Going Pro-Life
Raymond Hernandez for The New York Times takes a look at pro-life Democratic candidates:
Kelli Conlin, the president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, called the recruitment strategy misguided, saying that surveys conducted by her organization showed that even some Republicans express support for abortion rights when her group described the consequences of outlawing the procedure.
“The movement to recruit anti-choice candidates ignores the larger reality that this is a pro-choice nation,” she said. “It misses the larger point.” (Polls show a divided nation on the issue: A 2008 CNN-Opinion Research poll found that 53 percent of Americans characterized themselves as “pro-choice,” versus 44 as “pro-life;” a 2007 poll by the same organization showed the numbers reversed, 45-50.)
The Times uses Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) as the poster child for this trend, but he actually seems like an outlier example. Pro-choice Democrats regularly win statewide in Pennsylvania — Clinton in 1992 & 1996, Gore in 2000, Rendell in 2002 & 2006, Kerry in 2004 — and, indeed, pro-choice Republicans like Arlen Specter and Tom Ridge have a good record in the state as well. In a place like that, pro-choice voters are naturally going to have a strong preference for a pro-choice candidate. But the fact that Casey’s opponent was Rick Santorum nevertheless left Casey as clearly the more socially and culturally liberal candidate.
The main subject of the article is the rather different case of recruiting pro-life candidates to run in districts or states that are so strongly anti-choice as to make it highly unlikely a pro-choice candidate could win. To me, that seems like a very different calculation. What’s more, it’s clearly a calculation that makes national polling on abortion rights irrelevant.
63 Responses to “Going Pro-Life”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
October 27th, 2008 at 8:51 am
In Pennsylvania you have Philadelphia, that allows pro-choice candidates of having a decent chance of winning. In states like Ohio and most of the South you don´t.
The problem that I see is not abortion, but Democrats wasting votes defending a EXTREME position on that.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Matt, don’t you think there is any room for compromise on the issue of abortion? Is the only way to counter the far right’s opposition to all abortions to favor the right to abortions at any time in the pregnancy?
While I strongly favor women’s reproductive rights – access to contraceptives, access to abortion in the first trimester. I also believe that at some point in the fetus’ development cycle, it’s human rights match those of the mother. The Roe ruling itself tries to make that point with how it parses rights based on pregnancy trimesters.
I’m not saying I know exactly how the law should be written so that it protects both the right of the mother and the developing child, but I do think there is room for discussion and compromise. The extremists on both side of the issue get way too much attention from the parties. The parties use them and the issue mainly to raise cash. In the end, however, the devotion to the orthodoxy of the extremes prevents us from coming to a national consensus on the issue.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:58 am
And make no mistake, supporting the legalized butchery that is partial birth abortion is an EXTREME position.
It’s hardly as though we should be having this conversation- any nation that pretends to respect the value of human life must outlaw abortion in all except a few rare circumstances such as when the mother’s life is at risk. But of course, we are talking here about the nation that was responsible for Hiroshima and My Lai, so I guess all bets are off.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Matt,
You, of all people, with your subtle finessing of the most abstruse logical puzzles should know this rhetorical without having it pointed out:
There is no one, no one, who is not “pro-life.” The term, as used in the abortion-choice debate, deliberately obscures an inconvenient truth: to ban abortions will lead to a drastic increase in illegal, dangerous, indeed fatal, abortions. The “pro-life” position is better described as “pro-coathanger.”
The term “pro-life” also hides the class and race issues. Rich white women will always have access to safe abortions when they choose. Not so for poor women, who are disproportionally black.
If “pro-coathanger” offends your conciliatory sensibilities, then use the more objective terms “for abortion choice” and “against abortion choice” to describe the different positions.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Matt,
You, of all people, with your subtle finessing of the most abstruse logical puzzles should know this rhetorical fallacy without having it pointed out:
There is no one, no one, who is not “pro-life.” The term, as used in the abortion-choice debate, deliberately obscures an inconvenient truth: to ban abortions will lead to a drastic increase in illegal, dangerous, indeed fatal, abortions. The “pro-life” position is better described as “pro-coathanger.”
