It actually doesn't say that most people believe abortion ought to be illegal after the first trimester. What it actually said is that 38% believe that it ought to be illegal in most cases. This is overwhelmingly the people who believe that we are violating the magical ghost that their god hath breathed into even a lump of cells. Also notably this is virtually the same demographic that literally believes the earth is 6000-10,000 years old.
Of the 61% who believe abortion should be legal 44% believe the first trimester ought to be the line. Another 12% think the second trimester ought to be the line and another 44% think birth ought to be the line.
There are two questions. Ought abortions happen outside extraordinary circumstances and where do we draw the line. If we have discerned that a woman has a right to an abortion it makes no sense to average or combine the people who think the line is at zero and the people who think the variable has a value and use that to set policy. Firstly because the average of undefined and an integer is undefined and secondly because that is a fucking terrible why to deal with something that actually has a scientific answer that being basing it on birth rendering it an independent person or brain development such that the fetus goes from having never been conscious in the first place to something more akin to sleep.
Take it from the child of an Ahmedi who left Pakistan in 1986. When _you’re_ the wedge issue, you don’t have many other choices.
Muslim shops are being vandalized and burnt all over India https://twitter.com/meerfaisal01/status/1513541836756848644
Almost all the neocortical prenatal brain development takes place in the third trimester. Electrical activity exists at 13 weeks but it's incapable of consciousness.
It's simply ridiculous to tell a women who unequivocally is an actual human to subordinate her body to the preservation of a less than mouse if she doesn't want to.
The simplest solution is to declare a person a person if it survives birth or is liable and intended to.
It's only complicated if we make it so
The OP is not deceiving anyone when he says that watching an ultrasound made him change his mind on abortions. This is just a narrative trick that presents the " human life begins at conception" belief in a very dramatic fashion. OP probably made up his opinion much earlier when he decided which tribe/ingroup he is going to sign up for, and will support all of the Republican platform right think one way or another.
The artificial creation of the wedge issues is so absurdly obvious that it sometimes defies belief that people don't recognize it. A reply to an apparently benign business question "is usps actually losing money" will immediately reveal the person's voting choices with 99% accuracy. People are asked to sign up for a tribe in their formative years and then they simply take down notes from the propaganda and assume rigid positions. Propaganda was invented to convince the American people that joining world war 1 was necessary. It has never left us, since.
https://www.history.com/news/world-war-1-propaganda-woodrow-...
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/si...
The real issues facing the country are absurd health care costs, dropping life expectancy, unavailable urban housing and ridiculous student loans. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in solving the problem. Who really has the time to worry about other people's abortions and guns in the middle of all of this.
While Republicans are absolutely nuts, Democrats can be forced by massive public pressure to make at least some minor moves to address these problems - thanks to Bernie. But they will do it in a way that their corporate brethren are not hurt in the least bit.
Consider the price cap of 35$ on insulin. It doesn't mean that the insulin manufacturers profit will drop. Merely that everyone else's premiums will increase so that corporate profits aren't hurt. Bush shafted Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices too.
Rephrasing - if X is a manufactured wedge issue then why is it a wedge issue? I think you manufactured an unintended tautology!
I used to believe this too because of America’s awful science education. It wasn’t until I went to the ultrasound appointments for my first kid that I realized how incorrect that was.
A 13 week fetus, which under Roe can be killed for another couple of months still, has a face, hands and feet, finger prints, etc. They can suck their thumb and have other human baby reflexes.
> which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position.
Sure, if you wave your hands and say that your side is obviously right about the issues at the heart of a political dispute, you can make any issue seem manufactured. You should go to India and tell the Hindus and the Muslims that they’re both wrong about their “imaginary friends” and that their dispute is a manufactured triviality.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but the whole fixation with personal conscience, individual self determination, and the equal dignity of every individual—ideas that animate American social liberalism— also come from Protestant Christianity. Nobody is making amoral utilitarian arguments for or against same-sex marriage.
> It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate.
Incorrect. Over 65% of Americans would support making abortions illegal in all or most cases after the first trimester: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort.... The public opinion is basically closest to the Mississippi law that’s up before the Supreme Court: 15 weeks with exceptions for health of mother and baby. Incidentally, highly secular countries like France, Denmark, and Finland have settled on 13-14 weeks as well.
But more to the point: if abortion is a manufactured wedge issue, why do people in California care so much about what laws people in Mississippi choose to govern themselves?