The extremism of the pro-choice movement, and why it is politically stupid.

Abortion should be legal up to the age of 16.

You got a teenager McGentrix? Don't worry, they turn into adults soon enough.

Republicans are pushing another false claim about abortion to rile up voters
It worked in 2016. Will it work next year?

Antiabortion activists protest outside the Supreme Court during the March for Life in Washington in January. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)

By Laura Bassett

April 10

Listening to Republicans over the past few months, it would be easy to get the impression that women are routinely giving birth to babies and then aborting them — with Democrats’ full political support.

Republicans are pushing legislation in both the House and Senate that purports to address such atrocities by criminalizing doctors who fail to take every step necessary to revive a child born alive after a failed abortion. President Trump tweeted in February that Democrats “don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth,” and former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made a similar suggestion onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference that month. “It’s not live-birth abortion. It’s not infanticide. It is murder if you take the baby home and kill the baby at home, it’s murder,” Walker said. “The same thing is true at the hospital.”

It would be horrific to everyone if that scenario were happening, but it’s not. An attempted abortion late enough into a pregnancy to result in a live birth is extremely rare and happens only when the mother’s life is at risk or the fetus has a fatal condition. But we’re in a presidential election cycle, and Republicans have learned that abortion can be a winning issue for them if they find a way to keep Democrats on the defensive.

Part of the reason Republicans have been able to make some headway with this line of attack is that Ralph Northam, Virginia’s Democratic governor, garbled his response to a similar bill proposed in his state in January, misspeaking in a way that appeared to endorse afterbirth abortion and sparking a national firestorm. Soon afterward, New York enacted a bill that would allow abortions after 24 weeks in the absence of fetal viability, or to protect the mother’s life or health. Conservatives spun the two events as evidence that Democrats support infanticide — a massive distortion of the party’s position.

To further that narrative, the Senate Judiciary Committee — on which three Democratic presidential hopefuls sit — held a hearing Tuesday titled “Abortion Until Birth,” in which they discussed a bill by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) that would ban abortion at 20 weeks and criminalize doctors who fail to resuscitate “children born alive after attempted abortions.” Graham brought in a self-described “abortion survivor” to testify and claimed in his opening remarks that fetuses feel “excruciating pain” during abortions — a claim disputed by the medical community. Leana Wen, a physician and the president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said the hearing was “designed to manufacture outrage.”

[Yes, conservatives will try to undo Roe v. Wade. The only question is how.]

That outrage playbook worked in 2016. Republican presidential candidates seized on another inflammatory, hard-to-believe narrative: that Planned Parenthood was using abortion to harvest and traffic fetal body parts for profit. This was based on undercover videos released by an antiabortion activist group that purported to show the family-planning provider negotiating the sale of fetal tissue. (Planned Parenthood maintains that it donates fetal tissue for scientific research and is only reimbursed for the costs of preservation and transport, which is legal. It stopped accepting reimbursements after the controversy in October 2015.) The controversy hardly dented the family-planning provider’s overall popularity, but it further infuriated the group’s critics: A 2015 YouGov poll found that 89 percent of people with unfavorable opinions of Planned Parenthood had seen or at least heard of the videos, and 85 percent of those people believed the organization had acted criminally. Gallup reported the same year that abortion had edged up in importance as a voting issue for many Americans, with an all-time high of 1 in 4 conservatives saying it was their top election concern.

House Republicans spent 15 months and $1.59 million to investigate the claim, and more than a dozen states launched their own probes. None of the investigations produced any evidence against Planned Parenthood, and the organization was cleared of wrongdoing. But the antiabortion movement, in conjunction with the GOP, succeeded in keeping the issue in the news for long enough that it had to be addressed on the presidential primary debate stage, giving cover to the Republican candidates’ unpopular position that the government should defund the nation’s largest family-planning provider. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) called the group “an ongoing criminal enterprise,” and Carly Fiorina went so far as to describe a graphic scene at Planned Parenthood that had never actually occurred, even in the doctored videos. “Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain,’ ” she said at one debate in September 2015.

