Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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It’s different, though. Being anti-abortion in Europe is like being royalty in the UK. In practice the royal family has very little remaining power in the UK, and what it does have is basically a historical relic that persists because lots of people have vaguely positive associations with royalty and royal rule is perceived as harmless.
The King recognises that actually attempting to exert royal authority in the UK on anything other than a rare, informal basis where most of the public agrees with him (as when he requested Saudi investors to reconsider some particularly ugly building designs in mid London) will swiftly lead to overthrow of the monarchy. They accept having given up 95% of their power to preserve the remaining 5%.
As with royalty, so with abortion.
It would be an appropriate comparison if the King, say, had a vote (and regularly used it) in the parliament equalling 2/3 of the sum of the votes of other members, or equivalent amount of power, and everybody would just go "well, we know it's only a relic based on a technicality but that's how it is and we're not changing it". Effectively, abortion in Germany beyond initial 12 weeks is banned, and something that many in the US consider absolutely barbaric, batshit insane, unconstitutional, bible-thumping far-right lunacy - is accepted as the norm. I find it very hard to reconcile with "perceived as harmless" - if anti-abortion movement is so harmless and is merely a decorative relic, why not do the same as the left in the US has been doing for years and roll out free abortions for all to the birth and beyond? The left hasn't ever been shy in implementing their agenda - even with the strong opposition, they often manage to go very far. If the situation is so that there's no opposition to speak of at all, except some decorative relics - why didn't they do that? The most plausible explanation would be that your assessment of the opposition to it being merely a decorative relic is wrong and if the left tried to push the consensus from the current settled point they would encounter a significant pushback, and a lot of people actually think that this compromise point is better than what the left can offer them. For the left to be using this fact as an argument along the lines of "Europe actually loves abortions and long they implemented what we're asking for and they're all fine with it" in this context sounds very misleading.
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