In my heart of hearts, I agree with you. My cynical surface would just want to take this moment to kinda spread my hands as if to show that our current existence has been ridiculously politicized. You may not think it is a blue issue, but -- and I am not trying to derail this thread -- I just want to make an argument, isn't abortion a human issue?
A more interesting question is why is abortion consistently used as a tribal issue in US politics.
Of course there is an underlying difference of opinion, and of course it matters to those on both sides.
But it matters because the media have done an exceptionally good job of herding people into different camps - by focusing on a small and standardised collection of divisive issues and amplifying the rhetoric around them.
Does someone benefit from these divisions, and from the loss of civility and civic cohesion they create, and perhaps also from the implied promotion of violent oppositional defiant subjectivity over rational argument that powers them?
You almost had a point here, but your unfortunate choice of terms demonstrates a lot of what's wrong with US politics. Rather than referring to the pro-choice movement as such, you've adopted a label, pro-abortion, that is simply misleading. Here we have a debate over women's reproductive health rights, and it gets reduced to misleading soundbites like "pro-abortion."
In the same way, I think much of what is being protested in this thread comes from the false dichotomy between "pro-security" and "anti-security" that ignores how important the ideals of personal rights are to the debate. US politics is well-characterized by a practiced reduction of complex political issues to misleading soundbites.
In a sense, the refusal of most of American media to even give airtime to the discussion of when a fetus should gain rights/protections is why such extreme measures are being on the table. They painted this as a binary issue with no nuance or even discussion as regards the status of an unborn fetus so the reaction has been similarly binary with total lack of nuance.
That is my main political issue, but it comes with a major cavaet: where do you put the dividing line between humans? It is not as obvious as you might think, as both sides of the abortion comes down to the rights of the individual.
Same thing, but with opposite supports on a vaccine mandate.
There is no unborn child. It's not even a thinking mass of cells. A fetus is not a life.
What this shows is that conservatives do not give a single shit about harm, but this is about their own little morals and ethic allows them to justify a miserable existence for a woman and a child because you, as a man who is never going to be in a situation where your only choices are either getting an abortion in secret or being sued for doing do, thought that you could control their bodies.
Political opinions matter when they affect your daily life. For instance, after the Dobbs decision last year, Texas passed an anti-abortion law which made it illegal to terminate pregnancies even when the fetus had no chance of survival and continued pregnancy was a mortal risk to the mother. This was finally changed last month, but the situation persisted for over a year. For women at high risk of miscarriage (for instance, my sister-in-law who moved to Texas and has previously had a miscarriage), their neighbours' political opinions could actually kill them.
Perhaps it's an American thing because the American political system has resulted in a complete lack of common-sense legislation; but it's absolutely justified.
(My background here: I'm an American living in the UK. I've been consistently surprised by the number of common-sense laws and regulations that are supported by even conservatives, or if not supported, are not immediately repealed once conservatives gain power.)
No they’re not. A few are trying to regulate their citizens traveling to other states to get abortions. Meanwhile the mainstream position on the left is imposing a standard that under 30% of Americans support (elective abortions to 24 weeks) in every single state.
It doesn’t matter if fetuses are people. What does matter is if people who don’t want to be pregnant are people. Because abortion ban denies them their right to decide about their bodies.
Abortion ban is just yet another form of religiously motivated organized stupidity. It’s no different from LGBT discrimination.
Politically speaking, this is an amazing issue to argue.
Some on the political left have been arguing 'My body, my choice' with regards to abortion. But now it's often those on the right that are making that argument.
As your example you use a weird right wing wedge issue.
How about science based climate change where people think you can literally compromise on physics/math and make 2+2=5 because 4 is just too inconvenient.
Edit: (I’ll clarify: Abortion is used as a kind of hack into the religious/cultural background of Americans. It is purposefully used to divide political debate in a non rational way).
Hell, half of conservative political rhetoric is distinguishing between real and fake Americans.
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