Legislative efforts in Missouri and Mississippi are attempting to prevent voters from having a say over abortion rights
Legislative efforts in Missouri and Mississippi are attempting to prevent voters from having a say over abortion rights, building on anti-abortion strategies seen in other states, including last year in Ohio.
Democrats and abortion rights advocates say the efforts are evidence that Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents are trying to undercut democratic processes meant to give voters a direct role in forming state laws.
“They’re scared of the people and their voices, so their response is to prevent their voices from being heard," said Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. “There’s nothing democratic about that, and it’s the same blueprint we’ve seen in Ohio and all these other states, again and again.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, voters in seven states have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to curtail them in statewide votes. Democrats have pledged to make the issue a central campaign topic this year for races up and down the ballot.
It’s not even that.
It’s an emotional attachment to the idea that the right of the fetus trumps the rights of the pregnant person. It’s a fundamental difference in the way abortion is viewed.
For Republican voters (not the politicians), it’s a problem with fetal murder. It very much is not about bodily autonomy. They really see abortion as murder.
The politicians on the other hand… They likely see it as a way to control women and garner easy votes and therefore power.
Which has never made the least bit of sense to me. They don’t seem to realize that if you let the mother die, the fetus dies anyway. There’s no situation where preventing an abortion and just letting the mother die somehow saves the fetus.
Every anti-choice person I know, including myself in my younger, conservative years, is on board with exceptions to save the life of the mother. Many also in cases of rape and incest (though not all). I don’t claim to know a representative sample, but I do vaguely recall polls showing that almost everyone supports abortions to save the life of the mother.
I think the problem in the “mother’s life” part lies with the politicians who see this not as a moral issue, but rather as a tool to control the evangelical vote. They don’t actually understand it or care, they just want to control the population so they can remain in power, and don’t want nuance. They also craft laws that make it very difficult for hospitals and doctors to know whether they are protected, so they refuse the procedure. This is probably also on purpose.
Not that I in any way agree with the anti-choice crowd. I just want us all to understand where we are coming from so we can better address one another’s arguments.
I disagree with this part a bit. The evangelicals had no problems with exceptions for rape or life of the mother. I could be wrong here, but I don’t think they had much of an issue even with fetal anomalies not compatible with life.
It wasn’t until Trump came along that they suddenly took up issue with the exceptions. And that’s because Trump took the party in a direction where the answer to everything was just “Ban it”, and when people started asking the obvious questions about how everything was supposed to work, the only answer they had was “Ban that too. And that. And that. And ban that as well, just in case.”.
Remember, the current war over LGBT rights started off as a fight over bathrooms in schools, and then just spiraled out of control because of their mantra of banning whatever they don’t like and anything even tangentally related to it, and then banning more when people point out loopholes. The war over abortion was a stalemate for decades until Trump came along and introduced the same nuke-it-from-orbit tactic. The southern border. Everything. That’s how things are handled now in the Republican party. If you don’t like it, ban it. And if something else exists that creates a loophole, ban that too. And if that breaks something else, well then ban that too.
This isn’t about controlling the vote. This is about being pulled to the right in a party that will not accept anything but being pulled even further to the right. Yesterday’s reasonable exceptions are today’s political weaknesses.
Yeah i just don’t even think it’s that. They’re so beculted that they just do what their friends and family do, no questions asked. Obviously.