Ohio, these days, is a solidly red state. And yet, yesterday Ohioans went to the polls and approved an abortion rights initiative by 57-43%. What gives?
The answer is simple, but maybe not obvious. Last year Ohio passed a law (currently in court) that bans abortion after six weeks. This is effectively a complete abortion ban since most women barely even know they're pregnant by then—and it's very unpopular. Nationally, huge majorities think abortion should be legal during the first 13 weeks of pregnancy:
This number might be a bit lower in Ohio, but I'll bet it's still well over half. This means Ohio voters had only two choices:
- Abortion banned after 6 weeks (effectively a total ban)
- Abortion generally legal at all stages of pregnancy, but can be restricted after fetal viability
Many voters might not have thought either of these choices was ideal, but they still had to choose. And given these choices, they chose to make abortion generally legal.
If conservatives were willing to pass laws that banned abortion only after the first trimester, I'll bet they wouldn't be losing so many referendums. But they aren't. And they're learning, to their regret, that even fence-sitters prefer mostly legal to mostly banned.
I would have to say, it's no one's business but my own so let's try to keep politics and religion out of my uterus.
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+1,000 Not interested in having someone else's religion dictating any aspect of my life. I giggle with glee every time one of these conservative bans fails at the ballot box. Sure, give abortion back to the states, where it can be enshrined into the state constitutions by the voters.
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Why are so many people reluctant to look around? Canada has had no abortion laws, and fully taxpayer funded abortion, for nearly forty years, but none of the horrors the anti-abortionists persist in predicting have come to pass.
because it's not about concern for fetuses, it's about control and christian cultural religious supremacy.
Canada? That Satanic Land of gun control, universal health care and the metric system?
Don't forget "and legal cannabis".
Ohio's voters just legalized recreational marijuana, too.
Plenty of rightwing types love their pot too.
If conservatives were willing to pass laws that banned abortion only after the first trimester, I'll bet they wouldn't be losing so many referendums.
Don't be so sure about that. The results in VA yesterday suggest otherwise. In his attempt to flip the House of Delegates, Gov. Youngkin was leaning heavily into a prohibition on abortion after 15 weeks, safely beyond the first trimester, Not only was he unsuccessful in flipping that chamber, the Dems flipped the other.
Beat me to it. The 15-week thing was supposed to be the "sweet spot" that wouldn't turn off the (apparently imaginary) "middle-of-the-road voters."
BUZZZZT!
Voters don't like BANS. They certainly don't like the word "ban," and they don't like what they perceive as bans, even if some softer word it used and/or it's fuzzed up with lots of qualifications that they (rightly) perceive as window-dressing for what is effectively a ban.
Republicans, however, don't seem to be getting the message, not even after Wisconsin, Kansas, Montana, and now Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania. So as the man said ... "please proceed!"
Voters don't like arbitrary bans which take away existing rights, especially when they are implemented by the fiat of a handful of angry privileged old men.
the voters likely suspected a possible bait and switch on the 15 week thing
youngkin can't force the legislature to do anything, and if they had won yesterday they'd feel like the pressure was off and just ignore the whole thing, hoping the courts would impose the more restrictive ban
and without the amendment they would have been free to rescind anything they did pass any time they felt like it
Exactly.
Josh Marshall:
The results in VA yesterday add to my doubts about that NYTimes poll folks have been panicking about. Youngkin was supposed to be the sunny conservative rounding off the rough edges and not scaring suburbanites. The mainstream press went all out promoting this idea and they were all wrong.
It is also worth noting evert time the subject arises that a first trimester rule, or any other partial ban, is ideologically incoherent. The argument has always been that a zygote is fully human, with all the rights appurtenant thereto. Various implications arise from this assertion. The people making this argument don't want to contemplate most of these implications. The one that interests them is that therefore abortion is murder. How does allowing abortions, but only up to some arbitrary point, fit in with this? (Or, for that matter, allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest.) It doesn't. If all abortions are murder, it does not make any difference when in the pregnancy this occurs. Any compromise intended to make someone appear moderate actually converts the entire argument to "We, the party of freedom and limited government, want to impose this restriction upon some people." We should not be surprised that few find this compelling.
after 50 years of right wing vitriol and court packing, they end up with this amendment which is basically the roe framework
fox would never admit it, but roe's sliding scale was always the 'compromise' between personal autonomy vs the state's interest
Josh Marshall compares Republicans and abortion bans to moths and a flame.
