On abortion, 41 weeks after the end of Roe v. Wade

Y'all are going to hate this. But you should read it

Michelle Goldberg is a classic Times hard left opinion writer, but she’s willing to debate - she had me on a podcast just before Tell Your Children was published to debate the legalization of cannabis. (I don’t think that would happen now, unfortunately; the media has become even more polarized.)

Today Goldberg wrote a piece headlined:

The Abortion Ban Backlash Is Starting to Freak Out Republicans

It’s paywalled, but this is the crucial paragraph:

Having made the criminalization of abortion a central axis of their political project for decades, Republicans have no obvious way out of their electoral predicament. A decisive majority of Americans — 64 percent, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey — believe that abortion should be legal in most cases. A decisive majority of Republicans — 63 percent, according to the same survey — believe that it should not. When abortion bans were merely theoretical, anti-abortion passion was often a boon to Republicans, powering the grass-roots organizing of the religious right. Now that the end of Roe has awakened a previously complacent pro-choice majority, anti-abortion passion has become a liability, but the Republican Party can’t jettison it without tearing itself apart.

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Goldberg is correct, of course.

As a country the United States does not want to ban abortion. Women are furious. And not just young women. Women over 60 are old enough to remember the original Roe v. Wade decision, and most of them never wanted to go back.

The anger here is enough to turn purple and maybe even soft red states blue.

And I do think the right has a terrible ideological inconsistency on abortion. If being vaccinated as an adult is a personal choice - and it should be - then having an abortion is too. This is not because I support abortion. I think it is the taking of human life. As I wrote last year after the Court overturned Roe v. Wade:

Abortion is a very private murder, a murder for which the state has no responsibility and cannot interfere. It is a decision even more personal than being vaccinated. It is the ultimate betrayal of a child by the woman who carries him, and perhaps by the man who impregnated her too. It is a tragedy.

Is it a sin? Only God can judge sin. Will he? Does he? Your guess is as good as mine.

But this I know. Banning or criminalizing it will only add to the sum of human misery.

Reality is awful sometimes.

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(Yep, that’s a human life)

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The Republican Party has now locked itself into two positions that the rest of the country strongly rejects - support for Donald Trump and opposition to abortion. (Trump, of course, supported abortion rights until doing so became politically inconvenient.)

I’m not a politician. I’m not even a Republican - I’m a registered independent. I don’t have to worry about running for office or standing up to Republican primary voters (though I do have to stand up to my readers sometimes). I have no idea how Republicans get themselves out of these traps.

But if they cannot, Democrats and the health authoritarians they support will gain more and more power, woke censorship will worsen, our failed pro-drug policies will expand, we will continue to invite millions of the world’s poorest and least productive people to make a mockery of our immigration policies and borders, and the leviathan that is the federal government - which now spends more than $6 trillion a year - will only continue to grow.

As Goldberg noted:

[Republican] leaders are adopting a self-soothing tactic sometimes seen on the left, insisting they’re being defeated because they’ve failed to make their values clear, not because their values are unpopular.

Yep. If the principle of banning abortion is so important that Republicans are willing to cede any chance at winning national elections for it, they will get what they want.

But either way, the United States is not going to ban abortion.