Have you heard? Republicans are having trouble with women! And for some reason, taking their reproductive rights away and getting a full-on Stepford Wife to deliver a State of the Union response like a high school sophomore reciting Emily’s final monologue from Our Town in an audition for the role of Reno Sweeney in a community theater production of Anything Goes … hasn’t helped. Weird!
Over the last year and a half, the American people have made it abundantly clear at the ballot box that they very much do not want abortion to be illegal. Every time they’ve been offered the opportunity, they’ve chosen to keep it legal or elected those who would. So now, Republicans are starting to get real worried that those people might not want to elect one of them to lead the country if abortion is on the table — which it very obviously is.
On Monday, The Hill published an op-ed by one Sarah Chamberlain titled “How the GOP can stop alienating women over abortion.” It is perhaps the 73rd article I’ve read on the subject since the issue started losing them elections. They’re all the same. Sound less like misogynistic sociopaths! Maybe support some health care things for women and children so that our maternal mortality rate is not nearly three times higher than Canada’s, and, of course, repeatedly note all those leaks about how Donald Trump just cannot stop telling his advisors how very importantly he feels about exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.
Chamberlain writes:
With the eyes of American women upon them, Republicans are once again in danger of sending the national conversation about reproductive health spiraling out of control and putting the party at risk in the November election.
Let’s hope!
Chamberlain worries that stories like that IVF ruling in Alabama or the Texas supreme court trying to force Kate Cox to risk her health giving birth to a fetus that won’t survive will make people think twice about electing Republicans. Which they should!
The Alabama and Texas Supreme Courts failed scores of would-be parents in their states. But this goes beyond two state court rulings. Countless American women have been failed by a conservative movement and Republican Party that doesn’t know how to talk about — much less deliver solutions for — their genuine healthcare concerns.
I don’t know how to break it to you Sarah Chamberlain, but there aren’t magic words spoken in a magic voice that will make “We want to take your reproductive rights away” sound more appealing.
It’s also unclear how Republicans will deliver solutions for anyone’s healthcare concerns unless those concerns take the exclusive form of “tax breaks for pharmaceutical companies.”
This has been a consistent problem for years, but has gotten markedly worse in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The Roe compromise, in place for a half-century, was far from perfect. For instance, it was read by many as potentially allowing for abortion up to the moment of birth, which far-left legislators took advantage of in order to loosen restrictions on late-term abortions (something most Americans oppose).
No, it was never read, by anyone as “allowing for abortion up until the moment of birth.” That was a thing Donald Trump said by accident in a debate one time and y’all just went with it and started pretending that it was true.
In point of fact, those “late term abortions” are specifically meant to keep what happened to Kate Cox from happening to anyone else. Abortions that occur after the traditional point of viability are those where either the life or health of the mother is at risk or there is a fatal fetal abnormality.
At its best, the pro-life movement, a mainstay of the American conservative coalition for decades, has been animated by compassion.
No.
If conservatives can recalibrate our side of the conversation about women’s healthcare to one rooted in compassion, and informed by our traditional respect for privacy and individual rights along with a pro-family stance, we can reach more Americans and alienate fewer.
If your side were rooted in compassion and respect for privacy and individual rights and a pro-family stance … you would not be coming for anyone’s abortion rights.
Conservative women are doing the work to lead this dialogue in a more productive direction. Commentator Ann Coulter wrote bluntly: “The prolife movement has gone from compassion for the child to cruelty to the mother (and child).” Nikki Haley urged greater compassion and humanization of the abortion debate on the campaign trail. Former Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway returned to her roots as a pollster to advise congressional Republicans to focus on improving access to contraception. Rep. Young Kim (R-CA) sponsored legislation to provide more resources to moms and babies facing substance abuse disorders.
Just gonna say, we have seen the face of the “Compassionate Conservatism” … and it did not end well.
Nice words are nice, birth control is nice, “resources” are nice … but there’s really no pleasant way to say “We’re going to force you to have a baby you don’t want” or “Sorry, but the doctors are going to have to wait until you go into sepsis before we can do anything about your miscarriage.”
[F]ormer President Donald Trump has privately floated the idea of backing a 16-week ban on elective abortions, with the three traditional exceptions — rape, incest and saving the mother’s life — firmly protected. The New York Times reported that Trump rejects potential running mates who don’t support the “three exceptions,” telling advisors “that Republicans will keep losing elections with that position.”
Don’t you just love how politicians are always secretly very firmly telling their advisors about all the things they’re definitely not actually going to do in real life?
The conservatives trying to take back control of this issue don’t expect to get much recognition of their effort from Democrats or a media ecosystem bent on pushing polarization for votes or clicks.
Let us recap “their efforts” to date, shall we? Not opposing birth control, which is already legal (except for those of them who still oppose birth control and want that to be the next frontier), making abortion less accessible to those of us who live in states where we still have reproductive rights, and, of course, talking about trying to sound more compassionate, which is helpful to exactly no one.
And just for the record, there are a whole lot of people in this media ecosystem who will fall all over themselves praising any Republican — regardless of their actual voting record — who says anything that sounds even moderately based in reality. A Republican acknowledging that the world is round, vaccines do not contain mind-control microchips, and that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen could get standing ovations for weeks.
What the GOP fails to understand is that making abortion illegal was very appealing to a lot of people … so long as it never actually happened in real life. In the hypothetical, it worked fabulously for them. People liked talking about how very much they loved babies and sneering at the idea of women supposedly “using abortion for birth control” — which, may I just note, would be absurdly expensive. In the hypothetical world without abortion, all of the bad girls would stop having sex and learn to take some personal responsibility — or, if they were forced to have a child against their will, would ultimately be grateful for that and for their attendant redemption arc.
But the real, non-hypothetical world without abortion looks nothing like that. It’s messy. It looks like a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio having to travel out of state to have an abortion, it looks like a Tennessee woman having to ride in an ambulance for six hours to get an abortion to save her life, it looks like an Idaho woman having to go through a miscarriage for 19 days, it looks like Kate Cox being told that the state of Texas will force her to give birth to a dead baby despite the risks to her health.
It looks like the 13 other women who are currently suing the state of Texas after being denied abortions after their pregnancies went wrong. The one who was told to take antibiotics and pray when her water broke at 19 weeks, the two women who were told that one of the twins they were each pregnant with had severe abnormalities and wouldn’t survive and that only an abortion would save the life of the other twin, the woman who was forced to carry a fetus for months that had no chance of survival, the woman who was forced to wait until she went into sepsis for a second time and lost one of her fallopian tubes as a result.
In short, it looks like a fucking nightmare — and that’s not something that sending an Edible Arrangement or whispering sweet nothings of compassion in anyone’s ear is going to change.
PREVIOUSLY:
“The prolife movement has gone from compassion for the child to cruelty to the mother (and child).”
Did she specify when that happened? because I was protesting in the 1980s and those compassionate "pro-lifers" were bombing clinics, shooting doctors, and screaming at women that they whores and sluts and going to burn in hell. So I don't recall a time when they were aligned with compassion.
Yo Sarah Chamberlain, maybe a good place to start with your outreach to women should begin with not trying to get a legally liable rapist back into the White House?