Yeah, something like this. They don’t really care about this topic, it is just a talking point for them so they easily one-up each other. At some point if you are not for a total ban you are just a squish. There was no reason for this, just competitive nonsense.
Republicans know that this is one area that gets certain portions of their base out to the polls. I think most of them are fully squishes on the subject, but their voters are not and they need those voters. Anti-abortion voters will reliably show up and they are a safe passage for getting to the real agenda of tax cuts.
Evangelicals and conservative Catholics have been single issue anti abortion voters for so long that the GOP has no strategy for changing their position that won’t alienate this crucial part of their base. I guess they thought they could milk the issue forever (like immigration) since it was protected by RvW. So along comes Trump who is clueless about the game republicans have been playing, and he gives the fundies what they always wanted! So now at the state level they have no choice but to follow through on 40 years of promises, which has of course created AN EVEN LARGER single issue, totally pissed pro-choice voting block who’ll believe absolutely not a single word the Republicans say. And if they implement ANY compromise laws that are not very close to total bans, they will turn their single issue anti abortion base into a very angry enemy.
It is an incredibly personal decision, with a wide range of potential risks and complications and issues that have to be factored into the decision. This is why we had Roe and Casey, and why bother were compromise decisions: because it's just too personal an area for government to get involved in. Banning abortion means putting some women's health and lives at risk. It means taking away the autonomy to make the best decision for their health.
I'm not saying there can be no restrictions, but each restriction impacts women, many of whom have health concerns that go beyond "Do I want to have this baby?" And the more restrictions and limits and bans you have, the more women you put in that position.
Some people may express dismay on second trimester abortions (90% of abortions occur the first trimester when the zygote is smaller than a coffee bean) but I think setting an arbitrary number like 15 weeks sounds judgmental and sanctimonious. That’s why the Roe viability standard was considered a compromise: state involvement at the time the state can claim an actual and not a potential interest. IOW I don’t think politicians like Youngkin will be able to find a way to split the baby in half. Either you allow abortions or you don’t, everything else is noise.
Viability cannot be the standard. Lots of things happen during gestation that will result in a horrific birth (skull being crushed) or a life of only a few hours/days/weeks. Those things don't show up until later in a pregnancy. People can get their undies in a twist all they want over babies with Down's or other deformities but it isn't their life. You cannot demand that parents continue a pregnancy that's going to impact their lives like that. People who do continue are goddamn saints, but not everyone is a saint. It's not your choice to make for them.
As you probably know, the Ohio amendment covered that.
The legislature is allowed to ban abortions after viability, but there is an exception if the life of the mother or the fetus is at risk. This is decided only by the woman and her health care provider.
The problem Republicans have with the compromise approach is that no one believes they will stop there or that their compromise will have robust enough protections for health/life after the cutoff. Republicans had a chance to implement their dream legislation, and they drastically over-reached public opinion.
The problem is that except for Virginia (at least right now) the entire South has draconian abortion laws.
Of those states, only Florida and Mississippi allow for voters to vote directly on the issue, but Florida requires 60% +1 for passage, and Mississippi is a disaster.
The Mississippi laws requires signatures from five Congressional districts, and due to reapportionment, Mississippi only has four districts. The Mississippi Supreme Court, in a mind-boggling decision, said tough, you still need signatures from five districts.
If conservatives were willing to pass laws that banned abortion only after the first trimester,
No. No. No.
Kevin, this is just nonsense, and you should know it.
1) Many fetal defects cannot be detected till around the 20-week ultrasound. That means a 15-week ban would be forcing women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. Haven't you read the many horror stories about just this situation?
