Most Americans consider abortion to be a very important issue, one way or the other, and the country is very close to evenly divided on it. Given our two-party system, it’s inevitable that one party would end up being on each side of the issue. So it would be a terrible mistake for the Republicans to drop the issue.
The problem, though, is that they never really picked it up in the first place. For all their talk, there’s very little Republican legislation or other actions that would actually decrease the rate of abortions, and what few laws you do see in that direction are almost all proposed by Democrats, and hence reflexively opposed by Republicans. Take the health care law, for instance: When the Republicans realized that they couldn’t stop the whole thing, they instead devoted their efforts to killing the one part of it they could, the Stupak Amendment. And even without the Stupak Amendment, the health care act will still do more to reduce abortions than all Republican legislation on the issue, combined.
Obama won overwhelmingly among single women. Of the many lessons Republicans should take from this election, one of them is definitely that getting all up in our girly parts is a losing issue for them.
One of the only exceptions is a younger female family member of mine who was staunchly pro-Mitt and now thinks we’re all going to live in a dictatorship with no freedoms at all. She also says that being on the Pill makes her feel like she isn’t free.
I said reluctantly for the reasons I laid out. Nobody is pro-abortion. I think the most ardent pro-choice advocates in the country would be happy if nobody ever actually had an abortion - as long as nobody was denied the option. Nobody thinks abortions are a cause for celebration.
I am also not anti-mastectomy or anti-appendectomy. However much I wished people didn’t have to have those, they sometimes need to. Sometimes the solution to a problem has its own problems, but I’d rather we have that choice.
Some people have mentioned gay marriage in this thread. I see it as an interesting contrast.
Gay marriage is a positive. Two people of the same sex getting married is a good thing and I’d congratulate them. We can be happy when gay marriages occur.
Abortion is not a positive. Nobody gets congratulated for having an abortion. It’s not a good thing - it’s just the least bad option that could be made under the circumstances.
I thought criminality was pseudo-genetic, like poverty and low education. If the parents have these traits, the children are more likely to have them also.
This is why the “aborted crime wave” idea makes at least some statistical sense.
To you. To me the only tenable position is: STAY THE HELL OUT OF MY UTERUS YOU CREEPY PATERNALISTIC RELIGIOUS NUTJOB MALES!
Here’s the problem the GOP has with the subject of abortion going forward: There isn’t going to be a GOP going forward. They’re about to splinter, and that splinter is going to be between moderates and beltway insiders versus the religious fundamentalists. And there aren’t enough whackos in the center for the fringes to attract, and not enough morons who’re willing to blindly believe in the small government, fiscal conservative and trickle down lies anymore for the moderates to attract.
It’s over. The GOP has been exposed. A very strong 52 percent of the electorate said “we’re tired of the rich stealing our earnings, keeping it all for themselves, hiding it in foreign countries or other tax shelters we aren’t privy to so they can get out of paying the taxes they owe, having the gall to ask for even lower taxes and at the same time cutting off Survivor Security programs for the very people they’ve made poor by refusing to pay them a thriving wage in today’s economy, and campaigning to take away the rights we’ve enjoyed by law for 40 years that give us sovereign control over our own bodies.”
So you can couch it however you please. You can soften it. You can strengthen it. You can pretend it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter one lick how you talk about abortion rights in future elections because the faction that is fighting the hardest to keep women as incubators and chattel are vastly outnumbered and the other side of their party is about to be purged, meaning they’ll never, ever have the numbers to adversely affect choice on a national level ever again.
There Is A Brutal Civil War In The GOP, And It Looks Like Karl Rove Will Be The First Casualty
Chief among Rove’s critics is David Lane, a powerful evangelical kingmaker and conservative operative who organizes briefings between pastors and politicians. In an email obtained by Business Insider, Lane lays out his criticism of Rove and sets the stage clearly for the coming war between the GOP Establishment and the party base.
Lane writes:
Karl Rove presents a different problem – while [evangelical leaders] are politically naive (from my angle) — Karl is not, he’s as shrewd as a serpent.
