Stanek weekend Q: Better to pass “radical” anti-abortion laws, gradual, or both?
This weekend’s question taps into the re-percolating immediatist vs. incrementalist debate.
In its pro-abortion way, ThinkProgress.org, gets much of the controversy right:
Over the past several years, state legislatures have enacted a record-breaking number of abortion restrictions. That pace hasn’t abated during this year’s legislative sessions, as lawmakers are rushing to pass measures to shut down abortion clinics and create additional red tape for women seeking abortions. But even though the assault on reproductive rights has been steadily gaining ground, there’s one type of restriction that hasn’t been able to win enough support, even among some anti-choice Republicans.
So-called “fetal heartbeat bills,” a radical proposal to cut off legal abortion services at just six weeks — before many women even realize they’re pregnant — are failing in states across the country. Although the far-right abortion opponents who push six-week bans claim that the procedure should be outlawed after a fetal heartbeat can first be detected, they can’t always get their other colleagues to sign onto the effort….
In general, abortion opponents haven’t decided whether it’s better to continue gradually chipping away Roe v. Wade piece by piece, or whether it’s necessary to take a bold stance to ban nearly all abortions….
But so far, anti-choice lawmakers have actually had more success with the first, incremental strategy. That’s largely because radical restrictions like six-week bans, which are obviously extreme on their face, tend to capture headlines and spark outrage — while more subtle efforts to undermine abortion rights are able to slip under the radar.
Yes, there is the problem of political cold feet, such as in Colorado, where Republican U.S. Senate candidate Cory Gardner is backing away from a state personhood ballot initiative similar to those he previously supported.
But there is also the question of strategy. Some pro-lifers believe the U.S. Supreme Court at this point would reject personhood measures or six-week bans. The numbers aren’t there.
Other pro-lifers believe we must step out in faith, and if we do the number of strict constitutionalists on the Supreme Court will pleasantly surprise us if and when such a case lands.
These pro-lifers also say the six- and 12-week bans, and personhood initiatives, educate and persuade the public about the youngest of humans.
And there are yet others, like me, who think we should throw everything at them but the kitchen sink.
What do you think?
Pass a 100% complete ban.
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Here is my perspective as a born-again Christian.
I love and serve a “Radical,” holy God. God does not compromise truth or wink at sin. Likewise, since abortion is murder and at the very heart of Satan (since God claimed him to be the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning), I can only support “radical” anti- abortion laws. I also had much exposure to abortion during the years I served at my local pregnancy care center. I am not here to please the world system but an “Audience of One”. LL <3
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Definitely both. Look, there’s no guarantee that the Supreme Court will uphold anything, so we might as well try everything. If even one law-whether it be radical or gradual- survives the courts abortion will be more restricted than it was when we started this exercise. Also, the more laws we pass, the more time and money the other side spends fighting them. I would much rather their time and money gets used that way than on anything else they might do.
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Abolitionists in the mid 1800s asked the same question — should there be a gradual granting of more rights to slaves, or should slaves be immediately emancipated as “persons” with no hierarchy of 2nd class citizenship?
“Radical” abolitionist William Garrison, who created the newspaper The Liberator in the 1830s, argued there could be no gradual emancipation, that emancipation had to be immediate because slaves were persons. He wrote in The Liberator, “On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation… the apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.”
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Gradual, for the following reasons:
1. A greater chance they will actually pass and have public support. Even bills most of the population agree with in terms of morality- 20 week bans and parental consent laws- can be twisted into something negative and extreme by the mainstream media and prominent organizations. By having distinct exceptions for rape and fetal abnormalities, and imposing restrictions that are “lighter”, so it’s harder to twist it. For example, parental consent becomes notification, 16 weeks becomes 20.
