My interpretation of "rare" supports eliminating the convenience reasoning for the vast majority of abortions. Ideally, you just wouldn't want them to happen, so "rare" seems obvious to me. Fewer the better, no?
The "safe, legal and rare" approach is incoherent because there's no gray area regarding the morality of abortion. Louis CK jokes about it here:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U_h-G4uOzqc" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The first and second undermine the third goal, and vice verse. If abortion should be safe and legal, then that must mean it has the moral import of bowel movement. So why rare? You should
shout your abortion! It's empowering women!
But if it should be rare, then that indicates that something really bad is taking place during abortion (like the destruction of innocent human life), so why should it be safe and legal at all? By all means, distressed pregnant women should get a lot more support than they currently receive, and she can always give the kid up for adoption if being a mother is just completely out of the question. But there's no way to make infanticide "safe and legal" without utterly corrupting your society.
Ultimately, we all know at some level that abortion is terrible, but women can't be effective wage slaves if their employment is constantly being interrupted by pregnancy and childbirth, so we've opted to prioritize the financial interests of the 1% over stable family formation. Par for the course regarding American policy.
Anyways, until there's a true pro-life Dem nominee, it's going to force voters into a predicament. Moving farther to the left and pushing PL Dems or even moderate Pro-Choice voters out of their party seems like a disastrous plan for the Dems.
I agree. Only 13% of Americans believe abortion should be available up until birth, yet that's become a core plank of the DNC platform recently. And it's so sacrosanct that they brook virtually no dissent on this issue. If they had any vision, they'd tell Planned Parenthood to f*ck off, nominate someone like John Bel Edwards, and then dominate the White House for the rest of the 21st century.
*Whiskey, you have any reading I can do regarding this topic? I've heard a lot of people say that making it legal, more accessible, and having better education leads to a decrease in abortion rates. I feel you've posted in the past how that's not true. If so, I'd like to read more on that specifically.
It's hard to find reliable scholarship on this subject because there is
huge money behind the abortion lobby. The Guttmacher Institute is literally the propaganda arm of Planned Parenthood. Virtually all of the "research" purporting to show a link between liberalizing abortion laws and lower rates of abortion can be traced back Guttmacher itself, or is funded by one of its affiliates. Conversely, a lot of the research going the other way is funded and carried out by small outfits that are ideologically opposed to PP, like
this recent memo.
A lot of it is just liberal mythology. The idea that back-alley coat-hanger abortions were common pre-Roe is as widespread and laughably unfounded in fact as the ideas that most medieval peasants died in their 30s or that the Catholic Church pre-Reformation regularly burned people at the stake for harmlessly dissenting from Church teaching. History is written by the winners, and those with a financial stake in keeping female employment unimpeded by nature have been winning for a long time.
Does it make sense to you that legalizing, subsidizing and promoting something would
ever discourage it? Of course not, but liberalizing abortion laws almost always goes hand in hand with liberalizing sexual mores in general. Initially, you get a big increase in unwed pregnancies that correlates with a spike in abortions. Later, thoroughly liberalized sexual mores result in lower pregnancy rates across the board, and thus a "decrease" in the rate of abortions; but only vis-a-vis the initial spike. Due to its financial incentives, Guttmacher never explains that correlation doesn't equal causation, nor does it have any comment whether the dramatic fall of pregnancy and birth rates across the board is a good thing.
But rest assured that were abortion still illegal, inaccessible, and socially stigmatized, most of the 60 million American children aborted since Roe would be alive today.
Fun fact: did you know that abortion is the #1 cause of death globally? It's estimated that there are 56 million abortions performed each year, meaning it claims 3 times more lives annually than cardiovascular diseases, the next most common cause of death.
It helps me realize that I can’t vote for any of them. This is the Democratic Party of recent memory. Klobuchar, although more politely, that pro-life Dems have no place in the Dem party. That aboutsays it all for the party of inclusion.
Whoever gets nominated will have a reasonable chance of beating Trump, so even if we can't vote for Democrats in the general yet, I still think it's worthwhile to discuss who is most worthy of support.