Karl is far more formidable…in the presidential Republican primary in 12’, Karl stepped on Rick Perry and then Newt Gingrich every chance he got — albeit with deceit and sophistication — and elevated Mitt Romney at strategic, crucial points along their way to the Republican nomination — Rove’s candidate. …
That FOX News and the The Wall Street Journal worked out a hefty financial contract with Karl Rove is of no concern to me, Karl has every right to be paid well and — like me —participate in the political process. But giving Karl Rove the perch as a neutral analyst and an unbiased observer – honest broker — when in reality Karl is driven by his desire to enhance his clients and/or personal interests — corrupts the process.
Being whipsawed…[by] Karl Rove & the GOP chieftains and lieutenants has to be dealt with on our way toward 2016.
Now, if whatever remains of the Republican Party after this ass-kicking wants to have a serious discussion about the painful choices women face when they find themselves pregnant with a child they do not want and cannot afford to raise, they’d be wise to heed the words of David Frum, who has suggested they “get real about abortions.”
When Richard Mourdock delivered his notorious answer about rape and abortion, I was sorry that the debate moderator failed to follow up with the next question:
"OK, Mr. Mourdock, you say your principles require a raped woman to carry the rapist’s child to term. That’s a heavy burden to impose on someone. What would you do for her in return? Would you pay her medical expenses? Compensate her for time lost to work? Would you pay for the child’s upbringing? College education?
“If a woman has her credit card stolen, her maximum liability under federal law is $50. Yet on your theory, if she is raped, she must endure not only the trauma of assault, but also accept economic costs of potentially many thousands of dollars. Must that burden also fall on her alone? When we used to draft men into the Army, we gave them veterans’ benefits afterward. If the state now intends to conscript women into involuntary childbearing, surely those women deserve at least an equally generous deal?”
Exactly.
I resist using that term in reference to her, possibly because it’s hard for me to admit that we’re related.
I will say, though, that she has turned into a far-right Tea Partying idealogue whose posts have become either so grim or so ludicrous that I can’t bear to look at her page anymore.
Eh. 52% ain’t much. Dozens of scenarios could have resulted in a GOP win. Obama is a less elegant speaker. Obama flubs the last two debates. Romney isn’t Mormon and his 47% remark isn’t reported. The Hurricane Sandy response is messed up. The Osama bin Laden mission is messed up.
If the Republican candidate was slightly better, and the Democratic candidate slightly worse, the election could easily have gone the other way.
Nicely stated. If someone opposes abortion because they believe that they would have been aborted, it’s hard to diplomatically tell them that it’s a bad argument. Possibly their birth stopped their parents from having another child.
Since you put in that “at all” intensifier, here some possibilities:
I’ve read news reports of kidnapped teenagers and sequestered children that are impregnated and bear children – sometimes multiple children.
I’ve encountered ‘pregnancy porn’ where impregnating the woman was a major part of the thrill. Although there’s little correlation between someone’s porn fantasies and their real life actions, it’s not ridiculous to think a few actual rapists might find impregnation rape appealing.
And then there’s the history of: Bride Kidnapping.
[INDENT]also known as marriage by abduction or marriage by capture, is a practice throughout history and around the world in which a man abducts the woman he wishes to marry. Bride kidnapping still occurs in countries spanning Central Asia, the Caucasus region, and parts of Africa, and among peoples as diverse as the Hmong in Southeast Asia, the Tzeltal in Mexico, and the Romani in Europe.[/INDENT]
and… Forced Pregnacy.
[INDENT]During the 1992 - 1995 Bosnian war, the existence of deliberately created “rape camps” was reported. The reported aim of these camps was to impregnate Muslim and Croatian women held captive. Women were reported to often be kept in confinement until the late stage of their pregnancy. This occurred in the context of a patrilineal society, in which children inherit their father’s ethnicity, hence the “rape camps” aimed at the birth of a new generation of Serb children[/INDENT]
I have no idea whether a complete U.S. ban on abortions in case of rape might spur some men to deliberately impregnate women through rape, but it’s seems possible.