one thing he did was, he didn't talk about abortion all the time.
The right needs female voters. The 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed magically. You need female voters, so you need to talk about issues where there is not such a gigantic disparity between the average man and the average woman's views.*
I say this as someone who is agnostic on the whole question of whether abortion is or is not murder. I do not think there is any actually rational answer to that question, it is a matter of perspective. I am not so unempathic that I am incapable of feeling bad for aborted fetuses, but at the same time, I also have to think about actually winning against the left. I know it seems obvious, but it does not seem obvious to some people for whatever reason. If you really care about the well-being of fetuses, losing elections by talking about abortion the way the right currently all too often does is not going to help them.
*Edit: I just looked at the statistics, and the gap between men and women's attitudes on abortion is actually smaller than I thought it was.
This is such an incomprehensive take to me. Pro-life movement had one of the biggest victories recently with repeal of Roe v. Wade, even leftists tacitly admitted that
As for "winning elections" this to me seems as a strange thing, what do you need to win elections for? Presumably to pursue your preferred policies. If your candidate "wins elections" but then he goes against your deepest held values, does it even make sense to call him your candidate anymore? And it is not such a small number of people - according to Gallup the number of people who say abortions should be illegal under all circumstances ranges from 10%-20% since 1975.
One thing I also noted, is how right and left differs in treating their ideological fringes. Leftist mainstream people have no problem tolerating or celebrating even the most unhinged leftist radicals. Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers can get a cushy job at public University and get praise from Wall Street Journal columnist as a model citizen. Marxist radicals such as Angela Davis can be popular champions of police reform movement no problem. Democrats nurture and take care of their radical fringes, they defend them and propagandize in their favor, and then they use their vigor and energy to replenish their ranks and to push Overton window in favor of their policies. Kamala can have the most insane takes like taxing unrealized capital gains or transitioning children of illegal immigrants for free - and you see the ranks closing and defending her exactly on the grounds of pragmatism: it's only a rhetoric to mobilize more radical voter base, nothing to see here. She is still our joyful momala.
While the right absolutely shits not only on "far fringes" like J6ers, who have nothing on leftist radicals like Kathy Boudin - the mother of Chesa Boudin and professor at Columbia after being released from prison in 2003 - bombing the senate building. That would be absurd, but the right also shits on anybody who is not moderate like pro-life activists. They even shit on people who go against mainstream leftist narrative, it is "moderate" right who will be the first to execute their up-and-coming talent for racism, sexism, being pro-life - exactly like you do now. The rightist moderates completely adopt leftist versions of morality and sins, and push it on fellow rightists, moving the Overton window. It would be absolutely inconceivable, that some right-wing version of Bill Ayers such as some former abortion clinic terrorist would be a chair of charity organization, a university professor at state university and could ever be called as "model citizen" by WSJ or similar media.
So yeah, the right will not win elections with castrated elite, with no semblance of balls or spine, which tone-polices and cancels their own people in accordance to leftist sensibilities. And even if they win, they won't do shit with that victory. Or maybe even worse, they will take their victory and cave to leftist preferences as we saw it in UK with immigration, because supposed conservatives are terrified of being called as racists or booed if they go take their kids from private school/university. Who needs enemies with wussy wankers as allies.
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I want add to your edit another falsehood I often see repeated: That the wider western world also has free abortion laws similar to what the american left wants. As it turns out, 12-15 week bans are the norm, and if I talk with women here about it they also feel strongly about it not becoming longer. The 20 weeks+ I often see from the american left (and unfortunately even our own left is starting to propagate it) is almost as extreme as the Evangelicals ban on abortion except for medical reasons.
All Western European abortion laws have late-term exceptions you can drive a truck through, and also, abortion is far more easily available in the first two trimesters.
For all the talk of European laws and how moderate they are, any Democrat in a red state who proposed them as a compromise would be called a baby killing radical all the same.
Atlantic article on it - (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/roe-overturned-europe-abortion-laws/670539/) - Use archive.is or whatever.
This is exactly what I'm talking about tbh. The spin in that article makes my head hurt.
