Comment by kerkeslager 7 days ago
Work, raise kids, vote to let women die rather than remove an already-dead fetus--yeah, sorry, people dying does kinda matter to me, actually, and I don't think that's crazy or can be dismissed as "tribalism".
Trump appointed judges who said abortion is a state's rights issue, and leaders in states such as Texas and Florida openly declared that they would ban all abortion, without exceptions for rape, incest, or medical necessity. And many states delivered on this promise, resulting in a litany of easily-avoidable suffering[1]. None of this was a secret: this was Republicans doing exactly what they promised to do.
Every American who voted Republican voted for that. If you voted for them, you don't get to distance yourself from the abhorrent things Republicans said they were going to do and then did. If you voted for them, take responsibility for what you voted for.
If you knew that, you're pretending ignorance, and if you didn't know that, you shouldn't be spreading ignorance or voting. Either way, stop spreading misinformation.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-year-without-roe-here-are-...
1. Republicans knew what states would do, so actually yes, they do bear responsibility for positioning them to do it.
2. Surely we can agree that Republican state lawmakers are responsible for the laws they make? Surely we can agree that voters who voted for Republicans who openly said they are going to ban abortion without exception, are responsible when the lawmakers they voted for do exactly what they voted for them based on? Are you just going to pretend that these people aren't responsible for literally their own actions?
1. That's silly. Nobody from Ohio knows exactly what Texas is going to do until Texas actually does it. Hell, someone from Texas doesn't know either.
2. Lawmakers are responsible for the laws they write and vote for. They are partly responsible for the response to those laws by individuals, e.g. the response by healthcare professionals to grey areas created by those laws. Not fully responsible (otherwise it wouldn't be a grey area). Likewise voters are responsible for the lawmakers they elect, but only mildly responsible for the actual verbiage of the laws, and from there even less responsible for the human response to grey areas created by those laws. So sure, there is a measure of responsibility, but that measure is so minor and indirect I personally wouldn't break friendships over it, assuming they are unhappy (to some extent) with the end result.
To flip this around on you a bit: I assume then that you also blame voters when a District Attorney (who they elected or who was appointed by a mayor they elected) allows a violent offender off with minor punishment instead of serious prison time, and that violent offender murders someone shortly thereafter. All those voters are party to murder because the candidate ran on a platform of being not tough on crime and they chose to elect that candidate, right?
In a democracy, you can always blame some subset of voters for some bad outcomes, but at some point I believe that you need to re-focus on the people more directly responsible.
Said another way: I genuinely believe that most pro-life voters would not directly vote for a law (on a ballot) if you said to them (and demonstrated it to be true that): "this law as written will cause the (avoidable) deaths of pregnant mothers who want to keep their babies but have a miscarriage". If you could then present them with an alternate law/plan that still restricts elective abortions to the extent desired by the initial law but without that downside, 99% of the people you are blaming would vote for that new version. Given that, I find it hard to so strongly blame those voters. They voted for restrictions on abortion, not restrictions on life-saving miscarriage care. The fact that those things became entangled is not surprising, but I hardly think it is something voters foresaw when at the voting booth, as they are voting for the broad idea, not the specific verbiage that creates grey areas.
You can of course then blame them for not thinking through all possible outcomes and percentage likelihoods of certain scenarios, but at some point that just feels like you are blaming people for not being perfectly rational robots with perfect knowledge of future law-writing.
That is not the point I was making.
But also literally nobody is voting for that.