The New "Pro-life" Movement Has a Plan to End Abortion

[ShazzieB]

And it doesn’t care if American voters don’t agree with it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/04/pro-life-anti-abortion-roe-mifepristone-pill-ban/673763/

The unpleasant reality facing the anti-abortion movement is that most Americans don’t actually want to ban abortion. This explains why the pro-life summer of triumph, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, led to a season of such demoralizing political outcomes. Voters in Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky in November rejected ballot measures to make abortion illegal; just last month, in Wisconsin, voters elected an abortion-rights supporter to the state supreme court.

Yet the movement’s activists don’t seem to care. Thirteen states automatically banned most abortions with trigger laws designed to go into effect when Roe fell; a Texas judge this month stayed the FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, setting in motion what is sure to be a drawn-out legal battle; and some lawmakers are pursuing restrictions on traveling out of state for the procedure—what they call “abortion trafficking.”

*snip*

Hawkins [president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life] is realistic about the fact that her movement’s progress has a ceiling. Some states, especially the liberal strongholds of Illinois and New York, are never going to go for the kinds of laws that she’s pushing for. This is when, she says, her organization will shift its emphasis to the federal government—pushing for a constitutional amendment that would recognize fetal personhood, or for a ruling from the Supreme Court to affirm that the Fourteenth Amendment already does.

*snip*

Yet American culture seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The Dobbs ruling, though exciting for anti-abortion activists, was so enraging for abortion-rights supporters that, in some places, they responded by enshrining the right to abortion into state law. These and other political losses suggest that the pro-life movement is already overreaching—and generating a backlash. “It’s breathtaking to see people so motivated and so well funded to push an agenda that is so incredibly unpopular,” Jamie Manson, the president of the abortion-rights organization Catholics for Choice, told me. The months since Dobbs have exposed a fundamental tension between the outcome that abortion-rights opponents want and the one democracy supports.

Yeah, who cares what Americans really want? Who cares about democracy? Not these sanctimonious crusaders! Their goal is for abortion to become “both illegal and unthinkable” (direct quote from the article) throughout this country. They are swimming against the tide, but we can't afford to let our guard down for a second.

By the way, that bit about about how they think the Fourteenth Amendment may already recognize fetal persohood is absolute codswallop. The Fourteenth Amendment, which defines the rights and privileges of US. citizenship, begins by stating that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States" are citizens thereof. There's not much I would put past the current SCOTUS "originalists," but its really hard to see how even they could redefine that very clearly worded statement to apply to the so-called "pre-born."

Cross-posted to General Discussion.

[niyad]

1. These insane woman-haters will stop at nothing to achieve their objectives.