In the first, “In Post-Roe America, Nikki Haley Seeks a New Path on Abortion for G.O.P.,” we learn that
“We need to stop demonizing this issue,” Haley said at the first Republican debate. “It’s personal for every woman and man. Now, it’s been put in the hands of the people. That’s great.”
No, it’s not just “personal.” It is societal. Moral and ethical principles exist, and they aren’t principles if any individual can reject or ignore them as everyone shrugs and says, “OK! Different strokes for different folks!” That’s how we end up with mobs shoplifting at Walmart with no consequences. Is theft right, fair, acceptable and ethical, or is it wrong and damaging to society and humanity? Is that a hard question? No?
Great! Now lets do killing growing human beings.
The Times, naturally, quickly establishes itself as a flack for “choice,” writing about Haley’s search for “an anti-abortion message that doesn’t alienate moderate Republicans and swing voters,” because, presumably, anyone who isn’t a radical, extremist Republican will be alienated by advocating anti-abortion policies that treat abortions as they should be treated: legalized killings of human beings. Those who won’t recognize abortions as what abortions are—the word “kill” doesn’t appear anywhere in the Times news story, nor is there any reference to ending a life or lives—either haven’t thought very deeply about the matter, don’t want to, or won’t admit to themselves what the issue is. For example,
Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster, doubted whether Ms. Haley could square her “respectful and middle-ground, compromise approach” with a decade-long record of “actually not doing that when in office.” Republicans, she said, have far to go before voters will give them the benefit of the doubt on the issue. “Those candidates trying to walk back their previous positions on abortion look incredibly political and non-trustworthy,” Ms. Murphy said. “Their credibility is so low on this issue that voters just fundamentally believe Republicans want to ban abortion.”
Ethically and morally, how is legalizing abortions when the birth doesn’t genuinely imperil the life of the mother a “respectful and middle-ground” or “compromise” approach that can pass any ethical system without setting off sirens? Kant held that using another’s life as a means to an end was per se unethical. “Reciprocity” fails, obviously: would abortion advocates be supportive of their own mothers aborting them because their births would be inconvenient and a career handicap? Or are a half-million aborted babies every year in the U.S. just the price of equal opportunity? The ends justifies the means: brutal utilitarianism.
Here is a Republican showing that ethics don’t matter, just votes:
Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for governor in Michigan last year, warned that Republicans would lose the messaging fight over abortion again in 2024 unless they adopted a stance similar to Ms. Haley’s that is more focused on compassion and finding common ground. Ms. Dixon lost her own race after facing a barrage of Democratic attacks over her opposition to abortion, including in cases of rape or incest. “Democrats are trying to make anybody who is pro-life the enemy of women,” Ms. Dixon said in an interview. “It felt so good to see a strong, caring woman come at this message from a personal and loving perspective.”
How can saying that conservatives, Republicans and people who care about core moral principles like the sanctity of human life should advocate just enough abortions of unborn children to win elections be called “caring” and “loving”? Caring about what? Certainly not the half-million unborn who die each year—votes, I guess. “Loving?” Who and what is being loved? Not innocent nascent children. Power, then.
The Times article ends with this depressing quote:
Betty Gay, a Republican former state representative, praised [Hayley’s] approach.
“I think abortion is a horrible form of birth control, but there are some circumstances that require it,” said Ms. Gay, who was still undecided about the primary but does not plan on backing Mr. Trump. “I don’t want either of the extremes.”
Now ask Ms. Gay what “circumstances” require an abortion. I bet she says rape and incest. How are the offspring of rape and incest less deserving of a chance at life than any other children? Is ending the lives of babies with birth defects required? And what are “the extremes”? How is holding that once a human life is created that, without interference, will grow and develop into a viable embryo, baby, child and adults, that individual’s life should not be ended unless another life is preserved as a result?
Abortion is an easy topic for some people because the public debate is so dishonest and avoids the real issues. Abortion is a difficult topic for American society because of cynical and shallow people like Nikki Haley and distorted coverage of the issue by news sources like the New York Times.
The second Times article exhibiting an ethics void is “Abortions Rose in Most States This Year, New Data Shows.”The tone of the article is either “Yippee!” or “Nyah nyah nyah, you misogynists and those Supreme Court Nazis couldn’t turn the country into “The Handmaiden’s Tale” after all! The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision over-turning Roe v. Wade never took sides in the abortion debate at all, nor was it seeking to reduce the number of abortions. Roe was bad law, and Dobbs did what should have been done decades earlier. It’s a state matter, and SCOTUS returned it to the states. But from the Times we get…
“You have two forces at work,” said Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, who reviewed the Guttmacher report. “On the one hand, you have people trapped in ban states, and, on the other, you have people in a whole lot of the country where access has improved.”