The term “pro-life” also hides the class and race issues. Rich white women will always have access to safe abortions when they choose. Not so for poor women, who are disproportionally black.
If “pro-coathanger” offends your conciliatory sensibilities, then use the more objective terms “for abortion choice” and “against abortion choice” to describe the different positions.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:45 am
The Fake Crusader also gets his crypto-medical bullshit from the middle ages, I see.
Four years after publication, Cynthia Gorney’s ‘Gambling With Abortion’ remains one of the best pieces on the way the argument is conducted in the US, and the reasons why, per Col. Danite’s comment, it’s so polarised.
It raises a very important point moving forward to consider potential healthcare reform and the kind of bottlenecks that might arise in Congress. You have anti-abortion extremists in various state legislatures trying to restrict and prevent everything from sex education through emergency contraception to early abortions, in a thinly-veiled strategy to keep the clock ticking. That’s to say, Fake Crusader, that it’s warped fuckers like you who get off on late-term abortions. It’s your dirty little kink.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Colonel and Andre call the positions that Dems support “extreme”, and Hector characterizes support Dialation and Extraction “extreme”. So what is the “extreme” position that the Dems support? For the most part, Democrats support the status quo on abortion: available to women with pregnancy-related health problems with basically no restrictions (including an allowance to perform D&X in situations where a mother’s health is in danger) and allowing states to put a restriction on the general availability of late-term (3rd trimerster) abortions, as 40 states have done.
I have yet to hear of a case of D&X being performed when the mother’s health was not endangered, although I suspect that it would be blasted long and loud by wingnuts if just one existed. On the other hand, many Republicans hold the position that women should not be allowed access to abortion even when their health is in danger – note Sen. McCain’s air quotes around “health” in the third debate. I consider this position to be far, far more extreme than nearly anything the Democrats support.
I suspect that many people characterizing the pro-choice position as “extreme” don’t really know much about the current abortion laws, and their positions are based on the idea that current law allows widespread late-term abortions. It does not.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:10 am
@Andrew
Perhaps you are right and it is more an issue with messaging than with the actual position of the Pro-Choice side of the argument. Let me share my views on abortion and you can tell me if they are reasonable or not.
I agree that there should always be a mother’s life and health exception (no quotes, air or otherwise) included in any law that restricts abortions. I also agree that late term abortions do not take place based on a whim anyway so the demagoguing from the Right is offensive.
I think most Americans can agree to a consensus abortion rights framework that allows abortion with few or no restrictions in the first trimester and that outlaws third trimester abortions unless the mother’s life or health are at risk.
I do favor some first trimester regulations including parental notification with the option for judicial review. I also don’t object to laws that require abortion providers to offer information on adoption services and programs that support mothers and children. I don’t favor a “waiting period” nor do I favor mandatory “counseling” at abortion clinics because of the risk of intimidation.
The second trimester is a bit trickier. I would favor laws that make second trimester abortion restrictions similar to third trimester abortions. Others may want something a bit more flexible. That’s where I think we should focus our discussions.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Contra Andrew, from what I have seen, admittedly mostly anecdotal, the main reason that D & X is performed does not seem to be the health of the mother, but rather the health of the baby.
I have noticed that at least the women who have come forward to say their doctor’s recommended such a procedure have been women whose babies then died from illnesses which made them essentially non-viable.
It seems that the partial birth abortion debate is really a debate about euthanasia, with neither side wanting to fight it on those terms.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:29 am
If you oppose “partial birth abortions” somehow preferentially over opposing other abortions, then you have no idea what a “partial birth abortion” is. Or when the procedure is used.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Colonel Danite,
On the basis of what do you think second trimester abortions are “trickier?” Is that when the soul is supposed to enter the embryo? What’s your source or citation?
More importantly, what business is it of yours? Why not leave this to the woman and those closest to her? Why won’t you trust a woman to make the right decision?