I'm a german parent, I know german abortion law, I've talked with german doctors about the issue. By american conception, our abortion laws - both by law and in practice - would be considered at best center if not far-right, and is quite similar to what moderate GOP politicians are proposing. Abortion is strictly illegal here, punished with prison, except for four cases:
As a side note, I quote the purpose of the consultation by the literal text of the law: "Die Beratung dient dem Schutz des ungeborenen Lebens. Sie hat sich von dem Bemühen leiten zu lassen, die Frau zur Fortsetzung der Schwangerschaft zu ermutigen und ihr Perspektiven für ein Leben mit dem Kind zu eröffnen" (rough english translation: The consultation has the purpose of protecting the life of the unborn. It should strive to encourage the woman to continue the pregnancy and give her a perspective of life with a child.)
That's it. I don't doubt that there are some doctors somewhere who wink wink nod nod and spuriously claim medical emergencies and/or exceptional circumstances, but the average doctor takes this quite seriously. By the text of the law, the purpose of the fourth criteria is strictly to be used if the fetus shows signs of serious developmental issues that would preclude a fully realized adult life. Afaik it is also occasionally used for people who are not of sound mind, i.e. pregnant children and the mentally disabled. But strictly speaking this is not supported by the text of the law.
In both our pregnancies our doctor made very clear that she would not support late-term (in germany, late-term generally means the second trimester) abortions unless this criteria has been fulfilled beyond reasonable doubt ( which was actually a point of contention since we would have liked less strict criteria). A rough translation of a quote from her, concerning us asking for the more modern genetic testing for trisomy, as opposed to the traditional, more strict ultrasound testing: "If you can't see the trisomy (down syndrome) in the ultrasound, it usually is less bad. And even the disabled can lead a happy life."
I know enough people from other european countries - and have lived in one other for a while - to know that they generally have very similar laws, some slightly more strict, some slightly less.
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Public opinion is extremely malleable. As recently as 20 years ago, it was the abortion rights side that his from the issue. It seems that the main way to change public opinion is talking about it, on as big a stage as you can get. To quote myself (https://medicalstory.substack.com/p/a-parallel-campaign) "If pro-life views are quiet, especially when abortion is at stake, but pro-abortion views are not, the pro-life view will only become more unpopular. Whether you agree with gay marriage or not, consider its example. Even after repeated defeats of initiatives to legalize gay marriage including in blue state California, its proponents did not back down and within a decade or two, public opinion completely changed."
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Full credit for noting this - I think it's an important observation. For all that abortion is presented as a women's issue, and much of the rhetoric around it seems to presume a gender gap (men shouldn't tell women what to do, if men could get pregnant abortion would be legal instantly, etc.), historically trends have been pretty much the same. It's generally around half-and-half irrespective of gender. There's recently been a spike in the female pro-choice rate specifically, likely attributable to Dobbs and its immediate aftermath, but I'd bet that this isn't a permanent realignment and it will even out again given time.
I believe the people who feel the most strongly about abortion, both pro- and anti-, are women. I feel strongly about it, and even my feelings don't compare to the female pro-life activists.
And that's not surprising -- the sides in the abortion debate can be summarized as "get your hands off my uterus!" and "save the babies!" which both seem rather female-coded.
But also, any man who expresses a pro-life opinion gets shouted down by "you misogynistic rapist pig, get your hands off my uterus!" So pro-life women, who can't get shouted down like that (though they can get shouted down with "you've internalized misogyny"), are more vocal and willing to stand up for their values. It's the same with, for instance, opposition to casual sex -- a man does that, he gets labeled an incel, a woman does that, she doesn't get hated as much.
I'm inclined to agree - there's a kind of reservation of certain issues to the female realm, whether for better or for worse, which is almost bipartisan. I don't think it's as simple as saying that choices that exclusively or disproportionately affect female bodies are reserved to women, since that in itself involves a questionable judgement about male involvement in sex and reproduction, and a decision to minimise that involvement, but certainly those choices, around sex, birth, child-rearing, etc., have been moved into that realm. So even though there are just as many pro-life men as women, the pro-life movement has made the probably correct tactical decision to make women its most visible leaders.