2. We need to improve lives of mothers and babies BEFORE we criminalize abortion, not ban it and hope things fall into place. We need better welfare systems, improvements in foster care, access to affordable healthcare and child care, maternity leave, education on the dangers of illegal abortions. I know illegal abortions were not as common or as unsafe as PP would like us to believe, but as long as we have women in desperate situations- having a dying husband and not enough insurance to cover his treatments, finding out your baby will be severely deformed and believing no one will adopt this child, living way below the poverty line, suffering severe PTSD from the rape that conceived the child- we will have a demand for abortion, even if adoption is an option. We need to create a world where women are able to parent and carry unintended pregnancies to term safely and without too many complications, before we ban abortions.
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This is complicated. We cannot divorce ourselves from the political realities or from the machinations of the legislative/judicial system. The stronger and more restrictive the prohibitive law, the greater the chance of pro-abort challenge and Supreme Court review. Any restrictive law, whether an incremental regulation or a full personhood amendment enacted in a state, has the potential to reaffirm Roe v. Wade for a long time in a Supreme Court predisposed to do so. A satisfactory, reliable, right-to-life-respecting Supreme Court will only be formed if we, through the grace of God, change enough hearts and minds within our country to demand a right to life and ensure a Supreme Court that reflects that right. That is why I see a value to both approaches. The small steps help to change our culture. But, please, as a rape conceived person, I make this appeal: keep the rape/incest exception out of the laws. Such laws are self-negating, impossible to enforce and create a huge, ever-expanding loophole which will eventually lead to court challenges demanding more exceptions based on other hardships an abortion seeking mother may assert, sending us back to square one.
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When it comes to iradicating abortion, the most important work is a matter of hearts and minds. Criminalization might discourage some, but it will not end anything. In order to end the supply, we must end the demand, and that cannot happen in any legislative, executive, or judicial body. The illegality of murder has not wiped murder from the repertoire of human behavior.
When it comes to laws, though, I see some other issues involved. First, I want all people who participate in physiological procedures to be held to the same standards. I want all out-patient clinics held to the same standards. I want all people fully informed as to the procedures and substances they submit themselves to before they consent, and there should be no price attached to that informed consent. Practitioners who foul up their procedures or their contractual obligations should be held responsible for their failures. These aren’t just life issues or women’s issues. These are human rights issues.
As to the humanity and personhood of the unborn, I want our laws to be consistent. We can’t say that a fetus is a non-person in a medical context, but also have laws supporting their right to inheritance or prosecute people who kill an unborn child when they harm the mother. Our laws must be consistent. A big part of that needs to be the popular recognition that defining the status of a human life based on the emotional decision of another person is neither moral, nor logical, nor scientific, nor legal. This problem of popular and legal schizophrenia regarding the unborn is partially a legal issue, but also (again) a hearts and minds issue.
Finally, there is the issue of sovreignty. My chief objection to the Roe decision is that it unjustly robbed state and local governments of their right to regulate medical practitioners (of a certain class) according to the will of their constituents. Likewise it robbed legitimate, law-abiding medical practitioners of their constitutional right to equal protection. When a tattoo artist is held to a higher medical standard than an abortionist who holds a medical license, all the legitimate doctors who are held to a different standard are being persecuted by definition. This is not a life issue, it’s a civil rights issue.
I support incremental legislative attempts, largely because I support states in their efforts to assert their constitutional sovereignty. I support them because I oppose the legal schizophrenia surrounding the status of the unborn. I support them because they help to reign in the persecution of legitimate doctors. I support incremental legislation because it helps the human rights issue of informed consent.
I support radical legislation, because it keeps the argument in the forefront of the American consciousness, and that furthers the cause of changing hearts and minds. I support it, because I support state sovereignty.
But in the legal quagmire, let us not lose sight of the larger issue. Abortion only exists (legal or otherwise) because people–individuals–choose to participate in it. And that is a problem that no law can solve.
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I think we should “focus on” neither. The implication to focus is that we know human hearts and can predict human behavior and can, in a formulaic fashion, map out a course from point A(abortions) to point B(babies!).
