Consider that the Democrats want no restrictions on ultra-late-term abortions. I think there's plenty of blame to go around here.
Note: I say this as the grandchild of someone who attempted to abort my mother after being raped by my grandfather. My grandmother's life was basically ruined when she was forced to marry her rapist after the then-illegal abortion failed. My mother, and transitively, me, would not exist had safe, legal abortions been available in 1940. Even with this intensely personal connection to the abortion issue, the issue has zero influence on how I vote. It boggles my mind that those with almost no personal connection to it let it influence their votes to the degree that they do.
1. Few people are killed by cops. Does that mean the issue isn't important?
2. Abortion rates are higher than you probably realize. For example, in NYC over 1/3 of pregnancies are terminated [1]. And that's after it's been getting better. There are on the order of a million abortions every year, depending on how you count. You know a lot of people that have had terminated pregnancies. They just haven't told you about it.
3. Is it fair to be a single issue voter? If your perfect candidate in every other respect also planned to take away the right to vote from Native Americans, could you vote for her? Of course not.
The reason it's a controversial issue is because both sides see it as a human rights issue (like universal suffrage).
pro-choice:
* Women deserve autonomy
* They don't deserved to be punished and have their lives ruined due to mistakes and oversights in birth control
* Women are intelligent and deserve the benefit of the doubt about when abortion is a good choice or not
* Government should support women and their goals in their healthcare, not dictate their lives
pro-life:
* Unborn humans are humans, too, and deserve to be recognized as people with rights
* This is literally a civil rights issue on the order of importance of slavery, suffrage for women, or black civil rights
* Erring on the side of not killing is the right way to balance 'choice' with 'life'
* Bodily autonomy has limits in extreme circumstances (having sex in public, taking illicit drugs, wearing seatbelts)
* The sexism argument is a red herring. Half of children are women, and the most vocal pro-life proponents tend to be women as well.
Additionally, the pro-life side has procedural objections since there was never a democratic process for expanding the right to abortions. I agree with this point, which means I blame the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade for all this animosity.
[1] http://nypost.com/2014/02/17/abortion-rate-plummets-in-new-y...
If there's no reasonable way they could push that pet issue of theirs through (because the rest of Congress would just call them an idiot) then sure, why not?
It's sort of like the think/say distinction ("you can't get in trouble for thinking"), but taken another few notches further: politicans shouldn't really be judged for what they say they'll do, or even what they appear to attempt to do knowing they'll fail—only what they're likely to actually use power granted to them to accomplish.
Most candidates, once in power, are effectively centrists. With presidential candidates, there's the moderating influence of Congress and the Judicial system; but even with individual Congressmen or Senators, once they attain their positions, they're sitting atop a hierarchy of (technocratic) policy advisors that tend to—when all advising in the same direction—override the boss's personal preferences. If all your employees, all your lobbyists, and all the think-tanks say to do X, you're going to do X, even if you (and your "base") would rather do Y. (Which is why we call the thing the President heads the Executive branch: the President isn't much setting policy, they're effectively just executing policy decisions arising from the entirety of the D.C. strategic intelligence community.)
Thus, most candidate positions are postures: things said to signal allegiance to certain voting bases, in full knowledge of the fact that those promises will never (be allowed to) come to pass. Posturing is PR: a big machine which gets set aside when the election is over. And thus, posturing should be ignored—given no weight—when trying to predict the value of electing any given candidate. The candidate's posturing—their PR—has no predictive value on what they'll really accomplish when handed power.
If, on the other hand, you can look below the posturing, and figure out what each candidate will really do with power (which is much harder; it involves a lot of looking at who they have ties with and what promises or deals they've made to get power), then you can actually pick a candidate based on how you want the world to look in the future.
Abortion is not a Democrat or Republican issue Don't fall into that lie. The Republicans had the White House and both Houses and did ZERO over the years they had this. The Connecticut Republican Platform is Officially Pro-Choice if a party wants to say they are lying for your vote. With Obama and a divided house the number of abortions are at a all time low since Roe v Wade as well as Teenage pregnancy.
There are 3 Republican US Senators who and 4 Republican Representatives who get 100% funding from the Republican Party. Where I live Charlie Dent is (R) and is Pro Chose and got everyone's backing when he ran against a Pro-Life Democrat. Think that will happen here is we will have a Pro-Life Democrat running for US Senate and he will have zero support from "Pro-Lifers" even though his record is much better then his opponent.
