The Great Abortion Election Non-Issue

The Democrats have made abortion a big issue in the forthcoming American general election, but it isn’t and it shouldn’t be.

After advancing three conservative judges to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump succeeded in overturning the 1973 decision in Roe v Wade. This did not go down at all well with the Democrats, to put it mildly, and resulted in the time-serving senator Chuck Schumer threatening Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh with violence “you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price”.

Of course, a threat is only a threat when it comes from Republicans, and Schumer was allowed to weasel out of it. Clearly though, this is an issue that generates huge emotions on both sides. Having said that, this is a non-issue. Before Roe v Wade, abortion was illegal in 33 states. It was a decision taken at the state level. The new judgment was handed down by a Supreme Court consisting of 9 male judges headed by Chief Justice Burger. And it was based on a lie! Two feminist attorneys who were determined to bring about what they considered desirable social change recruited a woman named Norma McCorvey as a shill.

With the 2022 judgment – Dobbs v Jackson...the law of abortion goes back to the States, as it should. It was a Democrat President, Bill Clinton, who said abortion should be legal, safe and rare, a proposition it is difficult to argue against. Of course,  many people do, and as ever they quote extreme cases in support of their arguments. The recent, shocking case of a 10 year old rape victim who became pregnant is one such extreme case. The girl had to travel from Ohio to Indiana because there was no exception in state law for a minor to have an abortion.  This is dead wrong, there must always be exceptions for the health of the mother, and it is difficult to imagine a more pressing case. Equally important here was the life sentence with a 25 year tariff handed down to the monster responsible for this outrage.

Sensible exceptions need to be crafted at the state level, but leaving these aside it should be borne in mind that abortion is not a form of birth control, and since the advent of “the pill” in the 1960s, there is no real excuse for any reasonably intelligent woman to become pregnant without wishing to be.

In spite of this, the Democrats will continue to focus on an issue that affects only a very small minority of the population while the manufactured migrant crisis, runaway inflation, rampant crime and the risk of yet more foreign wars take a back seat.