A year after promising viewers a “red tsunami” in the 2022 midterms, only to be left with egg on their faces after the GOP drastically underperformed, Fox News was once again wondering what went wrong after Democrats romped to victory in statewide elections on Tuesday night.
Despite recent polls showing President Joe Biden deeply underwater with voters and even losing to Donald Trump in several battleground states, the Democratic incumbent governor easily won victory over his MAGA-endorsed opponent in deep-red Kentucky. And over in Ohio, a state Trump won by eight points in 2020, voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment ensuring access to abortion care in the state’s constitution.
The continued drag that undoing Roe v. Wade has had on the GOP was especially apparent in Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had promised to implement a 15-week abortion ban if the GOP was able to gain unified control over the state’s General Assembly. Instead, not only were Youngkin’s hopes of a Republican sweep dashed, but the Democrats now control both chambers.
Maybd an american can explain the abortion bans: Does 15 week ban mean no abortion after 15 weeks? That sounds reasonable. I thought the bans mean no abortions at all. In germany its no abortion after 12 weeks unless there is serious risk for the mother or the fetus is not viable.
Not an American, but from what I have heard, that along with the outright ban at 15 weeks, they also often include other inhumane things.
Making the woman listen to the fetus’s heartbeat. Forced waiting periods. Parental consent required for minors. Forced counseling. Etc.
Also, medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds and doctors forced to read scripted lies to scared patients. (just thought I’d fill in some of the etc.)
Also, pregnancy is declared to have begun basically four weeks before the last missed period. So a 15 week ban is really an 11 week ban. And you only get 11 weeks if you are regular and are keeping track.
Now keeping track, in some states, is becoming a legal liability. So these antiabortion measures are just going to cause more oopies. It’s just evil for the sake of being controlling.
Yep, it’s not about saving unborn fetuses, it’s about controlling woman
And about gaining power in general. The Ainsley Earhardt quote in the article is very telling.
She is flat out stating that they should drop the anti-abortion stance if it means gaining and keeping power. Abortion is, and has always been, nothing more than a tool the GOP uses to win elections and now that the tool is ceasing to be useful, they should discard it.
Don’t forget that good ol’ rape by instrumentation.
Part of the issue in the US is that the exceptions in these laws are made purposely vague to make it too risky for doctors to be able to help pregnant women unless they are literally about to die. Not familiar enough with the reasonableness of different week limits for abortion but the main way it’s framed here is that it’s mostly an issue between a woman and her doctor and not the business of politicians
Good video from John Oliver on this topic which just aired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eH2BItdo0M
The “unless” part is important…
The reason it’s not reasonable is based on how we age pregnancy. The counter starts at the last day of your last menstrual cycle. That means the gestational age of the egg might be two days but you’re already 4 weeks pregnant. On top of that a lot of diagnostic tests cannot be performed that early. My wife needed an amniocentesis due to possible congenital birth defects but by the time we had the initial screening, then the diagnostic test, we were at 16 weeks. Add onto that after a test like that the decision has to be made wether to terminate a pregnancy then the procedure has to be scheduled and performed. All in all you’re looking at 20 weeks or so.
A 15 week ban might as well be a total ban.
It isn’t, though: It’s forcing birth on someone who doesn’t want it, and probably forcing a child into a bad home.
The vast majority, ~96%, of abortions take place at 15 weeks or earlier. That said, conservatives in America have spent the last 50 years arguing that each individual state should decide how to handle the abortion issue themselves. Now that Roe has been overturned, they’ve immediately pivoted to pushing a federal ban, proving once again that there are no core principles in modern American conservatism.