Why burden a doctor with all sorts of complicated “thou shalts” that may make it easy for him/her to be hauled up on malpractice charges?
This is silly. Abortion should be, as Clinton once said, safe, legal, and rare. The end.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Were I a single-issue anti-abortion voter, I’d be mighty suspicious of these pro-life Dems. Do they give any hope, let alone any assurance, that they will vote against a Dem’s pro-choice judicial nominees? Probably not I’d have to guess.
Conversely, I have to suppose that a self-styled pro-life voter willing to vote for an ostensibly pro-life Dem simply isn’t very serious about the issue. So what it comes down to is that being a pro-life Dem candidate isn’t about anything policy-related, really little more than a promise not to disrespect people who have quasi-traditionalist views on sex. If that works to get a Dem elected, great, but it’s unfortunate that politics has to work at such an unserious level so often.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:57 am
In most western European countries, there are less abortions than in the US, maybe slightly more restrictions and it is not an issue that really gets fought over. It seems to me that in general, it is in the interest of U.S. Republicans that we continue to fight over abortion and in the interest of U.S. Democrats that the issue gets moved into the settled column.
The Republicans want the issue to keep a block of voters they need for other parts of their agenda. The terrain on which Democrats fight is often uncomfortable.
It would be interesting if a marginalized Republican party and a growing number of conservative pro-life democrats cause a movement toward settlement of the issue. Making abortion nominally illegal after N weeks with health exceptions takes the middle out of play and makes the horror stories “already illegal” (they mostly are anyway). Legislation to reduce abortions via other means also moves toward taking the issue off the table.
There was a little platform fight over abortion language in the democratic party. As we pick off conservative seats by being more conservative, the pro-life side might get more clout in the fights.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:57 am
@tristero
The basis for my reservations on second trimester abortions has nothing to do with the soul or with any other overt religious belief. I do think that the government should stay out of the decision as much as possible and that a woman has a right to make decisions about her body on her own. I think that we have to be very careful with how much power we give the state over anyone’s rights.
Ideally, the government should let us do just about anything we want as long as it doesn’t interfere with someone else’s rights. At some point, it makes sense that the fetus begin to have the protection afforded to any other citizen. Making birth that point in time is relatively arbitrary in my opinion. It certainly is a bright line but it is not necessarily the only logical time to afford those protections to the fetus/baby. After all, many states have laws that charge the killers of pregnant women with two murders if the fetus should perish with his/her mother. Do you oppose those laws?
Again, I’m not saying I have the answers or that my opinion is the only valid one. I’m not ready or willing to concede that the fetus has no rights until it’s born. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable position. I think that the absolutists on both sides make it impossible for us to have an honest discussion about this issue.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Democrats have a tough position on this issue – I think few democrats are uncomfortable with Mother’s health reasons but beyond that it gets progressively murky.
Personally I’m pro-life (birth to death penalty and war) but I think we have to look at the reason for the pregnancy and the reason for the abortion. Why is the abortion required?
As much as Democrats can moralize about the superior rights of the mother, you are killing a living creature. We don’t allow people to get rid of puppies by tearing them apart with a vacuum cleaner.
If we had decent medical care, a living wage for all work, and decent sex ed that explained the benefits of birth control and the consequences of improper use or manufacturing defect I believe we wouldn’t need abortion at anything close to current rates.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Colonel Danite,
The point is that the notion of “fetal rights” are wrapped up in morality and religious belief. The latter must not be intruded upon by the state and the former is usually best left as undisturbed as possible by the state.
Your personal morality makes a second trimester abortion a “tricky” decision rife with moral complications. For someone else, however, there may be moral certainty that this is exactly the right thing to do. And for someone else, equal moral certainty that it is exactly the wrong thing to do.
This is a case when the personal moral values of the woman making the decision can and should be the only arbiter. This is her decision, not her parents’, not her minister’s, not even her doctor’s.
I can support your making a case for persuading women to think of second trimester abortions as morally “tricky” because it is your right to do so. But I cannot understand a movement to take that decision away from a woman for many reasons that have little to do with the moral issues you focus upon.
