Over Performance Issues 🫣

There's a new push to get abortion-rights initiatives on 2024 ballots in battleground states of Arizona, Nevada and Florida as well as Republican-dominated Nebraska and South Dakota.

Conventional wisdom says the abortion movement (more properly the “get your ass out of my doctor’s office” movement) is fired up by the idea a “right” has been taken away.

Which means middle-class white people finally know what it's like to be a black or brown (or just non-white) person in America.

But I think the real reason is a subset of that.  Because the "pro-life" argument that wasn't the fringey "abortion is MURDER!" (now represented by MTG, who wrote a long Twitter thread after Election Day claiming abortion is not a medical procedure but simply "murder."  This is where the "abortion up to birth/after delivery" comes from.  Desperate times, desperate measures.), was always "rape/incest/life of the mother."  Before Dobbs, that "argument" didn't really matter, since it couldn't be employed.  After Dobbs, people can easily see what a tissue of lies it is.

No doctor, hospital, or clinic is going to perform an abortion "to save the life of the mother" or "due to rape/incest", without a court ruling on same.  By the time that's adjudicated, the fetus is an infant.  No one is going to perform an abortion on those "grounds" because the threat of prosecution, civil or criminal, is too real, and creates too much uncertainty, as the medical personnel (in Texas they would be charged as criminals) would have to wait years to get to court to defend what they did.  And who practices any profession just to explain themselves to a jury over and over and over again?*

So the reality of abortion restrictions now hits home; not just because an abstract "right" was taken away, but because of the very real, very simple, consequences.

If my (adult, married) daughter got pregnant and a medical condition meant the pregnancy endangered her life, I'd drive her myself across Texas to New Mexico (what, I'm going to Louisiana, Arkansas, or Oklahoma?  Are you nuts?) for the abortion.  But I shouldn't have to.  I've seen women have troubled pregnancies, I know abortion is a medical procedure sometimes necessary to save the life of the mother (or just for her healthcare), and I don't understand why the state has a compelling reason to interfere in, and review, and criminalize, that decision.  Period. 

I add the "period" because even Roe gave the government the authority to intervene in abortions in the last trimester.  I would scrap that, too, because the camel's nose gets under the tent with "save the life of the mother" exceptions even then.  And frankly, if some individuals want to have abortions as casually as others have cosmetic surgery (for no reason except vanity, in the latter category), then let them.  It's a small price to pay so the more responsible (!) among us can have full access to the healthcare we might deem necessary for our health.

I think taking Roe away with Dobbs has fully revealed that to people who, before Roe, only thought of abortion as something "sluts" did because they "couldn't wait for marriage."  Or were, you know, just "sluts."  A lot has changed since Roe, IOW, and that decision was a major reason for the changes.  So, no, it's not wrong to argue Dobbs took away a "right."  But I think the reaction to it from the right has been the problem that is really producing the response.

Or maybe the people are "over performing" in their support for abortion access.  I really gotta figure out what "over performing" means in this current political context.

*Yes, lawyers, but they aren't parties in the cases.