The Abortion Election

For obvious reasons, political candidates emphasize issues on which they align with public opinion. If you watched Trump’s interview with Elon Musk on Tuesday, you’ll have a fairly decent idea of where Trump’s brand succeeds. Generally speaking, interviewers give Republicans a tough time, trying to force them to address policies that might be less popular with the public. Musk took a different approach, one which he acknowledged early on. He announced that the conversation would not be adversarial, because “no one is themselves in an adversarial interview.” That’s all fair enough, and a nice change of pace for Trump. Trump took advantage of these favorable conditions, furnishing us with a neatly packaged list of his winning issues.

What Trump is Running On:

Energy and illegal immigration came up quite early on, as did any number of foreign policy matters: the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, Venezuela’s purported emptying of prisons onto American soil, the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines carrying Russian gas to Europe, the October 7^th attacks on the state of Israel, the $6 billion of assets the Biden administration unfroze for Tehran, the need to reform NATO, the need to pry apart Russia and China diplomatically, and the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Eastern Ukraine. Trump later pivoted back to foreign policy, speaking at great length of the danger of nuclear warfare (a problem also underlined as still one of our world’s most dangerous by such diverse voices as John Kerry and The Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk). Musk and Trump agreed: a world with an intimidating American president is a safer world.

Economic issues took up most of the rest of the airtime, prompted in part by Musk’s observation that we borrow a trillion dollars every 100 days, and that interest on the national debt exceeds the cost of the entire military. Discussion of wasteful spending featured prominently.

Social issues were not discussed as much. But the Musk and Trump also talked about federalism, college protests, tampons in boys’ bathrooms, drugs, lawfare, and first amendment issues. Notably, abortion did not feature in the conversation. This absence is consonant with Trump’s general approach to the campaign. When he mentions abortion, he does so briefly, and often with caveats about the importance of exceptions.

What Harris is Running On:

Harris has a standing invitation from Musk to discuss anything she wants. So far, she is not giving interviews to him or anyone else.

Recent Harris speeches couldn’t be more different from Trump’s interview. Freedom of choice, so called, is one of her campaign’s core freedoms. There is something distinctly tortured about the way she delineates these freedoms. The child has no right to live, but the mother has a right “to make decisions about her own body.” This right presumably entails making decisions about the child’s body. Restricting the right to bear arms, like the right to life, is rephrased as a kind of reverse freedom: in her speeches, the state restricting the ownership of firearms is “the freedom to be safe from gun violence.” (This is of course the same state that fails to protect citizens from a variety of lawless acts like robberies and illegal border crossing.)

Now, one may hold a variety of positions on the citizenry’s freedom to bear arms—but it is a freedom! Presumably, Saudi Arabia’s (recently overturned) female driving ban gave women the “freedom to be safe from car accidents.”

Most of the rest of her speech is pure bluster. She blames Republicans, absurdly, for the crisis on the Mexican border that erupted immediately after she and Biden took office. They not only stopped building Trump’s wall but also abandoned all other sensible safeguards he had put in place. Trump, we are told, intends to destroy the constitution and to become a dictator if he retakes the White House. He plans to turn back the clock to the 1950s. But “we need to move forward, not backward!”

Harris has a plan, apparently, to halve the prices of all drugs. But the viewer has to consume a lot of buzzword salad about the evils of big business, or big pharma, or any of the usual bugbears, before catching any actual details. One rare concrete proposal: She wants to eliminate taxes on tips. But that’s a proposal she appears to have taken from the Trump campaign. The latest Harris idea is to clamp down on “price gouging” by the sinister oligopoly that controls the supply of American groceries. Fact: net margins for the largest grocery sellers in the second quarter of this year ranged from 1.44% (Kroger) to 3.84% (Target).

Democrats and Abortion:

Kamala Harris has been busier distancing herself from her earlier, left-wing positions than articulating her new ones. But on one issue she has been consistent: abortion.

We already know why the far left in the Democratic party talk about abortion so much. The conventional answer is that it’s their most popular issue.

Except that the Democrats’ stance on abortion does not mirror the views of the American public. Abortion is a very divisive issue on which intelligent people of good will vociferously disagree. However, only a tiny fragment of the population, mostly housed in the identity politics sections of academia, think that abortions should be legal up to or even past birth. Yes—past birth. And yet, these post-birth abortions have been legalized by several blue states, including, recently, in Tim Walz’s Minnesota. (Worse still, they have backing from medical journals corrupted by the woke, which have in turn been decried even by moderate liberal media outlets.) Look carefully at the changes Walz made to this statute. You see, late-term abortions are risky processes because the baby is typically viable. Abortionists usually manage to sever the child’s limbs and crush its skull before it emerges from the womb, but not always. Prior to Walz’s intervention, whenever babies were born alive, the doctor was then required to switch goals from killing the baby to helping it live.

Any sensible person will be shocked at the logic here. Surely birth did not somehow turn “a mass of cells” into a person. If we are required to nurture and protect a newborn, surely the same is required for a baby in a different location. Walz-style extremists have caught up with the logic of this—but they’ve made the inference in the other direction. If you have a right to kill a baby at nine months into the pregnancy, surely a few seconds later you still have the right to kill a baby. Hence the deletion in Minnesota of the requirement to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.”

Charles Camosy gives a brief tour of this horrifying position’s emergence from the academy back into society. I encourage you all to read it in full. This paragraph will strike many readers as surprising:

A bit of history. Before Christian ethics became dominant in the West, infanticide was considered (along with abortion) a legitimate way to control reproduction. In ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, the abandonment of newborn infants (usually because they were female or disabled) was even systematized—with certain places designated as baby abandonment spaces. Very often such babies were killed by exposure or wild animals, but sometimes they were picked up by those who raised them as slaves or prostitutes.

What a brave old world we live in. India and China have aborted so many baby girls (tens of millions) for so long that authorities worry about young men being able to find wives. Iceland has reduced its Down syndrome population to close to zero by simply aborting every baby with it. And now we’re even getting back to the ancient world’s preferred method: post-birth abortion. Yes, it’s already happening. It’s just hard to say exactly how often under Walz’s new law, because, naturally, he repealed all reporting requirements on infants born alive during abortions.

 

This ought to be enough to make a normal person nauseous and furious. But it’s not all that surprising. After all, we live in a largely post-Christian world. Fanatics like Tim Walz and Kamala Harris aren’t just getting away with crazy positions on abortion. They are running on a platform of abortion.

Of course, most people—including many atheists—still have the Christian ethos deeply ingrained in their world view. If the American people understood the insane lengths to which people like Walz will go to make sure babies die, most would be horrified.

The Democrats used to be apologetic and embarrassed about abortion. Remember “safe, legal, and rare?” What happened to “rare?”

Democrats have made this election a referendum on the moral character of this country. They ask voters to reject Trump because of his personal moral and ethical flaws. If the American people—despite agreeing with Trump on most policy issues—side with the empty pant-suit DEI hire and her Midwestern Moloch of a sidekick then we’re even further down the road to hell than many of us thought.