482 Comments
Apr 11, 2023·edited Apr 11, 2023

In 10 years you'll be saying Republicans will always lose if they don't embrace LGBT ideology. We've had decades of non-stop pro-choice promotion by all the most powerful media institutions and we'll have decades of non-stop pro-LGBT promotion.

You have zero sympathy or understanding of the pro-life position. I'm not going to abandon my principles to sign on to your bullshit transhumanist techno-utopia. Block me, whatever.

That said, you're right. This issue will probably cause a massive wave of GOP losses.

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I'm a bit in shock that De Santis is going to sign a 6-week (!!) abortion ban. If he does so, he might as well save his time and energy and stay in Florida. He will have just kneecapped himself nationally, and possibly permanently.

I know Richard says that Americans wouldn't go for a European-style 12/15/16 week ban, and I understand his points, but I still feel like this would at least signal that Ron wasn't a zealot beholden to the fetus fetishists, and would make moderate normies less hesitant to vote for him.

Republicans are the dog who caught the car, and once again be careful what you wish for: they will have achieved their multigenerational goals of banning abortions in the jurisdictions they control, plus unlimited guns everywhere, while Democrats will have to console themselves with a lock on the executive branch, as well as ownership of the entire culture and most of media and academia.

The greatest strength of the Democratic Party by far is the Republican Party.

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Wow, Richard, so well thought out. I’m a mother currently pregnant with my 4th child, and I’m a traditionalist Catholic. And I’m adamantly pro-choice, although it goes without saying that I would never chose this for myself, even under extreme circumstances or risk to my own health

Until Dobbs, I never really thought about how my pro-choice position is completely at odds with my entire belief system. You hit the nail on the head when you write, “women react so strongly to abortions bans is that they have certain intuitions about the kinds of men who want to take their choices away from them in this area of life.” So true. This is a women’s issue, for women to decide.

I appreciate how you were able to put yourself into our shoes when it comes to the risk and vulnerability that comes with pregnant and childbirth. For some women (especially religious women like me), we can’t even articulate why abortion bans bother us so much, but we still have an “intuition” about these men who want to control us and our bodies. Very well written piece, you articulated what most women feel on a gut level

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Religion is conservative wokeness. Why anyone can't see this is beyond me. Belief in truth claims without evidence that stand in for moral values of increasingly niche cultural competitive utility paired with claims of identity victimhood/oppression if asked for evidence before we enslave public policy to said beliefs. And regular people rebel against this kind or moralizing certainty and probably do so at the voting booth while saying otherwise in public.

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Apr 11, 2023·edited Apr 12, 2023Liked by Richard Hanania

As a foreigner, I note that your political parties have no identifiable leaders who exert control over what their candidates can say during political campaigns. In Canada or the UK, if a party leader—that’s the guy who will be Prime Minister if his party wins enough seats in the House of Commons—doesn’t want his candidates to talk about abortion because it’s a vote-loser, he tells them not to talk about it. No one can run on any substantive issue that bucks the official party platform—the leader kicks them off the local ballot. [Edited for clarity:] If an MP goes rogue once elected, he gets kicked out of caucus, keeping his seat as un-re-electable Independent. That’s how Canadian political parties prevent “bozo eruptions” that kill their electoral chances. Unless the GOP can somehow purge the strong pro-lifers, the Dems will have a blank cheque forever to ruin the country.

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Strong whiff of ‘please may I have a crumb of pussy’ here. What makes you such a rank beta on this subject? Now you take marching orders from the likes of Jessica Valenti?

I’m an atheist and opposed to the vast majority of abortions. This is because the murder of children is exceptionally bad. When you say people prefer infanticide to treating miscarriages like crime scenes, this is not convincing. In fact, the rank insanity of this position (even if they were the choices available, which they are not) makes me even more certain I am correct. I am certain about very little. I am quite certain that murdering children is bad.

I don’t disagree, necessarily, that this is the balance of popularity. The popularity of a position is not related to its correctness.

I say this subject requires leadership, true leadership, and a whole lot of innovation. Artificial wombs and surrogacy, plus of course birth control (pre-conception) on demand are the way forward. I don’t know when these technologies will be mature, but it will be one day.

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It's always weird to see a dude be like "sure, you may save the lives of thousands of babies, but you will....lose political power!!", and act like we haven't thought of that.

Like, surely, if we were mongering power, we'd be lefties, yeah? We are not confused about whether rainbow flags or American flags are more profitable merchandise. The grifters who want to make their nut sell pussy hats, not maga hats.

There's always another election, but the left winning doesn't go back in time and kill the kids who escaped the womb. Those lives stay saved, even if the pro death dudes seize power and restart the killing.

