You’re right that the fight against porn was, for the left, always a fringe movement. Not so for the right, though. It is interesting that they just sort of phased quietly out of that battle.
What if the Dems quietly phased out of the abortion issue, and broadened it into the general fight for available healthcare for everyone, including women, new mothers, working mothers, children and family planning? Same goals, new package.
I have no idea which Democratic party you’re talking about, but this isn’t the “flag, their defining issue.” Their main issue these days is healthcare for all, with coverage for pre-existing conditions. I’d say they are also trying for reduced wealth inequality, funding for education, both for adults affected by changing technology and pre-K classes. They seem to want sensible gun measures (and not a total ban on guns). They seem to want to do something about global climate change with market-based environmental regulations such as cap and trade for CO2 emissions, plus other sensible environmental regulations.
Access to reproductive health services is an important part of their platform, but access to all health services is more important.
BTW, the Democrats position on abortion is much closer to the majority of Americans than the Republican’s position, which seems to be an outright ban. Most Americans do not want an outright ban.
And most Americans don’t want abortion on demand, either. The American public is divided into approximately three equal factions, one which wants abortion to never be allowed, one which wants it to always be allowed, and one which wants it to be allowed in some circumstances but not others. Both sides can therefore claim a 2/3 majority, by appropriate framing of the “two sides”.
This focus on “human life” is one of the biggest problems in the abortion debate. Human life doesn’t begin with conception; human life begins about a million years ago, depending on how you define “human”. And there’s nothing special about human life, anyway: There are plenty of instances of human life that everyone agrees have no rights and should be destroyed. What’s important is not “human life”; it’s personhood.
Two problems. When folks talk about “human life” in the abortion debate, they are talking about individual humans, not humans as a whole population. IOW, “the life of a human”, not “all human life”.
If you’re talking about the emergence of humans, in general, then it would be ~2.1M or ~300K years ago, depending on how you define “human”. That is to say, if you define human as “any member of the genus Homo” or "any member of the species “Homo sapiens”.
It sounds like you’re railing against the right’s description of the Democratic Party, not the way the Democrats describe themselves.
But if you define it as “the life of a human”, then you’re left trying to pin down either “when did it become human”, or “when did it become alive”, and the answer to both is that it didn’t: Both were already true even before conception. And there are human lives, even independent human organisms, that are unambiguously not people: Nobody argues for the rights of HeLa cell cultures, for instance.
As for my “about a million years, depending on how you define it”, I was intentionally splitting the difference between those two numbers, to get something of approximately the right order of magnitude. I didn’t mean it as a very precise approximation.
This. And in SO many areas. If you want to find out what Democrats think, ask Democrats not Republicans.
…so this entire thread is just a strawman then?
Huh. Here I disagree. If Dems want to know why Reps don’t vote for a Dem, then the image of Dems in Rep media is important.
I agree though that that image is not at all under control of any individual Dem.
Banquet Bear, no, why would you think that about a straw man?
I saw a poll that asked people who had just voted what their main concern was. 2% said abortion.
…provide evidence for the assertion that the Democrats have made abortion “their flag, their defining issue.”
FYI, here’s the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform – this serves as the current platform, as well, since it’s only updated at the National Conventions.
The party’s stance on abortion is under the plank of “Ensure the Health and Safety of All Americans,” and part of a larger section on reproductive health:
The PDF version of the platform has this plank on page 38 of a 50-page document.
tl;dr It’s definitely not the “flag” nor “defining issue” of the Democratic Party.
But as I quoted from the linked article back in post #30 which you seem to keep ignoring, there is no actual evidence that Democratic candidates are in fact losing Republican votes due to the Democrats’ pro-choice position. Here, let me highlight part of that quote for you:
So stop trying to tell us that shutting up about abortion rights would produce a net gain of Republican votes for Democratic candidates when you haven’t even produced any evidence that that’s true.
:rolleyes: I usually don’t get exasperated with Europeans blithely assuming that conditions in the US are basically analogous to Europe’s, but speaking as somebody who’s lived both in the rural US and in the (small and super-densely populated) Netherlands: You are not as fully informed about what you’re talking about as you think you are.
Pharmacies are not “everywhere” in the sense of being easily accessible to everyone in rural areas in the US. And widely scattered rural pharmacies run or staffed by anti-reproductive-rights zealots are very effective in hampering their customers’ access to birth control and abortion medications, even legal ones.
Ah, like that. Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe I was arguing with my own image of what I perceive to be a typical feminist Dem ( it’s one with more then a bit of SJW, in it, and some of the anger shown by posters like Modesty Blaise.). That image is something like here, coming from the very first page of googled images if I google “pro-choice”.
https://www.google.nl/search?q=pro+choice&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjlwfDzhNHeAhVRalAKHXgjCRQQ_AUIDigB&biw=1851&bih=978
As you see, the images on that first page mostly associate with, or amount to, “pro abortion”.
As Kimstu’s stats prove, that is not a reality when you talk to intelligent women actually living in the US who are well aqainted with the fight.
So… was I -unwittingly- indeed debating a straw man, a strawman I made up out of the pro-abortion images I saw in the media? Images supplied by a trifecta of:
I have to admit, that is a possibility. In that case, two things can be the matter:
Kimstu’s stat of that only 2 percent of people voted with abortion in mind, while, at the same time, posters in the thread have made clear that the reproductive rights via affordable health care are under attack, can mean a few things:
I don’t know which. I do know it is a problem. I would like to see that problem solved. I doubt that the current way of fighting is effective. I would like to see new ways of fighting.