Trapped! Nobody is “trapped” is a state: if the most important thing in a woman’s life is to have sex without being accountable for the life sex might create, then go to some place that matches your priorities. People who wanted to hold slaves to make a profit in crops and other businesses could move from free states to states that allowed slavery too—same thing, and ethically similar as well: human life was inconveniently and unprofitably respected in those states they were “trapped” in. Myers then reveals that increased access to opportunities to end the development cycle of living human being is a wonderful thing.
The article gives no hint that the topic is life and death. The Times says, “Altogether, about 511,000 abortions were estimated to have occurred in areas where the procedure was legal in the first six months of 2023, a review of Guttmacher’s data shows, compared with about 465,000 abortions nationwide in a six-month period of 2020.” Wait, doesn’t that mean about 46,000 more unborn children died? Why is the focus on the procedure rather than the human consequences?
You know why.
Here’s another revealing passage:
“Travel doesn’t come without a cost,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at the Guttmacher Institute and the lead researcher on the institute’s report. “Just because someone isn’t denied an abortion doesn’t mean it was an easy experience. And we know that some can’t leave their state.”
By all means, let’s make sure ending the life of an innocent human being is cheap and easy. Best to make sure the mothers think as little as possible about what they are doing too, I assume.
Ethics Alarms 
Because fathers of teen girls say so…and they vote.
Here is an example of pro-abortion logic.
“My body my choice” completely ignores the industry of coerced abortions.
Should parents be able to force an abortion on a minor without the consent of the patient? Medical privacy laws clearly state in many jurisdictions that discussions regarding reproductive health are privileged to the patient as young as the early teens. Do abortion advocates support procedurial safeguards and social support for women who wish to defy coercion here? What _about_ cases of incest where the goal is killing the “evidence?”
Had anyone even thought to ask the poor young woman who became a pawn in the debate shortly after the decision, or did the whole media, political and medical apperatus just make that life-defining decision “for her own good”?
Funny how abortion fanatics are always interested in protecting women of color by helping them kill their, wait for it, children of color. It’s basically genocide. Ironic, non?
I’ve come to the conclusion that, with some exceptions, but generally, women genuinely feel being able to produce a fetus and having to house it for nine months pop it out and care for it indefinitely entitles them to terminate same. It’s an apparently primordial or Freudian and completely irrational phenomenon.
There simply are not many politicians willing to right off half their electorate.
Or even write them off!
If there is ever a return to moral integrity in this country, history will not judge us charitably on this issue. Legalized abortion on demand will (deservedly) rank as a national shame that makes others pale by comparison.
Unfortunately, it is not just pandering politicians that parse their criticisms of murdering the unborn. It even extends to our churches. Several years ago, when the abortion toll to date was estimated at fifty-two million killed, my church prepared a display of 52 small metal crosses, half painted pink and half painted blue, which were displayed in a side yard that faces a prominent local road, along with a pro-life message on a sign. When we removed the display, we offered it for use by other churches in our area that we thought might be interested in promoting the pro-life message. First the offer was made to other local churches with which we have long-standing cooperative relationships. No takers. Then we made the offer to our county denominational association. No interest. Finally, we contacted a local multi-denominational ministerial association and were again rebuffed. Privately we began to hear from other churches’ clergy and some parishioners that while they agreed with our message, they didn’t want to risk offending members of their congregations who had undergone abortions. (My skeptical side wonders if those clergy aren’t more concerned with possible reductions in the offering plate.) So apparently in the eyes of many in the church, confronting people with the reality of sin is off limits. Good to know.
This is certainly not the only current moral issue on which the churches are failing in their responsibility to condemn evil, but that’s a discussion for another day.
The first handful of verses from II Timothy 4 came immediately to mind when reading your response. You probably thought of them as well.
What I heard Haley saying was that she opposed abortion, but that it needed to be addressed at the state level. She is bold enough to say — correctly I believe — that there is no chance in the foreseeable future of getting 60 votes in the Senate to pass a federal bill. She doesn’t address the thought that such a bill pro or con is very likely unconstitutional per the Dobbs decisions. Of course if you can’t pass such a bill it’s moot point.
There is certainly ground that Republicans can stake out on abortion that would be in tune with what the American public will support. So far they haven’t done so effectively and have consequentially lost to the Democrats who have succeeded in pushing an extreme position as ‘reasonable’.
That’s what the GOP needs to do and having leaders call for a nationwide law that can never be passed is not helping.
