Being "Moderate" on Abortion?

Don't be fooled by the former president's statement

Over the past two years, right wing activists have made it clear that the Supreme Court’s decision to send lawmaking about abortion back to the states is just a starting point.

As state governments dominated by Republicans have rolled out increasingly ghoulish laws, like those making travel by women of childbearing age subject to legal scrutiny, there have been what have been described as “overreaches;” legislative proposals and actions triggering public outrage. Trust me, the outrages will keep coming.

The ultimate intent of these laws isn’t up for discussion. They are cruel, they are unusual, and, where enacted, women are suffering. One of the clearest contrasts between the Biden administration and MAGAts is just how motivated women are choosing to campaign on this issue.

From the Associated Press:

•  A Texas woman who went into premature labor, developed sepsis and nearly died and a Louisiana woman who said restrictive abortion laws prevented her from getting medical help for a miscarriage are now campaigning for President Joe Biden as the Democrat highlights how women’s health is being affected by the overturning of federal abortion protections.

• Amanda Zurawski and Kaitlyn Joshua will travel to North Carolina and Wisconsin over the next two weeks to meet with doctors, local officials and voters. The Biden campaign sees their stories as potent firsthand accounts of the growing medical peril for many women as abortion restrictions pushed by Republicans complicate health care.

• “The abortion topic is a very heavy topic, and I understand that, said Joshua, 31, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. ”But I also understand and believe that the Biden and Harris administration is the only administration that could do anything remotely close to addressing the abortion bans ... and then also doing a deeper dive into research and understanding women’s health in general.”

When voters have been allowed the opportunity to weigh in, they have clearly indicated their opposition to restrictions advocated for by anti-abortion forces. There have been Herculean efforts to keep such measures off the ballot; a ‘compromise’ 15 week ban in Virginia wasn’t acceptable.

If you examine the totality of right wing thinking on the subject of women’s reproductive health, it becomes clear that their legislative small steps are driven by the common purpose of a complete restoration of male sovereignty, on both political and societal levels.

In today’s Republican Party there is no longer room for moderates on these issues… BUT (and this is primary) controversy on this topic needs to be tamped down until after the November 2024 elections.

Hence we have presumptive GOP candidate Trump making a meaningless public statement, misinterpreted by the media as “abortion should be left to the states.” Most major news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, CBS News.com, and NPR.org, gave Trump the headlines he likely wanted.

THAT’S NOT WHAT TRUMP SAID!

In fact, Trump said only that abortion “will” be left to the states, leaving open how he would respond if Congress passed a federal abortion ban or how regulators would treat abortion should he be returned to the White House.

Nor was there anything about whether federal regulators under his administration would move to ban medication abortions or restrict sending them through the mail, or how he will vote on the abortion referendum in his home state of Florida, or whether he will continue to appoint judges who will further curtail abortion rights.

Oliver Willis responded to the crappy headlines and coverage:

• This is utter garbage, but it is at just about the right level of complicity we have come to expect from the mainstream media. It is as if a serial killer like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy made a statement opposing murder, and the media ignored the piles of bodies they racked up.

• Laid bare here is the media’s habit of cleaning up for Trump, presenting an image of a malevolent force in America that bears little resemblance to the man and the movement behind him. Trump is no idle observer of the strife now occurring in America under Republican efforts to restrict abortion. He is the architect.

As the New York Times pointed out back in February, the former president’s advisors are busy making plans:

• In policy documents, private conversations and interviews, the plans described by former Trump administration officials, allies and supporters propose circumventing Congress and leveraging the regulatory powers of federal institutions, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Justice and the National Institutes of Health.

• The effect would be to create a second Trump administration that would attack abortion rights and abortion access from a variety of angles and could be stopped only by courts that the first Trump administration had already stacked with conservative judges.

• “He had the most pro-life administration in history and adopted the most pro-life policies of any administration in history,” said Roger Severino, a leader of anti-abortion efforts in Health and Human Services during the Trump administration. “That track record is the best evidence, I think, you could have of what a second term might look like if Trump wins.”

When you realize that the current legal strategy of the anti-abortionists includes prosecutions of women using the Comstock Act, it becomes obvious just how irrelevant the presumptive nominee’s statement is.