Okay, so if so many politicians Dem and Rep alike, with a pro-choice stance get elected, then why is the problem still so big and getting bigger? Is there perhaps a trend of politicians paying lip service to pro-choice and then always bowing to the pressure by pro-life groups when push comes to shove? It the problem perhaps not one of being pro-choice, but one of showing backbone against such groups?
(We have that problem in the Netherlands, when it comes to greening the industrial farming industry. All politicians say they want to “green” that sector up. Trends invariably show the opposite development. The lobby is just fighting harder, meaner. more efficient, more secretive, more in administrative ways. Mostly because in that sector, crime pays).
In the pro-live business, donors pay. How much money does that sector get? A lot. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/girls-women-grants-funding/2016/7/14/long-distance-funders-the-money-behind-the-endless-abortion.html
About those stats. Health care was the big winner for the Democrats in this past election, and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate its significance, mainly because Republicans have studiously ignored all the problems people are having. Europeans have trouble understanding our health care issues, not their fault, but the reality is that the GOP has been more concerned with dismantling protections and access to health care than protecting these things, and it creates a lot of noise and confusion to blur the issue at the same time so as not to upset the wrong people.
So it’s something like: Republicans believe that health care legislation kills jobs, and isn’t necessary, and rewards the lazy and unproductive, and also that we have the best system in the world and any info to the contrary is a liberal plot. AND, that Republicans are the ones actually “saving” the system, protecting insurance coverage for people, and rescuing rural hospitals and such, the American way and not like that socialist Obama fella.
So, reproductive issues did not disappear, but they do pale slightly in the context of people not be able to afford their insulin or cancer treatment as we speak. And on the Republican side, it is perhaps to their credit that they did not try to sell their respect for human life very hard in this last election.
A lot of it is that abortion rights are under attack on the state level more than the Federal level. The Federal Government can’t really make laws about abortion: they can only choose to fund certain programs (like Planned Parenthood) and, through the Supreme Court, set limits on what laws states can pass. Most of the pro-life legislation is state legislation, and the debate is at the state level–and there’s a different story in every state.
Careful, I’m not sure it’s true (and I don’t think I’ve claimed) that a pro-choice stance helps Republican politicians overall, even though quite a few Republican voters vote pro-choice for Democratic candidates. The subset of Republican voters that constitutes the Republican “base” nowadays definitely demands an anti-abortion stance from their candidates, and Republican candidates generally cannot get elected without the support of that base.
But that doesn’t mean that the anti-abortion Republican base would become more supportive of Democratic candidates if the Dems just shut up about abortion. Then you’d have the out-and-proud anti-abortion candidates (Republicans) competing for anti-abortion votes with the kinda-sorta-maybe-probably “not-really-all-that-pro-abortion” candidates (Democrats). And the Republicans are always going to win that competition, even ignoring the many other issues on which the hard-core Republican base prefers Republicans to Democrats.
Whereas if Democrats maintain their pro-choice stance, they continue to get the support of pro-choice voters, including quite a lot of Independents and Republicans. In fact, the more voters perceive reproductive rights as an important major issue, the more pro-choice voters are going to choose pro-choice Democrats over anti-abortion Republicans even if they disagree with the Democrats on some other matters.
Nitpick: It was Aescwynn rather than me who quoted that statistic, and s/he said that the pollsters found 2% of voters who had abortion as their main concern when voting, not just had it in mind.
Personally, I agree with other posters such as Chronos when they opine that anti-abortion voters are cynically being sold a bill of goods by the Republican Party (and as you noted, by influential donors). They are being conned into thinking that Republicans really want and intend to ban abortions altogether, and that the issue is so overwhelmingly important that any candidate who claims to be anti-abortion must be chosen over any candidate who claims to be pro-choice.
This has happened before with other issues, most notably same-sex marriage and gay rights in general. Anybody who remembers the '90s will recall how fired-up the Republican base got about the necessity of “defending marriage” etc. Many Democrats went along with that to some extent, and while it came back to bite them later (e.g., Bill and Hillary Clinton’s acceptance of the Defense of Marriage Act), it’s not clear that it really generated any additional support for them at the time.
So what happened in the long run? Societal mores on homosexuality moved leftwards, prodded by a lot of courageous insistence on the part of many gay-rights activists, and the number of Republicans who were reliable anti-gay-rights voters drastically shrank. There is still a lot of Republican support for allowing discrimination against gays on “religious freedom” grounds, but they don’t have the national gestalt with them on that anymore.
Same thing will happen IMHO on reproductive rights if we keep courageously standing up for them. A solid majority of Americans are not actually in favor of outright bans on abortions under all circumstances, and the “Abortion=Murder” zealots cannot logically espouse or accept any other position. Ultimately, they can’t win unless we give in to them.
Exactly this. In the current climate, it’d be very difficult for a Republican candidate for a state or federal office, who was vocally (or even not-so-vocally) pro-choice, to even make it through the primaries (in which they are only facing other Republican candidates).
In most states, the GOP primaries largely act as a litmus test to ensure that the selected candidate is one whose stated views and intended policies hew closely to the party line, which usually includes being as opposed to abortion as possible.
…definitely option 1. The OP doesn’t argue “the image in the media paints a picture that is unproductive for the right for reproductive freedom.” The media isn’t even mentioned in your OP!