"That’s a very long time for Americans to see what a pro-life America might look like—and to realize that the pro-choice movement’s lies about back-alley abortions and mothers’ safety have always been just that."
Being moderately left, and part of a Mainline Protestant denomination, I have long felt stuck in the middle on this.
My cousin was someone who was warned about severe health risks should her pregnancy come full-term. She chose not to get an abortion, and she died in childbirth. This is certainly a rare situation in the world today.
I also have a friend who was date-raped with drugs, got pregnant as a consequence, and chose to get an abortion.
Why do I bring these situations up? People passionate enough to debate the issue of abortion "rights" often lack empathy or civility.
My wife and I had a miscarriage during the resurgence of national debate on the issue of abortion. That was severely painful to have to endure the extreme pro-choice arguments in my Facebook news feed. We were grieving!
I think you are absolutely right that we need to conduct ourselves with empathy and charity for others when debating this topic.
And as for the debate? Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "'All truth is simple,' is that not doubly a lie?" All or nothing from either side is idiotic and glossed over the complexity of the issue (also a reason for the examples above).
If Abortion rights were overturned, as you say, States would begin to legislate their own respective courses through the issue. Agreed. Some states are so blue or so red, I think they will end up with laws that are unhealthy and lacking in compassion, but there are moderate states where a more reasonable and measured approach might be able to take hold.
I think if Roe got overturned the pro-choice folks would simply shift to State-by-State legislation emphases. I don't know that it would get a national backlash. Maybe, but who knows. The point is that I am not worried, and I don't think either the pro-life or the pro-choice need to be that worried if Roe got overturned.
Some good thoughts in this post. I like it. The analysis if the rhetoric is spot-on, I think. A funny thing hit me that the same piss-poor logic used by pro-choice folks to say that making abortion illegal will only encourage unsafe and illegal abortions is the exact same poor logic I hear from the gun-rights crowd when it comes to firearm purchasing restrictions: firearm purchasing restrictions will only encourage illegal "back alley" sales. I find that funny.
And yes, you can totally make up a word "frontlash." I think I get what you mean, so it works.
One of the things I hate about this issue is how many people try to use the edge cases (life of the mother) to define the overwhelming supermajority of cases (any other reason for abortion).
I also hate how many people seem to think that "My father raped my mother" is sufficient grounds for the death penalty. Abortion does not undo rape, it only manages to further victimize the mother and her child (and, actually, the rapist as well).
I bring up "edge cases" because they should be factored into the equation, not because I think they should control the entire issue.
If a person can believe a rapist can be victimized, I have serious cause for concern for their understanding of this very complicated issue. A rapist already has a severe lack of empathy for others. That is to say, a rapist is not fit to be involved in the life of a child that results from their act of raping someone. Furthermore, a rape victim has endured serious trauma, and should never have to encounter their rapist again. One of the reasons it is so hard to convict rapists is because it is re-traumatizing the rape victim to testify against their rapist, and hence many cases are never brought to trial. In this case, I am going to posit that folks who can suggest a rapist can be victimized fit into one of a few categories: by far the most likely explanation is that it is the result of not having sufficient personal experience with rape victims, but the other explanations are that the person is lacking in empathy or has not thought through their position on abortion very carefully.
Rape is unfortunately very common. Someone very close to me was raped. When some of my other women friends learned this, I became a "safe" man to talk to about their experiences. I can guarantee some of the women you know have been raped, but they aren't likely to talk about their experience of it with most everyone they know.
I bring up the edge cases often to weed out the all-or-nothing/black-or-white thinking. If a person cannot account for the edge cases, then they have not thought this issue through sufficiently.
Lastly, using the term "death penalty" to discuss the issue of abortion is most likely to shut down conversation. I find that people who do this are either venting their feelings on the issue or attempting to impose their view of abortion onto others. Or perhaps they do not understand how to engage in a discussion of the issue with people who may not agree with them. The best piece of advice I can give is to avoid pejorative terminology whenever possible. Sometimes it is unavoidable, but "death penalty" is unwarranted in this context.
I am not here to get you to change your mind, so much as to help deepen the conversation and your understanding of the issue. It did not take me very long to conclude that, while I may not entirely agree with James Heaney on this topic, I was convinced that he has a very good understanding of the issues at stake when discussing abortion. That earns my respect far more that those who agree with my conclusion, but do not have a good grasp of the issues at stake.
