What next? I have been somewhat optimistic, that we will have a few years, perhaps a decade, of wrangling at the state level about where the lines should be drawn. I will predict anger, extremist rhetoric, and accusations of bad faith on both sides, but would have said in the end it will come down to a collection of uneasy truces. I was basing this on the everyday people on both sides that I know who are not extreme in nature, however strongly they feel about most issues. I often tend to just write off advocates as fundraisers and speechifiers, useful for what they accomplish, but not representative of the views of their movements as a whole.
Sometimes I'm wrong about that, and this may be one of those times. David French's essay over at The Dispatch "Roe is Reversed and the Right Isn't Ready" suggests my estimation of the pro-life temperature may not be as good as I thought. He would know far better than I. He is seeing an amount of anger, extremism, and willingness to be punitive than I see in real life or where I visit online. Yet I tend to hang out with reasonable people as much as possible, so that may not be a good sample.
Slight change of topic: He relates the arguments to others from the right recently, including vaccine avoidance and resistance to even such minor inconveniences as masking. He quotes a Brown School of Public Health estimate that being under-vaccinated cost us over 300,000 deaths. You are welcome to have a go at where the study is wrong, and public health educators do tend strongly to claims of how much good intervention will do. But still, it's a big number, even if you cut it down to size, yet we still have people on conservative sites insisting that the vaccines killed more people and refusing all information they don't like.
If we want to insist that some things are worth the risk - a sentiment I would generally agree with - we at least have to be honest about what the risks actually are, in number of pregnancies not terminated, elderly people exposed to disease, immigrants entering illegally, all of it.
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I hope that the democratic process produces a reasoned, just set of conclusions on the subject of abortion. I'm not part of the "Pro-Life Movement" that French knows more directly; and as you know, my reasoning about what exactly is going on with abortion is not widely shared by any part of the public. Heartbeat bills don't make any sense to me, for example; the life process is already underway whether or not the heart has started beating (which, I learned just a few days ago that the cardiac cells start operating before they have technically formed a heart anyway; a 'heartbeat' is detectable without a heart, oddly enough). I don't share the sentiment that the child becomes more worthy of protection later in the pregnancy, and less earlier; that doesn't make any sense to me, but people do seem to feel that way pretty broadly.
Still, I hope that we can work out ways to protect women's lives -- only a very small number of abortions are medically necessary to save life, but some number are. We should, I think, save the life that can be saved in such cases. There are corner cases too where I would tend to err on the side of providing care, e.g., Lupus medicines that also double as abortifacients should not be kept away from people who need them for Lupus.
I've seen estimates of 13% fewer abortions per year once we get through all the states banning it that want to and other states protecting it; though with abortion sometimes running north of 600,000 a year, ~13% gets you 300,000 more Americans every five years (and more quickly if the actual rate of reduction is greater than the 13% forecast). That's a big number of children we'll need to educate and absorb.
My good friend who is on the other side of this issue says her side wasn't ready either. Alito was, but even the committed activists hadn't really thought through how much would change or how fast.
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