Timothy Birdnow

Should we have criminal charges for abortion?

David French, the Establishment dufus, was on a podcast by Alice Beth Stuckey where he railed against her for "lacking empathy" as she wrote a book about toxic empathy and how we are misplacing our care for others. French wants to be part of the liberal empathy movement.

Stuckey favors criminalizing abortions. I don't think she's wrong in her arguments; if a preborn baby is a human life then it is entitled to the same protections as a born baby - or the mother. Abortion is a great moral evil and it needs to go.

But in one of my rarer moderate positions I disagree with going for gold right now. It is politically untenable and will derail any chances of making any headway in this direction at this time.

Ordinarily my viewpoint is "do the right thing and the politics will follow" but in this case we have to take baby steps. The Supreme Court just overturned Roe V. Wade and it's going to take a full generation to get over that. Youngsters today will grow up with this as the law and then we can push again, but if we try to bite too much now we are going to spur a backlash that will hurt the cause.

The Left worked for years, decades behind the scenes to get abortion on demand and we are going to have to do likewise to end it. We need to start with simple restrictions, like no abortion after the second trimester, then no abortion after the first. Aborted babies will need to be treated like dead children and not waste matter. That means laws requiring dignified burials and whatnot. We need to pass laws making abortion mills illegal; you have to go to a hospital for an abortion. Slowly we need to chip away at the more radical parts of the abortion scheme and squeeze the life out of it eventually, anaconda like.

I know there is a lot of death going on and it's a horrible thing but Rome wasn't built in a day. We are in no position now to criminalize abortion and ignite a flurry of activism against our side, not yet. That would simply be killing the move to end abortions.

We could start by banning the abortion pill; that would help a lot.

I HATE to agree with David French but in this one instance I do, albeit for very different reasons than the big powderpuff Frecnch.

Overreach will lead to political losses and we cannot afford that right now. Like any good military commander knows, preparation is the key to success, not so much what you do on the battlefield if you go off half-cocked.

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