As a programmer, I appreciate wanting to account for edge cases. I have worked on a number of projects where failing to account for an edge case torpedoed portions of the work. Thankfully, most of those were discovered prior to coding...
Either abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human child and should be avoided at all costs, or it is no different than removing a malignant tumor and should be considered healthcare. It is demonstrably not the latter. The unborn child is a distinct organism of the same species as the mother, whereas the tumor is demonstrably a defective portion of the same organism. The only reason to consider any operation which could end 1 human life is if the status quo directly threatens another human life. Neither rape nor incest inherently raise to that level. Thus, those anticipated edge cases are successfully handled by the core premises.
"Lastly, using the term "death penalty" to discuss the issue of abortion is most likely to shut down conversation." -- On the contrary, my goal is to cause the other side to actually grasp what is happening. The choice to use emotionally loaded language is intentional. If you think that referring to abortion as the death penalty for the unborn children, what more accurate term would you substitute for the mass murder being wrought upon the weakest among us? The unborn child is brutally executed in a manner that would constitute war crimes were the child located anywhere other than its mother's womb at the time of the murder.
"That earns my respect far more that those who agree with my conclusion, but do not have a good grasp of the issues at stake." -- I agree.
One of my closest friends is a programmer. I understand what you mean.
The use of emotionally loaded language such as that demonstrably turns people off. You will not convince people that way. It isn't much of a problem for me because I am not diametrically opposed to your perspective. I try to keep in mind Nietzsche's words, "one often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the manner in which the opinion has been conveyed that is unsympathetic." Or there is the old saying that people can attract with honey and not vinegar.
I’m not all that tied in to the abortion debate, but would consider myself in the pro-choice camp versus the pro-life camp. I do wonder what the actual “goal” of each side is though. Allowing late-stage abortions seem just as absurd to me as banning Plan B. I personally feel that abortion access for the first trimester (with a mandatory ‘waiting period’ + clinic health regulations + etc…) and a blend of abortions/early deliveries for the second/third trimesters (with a requirement to try and keep the baby alive while always prioritizing the mom’s life) is the most ‘right-sized’ policy but it feels like both halves would hate such a resolution.
As a leftist, I wish the point you made of how strongly pro-life voters show up (versus pro-choice) wasn’t true. Hopefully limiting the delta between pro-life and pro-choice goals also causes there to be less of a delta between voter turnout of the two camps.
"I do wonder what the actual 'goal' of each side is though."
I think this is quite straightforward, on either end of the spectrum:
Pro-life: equal protection under law for all individual human beings, starting at the beginning of individual biological human life: conception. Abortion is incompatible* with equal protection, because all human beings have a right to life under the Constitution, the Universal Declaration, most moral codes, and so on.
Pro-choice: no mother should ever be saddled with an unwanted child, under any circumstances. Unrestricted, minimally-expensive abortion up to (and even a few minutes after) the moment of birth is a necessary expedient in order to bring that state of affairs about.
There's then a great deal of muddle in the middle. I admit that I actually find it easier to understand and sympathize with the "we should be able to abort a pregnancy up to five minutes after birth" crowd than I do with the "no abortions after 14 weeks, but any abortions up to 14 weeks (or whatever arbitrary line)" crowd.
It seems to me that plausible points for the development of human rights are:
(1) when you become a living human (i.e. conception, or, in rare cases, twinning), or
(2) when you become independent and autonomous, which (depending on how you define "autonomous") can mean viability, live birth, the end of infancy, or the start of puberty.**
The "let's have liberal first-trimester abortions but no later-term abortions" gang seems to be trying to split the baby between these positions in the name of moderation, but all they end up with is (in my opinion) an incoherent position and... well... a split baby!
*There are very rare cases where abortion _is_ compatible with equal protection under law. For example, in an ectopic pregnancy, the ideal solution is to end the pregnancy early (by C-section) to save the mom, then take care of the baby in the NICU like any other preemie -- but, in our present reality, we almost never have the technology to actually save those babies. Salpingectomy to save Mom is compatible with the principle of equal protection under law, even if the preemie who results will certainly not survive.
