This is also why the Democrats, when they get a majority, never bother to make a law ensuring the legality of the procedure or defining its limits.

It is too valuable to Left to fix, though the Right seems perfectly content to go forward and act. The Right isn't merely agitating, they're trying for policy. The Left aims for outrage and political energy.

"Clearly we have to pack the court!" No. Clearly you have to pass a law. Understandably, that's much harder, because you must actually engage the electorate and build consensus instead of passing the buck to judges to "detect" what the people want, or slant things in your favor by ignoring (or selectively upholding) the Constitution.

> "Clearly we have to pack the court!" No. Clearly you have to pass a law.

The reason people are suggesting packing the court is because there is a belief that a 6/3 SCOTUS can simply undo any laws you put in place. The irony here is that Roe v Wade is a perfect example of the court doing just that.

The way we have 9 rulers who are picked by whatever party happened to be lucky enough to have someone die is an absolutely stupid system. I hope every majority congress packs until the court is thousands of justices.

Overturning Roe v. Wade doesn't undo a law. The problem is there's no law in the first place. It overturns a precedent. It's the judicial branch's equivalent of countermanding an Executive Order with a new Executive Order.

If it were a law, it'd never get to the courts in the first place.

The original RvW did overturn a law -- Texas state law.

It absolutely would go to the courts. In the same way Obamacare went to the courts.

SCOTUS makes rulings on the constitutionality of laws written by both state and federal governments. If SCOTUS, for example, wants to argue a person is a fetus therefore deserves all the protections and rights ingrained in the constitution, they could easily dismiss a federal bill on abortion.

It's impossible for me to over-stress how toxic the GOP has been to any kind of productive conversation about fetal rights as a concept and how transparently opportunistic they've been about using abortion as a means to preserve power, lock in voters, and push back on progressive policies in general.

It makes it incredibly difficult to talk to many pro-life people about abortion in any context, because there's a huge effort happening to convince Evangelical voters that:

A) literally any sympathy for the parent, nuance, or lack of ferver is the same as wanting the unborn to die.

B) it's a primarily religious issue and that being an Evangelical means voting a certain way and aligning with a set of political issues, and that conversations about abortion must be approached through a religious lens.

C) that because it's a religious issue, there is one singular "correct" way to focus on reducing abortion, and any deviation from that specific strategy is literally a religious failing.

I see people just shut down during conversations about abortion, like even talking about it is itself a sin.

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There is still a lot of nuance; I'm not trying to lump an entire group together or demonize people or say that Evangelical conservatives all collectively hate women. But there is (to me) a very obvious intentional push coming from some parts of the political spectrum and from some Church leaders to eliminate any nuance or openness that those people have -- to get people to approach abortion though a very specific lens and to only ever acknowledge or think about that specific lens, because those leaders/politicians see it as a really convenient way to create an identity that requires people to vote/associate in a certain way, to demonize people who those leaders/politicians would like them to demonize, and to go even further and tie that political identity to people's religious security in a way that is inherently dangerous for them to question or examine.

As a result, it then becomes easier for people to tie that religious identity to other political topics as well; the more that pro-life becomes shorthand for Christian, and the more that Christian becomes shorthand for "votes Republican", the easier it is to pick out other social/political issues (wealth inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, even entirely amoral, purely practical questions about things like economic policy), and to say that deviation from the expected party position is literally a sin and that non-party positions are guilty by association with the enemy.

And again, definitely not all Evangelicals and absolutely not all Christians. I grew up in white Evangelical communities; I see their flaws and their occasional strengths. And regardless of the flaws I still care about people in that community. But it is a very concerning problem that the Church needs to grapple with; at some point something needs to break and white Evangelicals need to decide whether their primary identity is Christian or Republican.