No matter what the ethical position is, the American public/electorate is not going to allow a ban.
Diego Garcia,
“She is bold enough to say — correctly I believe — that there is no chance in the foreseeable future of getting 60 votes in the Senate to pass a federal bill. She doesn’t address the thought that such a bill pro or con is very likely unconstitutional per the Dobbs decisions. Of course if you can’t pass such a bill it’s moot point.”
She doesn’t address the thought that such a bill pro or con is very likely unconstitutional per the Dobbs decisions? No. It is unconstitutional under Dobbs! That is the whole point of Dobbs! It’s not a moot point. Every federal politician should state, when the occasion arises, “under Supreme Court precedent, there is no role for federal legislation on this issue.”
Then, I just thought of one: federal funding of health services (like the Hyde Amendment).
But, any politician who wants to pass federal abortion legislation should be mocked mercilessly. These people are used to having power and power tempts its own use. They need to be reminded that they don’t have it.
-Jut
Bingo.
I’m not a lawyer, but yes I don’t see how a federal abortion bill could pass constitutional must after Dobbs. Part of my point was that we will never have occasion to test that because neither party has or will have the votes to pass such a bill.
I think that for GOP candidates to advocate such a thing today is totally playing to that segment of the Republican party. The problem is that those voters are almost always going to vote Republican anyway. As a strategic matter, Republicans don’t need to be advocating things that will lose them votes in the general election. It’s not like we have plenty of votes to spare.
Haley saying there will never be the votes for a federal bill is a decent start. It may annoy some Republicans, but I think it doesn’t alienate voters in the center whom the Republicans absolutely have to win over. It is why Democrats aren’t honest about what they want regarding abortion. Saying they want abortion on demand up to the moment of birth will also alienate those gettable voters in the center.
As a Republican, I am tired of losing to what I refer to as the evil empire. I want us to win these elections, and it just makes me angry to see politicians put a gun to their own head.
“No it’s not just personal.” Well, she didn’t say ‘just’ personal. An issue can be both personal and societal, and one or the other can be seen to have (and to actually have) greater importance than the other, and that is one of the areas where a substantial ethics issue lies. What is the ethical demand for an individual and what is the ethical demand for society? And, saying it’s in the hands of the people is saying that it is societal.
“Now lets do killing growing human beings.” We as a society have determined over and over again that killing human beings (at times) serves a greater good. In our legal system, we have a death penalty. In warfare, we attack civilian populations killing innocents with only a bit of regret. We tolerate things we could avoid and that we know will result in death. Mostly, we have left it to government to decide for all of us what killing is and what killing isn’t justified.
“Republicans and people who care about core moral principles like the sanctity of human life”. Well, sanctity implies a religious belief, and we have a custom and a principle and a fundamental law that, in the USA, neither religion nor the religious dictate to us.
“Abortion is a difficult topic for American society because of cynical and shallow people like Nikki Haley”. In a world that demands 100 per cent acceptance of an ethical belief, every politician who does not subscribe will be seen as cynical and shallow. But, politicians have to live in the world of the possible if they are to have any impact; they cannot live in the world of idealism unless that idealism is accepted by 100 per cent of the population. So, no. Abortion is a difficult topic not because of this or that politician, but because of everywhere where people are free to consider and discuss it.
“if the most important thing in a woman’s life is to have sex without being accountable for the life sex might create”. Well, shades of someone in NJ who has said repeatedly and seems to believe that about the nature of women. But, it is not a stretch to believe that men, far more that women, desire to have sex without being accountable for the human life that might result. And, being male, and having had both sex and children, I know for sure who has it easier. Single parents are about 80 per cent female and 20 per cent male. So, let’s not kid ourselves about who is failing accountability.
For me, the issue of abortion is much more societal than personal, and as much as I lean toward states’ rights, I don’t believe this issue can be left entirely to the states. All men are created equal and have an unalienable right to life. Agreed. Now, we as a society have to decide what ‘all men’ actually means. Pretty sure the term now includes women. But, does it include a zygote, or an embryo, or a fetus? Well, we haven’t decided that as a society, have we, and Haley’s comment in the so-called debate helps to bring that question to the fore.
Looks like I’m being stymied by Word Press or a spam filter or something. Frustrating. I’m on the verge of shouting at no none in particular.
This speeds right through, but not my more thoughtful and less cynical comment. Hmmmpphhh!
I’m sorry. But it’s up now. Thanks.
Thank you, Jack. A mystery to me why it happens. Seems to be mostly device independent (more likely with the tablet, less likely with the laptop) but no rhyme or reason.