Any polity that bans abortion generally needs to spell out these situations very clearly in law. Lack of clarity in Irish law about the legal rights of the unborn child is what got Savita killed. The baby was already nearly dead, yet Irish doctors refused to operate, because they misunderstood the law and thought they couldn't operate while the baby had a heartbeat.
**All other attempts to set a time for the development of human rights ("when you have a heartbeat", "when you can feel pain") boil down to ensoulment arguments, which (setting aside all other problems with them) aren't a great approach under the U.S.'s secular legal system!
Man I wish Substack allowed footnotes in comments, too. Love the footnotes system.
I also have a friend who had an ectopic pregnancy. I didn't even know what that was until my friend and his wife were in that situation. There was no way they ever wanted an abortion, but that was the only viable option in that case. And they agonized over that decision, and while I haven't talked with them recently about it, I would guess they still hurt from that. I know when my wife had a miscarriage 6 years ago, the feelings of loss and sadness still sneak up on me and I will cry now and then (and, as a matter of fact, as I type this). It was their first attempt to get pregnant when they had the ectopic pregnancy. They now have a nine year old healthy daughter.
I guess what I was trying to get at there is something like:
“Right wingbat, you are correct that we must respect human life. We need to give some wiggle room for women to decide if the pregnancy is wanted though. Effective birth control, Plan B, and early term abortions are the only ways to do that until we finish that time machine and women can just go back and get unpregnant.
Left wingbat, you are correct that we should allow women to decide what happens to their own bodies. We can’t let them make that decision throughout the entire length of the pregnancy and still feel good as a society though. Here is an admittedly arbitrary point in the pregnancy that a decision must be made by.”
But that's the *least* coherent or logical solution, and the one that is (even taken on its own terms) *most* destructive to human rights.
If fetuses *are* human persons with a right to life, then your solution is like saying, "Wingbats, you're correct that rape is wrong. But we have to accept that men have a hard time controlling themselves, and some women are asking for it, so we have to allow *some* rapes." Rape is a horrifically violent crime. Nobody should accept legalizing even one single rape. Likewise, if abortion is the murder of a baby, the number of baby-murders we should tolerate is exactly zero.
On the other hand, if fetuses are *not* human persons with a right to life, then your solution is like saying, "Look, ladies, it's great that you want to be in the workforce, but we can't just have you in the workplace throughout your lives and feel good as a society. So we're going to set an arbitrary age... say, 37... at which age you will immediately be fired from your job and will have to live off your husband's income." This would be a horrifying usurpation of individual liberty by the State for the State's own weird, false conception of what women "should" be doing with their lives.
Either way, the compromise solution ends up looking just absolutely horrifying, no matter which side of the abortion debate is actually correct.
It's really inescapable. You have to determine whether the fetus is a person (yes or no), deciding along the way whether you believe in personal human rights (and why you believe in them), and work forward from there. From there, an absolute, black-and-white answer to *most* abortion questions becomes pretty hard to avoid. I have a great deal of intellectual respect for the people with the opposite view from me, but the people in the middle trying to have it both ways just strike me as confused. There's no skipping the fundamental question, much as the American public would dearly like to skip it.
(Of course, the American public will do the right thing, in the end, but only after trying everything else first. Churchill said it about World War II, but you see it more vividly in America's debates about slavery -- where, once again, most Americans really wanted to avoid facing the fundamental question of whether Blacks were actually people or not, and successfully skipped around it for several generations.)
I think a lot of this essay has aged like milk, but that is the benefit of hindsight, and it is interesting to see how you imagined things would spin out. The line that is sticking with me is the same one that grabbed Stephen E in the comments
"That’s a very long time for Americans to see what a pro-life America might look like—and to realize that the pro-choice movement’s lies about back-alley abortions and mothers’ safety have always been just that."
At this point, what do you think America has seen? Because I believe it to be very little, and the backlash is growing. There has been no subsequent pro-life victory in any situation where the voters get a say. The midterms would have been a blow out for the Democrats in the absence of gerrymanders, or if gerrmanders had been equally allowed. Without them, the Democrats would have a trifecta right now. At this point I think it entirely likely that the Democrats hold the Presidency, and take back the house by a healthy margin in 24. I think there is a good possibility they hold the Senate even though that path is hard for them, and Dobbs gets all of the credit.
