The official GOP line on abortion is the same as the Confederacy’s on slavery but even more incoherent
Here’s GOP flak Alice Stewart on why Dobbs makes voting for Donald Trump so very totally worth it:
As a pro-life social conservative, I received my fair share of criticism for supporting Donald Trump for president. But I always looked right past the mean tweets and online insults.I focused instead on the lifetime appointments to the high court that would elevate jurists who believed, as I do, that life begins at conception.
The “life begins at conception” framing has always been intended to deceive and obfuscate: after all a sperm cell is alive. What Stewart is actually claiming is that human personhood begins at conception, which is a metaphysical not a biological claim.
If you believe human personhood begins at conception, then of course intentionally destroying a fertilized ovum is homicide.
Now here’s where things get weird:
The Supreme Court is right to return the highly contentious issue of abortion back to the states. No two states will adopt exactly the same policies, which means that each state will have the flexibility to craft its own solutions. Provisions for rape, incest and protecting the life of the mother should also be protected, in my view.
This has always been a completely nutty claim. It’s the equivalent of a 19th century abolitionist arguing that slavery should be a state law matter. According to Stewart, abortion should be prohibited because at the moment of conception a human person comes into being, but hey if some states want to sanction legal infanticide, that’s just how things roll in our federalist system. (Also too, it’s OK to murder your baby if the child in question was a product of sexual assault, which is another claim that is totally incoherent on its face, but whatever).
Republicans claim to want to treat abortion as if it were something like differential state tax rates. This is an extremely obvious lie for extremely obvious reasons, as will become extremely evident about seven minutes after the GOP wins or steals the trifecta, for the next and possibly last time.