I am a Pro-Life Democrat and we have a Pro-life Democrat Senator and a Pro-Choice Republican. My "Pro-Life" friends supported the Pro-Choice candidate due to the Myth that Republicans are Pro-Life.
They're doing stuff in Texas and liberal groups are suing to overturn the rules. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
If abortion was an issue in the Democratic party, it would have come up in the debates. Not a single question in the Democratic debates had to do with abortion.
> MYTH = Republicans are Pro-Life
This kind of proves my point, actually. There are many more than two political positions here. You can be mostly pro-choice but think abortion at 8.5 months is a travesty.
You don't want it? Don't do it.
I actually understand the argument. For all the rest of you know, I actually wrote the above response myself (I didn't, but I could have).
The counterargument is that there are absolutely two people involved if a woman decides to abort on her due date. Even in liberal Western Europe abortions must be performed before certain gestation dates.
Now, this sort of absolutism makes a kind of logical sense. The kind that also makes legalization of heroin a defensible position. And there are smart, compassionate people who want to legalize heroin. Just not the President and every candidate in the Democratic primary.
Point being, there's no room for compromise on the abortion issue from the left. We could be talking about eight months versus seven months, what counts as a "medical exception", what forms of enforcement are fair, etc. But we're not. There's absolutely no room for compromise.
Did you mean left? There's lots of discussion on the left about what time limits should be set; or how many doctors you need to persuade; or what conditions could extend the time limits; etc. But from the right there's a blanket "no abortion, ever, for any reason", with fucking stupid comments like "First of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child."
The fact that you brought up a foam-at-the-mouth comment from a disgraced former politician seems like a point for the there's-too-much-partisanship-on-the-left-too column.
There is actually common ground on the abortion issue, perhaps counter-intuitively. There is overwhelming support for reducing abortion rates, for example. The American people would absolutely be OK with a compromise that includes education, increased access to birth control, and bans on abortions after, say, 8 months of gestation.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129580-200-the-worl...
Listening to anti-abortionists you'd think the woman just found the pregnancy inconvenient, when the reality is that the woman is going through an intensely traumatic time and having to cope with the loss of a much wanted child.
I find your selection of topic really interesting. I'm not a US citizen, but I'm on good terms with a lot of smart and reasonable people in US from all the political spectrum, from Bernie to Trump, and I've noticed a curious thing: the issues these people are talking about are different. Even if they are sometimes related (like taxes and government spending), red/blue teams don't make the connection.
When a friend of mine (highly intelligent developer at Facebook, btw) explains why he would vote for Trump, he doesn't mention any of these. He and others like him talk about gun laws, about foreign policy, macro-economics and capital flight.
If both parties weren't as polarized, I think they would be able to come to some compromise about these issues, allowing the adversary to get his way on some stuff that is just not as important for them. But the rhetoric I see is always polarized and absolute. People aren't ready even to ask the question about why would the other side think otherwise and assume good will even for a second. Instead, they immediately conjure racist/anti-american/anti-poor/communist strawmen.
(it presents a very compelling theory as to why people separate into political left and right)
I've taken lately to becoming a Trump contrarian in social settings full of ideological group think which are students I hang out with for an Advanced Calculus by Sternberg and Loomis study group where afterwards the conversations always devolve into politics. Not that I would support any current politician let alone Trump but he was the easiest candidate to find blatant media misrepresentation, and I do find it an interesting social experiment to witness normally friendly people go into witch trial mode for daring to challenge their ideology.
I FORGOT to say minimum wages I just find it crazy that we provide the safety net for low wages for large profitable corporations and that they want to continue supplying workers for them on the backs of tax dollars.
I use to be a librarian and I do a lot of statistical work and analysis but I am not an expert but everything I have looked at that is anti-minimum wage I can usually always trace back the money to corporations or some private entity that feels they benefit from low wages. The Pro-Wealth and down trodden the poor has been going on for centuries and we are doing a better job BUT we can do so much better.
I fail to see the proper small government view of low wages. These people HAVE TO HAVE MONEY so instead of their job paying them tax payers are making up the slack. WIC,Health Care, Food Stamps would go away with higher wages but instead we continue to give the money to corporations.
> I see it all the time though that is anecdotal evidence.
He's saying that he "sees it all the time," but he recognizes that this is only "anecdotal evidence."
All the nation-wide issues that could easily be state issues.