There is no pro-life stepping up to meet human need, and people's fears were well founded. In the meantime, Clarence Thomas won't live forever, and a Supreme Court can turn on a dime as we have seen in Wisconsin in the past few days. There is every possibility we could see the rights laid out in Roe enshrined in Federal law by 2025, and I doubt even that will stop the pain for the GOP.
I think we can also conclude from the results in Ohio yesterday that the Dobbs effect is still with us. With no recession expected and inflation falling, things are looking grim for the Republicans in 24.
Thank you for the grist, and, with the electoral question out of the way, I hope to get to the heart of your comment -- the public face of the pro-life movement -- soon enough.
Thank you for the welcome! I have given your new essay a read, and I think I will read it twice more before I respond. Some things I thought I would mention as I read got addressed in the footnotes. You dotted your i and crossed your t's, so I won't be talking about races run unopposed as I immediately figured I might, but I do feel there are still parts of that story that can be chewed on. Considering we have Alabama refusing court orders regarding their maps, and The Purcell principle at play in the election being discussed... well, I will save that for my proper response.
You mention scoring your post, and I look forward to it. My reason for responding in the first place was my fascination with your 18 month expectations. As I type this. 13 months since the decision, I think you might agree that there is no conservative stepping into the gap in a meaningful way. Instances of expanding Medicaid in what I would consider to be stingy ways, but not a lot of substantiative legislation in states the GOP has super majorities in where they could enact anything they like. I am not sure what has happened that might tell voters about "pro-choice lies". I can clearly remember many hard case stories in the past year and change though, starting with a 10 year old, and most currently with a 7th grader.
It would have been very easy to brush me off, or reply curtly, so I am very impressed, and somewhat humbled that you took the time to compose this elegant prose. It was not my intention to make you do work, but it is appreciated.
"That’s a very long time for Americans to see what a pro-life America might look like—and to realize that the pro-choice movement’s lies about back-alley abortions and mothers’ safety have always been just that."
*STRONG CLAPPING*
Being moderately left, and part of a Mainline Protestant denomination, I have long felt stuck in the middle on this.
My cousin was someone who was warned about severe health risks should her pregnancy come full-term. She chose not to get an abortion, and she died in childbirth. This is certainly a rare situation in the world today.
I also have a friend who was date-raped with drugs, got pregnant as a consequence, and chose to get an abortion.
Why do I bring these situations up? People passionate enough to debate the issue of abortion "rights" often lack empathy or civility.
My wife and I had a miscarriage during the resurgence of national debate on the issue of abortion. That was severely painful to have to endure the extreme pro-choice arguments in my Facebook news feed. We were grieving!
I think you are absolutely right that we need to conduct ourselves with empathy and charity for others when debating this topic.
And as for the debate? Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "'All truth is simple,' is that not doubly a lie?" All or nothing from either side is idiotic and glossed over the complexity of the issue (also a reason for the examples above).
If Abortion rights were overturned, as you say, States would begin to legislate their own respective courses through the issue. Agreed. Some states are so blue or so red, I think they will end up with laws that are unhealthy and lacking in compassion, but there are moderate states where a more reasonable and measured approach might be able to take hold.
I think if Roe got overturned the pro-choice folks would simply shift to State-by-State legislation emphases. I don't know that it would get a national backlash. Maybe, but who knows. The point is that I am not worried, and I don't think either the pro-life or the pro-choice need to be that worried if Roe got overturned.
Some good thoughts in this post. I like it. The analysis if the rhetoric is spot-on, I think. A funny thing hit me that the same piss-poor logic used by pro-choice folks to say that making abortion illegal will only encourage unsafe and illegal abortions is the exact same poor logic I hear from the gun-rights crowd when it comes to firearm purchasing restrictions: firearm purchasing restrictions will only encourage illegal "back alley" sales. I find that funny.
And yes, you can totally make up a word "frontlash." I think I get what you mean, so it works.
Haven’t read the article yet but a very well-worded comment, perfect appetizer to the next 20 minutes of reading
Thanks!
One of the things I hate about this issue is how many people try to use the edge cases (life of the mother) to define the overwhelming supermajority of cases (any other reason for abortion).