2) Conservatives will never stop at 15 weeks. Their ultimate goal is a total ban from the moment of conception, with a (reluctant) exception to save the woman's life. Voters are beginning to catch on to this.
You need to stop falling for disingenuous (and outright lying) conservative messaging regarding this subject.
You haven't actually contradicted anything he said. He is not arguing that the best law would be one that banned abortion after 15 weeks, or that it doesn't make much difference if such a law passed. It was just a day or two ago that Drum had a post arguing that the Ohio referendum is stronger than people are saying and that he hoped it would pass in the stronger form.
Nor is he arguing that Republicans will actually settle for a 15 week ban.
Instead he is essentially defending an earlier post in which he argued that America's position on abortion is not really pro-choice or pro-life. Since the results of yesterday's election seem to support that the country is pro-choice, he is defending that earlier post by arguing that yesterday's results are a result of the Republicans not offering what people actually want.
The results in Virginia seem to undercut his argument. Although it is hard to be sure since the vote in Virginia wasn't directly about abortion. And it could well just be the result of the fact that Virginian is a blue state that had an unusually Republican year in 2021, the only election in the Trump era that Republicans managed to distance themselves from Trump. Which is to say that it will be hard to directly test Drum's view, although what evidence there is doesn't seem supportive. Although I guess it turns on whether one trusts polls more than votes.
I think the bills Republicans have passed in the states they control have stripped them of any credibility when they try to offer compromise bills now. Everyone knows their base wants full bans and will push for those if Republicans get enough power.
Does this not obsolete your post about abortion being opposed from a while back?
Actually this is meant to defend that post. He was responding to the perception that post-Dobbs we have learned that people are pro-choice and argued that the polling suggests that people are somewhere in-between pro-life and pro-choice. The results of yesterday's election has been taken to support the view that people are actually pro-choice, and this column is meant to show how it is still true that people are somewhere in between. Maybe there is the added concession that given a choice between pro-life and pro-choice people will go pro-choice. But the idea here is to still defend the idea that the winning line is in-between.
It's all Taylor Swift's fault!
"Taylor Swift, I think she put up one voter registration link and she registered millions and millions and let's just be honest, all the Swifties want is swift abortion. That's what they want. It's 100%."
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/meltdown-over-election-results-charlie-kirk-attacks-taylor-swift-all-swifties-want
You know, Ohio also legalized recreational marijuana.
VA elected democrats to prevent Youngkin from doing a 15 week ban, so I think you’re wrong that abortion as an issue would disappear if only Republicans would do 15 week bans instead of 6.
This is much more complex an issue than just picking a number of weeks and seeing how many abortions occur before that time.
As many have pointed out, amnio is typically performed between weeks 16 and 20, and some eventually fatal defects show up later than that. Many couples want to avoid having a child with those defects.
Eclampsia can hit at any stage of a pregnancy. Not being a doctor, I assume that delivering a baby can be performed once the fetus is past viability, but I don't know that for a fact, and viability is probably around 24 weeks anyway.
Are there exceptions made for life of the mother, health of the mother, age of the mother, rape, incest? How is the health exception phrased? Sometimes there are so many restrictions on the health exception that it requires great suffering before they can be used. Sometimes a rape exception requires a timely rape report filed with the police, which often doesn't happen.
For example, if the woman's doctor performing the abortion is the person who certifies that an abortion is necessary to preserve the health of the mother, it's a lot clearer than if the law is written in the passive voice, where conceivably a prosecutor can second guess the MD. And a lot of red states wrote these laws in the passive voice, explicitly to add uncertainty to the exception.
Are there other constraints on getting an abortion? PA is typically viewed as a pro choice state, but even we have stupid waiting periods that make it more expensive for someone to get an abortion outside of their home town.
This is a complex situation, and many men and women recognize this. That's why maximum flexibility in the laws is best. It's pretty much impossible to get a truly elective abortion post viability anyway.
It's interesting that the guys who were arguing against abortion rights in the thread a couple days ago have not shown up in this one. I wonder what might have happened to make them shut up?