@davidaugust @johnpavlovitz
One topic I don't see being openly discussed is how many Americans truly are one-issue voters. When you boil away all analyses, when you zoom out of focus and lose all the analytical details and think like a nonpolitical nonanalytical person drinking a beer on the back porch, the fire that burns the brightest is the innocent sweet helpless aborted babies. As humans and as mammals, we care for the young of our community. Evolutionarily, the fundamental principle is NOT survival of the fittest individual... in contrast, it's survival of the fittest group of individuals. So, groups and group dynamics are in our genes. Humans love*love*love our sweet and innocent soft and clean little babies and we can't stand the thought of them being scraped out of a womb even though we all know—since we went through that stage ourselves and don't recall anything about that time—there is little or no consciousness or suffering at that time. And since God knows everything ahead of time all the time, maybe He in His wisdom chooses not to put a soul into those that He knows aren't going to naturally or artificially make it out alive. We don't know how God doles souls. If they do have souls, it's little consolation for people to hear that being aborted would then be a free pass into Heaven without the suffering of this world. Even if some do find comfort in thinking of it that way to make themselves feel better about it, not everyone can do that and almost no one can differentiate between voting for a pro abortion government representative and scraping the babies out themselves. So many people feel the guilt of association. They're afraid "what if God tells me my vote caused the deaths of the following aborted babies and they're gonna vote on whether or not I get through the pearly gates." People feel that voting for pro abortion legislators and representatives is actually committing a sin of their own because they premeditatedly chose to vote for that person knowing what the person would try to legislate if they won. "Women's right to choose what happens to their own bodies" still comes across as "Go on ahead and scrape out those unborn babies just because you didn't wrap it up or strap it up." People would pay for higher bread to save aborted babies. People would begrudgingly pay more taxes and vote for someone who will make them pay more as long as it protects innocent sweet little unborn babies. It boils down to the rights of grown women (vacillatingly painted as important because she should be responsible enough to avoid a pregnancy and unimportant bc she's a woman) vs the rights of the innocent and vulnerable and voiceless. The babies win every time. More people got off the couch to protect the babies and many people stayed on the couch to avoid association with the sin of premeditated voting for the murderability of babies... in case that has moral consequences on my own soul on judgement day.

To shift the abortion issue away from the same recycled points made over the ages that never ever go anywhere, I think it needs to be reframed as legal protection for doctors to provide medical care to the full extent of their training and experience. They wanna pass out so much immunity and impunity... give some immunity to doctors so they feel legally safe to make the right medical decisions for their patients instead of being legally obligated to protect their own license by neglecting deterioration until it meets the legal minimum standard to begin treatment. Yes, it's a potentially more patriarchal way to make the point, but unfortunately, sometimes we have to resort to pulling the levers we have rather than pulling no levers at all. Most people trust doctors to make the right choices. Our legislators need to trust doctors, too, and it's going to take us all working at this without relenting to get it straightened out.