I also hate how many people seem to think that "My father raped my mother" is sufficient grounds for the death penalty. Abortion does not undo rape, it only manages to further victimize the mother and her child (and, actually, the rapist as well).
I bring up "edge cases" because they should be factored into the equation, not because I think they should control the entire issue.
If a person can believe a rapist can be victimized, I have serious cause for concern for their understanding of this very complicated issue. A rapist already has a severe lack of empathy for others. That is to say, a rapist is not fit to be involved in the life of a child that results from their act of raping someone. Furthermore, a rape victim has endured serious trauma, and should never have to encounter their rapist again. One of the reasons it is so hard to convict rapists is because it is re-traumatizing the rape victim to testify against their rapist, and hence many cases are never brought to trial. In this case, I am going to posit that folks who can suggest a rapist can be victimized fit into one of a few categories: by far the most likely explanation is that it is the result of not having sufficient personal experience with rape victims, but the other explanations are that the person is lacking in empathy or has not thought through their position on abortion very carefully.
Rape is unfortunately very common. Someone very close to me was raped. When some of my other women friends learned this, I became a "safe" man to talk to about their experiences. I can guarantee some of the women you know have been raped, but they aren't likely to talk about their experience of it with most everyone they know.
I bring up the edge cases often to weed out the all-or-nothing/black-or-white thinking. If a person cannot account for the edge cases, then they have not thought this issue through sufficiently.
Lastly, using the term "death penalty" to discuss the issue of abortion is most likely to shut down conversation. I find that people who do this are either venting their feelings on the issue or attempting to impose their view of abortion onto others. Or perhaps they do not understand how to engage in a discussion of the issue with people who may not agree with them. The best piece of advice I can give is to avoid pejorative terminology whenever possible. Sometimes it is unavoidable, but "death penalty" is unwarranted in this context.
I am not here to get you to change your mind, so much as to help deepen the conversation and your understanding of the issue. It did not take me very long to conclude that, while I may not entirely agree with James Heaney on this topic, I was convinced that he has a very good understanding of the issues at stake when discussing abortion. That earns my respect far more that those who agree with my conclusion, but do not have a good grasp of the issues at stake.
As a programmer, I appreciate wanting to account for edge cases. I have worked on a number of projects where failing to account for an edge case torpedoed portions of the work. Thankfully, most of those were discovered prior to coding...
Either abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent human child and should be avoided at all costs, or it is no different than removing a malignant tumor and should be considered healthcare. It is demonstrably not the latter. The unborn child is a distinct organism of the same species as the mother, whereas the tumor is demonstrably a defective portion of the same organism. The only reason to consider any operation which could end 1 human life is if the status quo directly threatens another human life. Neither rape nor incest inherently raise to that level. Thus, those anticipated edge cases are successfully handled by the core premises.
"Lastly, using the term "death penalty" to discuss the issue of abortion is most likely to shut down conversation." -- On the contrary, my goal is to cause the other side to actually grasp what is happening. The choice to use emotionally loaded language is intentional. If you think that referring to abortion as the death penalty for the unborn children, what more accurate term would you substitute for the mass murder being wrought upon the weakest among us? The unborn child is brutally executed in a manner that would constitute war crimes were the child located anywhere other than its mother's womb at the time of the murder.
"That earns my respect far more that those who agree with my conclusion, but do not have a good grasp of the issues at stake." -- I agree.
One of my closest friends is a programmer. I understand what you mean.
The use of emotionally loaded language such as that demonstrably turns people off. You will not convince people that way. It isn't much of a problem for me because I am not diametrically opposed to your perspective. I try to keep in mind Nietzsche's words, "one often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the manner in which the opinion has been conveyed that is unsympathetic." Or there is the old saying that people can attract with honey and not vinegar.
I’m not all that tied in to the abortion debate, but would consider myself in the pro-choice camp versus the pro-life camp. I do wonder what the actual “goal” of each side is though. Allowing late-stage abortions seem just as absurd to me as banning Plan B. I personally feel that abortion access for the first trimester (with a mandatory ‘waiting period’ + clinic health regulations + etc…) and a blend of abortions/early deliveries for the second/third trimesters (with a requirement to try and keep the baby alive while always prioritizing the mom’s life) is the most ‘right-sized’ policy but it feels like both halves would hate such a resolution.