The fact is that women will terminate unwanted pregnancies. They will do so for whatever reasons they have, including ones you or I might not agree with. Rich women will always have an opportunity to terminate pregnancies safely. Therefore, any ban on abortion will fall disproportionally on the poor. Poor women will die.
This makes the abortion debate really about the poor’s accesss to decent healthcare. And about issues of class and, because it interacts with class, race.
Poor women, women whose “right to life” is contested by no one, will die if abortion is banned, even for the second trimester only. Underaged girls will bear children into a life of misery and poverty if this country insists on pimping a specific religious propaganda program in a doctor’s office. That is what this is about and that is why I find little room for compromise on the legal issue
On the morality of abortion, I fully agree that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. But I also agree that when a woman, for whatever reason, decides she wants or needs an abortion, the procedure should be available and performed.
It is her decision, not mine. And it’s not yours.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Look at some S. Tx. dem congressmen. They tend to be pro-life and strong democrats. Some of it is religious beliefs and some of the reasons are cultural but either way, these types of dems do exist and make a difference.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Tristero writes: “Abortion should be, as Clinton once said, safe, legal, and rare. The end.”
But, of course, making abortion rare is not in the business interests of Naral and Planned Parenthood, nor in the interests of groups, purporting to speak for women, who are funded by what amounts to this billion dollar per year industry.
It is simply farcical to suppose that, in this instance, corporations are for the support of women’s “rights” instead of their own bottom line. The inability of the Democratic establishment to brook any kind of compromise on abortion legislation has less (or nothing?!) to do with the supposed “right”–Constitutional or otherwise–to terminate a pregnancy and more to do with their dependence on the lobbying monies supplied by such corporations.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Tristero,
To say that “the notion of “fetal rights” are wrapped up in morality and religious belief” is simply incorrect. There are many foes of abortion who are atheists (Nat Hentoff, Hitchens, etc.). But if you mean by this that the notion of fetal rights is a moral question–then I agree. But it is precisely the refusal to engage this moral question that marks your responses in this thread. But these arguments never go anywhere, and I’m not foolish enough to think that I will change your mind, or you mine.
I would ask you at least to acknowledge, however, since your mention of race and class alerts me to your awareness of these concepts’ implication in abortion, that corporations should never be believed when they claim that their interest is in the “rights” or “human dignity” of their customers: and this holds for Planned Parenthood especially, whose actions in the inner city have not always been ethically admirable.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Oh, I think there are enough pro-coathanger types around to keep PP and NARAL in business for a real long time. If I were you, wj, I’d be investigating whether NARAL and PP made secret donations to Operation Rescue, because a better advertisment for them doesn’t exist.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:39 am
In most western European countries, there are less abortions than in the US, maybe slightly more restrictions and it is not an issue that really gets fought over.
As Cynthia Gorney wrote in that piece from 2004:
Which is why I say that the oncoming healthcare debate runs straight into the issue of whether states are prepared to underwrite sex education, contraception and even early abortions.
wj: keep saying that to yourself, won’t you? It won’t make it any less of a lie, but it might salve your warped conscience when you’re firebombing clinics.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:40 am
@ tristero
I agree with almost your entire post about the risks associated with restricting abortion rights. However, my argument about balancing the rights of the mother and the rights of the fetus/baby are not reliant on my religious beliefs. That’s like saying I oppose murder or rape only because of my religious beliefs.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:42 am
wj,
Apparently I confused you. Of course, morality does not imply religion. That’s why I mentioned both. Could I have written that more precisely? I’m sure I could have, but I’m not in a philosophy final exam here.
I have no idea whether corporations should or shouldn’t be believed when they mention “rights” or “human dignity.” I don’t see any reason a priori to make a blanket statement.
