And there are six states without any term restrictions on abortion whatsoever, and prominent pro-abortion organizations are advocating those positions. But the fact remains that such extreme positions are unlikely to get nationwide traction. The central territory of the debate, and what the Dobbs case actually involved, is second trimester bans (12-15 weeks).

I understand why folks want to focus on the radical position that some parties have advanced, and not the fact that the actual law in the US for the last 50 years was quite radical in the opposite direction.

This should not be a radical position. In fact it is the only moral position. This probably sounds strange, but it comes down to who is getting late term abortions. The people who need these abortions are the ones who have discovered later in the pregnancy that their child has some sort of medical issue so severe that it appears in a sonogram. It might be possible to deliver the child, but that child would suffer from poor quality of life and/or a short lifespan. These are not the people who had an "oops the condom broke" moment, they have a serious moral obligation to avoid personal tragedy, and we are writing laws demanding that no, that child with only one lung and no face must be carried to term and cared for until they die a few weeks later of complications from the constant extreme pain they are in after saddling the parents and their family with enormous unnecessary medical bills.

You might be thinking "but this is one of those emergencies that has an exception right?" But that's not how the bans work. Even when the law allows for emergency procedures there are no doctors in the state qualified to perform them, nor any hospitals or clinics that will allow it due to the legal liabilities. Even with a fully justifiable reason the parents are forced to travel hundreds or thousands of miles on their own dime to get the necessary procedure. Even if the mother's health is on the line and she's not fit to travel you still need to get her across state lines, and if you are in the midwest or the bible belt she may just have to die, just to satisfy an overly simplistic "moral" position.

If your moral position requires you to torture newborns until they die you need to re-evaluate it.

I’ll preface this by saying I am militantly pro choice but, to the anti abortion side, abortion is also “torturing newborns until they die” because they believe the fetus is as much a person as a newborn. Your moral position is just as disturbing to them as theirs is to you.

A fetus is not a newborn by definition.

When a baby is going to be in constant pain for its entire life due to medical complications it is really hard to justify bringing them into the world.

What’s the distinction? Is a a newborn cognitively different from a fetus at 18 weeks? 24? 30? Why is a baby that suffers for its entire “life” of two weeks outside the womb different? Why does its “life” inside the womb not count? When does this fundamental change occur? That’s the debate we should be having, not whatever this current debate politicians are having is. Extreme moral statements like the one you made only serve to be divisive and to distract from the real conversation.

You're creating a false dichotomy. The Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs had an exception for severe fetal abnormalities after the first trimester. So do the abortion laws of every developed country that otherwise bans abortion at 12-14 weeks. Support for such exceptions in the US is vastly higher than for elective later-term abortions.

You're incorrectly assuming that in substance there is no difference because all late-term abortions are the result of medical emergencies or genetic defects. In Germany, which bans abortion after 12 weeks but contains exceptions for fetal and maternal health, only 3% of abortions are performed after 12 weeks:https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/nine-out-of-10-abortion.... In the US that number is more than twice as high, at 7%.

Given the 600,000 abortions in the US each year, getting our number down to the German rate would affect 24,000 abortions of fetuses that most developed countries have deemed to be worth protecting.

The late term abortions may be technically legal in certain circumstances, but since the laws drove out all of the doctors who can perform them and closed all of the facilities it becomes a de-facto ban.

It is not the case that every developed country with a 2nd trimester limit (or any limit) on abortions has an exception for fetal abnormalities.