Each person should act as their conscious dictates case to case. In one moment this might mean that they sign a personhood initiative but the next time such an initiative rolls around maybe they get a different vibe from the group organizing or their time in prayer and meditation doesn’t leave them with a clear conscious to sign. The possibilities for why someone might support different approaches at different times are limitless… and in asking people to consider each separately and uniquely prompts all of us to constantly re-understand our position and examine our actions.
I think it’s unreasonable to lay down two options in front of people and tell them they must pick one now and stick with it. That’s kinda what’s gotten us into this trouble to begin with.
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I agree with you to a point Lrning, but I do worry that’s how the movement gets fractured (not that we’re all that particularly organized anyway, lol) and we don’t get anything done overall.
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To me there is no controversy about the approach that needs to be taken. The approach should not be the immediate or incremental approach, the approach should be implementing both approaches simultaneously! We should never forget the power of the coordinating conjunction “and.”
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*Laurie, not Lrning. I can’t read.
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Although I view the immediatist approach as noble being one of those old-school Roman Catholics I have to agree with Jim Noble. Pro-life has to be a realist movement rather than - as Jay Rogers argued on the other thread – view Roe as illegitimate. It weakens the Pro-life position to approach affecting change without consideration to the realm we operate within.
Do we compromise our ultimate goal of ending abortion in the US? I disagree. In my opinion, the all or nothing approach has proven to be a dead end more often than not.
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I was in the noble mode there. I am sorry. I agree with Jim Sable…
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We need to train our side to stop cowering to compromise. The left, with all their anger, lies & false testimonies, can be very intimidating. There is no compromising with evil. Compromising with evil always benefits evil. Most incremental legislation doesn’t even save any lives. The average abortion rate is still 1.2 million despite thousands of incremental laws passed by the states. The only reason abortion rates dropped slightly was because of the legalization of the abortion pill 14 yrs ago. If we used all the effort it took to pass thousands of bills & put it to use in the right place, we would of stopped abortion a long time ago. I will give you an example. When PersonhoodUSA 1st got on the ballot in Colorado in 2008, they got 27% of the vote to ban ALL abortions with NO EXCEPTIONS. 2 yrs later, the same Q got 30% of the people to agree with this “radical ant-abortion law” In 2012 it was blocked from getting on the ballot by the attorney general because they were so successful. Imagine if they got a net gain of 3% every 2 yrs? This has to be the most successful pro-life effort I’ve ever seen. PersonhoodUSA hits the streets & reaches the general public with ballot questions. It is the cheapest advertisement & reaches more people than the mainstream media. In the halls of congress we are at a disadvantage because the left ALWAYS dominates the debate & the media blocks our voice. PersonhoodUSA bypasses them & is definitely onto something good. In fact Planned Parenthood said, “Everytime PersonhoodUSA puts on a ballot Q we have to waste valuable time, energy & money fighting it.”
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DLPL, I wondered if that was me…
Fractured is a state of humanity. I don’t see that we’re going to avoid. Even if there were only a single legal approach, we’d still find things to fervently debate.
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Defenders of Women, you speak essentially against compromised incremental pro-life endeavors and argue about their futility in saving women’s lives. I have several concerns regarding your analysis. Let me begin by taking a cue from your moniker. At the very basic level, we have side-walk counselors. Surely you realize that “saves” occur one woman at a time. So you’d assert that hitting the streets is somehow more effective than what a sidewalk counselor does? How is this jive with the claim you make in your moniker? Does that one woman saved from an abortion mean nothing to you? She will you know, change her perspective because of that side-walk counselor and she will pass it forward.
Change is always incremental. That is its very nature. Legislative changes stem from incremental shifts in people’s ideologies. In order to accomplish our ultimate goal of ending the practice of abortion, we cannot discount small victories in the paradigm shift of life-affirming changes in policy because they can and do increase exponentially.
Putting the cart before the horse is not wise….
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What do I think? I think you intentionally misunderstand the issue, Jill Stanek. But I have no idea why. You propose a straw man. There is no “immediatist” vs. “incrementalist” controversy. The disagreement is whether we should have laws that explicitly state an exception a compromise — a law that states in so many words — “… and then you can kill the baby.”