I have no interest in defending or disparaging PP or Naral here and now. I only have an interest in defining this debate accurately. Defining those opposed to abortion choice as “pro-life” is ludicrous. I support abortion choice and I’m most certainly pro life.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Colonel Danite,
I understand that is not your religious beliefs. That is why I separated out morality. But your own views on what is moral can, and will, conflict with others. That is why, as I mentioned, states tend to avoid legislating morality, especially in complex, fraught situations like this one.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:52 am
If you oppose “partial birth abortions” somehow preferentially over opposing other abortions, then you have no idea what a “partial birth abortion” is. Or when the procedure is used.
Exactly. Some regulations on abortion are at least theoretically defensible. Bans on D&X abortion are just transparently irrational.
October 27th, 2008 at 11:59 am
It´s not rare to have infants born after less than six months of gestation. What´s the difference putting down a child inside or putting down outside the womb?
The point is that discourse is a cheap way of alienating voters and losing elections. Had Kerry won a higher percentage of Catholics in Ohio he would be running for his second term right now.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Tristero,
I suppose, then, that we should never have abolished slavery. Can’t impose your personal moral values about slavery on the slaveholders, or your personal views about genocide on the Nazis. You people are truly despicable.
I suppose that’s a problem from an Enlightenment-liberal point of view. It isn’t a problem for me, since I utterly and categorically deny the foundational ideas of liberal civilization. I don’t think that your personal views about the ‘morality’ of abortion have any validity whatsoever, and I believe the state has the right and duty to prevent you and anyone else from putting them into action. Human life is at stake here, and that’s much more important than your pitiful attempts to justify homicide.
That said, I vote Democratic because unfortunately people like you are in the majority now, and this country is not going to return to a pro-life consensus anytime in the near future. I think that Barack Obama, in spite of his repulsive views about abortion, is a better choice from the point of view of foreign policy and the environment, and I also believe that the trashing of the natural environment is a bigger threat to both human life and the natural order than abortion. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m happy about it, and don’t call me unserious. I would be much happier, really, living in one of the Latin-American countries where protection of unborn life is a fundamental constitutional principle respected by both Left and Right, and I could vote for Left-wing candidates secure in the knowledge that they would not pursue legalized homicide.
“Safe, legal and rare” by the way, is nonsense. It could only ever work if there were other, non-legal sanctions (say, economic, social or religious) placed on people who perform abortions, and that isn’t the society we live in.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
pseudo in nc first attributes to me a text that I didn’t write, and then closes an otherwise rational post with the following: “wj: keep saying that to yourself, won’t you? It won’t make it any less of a lie, but it might salve your warped conscience when you’re firebombing clinics.”
This is the kind of statement one expects to see on Powerline or Redstate, where, say, ad hominem rhetorical attacks often substitute for the articulation of an argument. Usually Yglesias’s threads are more substantive and less shrill.
Were I a Marxist, I would no doubt comment upon how telling it is the the one issue that educes from otherwise intellectually respectable liberal-progressive blogs sentiments and expressions that exactly mirror the reactionary right is an issue that (purportedly involves) freedom, autonomy, choice, and privacy:-exactly the same set of fictions used to countenance the worst violence against the innocent–the “merely” human, as Marx might say–from the right.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
At some point, it makes sense that the fetus begin to have the protection afforded to any other citizen.
Last week, a woman in Boston died from an emergency c-section. Sorry, but there’s no other citizen who lives inside another person’s body and can kill them.
It’s time to stop playing pretend. Pregnancy is dangerous. The natural rate of death for pregnancy is estimated to be something like one mother per 100 live births. In sub-saharan Africa, one of every 16 women dies due to pregnancy. The reason this doesn’t happen in the United States is because of modern medicine–and abortion is part of that. We identify and end dangerous pregnancies so the mother can live.
If a woman wants to take the risk and continue a dangerous pregnancy, that is her choice. She should be supported in that, and get the best medical care. But, I’m sorry, the last thing women in a health crisis need is to go to the morality police to make sure the morality police think it’s OK for them to have an abortion, or if maybe they should risk dying or permanent health damage. I don’t think the government should be deciding whether or not a 27 year old with pre-eclampsia should risk a massive stroke. Call me wacky, but that’s her call.