As a leftist, I wish the point you made of how strongly pro-life voters show up (versus pro-choice) wasn’t true. Hopefully limiting the delta between pro-life and pro-choice goals also causes there to be less of a delta between voter turnout of the two camps.
"I do wonder what the actual 'goal' of each side is though."
I think this is quite straightforward, on either end of the spectrum:
Pro-life: equal protection under law for all individual human beings, starting at the beginning of individual biological human life: conception. Abortion is incompatible* with equal protection, because all human beings have a right to life under the Constitution, the Universal Declaration, most moral codes, and so on.
Pro-choice: no mother should ever be saddled with an unwanted child, under any circumstances. Unrestricted, minimally-expensive abortion up to (and even a few minutes after) the moment of birth is a necessary expedient in order to bring that state of affairs about.
There's then a great deal of muddle in the middle. I admit that I actually find it easier to understand and sympathize with the "we should be able to abort a pregnancy up to five minutes after birth" crowd than I do with the "no abortions after 14 weeks, but any abortions up to 14 weeks (or whatever arbitrary line)" crowd.
It seems to me that plausible points for the development of human rights are:
(1) when you become a living human (i.e. conception, or, in rare cases, twinning), or
(2) when you become independent and autonomous, which (depending on how you define "autonomous") can mean viability, live birth, the end of infancy, or the start of puberty.**
The "let's have liberal first-trimester abortions but no later-term abortions" gang seems to be trying to split the baby between these positions in the name of moderation, but all they end up with is (in my opinion) an incoherent position and... well... a split baby!
*There are very rare cases where abortion _is_ compatible with equal protection under law. For example, in an ectopic pregnancy, the ideal solution is to end the pregnancy early (by C-section) to save the mom, then take care of the baby in the NICU like any other preemie -- but, in our present reality, we almost never have the technology to actually save those babies. Salpingectomy to save Mom is compatible with the principle of equal protection under law, even if the preemie who results will certainly not survive.
Any polity that bans abortion generally needs to spell out these situations very clearly in law. Lack of clarity in Irish law about the legal rights of the unborn child is what got Savita killed. The baby was already nearly dead, yet Irish doctors refused to operate, because they misunderstood the law and thought they couldn't operate while the baby had a heartbeat.
**All other attempts to set a time for the development of human rights ("when you have a heartbeat", "when you can feel pain") boil down to ensoulment arguments, which (setting aside all other problems with them) aren't a great approach under the U.S.'s secular legal system!
Man I wish Substack allowed footnotes in comments, too. Love the footnotes system.
I also have a friend who had an ectopic pregnancy. I didn't even know what that was until my friend and his wife were in that situation. There was no way they ever wanted an abortion, but that was the only viable option in that case. And they agonized over that decision, and while I haven't talked with them recently about it, I would guess they still hurt from that. I know when my wife had a miscarriage 6 years ago, the feelings of loss and sadness still sneak up on me and I will cry now and then (and, as a matter of fact, as I type this). It was their first attempt to get pregnant when they had the ectopic pregnancy. They now have a nine year old healthy daughter.
I guess what I was trying to get at there is something like:
“Right wingbat, you are correct that we must respect human life. We need to give some wiggle room for women to decide if the pregnancy is wanted though. Effective birth control, Plan B, and early term abortions are the only ways to do that until we finish that time machine and women can just go back and get unpregnant.
Left wingbat, you are correct that we should allow women to decide what happens to their own bodies. We can’t let them make that decision throughout the entire length of the pregnancy and still feel good as a society though. Here is an admittedly arbitrary point in the pregnancy that a decision must be made by.”
But that's the *least* coherent or logical solution, and the one that is (even taken on its own terms) *most* destructive to human rights.
If fetuses *are* human persons with a right to life, then your solution is like saying, "Wingbats, you're correct that rape is wrong. But we have to accept that men have a hard time controlling themselves, and some women are asking for it, so we have to allow *some* rapes." Rape is a horrifically violent crime. Nobody should accept legalizing even one single rape. Likewise, if abortion is the murder of a baby, the number of baby-murders we should tolerate is exactly zero.