Republicans had apparently learned from 2012’s “Year of the Woman,” when an unprecedented gender gap at the polls led President Barack Obama to a crushing victory over Mitt Romney, that playing defense on reproductive rights isn’t a winning strategy for them. Romney was the only GOP candidate that year who had refused to sign a leading antiabortion group’s “Pro-Life Pledge,” and he tried to soften his message on birth control when the Obama campaign repeatedly hit him on his opposition to Planned Parenthood funding and contraceptive coverage. He spent the entire campaign on his heels, plagued by multiple Republican gaffes on reproductive rights that year that made it easy to paint the whole party as extreme. (Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin notoriously said survivors of “legitimate rape” cannot become pregnant because the body has ways to “shut the whole thing down.”)

The GOP had lost its way on abortion. In previous years, the party found success in its strategy of highlighting the particular scenarios that put Democrats in an uncomfortable spot, forcing them to explain at length the nuanced reasons they would oppose something like a ban on medically necessary late-term abortions. Republicans deceptively branded those as “partial-birth” abortions in 1997, and 70 House Democrats voted against their party to ban them. President Bill Clinton vetoed the legislation, but his successor, George W. Bush, signed it into law in 2003.

[If abortions become illegal, here’s how the government will prosecute women who have them]

With Trump, the GOP has revived its old strategy of playing offense. Trump, like Romney, didn’t seem to have any strongly held opinions about abortion before running for office. He once called himself “very pro-choice.” But instead of running as a moderate on the issue, he capitalized on the inflammatory “Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts” narrative, also promising to defund the family-planning provider, to “punish” women who have abortions once they’re made illegal, and to fill the Supreme Court vacancy with a justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal until viability.

The strategy appears to have helped: Strong support from evangelical voters was integral to Trump’s win, despite his otherwise apparent lack of religiosity or Christian morals. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for him — a margin higher than for previous Republican nominees. They were also an outsize part of the electorate in 2016, making up 26 percent of all voters while only 17 percent of the population.

Their enthusiasm paid off in a big way, with two new antiabortion justices on the Supreme Court. Trump and Republicans have failed, so far, to defund Planned Parenthood, despite many conservative congressmen listing it as their top legislative priority and Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress for two years. Trump did reinstate the “global gag rule” on abortion and allowed states to defund Planned Parenthood, but then lost control of the House by a landslide in 2018.

Now that the Planned Parenthood controversy has died down, and Trump has safely tipped the Supreme Court against abortion rights, Republicans need a new way to ratchet up the base’s energy on the issue and paint Democrats as extreme. It’s not easy to do: Polls consistently show that roughly two-thirds of Americans support Roe v Wade. The Democratic Party’s stance on abortion is squarely within the mainstream.

The GOP, meanwhile, is moving further and further out to the margins on abortion, passing hundreds of laws that chip away at abortion rights and that are designed to pick legal battles. Legislators in 41 states have introduced more than 250 abortion restrictions in 2019 so far — a 65 percent increase over last year. Three states have passed legislation that, if allowed to go into effect, would ban abortion at just six weeks gestation, before many women even realize they’re pregnant. John Kasich, the former Republican governor of Ohio, vetoed a similar bill in 2016 for being too extreme.

Brazenly gunning to overturn Roe, a broadly popular legal precedent that prevented women from dying in unsafe procedures, is not going to win an election for Republicans. But if they can refocus national attention on the image of a baby born alive in a failed abortion, they could change the debate from being about a woman’s body, her health and her rights to being about an infant. The woman disappears entirely.

Democrats already blocked the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act in the Senate this year, united on the message that it’s a disingenuous political ploy. But expect Republicans to continue to find ways, until November 2020, to keep the issue alive and topical. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) used a procedural move to try to force a vote on the bill in the House last week, making a lot of noise about the issue on Twitter and trotting out a woman at a news conference who claims to be an abortion survivor.