And frankly, I don’t think a bureaucrat like John McCain who puts air quotes around “health” of the mother is someone who should ever be involved in this decision.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
We are now told that “Pregnancy is dangerous.” Comments like this are purely in the service of ideology, and have the effect of encouraging women to distrust the marvelous capacities of their own bodies, which must be managed and controlled lest the “risk” posed by their natural workings should cause harm: she who is being harmed in this case is no doubt figured as an autonomous self making use of a calculative rationality which is in the service of efficiency and material production. Having already transformed the norms of traditional masculine agency so as to bring them in line with the demands of the market, late capitalism now is concerned to frighten women with the natural difference of their own bodies, so as to make them as much like men as it is possible for them to become.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
@ anonymiss
I agree that any abortion restriction include exceptions for the life and health of the mother. There is no reason for the government to force a woman to continue a pregnancy that put’s her life or health at risk.
@ Hector
My problem with outlawing abortion is that it doesn’t actually eliminate or even greatly reduce the rate of abortions. If you look at the rates of illegal abortions in the Latin American countries you admire, you would see that they are close to what they are in nations in which abortion is legal. abortion rates
There are better ways to reduce abortion. In my opinion, better economic opportunitiy, better access to contraceptives, better comprehensive sex education, better access to inexpensive child care and child health care and of course better parenting (in the case of minors) would all be better tactics.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
That’s an awful lot of empty puffing, wj, in defence of your bullshit assertion that the Democratic Party’s pro-choice position is built upon its “dependence on the lobbying monies supplied by such corporations.” That you have trouble discerning the meaning of the word “that” in reference to your comments upthread is your own problem.
Like I said, keep thinking that absent Planned Parenthood money, the Democrats would abandon the pro-choice position. You’d still be completely full of shit, but it’ll salve your conscience.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
See, wj, if you actually respected the complexity of this particular issue, you wouldn’t be saying that it all comes down to the money from NARAL and PP, rather than the idiosyncratic nature of the American abortion debate, something that Gorney describes in detail.
That kind of stupid, reductive bullshit suggests that you’re arguing in bad faith. Sorry, can’t be pestered with bad-faith arguments from people who write like they just ate the freshman cult-stud textbook.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Hiding behind these nationwide poll numbers, aside from avoiding task of doing as well as liberals can do in pro-life areas of the country, also avoids the important issue of how much pro-life Democrats are going to be unreliable on other liberal issues. What’s the total damage of accepting and even promoting pro-life candidates?
The real example is probably not Casey but Harry Reid. Reid has serious pro-life credentials, and yet his political approach to abortion does not involve packing the federal courts with extreme right-wing judges who are eager to overturn Roe. Those judges would be horrible on a host of other issues, which is why some pro-life elected officials could be distasterous not only on Roe (from the perspective of pro-choice people) but also on other issues as well.
It’s also why the right-wing loves the life issue. They’ve got a very strong, large social movement that’s not inherently conservative yoked to a radical right wing strategic initiative for the courts.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Hector,
“I suppose, then, that we should never have abolished slavery.”
I thought the subject was abortion. Funny how anti-liberals can’t keep to a topic.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
This name calling and derision of “morals” is one of the biggest threats to the current progressive coalition. If the economic right wing of the Republican party succeeds in throwing out the pro-life evangelicals and Catholics in their caucus after the McCain fiasco we could see a whole new single issue party.
Call it the “Life” party. It could throw off all the toxic military and worker rights stances in the republican party and start from the precept that all men are equal and deserve dignity.
There are a lot of Democrats that swallow hard and vote the the democratic party because its policies best support human dignity. If there was an alternative out there without the built-in corruption of a nearly 200 year old political machine that doesn’t look to big corporations for guidance, they will jump in a heartbeat.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
@ traveldad65
Well put. I am a staunch Democrat and though personally a conservative person (married, kids, church going, etc.) I am also a social progressive. I strongly believe in gay rights, in women’s rights and in minority rights. I, like most people, would prefer that there were no abortions. I believe that the Democratic Party’s platform has the best prescriptions for reducing abortions. If we can create a society in which having a child is not an economic catastrophe burden, we can greatly reduce the number of abortions. Access to inexpensive day-care, health care, quality education are better programs to reducing abortion than banning it.