On the other hand, if fetuses are *not* human persons with a right to life, then your solution is like saying, "Look, ladies, it's great that you want to be in the workforce, but we can't just have you in the workplace throughout your lives and feel good as a society. So we're going to set an arbitrary age... say, 37... at which age you will immediately be fired from your job and will have to live off your husband's income." This would be a horrifying usurpation of individual liberty by the State for the State's own weird, false conception of what women "should" be doing with their lives.
Either way, the compromise solution ends up looking just absolutely horrifying, no matter which side of the abortion debate is actually correct.
It's really inescapable. You have to determine whether the fetus is a person (yes or no), deciding along the way whether you believe in personal human rights (and why you believe in them), and work forward from there. From there, an absolute, black-and-white answer to *most* abortion questions becomes pretty hard to avoid. I have a great deal of intellectual respect for the people with the opposite view from me, but the people in the middle trying to have it both ways just strike me as confused. There's no skipping the fundamental question, much as the American public would dearly like to skip it.
(Of course, the American public will do the right thing, in the end, but only after trying everything else first. Churchill said it about World War II, but you see it more vividly in America's debates about slavery -- where, once again, most Americans really wanted to avoid facing the fundamental question of whether Blacks were actually people or not, and successfully skipped around it for several generations.)
I think a lot of this essay has aged like milk, but that is the benefit of hindsight, and it is interesting to see how you imagined things would spin out. The line that is sticking with me is the same one that grabbed Stephen E in the comments
"That’s a very long time for Americans to see what a pro-life America might look like—and to realize that the pro-choice movement’s lies about back-alley abortions and mothers’ safety have always been just that."
At this point, what do you think America has seen? Because I believe it to be very little, and the backlash is growing. There has been no subsequent pro-life victory in any situation where the voters get a say. The midterms would have been a blow out for the Democrats in the absence of gerrymanders, or if gerrmanders had been equally allowed. Without them, the Democrats would have a trifecta right now. At this point I think it entirely likely that the Democrats hold the Presidency, and take back the house by a healthy margin in 24. I think there is a good possibility they hold the Senate even though that path is hard for them, and Dobbs gets all of the credit.
There is no pro-life stepping up to meet human need, and people's fears were well founded. In the meantime, Clarence Thomas won't live forever, and a Supreme Court can turn on a dime as we have seen in Wisconsin in the past few days. There is every possibility we could see the rights laid out in Roe enshrined in Federal law by 2025, and I doubt even that will stop the pain for the GOP.
I think we can also conclude from the results in Ohio yesterday that the Dobbs effect is still with us. With no recession expected and inflation falling, things are looking grim for the Republicans in 24.
Hi, John! Welcome to De Civitate and thank you for the comment. I definitely got some things right in this post, and some other things wrong.
I started typing a reply to your comment, but it got... a little bit longer than I planned. I've posted the first part of my response today as an article: https://decivitate.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-dobbs-on-general-elections
Thank you for the grist, and, with the electoral question out of the way, I hope to get to the heart of your comment -- the public face of the pro-life movement -- soon enough.
Thank you for the welcome! I have given your new essay a read, and I think I will read it twice more before I respond. Some things I thought I would mention as I read got addressed in the footnotes. You dotted your i and crossed your t's, so I won't be talking about races run unopposed as I immediately figured I might, but I do feel there are still parts of that story that can be chewed on. Considering we have Alabama refusing court orders regarding their maps, and The Purcell principle at play in the election being discussed... well, I will save that for my proper response.
You mention scoring your post, and I look forward to it. My reason for responding in the first place was my fascination with your 18 month expectations. As I type this. 13 months since the decision, I think you might agree that there is no conservative stepping into the gap in a meaningful way. Instances of expanding Medicaid in what I would consider to be stingy ways, but not a lot of substantiative legislation in states the GOP has super majorities in where they could enact anything they like. I am not sure what has happened that might tell voters about "pro-choice lies". I can clearly remember many hard case stories in the past year and change though, starting with a 10 year old, and most currently with a 7th grader.
It would have been very easy to brush me off, or reply curtly, so I am very impressed, and somewhat humbled that you took the time to compose this elegant prose. It was not my intention to make you do work, but it is appreciated.
To be sure, I have been looking for an excuse to revisit this article anyway, and you kindly provided me with one! So I appreciate it.