All officialdom in those states should be mobilized to make hospitals fear malpractice suits more than hypothetical pro-life prosecution.Īnd it requires longer-term creativity, so that every new protection for the unborn is combined with reassurances that mothers and children alike will be better supported than they are today. It is not enough, for instance, for abortion opponents to react to stories about delayed care for miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies in pro-life states by pointing out that the laws are being misinterpreted. ![]() That requires addressing immediate anxieties head-on. And the way you change opinion is by proving the incremental version of your ideas workable, so that voters trust you more and more. But at the margins there are clear opportunities: If Republicans run on no-exceptions platforms in moderately conservative states or back first-trimester bans in swing states, they will lose some winnable elections.īut again, serious pro-lifers have always known that if you bring abortion back to the democratic process, you have to deal with public opinion as it actually exists. I suspect that liberals are deceiving themselves if they imagine abortion becoming a dominant issue in an environment as economically and geopolitically fraught as this one. In reddish Florida, the popular governor, Ron DeSantis, is making his stand for now on a ban after 15 weeks. Brian Kemp signed a law in 2019, which is now taking effect, banning abortion after around six weeks with various exceptions he looks like he’s on his way to re-election. Can the pro-life movement settle for that kind of goal? Well, that’s the question, with different states supplying different answers. Would the result have been different if the referendum had proposed restrictions around 12 weeks? I suspect so. The state already has a late-term ban, and the prolix ballot measure didn’t specify an alternative, it just promised the legislature a general power to write new abortion laws. The Kansas result confirms that assumption. ![]() That was clear before Roe fell - that outright bans would be the exceptions, and the contest in many states would be over how far restrictions can go. Even with exceptions, a state probably needs to be either very Republican or very religious for a first-trimester abortion ban to be popular, which basically means the Deep South and Mountain (and especially Mormon) West. In many red as well as purple states, those constituencies hold the balance of power. That means that millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump favor a right to a first-trimester abortion - some of them old-fashioned country-club Republicans, others secular working-class voters or anti-woke “ Barstool conservatives” who dislike elite progressivism but find religious conservatism alienating as well.
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