Although... the problem they sometimes run into is that the pro-life movement is heavily Catholic, and the leadership class of the Catholic Church is predominantly male. They can't just set aside Evangelium Vitae or something, which is unavoidably by a male pope, so they have to face this accusation. I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".
One of those convenient sticks to hit the dog with. Of course the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics have married priests (and even some widower Bishops with adult children, at least in the Orthodox church) and are just as pro-life, which somehow doesn't come up. (And you can find plenty of pro-life Evangelicals even in the squishier groups that ordain women.)
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Two points:
First, abortion being a losing issue is way more true post-Dobbs than it was before. I think pro-life people need to focus more on taking wins that they can keep (in a close state, enact the three month ban, not the 6 week ban), because otherwise it'll be extended to birth and more people will be murdered. Yes, this is unjust, but it may be necessary.
Second, the pro-life movement is driven by women to an extent unusual among conservative causes. Women care about babies more, and men sometimes feel out of place—at least, those are the causes, I suspect.
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You're still not taking the abortion-is-murder worldview seriously enough.
Try to imagine that you are sincerely convinced that abortion is murder. Suppose further that, as you say, the pro-abortion position is so popular among women that the only way to have a non-negligible chance of winning a national election is to stop being publicly anti-abortion.
A natural followup question is, why is the pro-abortion position so popular among women? What explains this fact? The way I see it, you have two main strategies for explaining this fact:
One is to accept the popularity of abortion as evidence for the claim that abortion is not actually murder after all. If we accept as a starting point that most people (including most women) aren't particularly morally heinous, then the widespread popularity of X is evidence that X is not isomorphic to "murdering lots of innocent people for no good reason".
Alternatively, you can go the route of claiming that most women (or at least a large enough number of women to matter for a national election) actually are morally heinous, because they support the unjustified murder of innocent people. In which case, that's a problem, and you have bigger issues to deal with than who wins the next election. That's the type of deep societal and spiritual rot that can't be undone just by installing the right figurehead for four years.
The point is that "millions of our fellow citizens are complicit in the industrialized slaughter of innocent people, buuut we need to win the next election so let's just roll with it" isn't really a stable worldview. That doesn't fly without some major cognitive dissonance. If you truly believe that abortion is murder, then it seems to me that the natural course of action in that case is uncompromising activism, as opposed to even a qualified capitulation.
(Full disclaimer, I am weakly pro-abortion, but I do get frustrated at how the anti-abortion position is systematically mischaracterized and misunderstood.)
This is, for what it's worth, the line that I think I most often see from pro-life organisations and activists. This might be just a factor of mostly encountering it in Catholic contexts, but the line is usually not that we just need to change this law, but rather that abortion is a symptom of a wider 'culture of death'. This sort of idea. However, evangelicals also make a similar argument (see parts three and five), emphasising the importance of shifting the moral vision of the country and building a culture that values life as such.
This would also be the argument against meduka's claims about eugenics - that is, even if we were inclined to believe the claim that abortion is eugenic, life is life, and we don't believe in killing people over a few points of IQ or a skin colour or a genetic disease. Human life qua human life is sacred, and the fact that there are people who would see to quantify and judge the worthiness of any particular life on criteria like these is just evidence of how far we are from a true culture of life. The rot runs deep.
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This is a really good and concise treatment of the issue. @Goodguy's post to me (a pro-life right winger) reads like saying;
"It's justifiable to rob a bank if you're definitely then going to give the money to charity." Leaving aside some literary inclined young people, anyone can see the quandry that comes up. And that's how a lot of pro-lifers feel. "Just a little bit of abortion" is literally "Just a little bit of murder" to us.
But I will agree with @Goodguy on the issue of the centrality of the abortion issue. I think it is talked about too much. You can be morally resolute without always talking about how morally resolute you are. I'm in favor of never using the "A" word in politics. Simply say, "I want more stable families and more babies." If a pundit asks "How do you feel about [route into Abortion topic]" you respond with "Comply with the laws at you state level. I want more babies!"
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And to me the answer when I see murder isn’t “let’s do something that won’t reduce murder” but “let me do what I can to reduce the number of murders.”