The debate is between principled incrementalism and compromised incrementalism.
Also, you misunderstand Personhood’s position on Roe. Our goal is not to challenge Roe, but to ignore it as illegitimate. It’s a fallacy to say that a Supreme Court case needs to be overturned to counter injustice. Dredd Scott was never overturned. Roe will likely never be overturned either. But that is not how abortion will end.
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Most incremental legislation doesn’t even save any lives. The average abortion rate is still 1.2 million despite thousands of incremental laws passed by the states. The only reason abortion rates dropped slightly was because of the legalization of the abortion pill 14 yrs ago.
Please provide support for these claims.
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To: Thomas R.
I’m not against incremental “Change” I’m against incremental “legislation” full of compromises w/ pro-abortionists. Sidewalk counseling is a good example of long, hard work with positive results. However, if a more effective means becomes available we should also put an equal amount of effort into that. For example, when I started a full-time pro-life campaign, reaching youth BEFORE they got into a pregnancy situation, they all listened to me by a tune of 90%. Once in a great while you run into a crazed drug crowd or a post-abortive youth, but this campaign of mine helped “pick off” women in front of the clinic easier because the seeds were planted & we had a record number of saves that yr in front of the clinics & it was TWICE the amount of saves(120 babies) as the average yr saves(60 babies).
It is wrong to support pro-life legislation that allows the legal killing of babies for rape etc. Rape allows enough loop wholes to make all abortions legal. See Abby Johnsons excellent article on lifeSiteNews last week about how Abortion clinics tell all their Staff & patients to just say it was rape if abortion becomes illegal. In addition, if that isn’t practical reason enough, ask yourself if God would ever aprove of legislation that ends with; “…& then you can kill the baby”? Jesus said, let your no mean no & your yes mean yes. & we teach by horrible example when we gutlessly say, “We support this compromised legislation.” Sorry, friend, but we tried it the devils way the last 41 years. Are you surprised the devils way never panned out?
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To: Navi,
The 1.2 million abortions reported every year in the USA do not include medical or chemical abortions, i.e. the pill, only surgical abortions. When RU486 was legalized in 2000 that was when the surgical abortion numbers began to drop because they were being replaced by abortions by the pill which do not go reported. The clinics want to get every women to have an abortion by the pill but they can’t because many women don’t realize they are pregnant until after the legal gestation( The pill can only be administered up to the 6th week). The surgical numbers come from both the CDC & the Guttmacher Institute(a Planned Parenthood Affiliate). In other countries, like France, which introduced the pill much earlier than the USA, the most women they could get to use the pill was 30% of all abortions. That has been statistically true everywhere the pill is-only up to 30% of all women who had abortion can be put on the pill. In America, you see that the surgical abortions have dropped about 30% & no more. It is not because less women are having abortions. It is because more women are using the pill.
The Partial Birth Abortion Ban saved no lives because it didn’t ban 3rd trimester abortions, what it did was ban that particular procedure. Abortions in the 3rd trimester are a small % of all abortions performed anyway. So that is an example of incremental legislation that does not save any amount of significant lives whatsoever. In Texas, when they passed the Womens Right To Know Law, to get around it, all the clinic had to do was come up with a thick book of information with no pictures & hand it to her just before the procedure, knowing she will never have time to read it.
In Massachusetts, when they passed a Parents Consent law, the abortion clinics, in order to get around it, would send the girl to court for a judicial bypass. A recent report by the Pro-life Legal Defense Fund found that over 99% of these cases(called Mary Moe to protect her identity) were granted in favor of the girl having the abortion- saving next to no lives.
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RU-486 abortions are included in Guttmacher’s data. See:
Jones, Rachel K., and Kathryn Kooistra, March 2011, “Abortion incidence and access to services in the United States, 2008,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 43(1):41-50
From the article, “Unless otherwise stated, all abortion data presented include both surgical and medication abortions.”
