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O.'s avatar

Man, I hate to countersignal here because on fundamentals, I feel like you're right on so much.

I think this takes a good observation and takes it a bit too far.

The pro-life 'movement' is one run by aged karens and catladies. It has since time immemorial. These people are culturally and socially ill-equipped for the insane modern age we're in. But they control these organizations, coveted endorsements, and they make repeated major strategic mistakes.

For one, they stillborn effective pro-life activism. They constantly henpick and denigate anything that isn't under their control. They don't cultivate enthusiasm so there's no class of young turks who have field tested messaging, actions, new methods of outreach.

Also, they don't expand the leadership. So, in most states, you have the same people running a Right to Life chapter who were running it in the 1980s.

Third, they repeatedly let themselves get taken advantage of by RINOs. Transparently insincere RINOs get endorsements from these groups because they flatter the Karens. I've seen this so many times and no matter how much I scream, flail, and protest, 100% of the time it works everytime.

Fourth, every issue in American politics exists off of a subsidy provided somewhere that is advantageous, typically, to elites. We're fighting between NGO's on the right who are often just sophistry-machines for tax cuts, against NGO's on the left that are sophistry-machines for total cultural, religious, and civilizational destruction. In politics and economics we call this the 'tragedy of the commons' but in reality it's that good ideas often don't have a constituency.

Nobody wants to admit this, but the growth of pro-life politics became a parallel interest for elites to keep a fledging right-wing alive by peeling off 10-15% of liberals who were single-issue pro-life voters. Without abortion, we would have a one-party state run by neoliberals who control the colleges, the media, and every institution worth controlling except for the military (which they're hard at work on) and the energy industry (which they're busy destroying).

A political right without pro-life politics is left arguing inane economic theories that no one really believes, and platitudes about immigration that no elected official has the courage to fully express. That will not yield more victories.

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Sabrina Sherman's avatar

Unfortunate rare terrible Josiah take. You acknowledged yourself that “America is basically ok with abortion as long as there are restrictions”. This means that an incremental approach is possible and actually likely to be popular. We can start by banning partial birth abortion, requiring parental notification for minors, 24 hour waiting periods, increase health and safety standards (require that emergencies be reported to the state health boards and be available to the public), banning tele-health visits for abortion pill prescriptions, and even 24 week bans. Late term abortion is not popular, the general American public agrees with that.

When the issue is innocent babies being ripped apart and killed in the place that they should be most safe, their own mothers womb, then it is never ok to “wrap up shop and give up”. Yes, I agree that the pro-life political strategy needs to be reevaluated and changed to incrementalism in order to win (which is most important), but pro life activism and the large organizations have been changing many hearts and minds on abortion for generations. It was their hard work that changed the culture enough to get some states to ban abortion incrementally and to establish huge networks of organizations to help women in crisis pregnancies. The pro-life movement has accomplished a lot on the individual/private basis and has done the work to save many babies and help many women. It needs to continue to be active politically, but simply with a different strategy.

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