From the Washington Post:

• Prudish even by the standards of the Victorian Age, Anthony Comstock ranks as one of the more bizarre and destructive figures in U.S. history. The founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873, Comstock boasted of hounding women to suicide by pursuing their prosecution for selling contraceptive pills or assisting abortions. As a federal postal inspector, he once raided an art gallery selling nude paintings, including a reproduction of the “Birth of Venus,” which a court ordered seized. He saw newspapers, magazines and novels as satanic influences for promoting “evil reading” and encouraged destruction of books.

• He lobbied for an 1873 federal law that makes it a felony to mail any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” or even any advice on how or where to get an abortion or contraception. Later judicial interpretation prompted removal of the Comstock Act’s prohibition on mailing contraception, but its purported ban on abortion-related supplies is still on the books. Americans were reminded of this astonishing — and troubling — fact at Tuesday’s Supreme Court oral argument over efforts by antiabortion doctors to rescind Food and Drug Administration rules allowing the distribution of mifepristone, used for medical abortions.

Given how state lawmakers have rushed to enact draconian laws, his statement amounts to permission to do more. Under the executive powers Trump expects to assert, the federal government will no longer intervene when injustice results from state enforcement. Taken to it’s (likely) extreme, women’s reproductive health care will become a vehicle for morality preaching, with misinformation as the backbone of its services.

It doesn’t matter what Trump says or doesn’t say about a national abortion ban, or leaving the issue to the states. Thirty thousand plus lies later, there’s no reason to take him at his word. The only certainty is anti-choice groups get what they want. The GOP hopes this wishy-washy statement will take the rough edges off abortion as a toxic issue for their candidates. 

As pro-choice activist Jessica Valenti says, “It doesn’t mean shit.”

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Monday News You Should Read

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Earth Matters: Kim Stanley Robinson & Michael Mann on doom; 33 green transition myths zapped via Meteor Blades at Daily Kos.

• Over the past four decades, in an example with seriously malign consequences, some rich and powerful agents of disinformation have brought us to the precipice on climate with ominous potential for our species and millions of others, all for profit. And now that the cruder denial elements of that scheme have collided with climate reality on the ground, there’s been a shift from outright denial to an aggressive fight against the transition to a greener, decarbonized future.  Disinformation now rife will soon be made worse by robot propagandists, one of AI’s inconveniences. 

• Some of the lies are old, some new, but all are designed to delay the day when fossil fuels are actually left in the ground where scientists say they must remain if we’re to have any chance of keeping at least parts of the planet humanly habitable. 

• To help combat anti-green disinformation, Jacob Elkin, Matthew Eisenson and other researchers at the Climate Law blog of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center have put together a helpful aid for when you’re arguing with somebody who’s been stuffed with what President Joe Biden might charitably call “malarkey.” It’s a data-rich report Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles.

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Trumpism Is Emptying Churches By Francis Wilkinson at Bloomberg Opinion

• The MAGA-Christian merger has produced a gusher of political power, directing state force against disfavored minorities, such as migrants and LGBTQ children and adults, and forging a US Supreme Court majority that routinely imposes narrow racial and religious values on a pluralistic nation.

• It’s less clear what Christianity has gotten from the deal. “Younger, left-leaning, or moderate Americans who might have formerly identified as ‘Christians’ in decades past are growing up in a world where the most famous representative of conservative Christian values is Donald Trump. They’re saying, ‘No thanks,’” Perry said.

• Few who flee church are clamoring to get back in. “The vast majority of the religiously unaffiliated appear content to stay that way,” said Robert Jones, president and founder of PRRI, pointing out that only 9% of the religiously unaffiliated say they are seeking a religion that’s right for them. “My hunch,” he said, “is that if there is a Trump effect to these dynamics, his takeover of the Republican Party and conservative White Christian politics has been confirming to many who left that they made the right decision.”

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Steve Bannon to host eclipse prayer service to stop 'satanic forces that come through' via Raw Story

• Conservative podcaster Steve Bannon revealed Monday that he would host Christian prayer services on his social media channels to stop "satanic forces that come through" during an eclipse.

• Bannon announced the prayer event on his War Room podcast.

• "Bishop Strickland is going to say a mass simultaneous with the, with the, what is it? The eclipse today," the podcast host said. "And we are going to stream that on both our Gettr and our Rumble."

• "This is about having, making sure there's no satanic forces that come through," he added. "I think it's at, I think it's going to start at three because I think the thing goes down at 3:20 or something, Eastern Daylight Time."