| > At least many people opposed to abortion ostensibly think that it's murder. Given that framing, trying to collect evidence from hospitals seems reasonable. Is it? I often frame abortion as murder, but even then this goes a little far. If someone travels internationally to Slovenia (or Thailand, whereever), and they rob a bank there then it is more than a bit absurd for my Attorney General to try to prosecute that bank robbery from here in Minnesota. Even if the Slovenian government declines to prosecute and people are generally worried about justice being denied... it just can't happen from here. It doesn't work. Even that's not the end of it. A prosecutor who attempted it is merely wasting time and money, and maybe there's more than enough time (and though we shouldn't be wasteful, we're a rich country... wasting money's not as big of a deal as we might want it to be). But if it were more than a waste of time and money, if it undermined some principle or another that we should hold dear, then it becomes a big problem. General medical privacy is maybe one of those. How are we supposed to believe that it would only turn up abortion records? Maybe they're trawling for medical info so my insurance can be dropped even though my cancer's in remission. > The way they act concerning it makes me think that relatively few really believe it. How are they supposed to act? Like, is there a particular set of behaviors that would preserve your belief in their sincerity and their sanity? As far as they're concerned, they've lived through a half-century holocaust of baby murder, but the abortion clinic bomber was a terrorist and suggesting otherwise should have their names put on a watchlist. They're impotent to fix the greatest moral failing of their lifetime, ridiculed for even speaking out against it, and don't know how to pass their values on to their own offspring successfully. I suspect that, given their need to cope with something that is intolerable-yet-must-be-tolerated, they've all collectively decided not to bother trying to seem sincere to those who do not agree with them. |
It's interesting how this narrative has developed only in the past 40 years or so. At the time of Roe vs. Wade, the Catholic Church did not view a person as being alive until the first breath (a view held today by the Jewish Faith - I've heard they consider the truncated care available to women as an affront to their faith). It wasn't until around Regan that the view really started to change as stopping abortion became a mainstay of the Republican party's policies.
This incorporation into their policies and values is mostly what drove the change in view - going from "it's not a person until it's born" to "fetal personhood". Then after the Dobbs decision and in the leadup to this election, that the phrase murder started being thrown around.
Ever wonder why they're still only prosecuting for the act of abortion, not murder? It's because federal law (which trumps state law) only considers a person as someone who is born.
> they've all collectively decided not to bother trying to seem sincere to those who do not agree with them.
I'd argue that they act quite sincere, and often violently so. Raised voices is the least of what a conversation between a "abortion is murder" and "abortion is health care" tends to result in.