The abortion rate fell the most between 1990 and 2000 (which corresponds with the introduction of several state-level incremental laws):
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/graphusabrate.html
The Partial Birth Abortion Ban didn’t directly save any lives, but that doesn’t make it insignificant. It was an important victory in the court of public opinion. Pro-life advocates showed the American public a particularly horrific form of abortion, and abortion proponents fought tooth and nail to keep it legal. The public decided they did not want to sanction it, and the pro-choice side permanently lost ground. And at the Supreme Court level, the majority of the justices ruled for the first time that a specific procedure can be banned – even without the “health” exception required by Doe v. Bolton. This considerably weakens the standard set by Roe v. Wade and paves the way for lawmakers to test new forms of pro-life legislation.
The Women’s Right to Know Act was updated in 2011 so that an ultrasound is required 24 hours prior. There is also evidence that parental consent laws (especially those that require consent from both parents) do reduce abortion rates among minors:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/02/analyzing-the-effect-of-state-legislation-on-the-incidence-of-abortion-among-minors
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa054047#t=articleBackground
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“I’m not against incremental “Change” I’m against incremental “legislation” full of compromises w/ pro-abortionists.”
So what you are saying Defenders of Women is that you want to close your doors just like AHA promises to do if they do not achieve their goals by the end of this year? The way you’re going, you will compromise everything you stand for and come away with nothing…
All of us in the Pro-life movement are against rape exceptions, we just disagree on the strategy how to get there. Some of us don’t want to be cornered by the all-or-nothing approach.
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TO: Thomas R,
There is no “all or nothing approach” with me so please try & refrain from presumptions. I’ll take what ever works & will drop what doesn’t work. We know that compromised legislation doesn’t work as 41 yrs of experience screams out at us to that fact. We know that the whole fight against abortion circles around whether the unborn life is any lesser value of a born life. We know millions upon millions have believed abortion is ok just because it is legal. We know that many pro-lifers have even succumbed to the pressure & aborted. I know of at least 1 who was a sidewalk counselor & then aborted & then got angry at her fellow pro-lifers &then became a pro-abortion activist. We know of the tremendous pressure unscrupulous pro-abortion doctors place on unsuspecting women with threats to abort “or else you shall surely die!” When you allow exceptions for rape, you are strengthening the mentality of all these myths that the unborn is “lesser”. Even if that legislation sounds like it will save the majority of unborns, it really won’t. Show me 1 time when it did or when the pro-aborts didn’t exploit a loophole. I don’t know how naive you are because I don’t know you, but I, for one, would never trust someone who kills babies for a living to follow the letter of the law. If you make exceptions for rape suddenly every woman seeking abortions is going to be labeled a rape case & then the whole mentality of aborting unborns are going to be deemed as ok by the next generation, if they think they have a good reason for it. It is the mentality of “it’s not born yet” that we are fighting. The whole battle of abortion circles around the question of how much value the unborn has; equal or less than us. How many times have you heard of a great pro-life activist act like a 3rd trimester abortion is worse than a 1st trimester one? A lot, right? I rest my case.
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TO NAVI:
On the 1st link your data comes into question because both the CDC & the Guttmacher I. are 4 yrs behind in the releasing of abortion statistics. This has always been the case. The source you use, Wm. Robert Johnston , has stats up to 2014. 2014 isn’t even 1/2 over yet & I’ve never heard of Robert Johnston. I’m not saying you are being fraudulent, but could you please explain this discrepancy & who the Wm. Robert Johnston company is?…
I like the Womans Right To Know Law. I may disagree with other pro-life heros who rightfully refuse compromised legislation, but, like I wrote earlier here; “MOST incremental legislation does not work” because it forces us to compromise with evil & that, in itself is evil.