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>Whenever I’ve talked to a person who believes this, they don’t try to convert me to their religion but tell me that it is possible to come to agree with them through secular reasoning.<

This shows a profound misunderstanding of the pro-life position, one which I have to assume is willful. Who counts as a human being, and why? Pro-life people believe that fetuses are people i.e. human beings, usually from the point of conception, although I suppose there might be some squishier ones who pick an arbitrary cutoff point at a certain number of weeks (I can't remember seeing any such person describe him or herself as "pro-life").

How people vote on the issue has nothing to do with this question. How women feel about the issue has nothing to do with this question. Whether or not you are religious has nothing to do with this question. The question of who counts as a human being is just as important to the secular as it is to the faithful--or at least, so one would think. People's feelings and votes do not determine truth. You might have noticed that people often vote in favor of complete nonsense for one reason or another.

It is thus entirely possible that abortion is a permanent electoral loser for the right, and yet the right also holds the morally correct position on the issue. It's disappointing that you refuse to seriously engage with the topic by investigating the real question at its core: Who counts as a person and why?

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The main reason I supported overturning Roe v Wade was simply, its terrible law. The supreme court shouldn't have decided what is a political question, and now we are playing 40 years of political catchup.

Stratigcally, it will be an L for the republicans, but overall its having elections on these large questions is what we should have been doing since the 1950s, and NOT having 9 judges ruling from the bench.

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My wife is active in pro-life community. She donates and participates in March for Life, she is active in bottle drives organized by our Church. Pro-life movement is largely a women led movement, and republicans cannot let go of it, because it is one of the only republican ideological position that is still respectable in elite circles other than lowering taxes and regulations. Secondly, I think it can be explained by your article about Women's tears, as pro-life movement is based in pure emotions rather than any logical arguments. My wife's church women's group are so emotional about the millions of innocent babies killed by abortion industry.

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The reason we can't move on from abortion is because there are huge advocacy groups on both sides that have made a living off of abortion for 50 years and don't want to give up the grift. And because politicians know that it will motivate emotional low-information voters to the polls.

I like the example of Nevada, where abortion is legal and has been set in stone. Yet, in 2022, the most all of the Democratic campaign ads and flyers were about abortion. It is just a giant lever and the Democrats and the Republicans can't give it up.

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The irony of the left gaining power by the religious right trying to forcibly save the left's offspring is just nuts. Folks, need to be more Machiavellian.

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"But think that, assuming all goes well, a woman has to at the end of all this lay down, spread her legs, and allow perhaps a dozen or so strangers to spend hours, perhaps days, undertaking a procedure involving the most intimate parts of her body in the most vulnerable moments of her life."

Such a retard country/culture. My wife gave birth to no. 2 and 3 at home, with one midwife, and doula, whose job was mostly just chatting and making tea. And she didn't lay down because that's not how mammals give birth. An underexplored issue is the relationship between support for abortion and having a twisted and perverse relationship to our basic biology.

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You are right that pro-choice on the grounds of bodily autonomy is the morally correct stance, but it is weird to see you engage in the same type of women's tears hysteria that you've already critiqued. In that article you wrote that conservatives like to pretend their opponents are men, because they know what to do against masculine versions of authoritarianism. But don't liberals act the same way with regards to abortion? There is not a significant gender divide among pro-lifers, and female pro-lifers tend to hold more extreme anti-abortion stances. The low status incel man who wants to "punish" women usually stays in their basement and has less influence in the movement than the pro-life female activist who protests and attends marches. Framing the abortion debate as men who want to take women's rights vs women freedom fighters is a cope.

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Apr 12, 2023·edited Apr 12, 2023

Okay, a couple of things on this.

First, I think you caricatured the pro-life position -- particularly the one held by men -- a bit too liberally. This feminist-type hysteria of conservative men trying to "control women's bodies" is beneath you. Also, most these men are pro-life not because they're necessarily low-status (lawmakers, lobbyists, and lawyers aren't) but for the same reason the women in the movement are pro-life: they're just deeply put off by the abortion procedure.

With all that said, the conservatives who cry "eugenics" towards certain pro-choice positions should know that 90% of the reason, I, lifelong right-winger and Republican, am pro-choice is eugenics. The chief reason I'm fine with abortion up until 15-20 weeks is because certain people are much more likely to resort to it than others, and I want fewer of those people around. That's it. The eugenic aspect is the only saving grace to this otherwise-barbaric practice.

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This was very insightful and answered questions I've long had. Such as, why is it that so much of the rhetoric around pro-choice advocacy phrased in terms of stoping men from interfering with women's choices when the pro-life movement is pretty gender equal (and indeed the greater female investment in religion often means they feel more strongly about the issue).

From a strategy POV the problem pro-lifers have is that there is a considerable correlation between pro-life views an a desire to elect male canidates. That's a hard correlation to break given they both are associated with more traditional values but it leads to a huge image problem.

Not one I have any trouble with as someone who is deeply pro-life (other than a few ppl who agree with Singer I'm one of the only ppl I know who supports legal abortion at any time before pregnancy) but it's an interesting political situation.

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