Does France have more restrictive abortion policy than Mississippi? (SPOILER: no and please stop pretending you know anything about abortion policy)
By 
Not this shit again:
This is of course just ignorant dilettantism:
- It is, at best, extremely misleading to say that France or Denmark “bans” abortion starting in the second trimester. Their “bans” have very broad exceptions that are generally liberally applied. Neither on paper or in practice are they anything like the 15-week ban the Supreme Court just upheld.
- The bizarre, obsessive contrarian pundit focus on the point during the second semester when some kind of abortion regulation starts creates a perverse comparative framework in which many American regulations of abortion don’t count because they apply at every stage of the pregnancy. European countries generally don’t have a blizzard of arbitrary regulations that make it harder to obtain a first trimester abortion or designed to make it hard or impossible for abortion providers to operate.
- In Europe abortions are generally free or heavily subsidized. Until the Hyde Amendment is repealed apples-to-apples comparisons of American and European abortion regulations are not useful.
Because this know-nothing trolling made it into Alito’s opinion for the Court in Dobbs — his chambers are nothing if not a comprehensive resource for know-nothing trolling — this gives our nation’s pundits the chance to actually learn something about abortion policy by reading the joint dissent:
Very glad to see the dissent point out that the claim (not just the majority but way too many poorly informed pundits) that the U.S. was some kind of outlier on abortion policy is nonsense that requires willful ignorance about how abortion law in Europe actually works in practice pic.twitter.com/cyPYMQs2a9— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) June 24, 2022
Alas, for some punditry knowing as little as possible about a subject before you weigh in pretty much is your job.