They are welcome to not have abortions- they still don't get to impose that on other people, particularly when for most of those people (not all, but a lot) it's a front. They have just as many abortions as anyone else. They simply justify to themselves that there case is an exception. You wouldn't believe some of the stories I've heard of women in the abortion clinic asking to not have to sit with "those other women" and one even telling her doctor he should be prosecuted for what he was doing - to her. And more tellingly, as they are taking away abortion rights with one hand they are taking away assistance for women and children with the other. They don't actually care about babies or their other actions would reflect that. All their laws are targeted at women, not at the men who ejaculated irresponsibly and caused the pregnancy. That's where a lot of the up in arms rhetoric comes from - because the people making these laws very clearly don't actually care about babies.
As I've already said multiple times, there is nothing wrong with expressing an opinion about methods for navigating this topic that you feel are more productive, more effective, take into greater account the feelings of others, but that has to be done with empathy and understanding. People who have been dehumanized don't want just a little bit of their humanity back and they are unlikely to accept that as sufficient or a good start, or what have you - even though that seems logical to you. As I said before about 2% of thought is conscious and cognitive. The rest is taking place in what is functionally the emotions - the subconscious places that stem from childhood experiences and indoctrination, stereotypes, cultural narratives, media, etc. People who are under primal threat are not typically in the most cognitive parts of their brain. And on a topic as emtionally charged as abortion, there's a good chance you aren't going to reach anyone with reasoned logic. As per cognitive scientist George Lakoff, "Because logic works by embodied primitives, frames, conceptual metaphor, and conceptual integration, actual data often has little impact on how we feel about a particular topic."
You'll get no argument from me about trying to defeat evil, not people, and I've never once said that I support calling anyone a Nazi or anything like that. I just understand why it is happening. Reasonable people can certainly disagree about when life begins, although it is curious that in both Catholicism and Judaism, the fetus is not considered a "person" until it's drawn it's first breath. In the Bible, if you kill a woman, the punishment is death. If you injur a pregnant women so that she loses her baby, the punishment is a fine (because it's not yet a person). So what both Evangelicals and the Catholic Church are holding fast to has no basis in their actual religions - it's just a patriarchal stance meant to keep women in their roles.
But it also doesn't matter from a body autonomy perspective whether or not the fetus is also a human being because under legal precedent you cannot be forced to save the life of someone else using your own body. This is very, very clear and why 20% of Americans support full body autonomy for pregnant women as well - because from a legal standpoint, it's less likely to muddy the waters. As you already know, I'm more in favor of pre-viability rights. I think that's a good balance.
What was so egregious about Dobbs is that it threw out 50 years of legal precedent.
There are people out there who do feel horrified at the thought of abortion, and they are entitled to feel that way, although it is something that has existed since the dawn of humanity and it will always exist. We already know that outlawing abortion doesn't make it go away or even reduce it very significantly, so if someone actually has a horror of abortion they should be focusing on preventing unwanted pregnancies not making abortion illegal. But mostly they aren't because it's not about actually saving lives (for most of them), it's about condemning and punishing "immorality."
Here's a little more on the deep roots that infanticide has in human culture. It’s not really an opinion on whether this is right or wrong - simply noting that is human history.
"Humans evolved in collaborative bands where care for the group was a primary survival strategy. Women who for whatever reason did not have adequate support often declined to even attempt to raise a child born into that situation. A new mother who didn’t feel that she could adequately care for her offspring because she didn’t have enough help might well leave it to die.
By modern standards, that sounds pretty heartless, but it served an evolutionary purpose. Human children are dependent on their mothers for longer than almost all other animals and it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to only invest in children who have a real chance of survival. A child needs a network of care in order to thrive and it’s been that way for thousands of years.
Years before a mother’s previous children were self-sufficient, she would give birth to another infant, and the care these dependent youngsters required would be far in excess of what a foraging mother by herself could regularly supply. Both before birth and especially afterward, the mother needed help from others.” (p. 31) Without alloparents (kin and others besides the actual parents) to help feed and protect them, few Pleistocene children could have survived into adulthood.
With the exception of callitrichids (tamarinds and marmosets) who also produce closely spaced offspring that exceed their ability to care for them alone, humans are the only primates who initially show such a contingent investment in their children. “When prospects for support seem poor, mothers in both groups are more likely to bail out (abandon their offspring to die) than other primates are.” (p. 100)"
I am 100% in favor of humanity, civil discourse, and "reaching across the aisle." I just have compassion for how and why that sometimes doesn't happen.
