What Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to is elective third-trimester abortions, which are not legal in any state, nor is there any significant effort to legalize them. (Nor should there be, IMO: the state’s interest in protecting the life of a healthy viable fetus at that point can reasonably be held to override the state’s interest in protecting the autonomy and reproductive choice of the pregnant woman carrying said fetus, although not her life or health.)
But a bill to subject doctors to criminal penalties if they don’t apply painful resuscitation techniques to nonviable fetuses that temporarily survive delivery during a crisis pregnancy termination is not in any way protecting the lives of unborn babies. It’s merely demanding that doctors be forced to torture the nonviable fetus outside the womb until it dies painfully.
The fact that many Americans may not understand the difference between those two situations does not excuse Republicans from callously attempting to exploit their confusion, and inflict unnecessary suffering on fetuses, patients and doctors, in order to smear Democrats. And you ought to be ashamed of yourself for volunteering for the Republican team on this malicious campaign.
I don’t want to smear Democrats. I want Democrats to be smarter and not shamble haplessly into the smear traps the GOP sets. Big difference.
I’m not saying the bill would be efficacious in some policy wonk sense. There were some political reporters a few years ago who wrote a book with the thesis that in politics and government you have “hacks” and “wonks”. I’m a hack of the Carville/Begala variety (not that I’m saying I’m as talented as those guys: I’m definitely “not worthy”)…
But even hacks must try to work with wonks (and vice versa), so here’s a wonky answer to the first part of your question:
Because if public opinion were 3-1 in the other direction, I would NOT favor Democrats’ voting for the bill, regardless of my ideological support.
To take a related example to illustrate: I ideologically support reparations for slavery, but if public opinion is 3-1 against, I would not favor Democrats (especially presidential candidates) speaking out in favor of it.
Or do you remember Michael Newdow, the atheist who made a splash in the '00s suing over the Pledge of Allegiance? In response, congressional Republicans led a group out onto the Capitol steps to show their patriotism by reciting the Pledge. That’s really eyeroll-inducing to me as an atheist and a big First Amendment guy. But you know what? When Democrats cravenly went out and joined their Republican colleagues in this nauseatingly jingoistic display, I breathed a huge side of relief. The last thing we needed was to give the other side ammunition in that fight, when I know the overwhelming majority of voters are going to recoil at any affiliation with “godlessness”.
Getting back to the “born alive” bill: I don’t believe this will actually apply to enough people that it really makes much difference to me substantively whether it is passed into law or not. It’s all about the political optics and the messaging. Those are precisely the things we shouldn’t take a stand on, no matter how we feel about the substance. If it’s mostly symbolic, and public opinion is starkly against you, just give in. Discretion is the better part of valor!
This isn’t about politicians’ PR stunts like reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or wearing flag lapel pins and such. This is about legislation that actually affects people’s lives.
So why aren’t you working to change the “messaging” by pointing out the Republicans’ callous lies on this subject?
The reason I don’t trust your bona fides on this issue is that you seem to have all the time in the world to reinforce the message that Democrats are supporting evil babykillings and should stop doing it for their own good, but no time at all for spreading the more accurate message that the aforementioned message is founded on a partisan Republican lie.
As this is a roast of him, it has to be noticed here that he seems to fall for similar weaponizing of lies that can be seen coming from the Republicans or very conservative circles and media regarding global warming, differences of intelligence among “races” and other subjects.
As I pointed before, there were many intelligent or bright people that fell for Uri Geller or Immanuel Velikowski, so seeing guys from the “intellectual dark web” falling for modern versions of that kind of ignorance and supported now by well funded reactionary media is not so surprising.
Whatever, if you go look at the countless posts I made in Elections in 2016, there is no way a reasonable person can interpret my posting history* in toto* to represent even a subtle or sneaky effort to lobby for the GOP position on most issues being the correct one.
I was too busy this weekend to respond to all of your drivel, SlackerInc, but I do want to address one point – that this doesn’t hurt only infants who are born despite an abortion. You were incredulous because apparently in your simple mind, pregnancy always ends in either abortion or a healthy baby. Well, news flash-- it’s a lot more complicated then that, and under this abortion of a bill (see what I did there?) a nonviable infant who is born during a miscarriage – ie the mom goes into labor early on her own – would also undergo pointless, stressful, and pointless resuscitation attempts, with no doctor discretion possible.
Don’t make excuses for him, he admitted that he believes that performing painful CPR on a deformed infant with half a lung and no heart is the correct policy, because reasons.
Oh, I knew you were being sarcastic, that’s the tone I was going for too, while also reminding people just how vile what he’s said is, since he’s gonna jump back in here and call me stupid again.
:dubious: I’d call that a strawman if you were smart enough to construct one. In this case, I actually accept that you might really think this is my belief. Needless to say (or it should be, at any rate), you are nowhere near correct.
Then why do you keep insisting that 1) this bill will only affect a tiny portion of people and 2) these people will only be women who attempted a late term abortion? You have had your error explained to you in this thread multiple times by multiple people. So either the disconnect is that you don’t understand how pregnancy works, or you’re being disingenuous. I was being generous and assuming the former.
I have had four children, and have been very involved with all four pregnancies, going to all midwife or OB visits as the case may be, staying with the mother throughout labor, and holding my babies postpartum to give them skin to skin contact until my wives were out of recovery from their c-sections (in three of the four births). I was the only expecting father on my eldest son’s Babycenter due date club. I’ve read several books on the topic, so I’m pretty knowledgeable about pregnancy.
Honestly, how many miscarriages occur in a hospital or doctor’s office? In the cases where that does happen, maybe some viable fetuses will have some resuscitation attempted on them. So what? Having a miscarriage is very sad. Some efforts by medical staff doesn’t make it significantly more sad. I mean, WTF: “I was enjoying my miscarriage until they brought out the resuscitation bag, and that just really ruined the whole experience for me”?!? :dubious:
But those “extremely difficult decisions” are exactly what the Republican bill is attempting to railroad with invasive legislative interference in medical practice.
Having to go through the miscarriage or premature birth of a nonviable fetus at any stage of pregnancy is indeed very sad. I don’t think you’re really competent to judge how much more traumatic the experience would be if the attending physicians were legally forced to subject the fetus to what doctors themselves describe as “painful and unnecessary interventions”.
These are, as the linked article notes, extremely difficult and complicated decisions with no one-size-fits-all “right answer”. Your attempts to trivialize the malignity of the Republican efforts to hijack these traumatic medical crises for the sake of political showboating are doing your own “optics” no good whatsoever.
“There’s no right answer” doesn’t appear to be the philosophy of *either *side here.
So we’ve got one side offering an oversimplified “solution” to a problem that isn’t significant enough to justify the attention of the Senate on the merits. But opposing it is not going to go over well with voters we need, and voting for it isn’t going to do massive harm. So just vote for the fucking thing and move on, FFS. :smack:
No change on the +6 support for a democratic congress critter by registered voters according to Harris in the last two weeks.
Also, after a few weeks too, Trump’s polls are going down again.
To be concerned about the trolling we need to… well, see evidence to be concerned.