Senate Republicans can keep holding votes and scheduling hearings on the issue as many times as they want. This will force vulnerable Democrats and all of the senators running for president to talk about why they won’t outlaw late-term abortion. A conservative PAC is airing attack ads against Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) for voting against the Born-Alive bill, claiming that she “opposed medical care for babies.” Trump will do the same on a debate stage.

Democrats should refuse to play along. Allowing Republicans to set the conversation around abortion, and then getting caught up in overly technical explanations about third-trimester procedures, as Northam did, is a political trap. They should stick to the point that women and their doctors, not clueless politicians, should be making personal medical decisions, and that increased access to contraception and sex education is the only proven way to reduce abortions. The U.S. abortion rate hit an all-time low, after all, when Obama was president.

This is an interesting article. She is correct about the Republican strategy, she is wrong about the response. The Republicans are claiming to take the middle ground on abortion, and are painting the Democrats as extreme.

The vast majority of American voters, both women and men, support restrictions on late term abortions. The Democratic base is opposing every piece of legislation that has any restriction up until delivery.

Of course the Alabama bill was a big Republican mistake, and pro-life leaders from Trump to Pat Robertson have distanced themselves from it. Americans don't like extremism from either side.

In the coming 2020 elections you will see the Republican party painting themselves as the reasonable moderates and the Democrats as extremists. And you will see Democrats acting like extremists. This is what Neptune's article is saying.

(see https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-views.aspx)

This is only a debate in countries where religious extremists are allowed to dominate.

It's a non issue everywhere else. You're not moderately pro choice Max. You're an extremist who wants to control women's bodies and the fact you dub normal people who are just standing up for their rights extreme shows how much of a fascist you really are.

If I understand correctly, elective abortion in England is allowed until the 24th week of pregnancy.

This isn't the pro-choice extremism we have in the US.

In England and Wales (and also in Scotland, whilst Northern Ireland has one of the strictest abortion laws in the European Union).
For medical reasons it's in England and Wales (and Scotland, I think) beyond the 24-week period.

The only extremists are the ones trying to control women's bodies.

I'm sure 70% of voters in the South felt that Jim Crow laws were fine. Likewise, 70% of those Southern voters in the run-up to the Civil War probably felt that slavery was perfectly acceptable. Maybe 70% of German voters felt discrimination against Jews was acceptable before WW2. You might find that 70% of voters are in favor of institutionalizing discrimination against Muslims today.

Civil rights are not based on polls. It is the purview of the privileged and entitled to play politics with someone else's civil rights.

Actually there are two extremes.... One is trying to "control women's bodies" the other is comitting a "genocide on unborn babies".

Most people are somewhere in the middle.

How do you know which side of history you are on, Engineer?

Maybe your views on ending the lives of unborn babies will proved to be wrong. You are suggesting that humans can be wrong. Assuming that you are human, you should accept the possibility that your ideology might be wrong.

Comparing people who disagree with you with Nazis seems a little extreme.

You're the extremist, painting pro choice as something else. You're like Goebbels in that respect.

Cutting and pasting other posters, that's about as original you get.

The point is that this is only an issue in countries where religious extremism is allowed to dominate.

So much for the land of the free and the separation of church and state.

Anyone who's supposed to believe in those values, as apposed to parroting them mindlessly, should be outraged by this.

That's the ******* point!

Deciding your ethics based on popular opinion seems extreme to me. You say your opinion is right because it is in the majority and not going with the majority is "politically stupid". It's interesting that you took my comments to the Nazi extreme since I didn't use that term at all. I said a majority of Germans before WWII would have approved of the oppression of Jews. In your thinking that would mean that the politically astute thing to do would be to back that opinion. That's how you got the rise of the Nazi party.

This made me chuckle. Izzy compared me to Goebels.

Those would be the same people that took control of your children's bodies? Islam gets no better when those girls turn into women. You should not speak on the subject of women you watched being raped while your authorities did nothing.

So, CJ, how many of those rape videos did YOU watch?