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Really? I could believe e.g. that some fundamentalist voters (a small minority) believe that the non-viable fetus is still a living creature and therefore deserves protection. I could also believe that Ken Paxton is an attack dog who will go after suffering mothers because it's in his political interest. But the median voter? If you brought a case of a late term miscarriage, would the median voter really insist doctors wait for weeks before offering medical care?
Admittedly, I don't have great evidence for my view. I haven't looked at voter surveys on this question for example (are there any?). I do have some evidence: the Tx legislature clarified the law in HB 3058. But what evidence do you have?
And if the median voter doesn't have such a hardline view, we're back to my original question. Why would the Texas Legislature impose such a blunt guideline instead of a more nuanced one?
The pro-life movement is funded and staffed by fundamentalists, and they wrote the legislation. By and large, the pro-life movement do support an exception for sufficiently dangerous-to-the-mother pregnancies . They don't support an exception for non-viable fetuses, which forms part of a pattern where pro-life Christians (particularly Catholics) support heroic intervention to keep non-viable babies like Charlie Gard alive for as long as possible, as well as their opposition to withdrawing treatment from effectively non-viable adults like Terri Schiavo. I think pro-life Christians are consistent in their attitude to these cases and that it reflects their religious beliefs, but I profoundly disagree with them.
I don't know why Ken Paxton chose to noisily go after a mother who wanted to abort a non-viable fetus, but he did. I hope the median general election voter applies condign punishment, but given the nature of Texas politics I doubt it. My best guess is that Paxton is positioning himself to run for governor, and the main obstacle is a Texas Republican primary in which the median voter is well to the right of Donald Trump. One weakness of the American electoral system is that in a 60-40 state like Texas it tends to elect a government that represents the median Republican, not the median voter. And given that almost 40% of Americans claim to be young-earth creationists when polled, I don't think that fundamentalists are going to be a small minority of Texas Republicans.
HB3058 doesn't cover non-viable fetuses, it clarifies two particular cases where there is a genuine threat to the life of the mother (as opposed to the fake threat to the mother's continued fertility that Cox's lawyers tried to use to work around the lack of an exception for non-viable fetuses). Unlike danger-to-mother cases where there is clearly a desire to produce workable rules that allow a reasonable margin of discretion to the doctor treating an emergency case without opening a loophole the size of a barn door, I see no movement from the pro-life right in the US on this point.
The Terri Schiavo case isn't relevant because carrying a nonviable fetus is far more damaging to the mother than caring for a comatose patient is for a hospital.
Good point on perverse incentives from the primary system.
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