So I take wins where I can get them and then try to work on changing hearts and minds.
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I'm in the same boat, but I'm not sure how you land at the conclusion that uncompromising activism is the natural course of action. It's certainly one plausible course of action, but so is trying to dishonestly and cynically win elections in order to gain power to enforce one's intentionally hidden agenda, but neither strikes me as more natural than the other, and more importantly, it strikes me as even less likely to work than trying to win elections. If winning just one election isn't enough, then surely that calls for winning even more elections, rather than pivoting to uncompromising activism, which has a rather questionable track record. I think this primarily points to politicians, activists, campaign managers, etc. are really just not all that rational or competent and tend to follow what makes them feel good in the moment rather than what increases the odds of bringing about a future that they prefer.
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Uncompromising activism, to the point of bombing abortion clinics, has been tried in the US and it failed. There just isn't a large enough number of people in the US who feel deeply enough that abortion is wrong to go do anything about it other than vote. And in this context, the only thing one can do as a pro-lifer is to use convincing arguments and electoral politics. If a strong anti-abortion position prevents one from winning in electoral politics, it stands to reason that one should a adopt a less strong anti-abortion position, since it is better to win an election and then do at least something against abortion than it is to lose an election and merely imagine what strong measures one would have taken if one had won it.
And yet there is a whole arena of lawfare around protesting / demonstrating outside of abortion clinics, and a second one around crisis pregnancy centers.
It only takes a few hundred to a few thousand truly dedicated activists to do that though. The Westboro Baptist Church has under a hundred members and was able to grab national headlines and led to tons of lawfare.
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In my experience, I don't think you're wrong that bringing up abortion in campaign ads is a bad strategy. But I will say that the loudest pro-life voices I've encountered in life have been women, mostly Catholic ones. I believe the stats bear out that women tend to have much stronger opinions on the issue (in both directions!) than men. I think one thing the left gets wrong is assuming that pro-life advocacy is primarily male-coded, even if the politicians in question tend to be men.
Is that something they get wrong, or a deliberate rhetorical trick to strengthen their own position in the public eye? Granted, "deliberate" is certainly putting in a lot of work there.
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The western world created the most mentally ill women of all time. We have the most stressed women that sleep the least and have the most mental problems of any society. Women are having far fewer children than they say they want, are obeser than ever and more addicted to psychiatric medication than ever.
The sexual revolution was a disaster for women and defending it in order to be pro women isn't a viable strategy. Hookup culture, hyper sexualization and the breakdown of family is not something that will help women.
Rather than pushing issues that are hurting women the right should focus on how the left is terrible to women. Defund the police saved criminal black men by throwing women under the bus.
I recall a poster a while back talking about how non-Anglophone Western Europe has much lower rates of mental illness and higher life satisfaction among women, despite being even more sexual-revolution-y than the Anglosphere. I believe the sexual revolution is wrong, but not because it inherently makes women unhappy.
I think the far right has something to say about women’s unhappiness, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the sexual revolution.
It's the same thing when you look at stuff like suicide rates among the youths - if it's all Instagram and phones, then it's not showing up in various countries in Europe. There's something more, but the real reason isn't probably something as easy as "capitalism sucks" or "feminist and immigrations sucks."
But here in europe we do have the same problems, we are merely lagging a few years behind - in both social media usage and teen mental health issues. I agree that it's almost never just one thing, though. The social contagion theory also seems extremely hard to deny from our vantage point - we can literally watch how american social problems spill over here through the (american- dominated) media.
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I can't speak to experience, but I've often wondered how the cultural milieu on the Internet differs for non-Anglophones. English as the default seems ubiquitous enough culturally that it seems like a bit of a "fish describing water" question to ask what everyone else sees.
Is the, say, Francophone Internet (or culture more broadly) quite as, um, gestures broadly at The Internet frenetic and self-hating? That alone seems like it might make people happier.
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Maybe, maybe not. But that is tangential to my argument. Whether that is true or not, it does not matter, because the 19th Amendment is not going to be repealed. If you want to win elections in the United States, you need to try to get women to vote for you.
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