U.S. Abortion Politics is Following a Well-Worn Path



Abortion politics follows a predictable cycle. In the U.S. several decades ago Roe was passed making abortion legal in all states. I don't recall much discussion about how many abortions went on before that but we know there were a lot of them. From what we can tell, abortions, even though illegal, were about as common as they became when they were made legal by Roe v Wade. 

As soon as Roe made abortions legal religious political operatives, including the U.S. Catholic Bishops, began lying by saying there were no abortions before Roe. Before Roe made abortions legal there were wings of Catholic hospitals devoted to young women with infections from amateur abortions. Those records could be located today. Conservative branches of Protestantism joined in on the hoax.

The lie was exposed after Roe was overturned and abortion was left up to the states. We have seen the numbers rise as the number of women in the fertility age cohort increased. Neither making abortion legal or not legal changed the numbers.

The world-wide pattern is that abortion numbers are stubborn. In the religion and politics surrounding abortion these stubborn numbers take a while, decades, to soak into the minds of voters. Perhaps it could be said no country in the world seemed more anti-abortion than Ireland. When it came to a vote, however, the large numbers of women being forced to fly across the pond in England became widely known. The political question became, "If women are going to get abortions anyway, why force them to fly to England?" Abortion became legal in Ireland.

The same thing happened in Chile. It voted to legalize abortion.

From what I see on religious sites like Christian Post, the same thing is happening right now in the U.S. Articles are being published there and other Christian places lamenting the fact that abortion numbers are rising. Slowly it is dawning on Christian conservatives all their efforts in anti-abortion politics have come to nothing. I predict the source of money for this political effort will slowly dry up and it will become a shell of its former self.  

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