Pro-life loses in Ohio

“On Tuesday, Ohioans voted 57 to 43 percent in favor of adding a sweeping right to abortion to their state constitution.” - N.Review

Discussion

As someone who is personally on the "further right" of the GOP, what I'm taking away from this is that there are two major issues going on.

First, the pro-life movement (of which I am a part) is overestimating the degree to which the public is ready to ban abortion. They're OK with after viability, not so sure with at six weeks.

Second, the general election results seem to indicate that a lot of moderates are uneasy with the degree to which Trump is running the GOP. A lot of candidates lost in winnable districts, and one of the unifying factors is that a lot of them were linked too tightly to a guy facing multiple legal actions, and who is also being a lawyer's nightmare client in doing so.

Solution; for abortion, one needs to be satisfied with smaller victories. For example, can conservatives reduce or eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood and the like under the notion that it's wrong for the left to force pro-lifers to fund them, even for things like birth control and referrals for pap smears and the like. This is key because the economics of abortion simply do not work--outside of big cities, you will not have enough abortions to keep a full time ob/gyn on staff and fund the facility he needs.

End public funding, and you've immediately restricted abortion to big cities and maybe a few D1 college towns. That's huge.

Solution regarding Trump; be thankful for the good things he did, but admit that his recklessness is a liability that makes moderates uneasy. Distance one's self from that.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.

I find it interesting that after the overturn of Roe, abortion is less restricted now in many states than it was with Roe. Ohio, my state, just opened the doors to abortion whereas before it was significantly restricted.

So, perhaps overturning Roe wasn't the "big win" everybody hoped it was going to be.

The problem, as Bert mentioned, is that the majority of Americans support abortion access. Until that changes, Christians will continue to lose on this issue.

Speaking of losing, I suspect the Republican party overlords will get wise to this and will de-emphasize abortion in the near future. Just like gay marriage. So, it won't surprise me to see more pro-choice Republicans get the nod in the future.

As I've been saying, the Republican party is about winning, not abortion or other issues important Christians. They will do what needs to be done to win elections.

Some perspectives…

5 reactions to passage of Ohio Issue 1 enshrining abortion right into state constitution

One of the more interesting phenomena of our current political dynamic is how both parties keep overplaying their hand. In two impeachments, Democrats overplayed their hand on the charges brought against Trump. (Not that the outcome would have been any different, probably.) On the right, leaders keep overplaying their hand on abortion. There are other examples, though I’m not quite awake enough to recall them at the moment.

I just keep reading news items and thinking, “If you’d asked for half of that, you might have gotten it. What are you guys thinking?”

As for Ohio: Yet another example of the limits of what can be achieved coercively. If the culture isn’t there, you’re not going to fix it with laws.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.