October 27th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
traveldad65,
Not easy forming a new party. Ask Mr. Perot.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Colonel Danite,
That’s a good argument and one I hear from many well-meaning people. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. The rate of abortion would probably still be high if abortion was outlawed, but it would be much lower than today. The absolute high end of reputable estimates of illegal abortions in 1970 are 800,000 and the low end is 400,000. A couple years after Roe v. Wade, the rate jumped up to 1,200,000. Today it’s down to 800,000 probably because of more widespread contraception, and greater tolerance of unwed mothers, which is all to the good, but not quite enough. What that tells me is that it’s likely that if abortion were legal, the rate might drop by between a third and two thirds, and hopefully be even much lower than it was in 1970.
I agree that abortions to protect the woman’s life should be legal, and I’m also inclinded to say they should be legal in cases of rape, insect, terminally damaged fetuses, and non-lethal threats to the woman’s health (given that there isn’t always a clear line between lethal and non-lethal threats). Of course, those don’t constitute the majority of abortions, which makes this health business something of a red herring.
WJ,
Yes, as a Christian socialist I totally agree with you that late capitalism is responsible for the moral decay of our society which permits abortion. Late capitalism and abortion both share in common a contempt for our natures and our innate moral intuitions, and a penchant for reducing human interactions to a battlefield of competing self-interest.
Traveldad,
Yeah I would like to see a new party form, and would vote for it right quick.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
If “pro-coathanger” offends your conciliatory sensibilities, then use the more objective terms “for abortion choice” and “against abortion choice” to describe the different positions.
Tristero: There are plenty of people who think that the post Roe legal/policy standard on abortion in America — namely that voters essentially can’t take any actions whatsoever to defend the lives of the unborn — is extreme. So, if pro-life/pro-choice offends your sensibilities, how about “pro regulation” and “anti regulation” ?
October 27th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Yeah I would like to see a new party form, and would vote for it right quick.
The Crusader Party! Bring your own cardboard swords, eggbox armour and sexual hangups!
October 27th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
“pro-life democrat” is an inaccurate term.
“anti-choice democrat” is more accurate but an oxymoron.
somebody explain why it’s a good idea to allow republicans to shed their unattractive party affiliation and get in through the democratic door?
October 27th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
@tristero
Its not easy to form a party – but that is close to how the current republicans formed – a single moral cause – the end of slavery pulled together coalitions that weren’t there before.
There are many peaceful people – Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and atheist that would like to see the dignity of all life upheld. They really don’t care about coddling millionaires.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
hector said above:
wtf? the idea that naral, pp and “people who perform abortions” are somehow coercing or encouraging or enticing women to have abortions is laughable.
you should be embarrassed to be seen making such a statement in public.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Pseudonymous in NC,
Your obsession with me and my beliefs is getting rather tiresome. Why don’t you go bother Steve Sailer over at the National Review.
If it were up to me, I would call it the Penitential Party, and it would be dedicated to the proposition that the entirety of the current American lifestyle- with its late-capitalist economy, its decadent personal mores, its aggresive foreign policy and trashing of the environment- is a gross affront to the natural order, and something deserving of a serious national penitence.
Karen Marie’s obtuseness is, of course, typical of what I’ve taken to calling the modern Dimocratic or Dumbocratic party.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
my obtuseness, hector?
was there something i misunderstood in your statement?
October 27th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
The point is that the notion of “fetal rights” are wrapped up in morality and religious belief.
The same is true of all rights. The notion that I do not have the right to smother my six-month old son or that white people should regard black people as free and equal human beings is wrapped up in morality and religious belief.
Your personal morality makes a second trimester abortion a “tricky” decision rife with moral complications. For someone else, however, there may be moral certainty that this is exactly the right thing to do. And for someone else, equal moral certainty that it is exactly the wrong thing to do.