Here is where the Right To Life organization has done more damage to the cause of pro-life than many pro-aborts, by teaching us, their members, that we can’t pass pro-life bills if we think the court will strike them down. For one, it is possible to pass a pro-life bill, have it challenged by PP & have PP lose, then PP takes it to the Supreme court & the court can simply decide not to hear the case, meaning the pro-life legislation stands. Also, some pro-lifers act like Abortion is “settled national law” When it is not & any state can over turn it by a simple passing of a law. The corrupt left pass laws against the constitution all the time, separation of church & state laws, gun bans, taking of unborn lives, etc etc all these things have no right to even be voted on when they are protected rights, but the left doesn’t care because they dont follow the law. So, I ask you; why can’t we challenge laws that challenge our lawful rights? If we foolishly think that the court said we can’t pass pro-life legislation(I mean the good kind to ban ALL abortions) than we are cowardly, little brainwashed sheeple who don’t deserve to call ourselves Americans & we put our ancestors to shame who died fighting for true freedom for God. If we cower here & believe the states can’t ban all abortions, because “the supreme court said so” then I seriously question if we are even good enough to call ourselves Americans. Here’s what you wrote that set me off: “…& paves the way for law makers to test new forms of pro-life legislation”. WHAT? Please consider the constitutional folly you wrote here & ask yourself if you are not walking right into the pro-aborts trap that they WANT you to have the mentality that you can’t fight back! Also note that RTL is on public record as saying they fought tooth & nail against other pro-life legislation, like PersonhoodUSA because, “It will cement abortion rights in the courts forever” Anyone who says that should NOT be leading a pro-life group. Definitely not!
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I believe his data is compiled based on some sort of weighted average of CDC and AGI data. If you don’t like that source, you can visit Guttmacher’s website to get their data (click here, select Abortion -> abortion rate -> US total):
1978 – 27.7
1979 – 28.6
1980 – 29.1
1981 – 29.1
1982 – 28.6
1984 – 27.9
1985 – 27.8
1987 – 26.7
1988 – 27.2
1991 – 26.1
1992 – 25.6
1996 – 22.3
1999 – 21.3
2000 – 21.2
2004 – 19.6
2005 – 19.4
2007 – 19.4
2008 – 19.3
So slightly different numbers, but they still make the same general point (that abortion rates declined significantly in the 1990s).
Compromise means that both sides make concessions, or that both sides permanently accept standards that are less than desirable. It’s not compromise when one side organizes a massive march in Washington D.C. to protest the new law. Nor do pro-lifers have any plans to stop limiting abortion after they experience some legislative success (and our opponents know this full well). It’s no more a compromise than gaining 10 yards in a football game is a compromise, or Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (a federal order that left slavery legal in some Union states) was a compromise.
For one, it is possible to pass a pro-life bill, have it challenged by PP & have PP lose, then PP takes it to the Supreme court & the court can simply decide not to hear the case, meaning the pro-life legislation stands.
That would require judges in the right places making the decisions we need them to. In real life, most judges rely heavily on legal precedent set by higher courts. Prior to Gonzales, the precedent was something along these lines:
After Gonzales, the legal precedent is more like this:
(see http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/220690/face-over-partial-birth-abortion/edward-whelan )
I think it’s obvious which legal climate is more likely to uphold future pro-life bills.
From what I see, the political left puts forward new bills they think are most likely to advance their agenda the furthest at the given time (otherwise known as being rational). They don’t just put forward the most radical legislation possible (irrespective of its long-term survival prospects) and hope that it passes. Likewise, it isn’t cowardly or immoral for pro-lifers to pass incremental bills rather than going for a Hail Mary pass every play. It’s doing the most good we can (making an impact rather than a statement) with the political power we have right now (which is limited by the judges in the courts, the composition of the legislative bodies, the man that sits in the Oval Office, and the attitudes of the voters).
Nobody that’s pro-life seriously thinks abortion is settled national law. They think there’s no silver bullet that will end legalized abortion over night, based on the reality of the current situation, but that we can still use legislative tools to save as many lives as we can while simultaneously working to gradually change the legal and political climate to one more suited to protecting unborn children.
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To DoW:
What Navi said!
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