I might say the same thing about Casey Anthony. She might have no qualms whatsoever about chloroforming her daughter and putting her in the trunk of her car.
This is a case when the personal moral values of the woman making the decision can and should be the only arbiter.
Why in this case, but not in the case of person who can’t stand their two-year-old any longer?
Some people believe that an unborn human organism is a person with rights, some people don’t, and some people believe it to be a person but not to have the right to exist as long as it depends on someone else.
The question is, what position do we take as a society? To answer “we need to leave it up to the mother” is not sufficient, because it does not explain why we choose to leave it up to the mother in this case, but not, say, in the case of Casey Anthony.
nonymiss is the only person to have actually made an argument as to why society should not protect the fetus as a rights-bearing person.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
In any case, no one here has addressed Matt’s political point.
In essence, Kelli Conlin is suggesting that the Democrats only put up pro-choice candidates. She sees this as a good strategy because the pro-choice position is the more popular one in the U.S.
Matt is pointing out that other than in the Presidential race, people don’t run for election in the entire country but in individual states and districts, and that a smart Democratic Party will have to make compromises on particular issues here and there to gain seats in those areas and to try to promote their overall agenda.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Karen Marie,
Your ‘obtuseness’ consists in the fact that you don’t appear to be well acquainted with basic precepts of moral philosophy, such as that the deliberate taking of innocent human life is forbidden, with very few exceptions.
There also seems to be a presumption here that it isn’t the function of the state to try to encourage the moral uplift of its citizens, and to defend a particular vision of morality. I disagree with that presumption, of course, and people who defend it like Karen-Marie often seem to not have read much moral philosophy that predates the slave-rapist Thomas Jefferson.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Casey’s actually a good poster child for this trend, and PA’s not a bad example. PA’s democratic party is -very- fractious, and there’s a strong division between Philly (which, on the whole, wishes it was in a classier state) and not-Philly (who tend to be pro-life, pro-gun and communist). If you haven’t gone further west than Bucks county, you might think PA is an east coast state, but it’s more like an east coast city with a midwest state glued onto it.
My personal favorite stat explaining this is that Pittsburgh is the second -and third- largest urban centers in PA. This is partly due to Oakland’s increasing importance in Pittsburgh’s economy, but also due to the prevalence of dinky little townettes that make up the bulk of PA. You drive down the turnpike and you see these little suburban ranch houses in the middle of nowhere and have to ask yourself “How do these people survive?”. Lots of small towns, -very- conservative socially; quintessential Reagan Democrats.
Anyway, PA basically has the Senator from Philly and the Senator from Not-Philly. Not-Philly is pretty damn pro-life, Philly is pretty-damn pro-choice. The PA democratic party is thick with pro-lifers (pretty much any major officeholder outside of the Philly area is – Murtha, Wagner, Knoll, Doyle), which has led to a sequence of impressively nasty fights over the past 10 years, and at least one election (2000) being thrown to Santorum. The real achievement of 2006 is that everyone was able to come to their senses, stop the imbecilic infighting for about 10 minutes and get Casey into office rather than engage in their favorite civil war. It really was a triumph of pragmatism over ideological purity, and is part of what’s making the Democrats successful right now – while the GOP is sniping each other over who wants to cut taxes into kleptocracy first.
This, incidentally, is why I personally will be watching most of this “better democrat” hoo-hah with a somewhat jaundiced eye over the next 4 years. First thing you have to do is kill everyone who disagrees with you…
October 27th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Mike Collins,
So I guess the big question is, who is going to give in, Philly or not-Philly? Because someone has to give, eventually.
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:42 am
levitraI want to say – thank you for this!
March 11th, 2009 at 5:08 am
I just wanted to say that I love this site
March 17th, 2009 at 2:34 am
Incredible site!
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 10:37 am
buy viagra online
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:38 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:24 am
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 7:31 am
I want to say – thank you for this! viagra
April 14th, 2009 at 9:35 am
I bookmarked this site, Thank you for good job!
viagra