There will be a lot of post mortems trying to explain Romney’s defeat, but the re-emergence of abortion as something of a national issue — and how the Democrats exploited it — should be closely examined.
In Missouri, Republican Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin said in a local news interview that women have biological ways to avoid pregnancy after a “legitimate rape.” Tuesday’s early exit polls show 51% of Missouri voters say they believe abortion should be legal all or most of the time. Of those voters, exit polls show 76% supporting Akin’s opponent, Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill while 19% voted for Akin. Forty-seven percent of Missouri’s voters say abortion should be illegal. Exit polls show Akin takes 67% of this group’s votes while 27% of people who think abortion should be illegal supported Sen. McCaskill.
The other state where abortion became a big controversy is Indiana, where Republican U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said during a debate question over abortion rights, that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape…it is something that God intended to happen.” CNN projected Mourdock’s opponent, Joe Donnelly, will defeat Mourdock for the U.S. Senate seat but Indiana voters’ attitudes about abortion are unclear because they weren’t on the exit poll questionnaire.
In some of the other swing states where voters were asked about abortion, 56% of Ohio’s voters told exit pollsters abortion should be legal all or most of the time while 39% say it should be illegal.
Sixty-three percent of Virginia’s voters say abortion should be legal all or most of the time while 33% say it should be illegal.
The split is even more lopsided in New Hampshire where 71% say abortion should be legal all or most of the time and 27% say it should be illegal.
It wasn’t just the ignorance of Akin and misstatements of Mourdock that allowed abortion to bubble to the surface in some states. This was a dynamic the Democrats were trying to exploit even before the gaffes. The “War on Women” became a referendum on abortion rights for some voters, and that worked to the Democrat’s advantage.
Clearly, the issue will not work to the advantage of Democrats everywhere. But to the extent that it can work as a wedge issue, driving women to the polls to vote for pro-choice candidates in some states, it is something the GOP must work to counter.
No, the GOP lost over abortion. Y’all claim to want smaller government, Constitution, and free enterprise…until you find an issue you want more government for, like abortion. How about this?
Get government out of the abortion business. Planned Parenthood? Sure, if it can survive on private funding. If a pharmacist doesn’t want to sell birth control, fine. Doctors choose how to run their own practice: provide abortion or no.
If abortion is so wrong, win in the free market of ideas. If you can’t sell it there and want to use government to do it, you’re using legal force to impose your will. That makes you a socialist. Take responsibility and learn how to communicate better.
Some religions believe life begins with the first breath. If you want to impose your religious stricture on them, you’re using legalized government force to impose your will and destroy the First Amendment. Why don’t you move to Iran, where you’ll fit right in?
Casey Stengel said games are lost, not won. Time to figure it out and learn how to win.
a baby at conception is a unique human. DNA proves this fact. Where is the equal protection for the unique human?
To force an impregnated rape victim to remain pregnant must feel to the victim like being forced to relive the assault every waking moment for months-and never mind the many permanent changes to a woman’s health and body that can result. That’s why Mourdock’s and Akin’s asininities provoked such outrage and revulsion : Their obvious belief that women’s feelings, women’s anguish, do no matter, not when a Sacred Fetus is at stake.
I agree with you, anonymous. Not only is making abortion illegal an election loser, it is an offense to those who want a smaller, less intrusive government. And yes, those who are happy with the idea of forcing pregnant women to carry to term regardless of the women’s situation, regardless of how she became pregnant, seem to believe that women are a form of livestock, with no more say over how they are bred than are mares, cows, sows, or ewes. They should convert to islam and emigrate to one of the 57 IOC states : They’ll fit in, they’ll be ever so much happier,and so will the rest of us.
Tell me, if there is an issue, in which both sides have a weakest link, and the media only asks one side about thiers, what do you think will happen?
From now on, this is the only answer that should be given to a question about abortion for rape/incest: “I will answer that question as soon as my opponent explains why he supports abortion for sex selection.”
And in the unlikely event that is done, give Todd Akin’s main answer:
“The child did not commit the rape, and should not be punshed for it.” (Too bad he gave it second.)
theirs
DNA proves the lump of flesh is human. Soul is eternal, a beloved spark of God. It doesn’t need your protection, but it’s nice of you to offer. My plan would immediately reduce abortion availability. Yours insures marginalizing the GOP. Do you want to get America back on track, or do you want to be obstinate with self-righteousness and lose? America has rejected the anti-abortion agenda. Time to revise strategy and learn to win.
DNA would show my toenails clippings are human too.
Your criteria has nothing to do with the question.
You’re right. DNA is a great way for y’all to ignore my points.
Abortion is worth fighting a civil war to end, just like slavery. If the abolitionists had taken your advice, we’d still have slavery.
You must have a lot of Democrat in your ancestry.
Murder is worth stopping, even with a civil war. Go ahead and start it over even abortions which aren’t murder, it’ll make my job easier.
Democrats started the civil war to keep slavery legal. Abortion could not possibly be anything but murder, but since you do not see the unborn as human any more than masters saw their slaves as human, and since you think that people are a slave to their ancestry, I believe it is you who is the Democrat.
Most people don’t believe a new mix of DNA makes a human–it happens first, it is a prerequisite–it is not the event which creates a human for the first time where before there was none. No single cell is a human being, neither is any like collection of cells too few days gestated.
Most people believe an abortion done in the first trimester isn’t killing a human, almost everyone agrees an abortion done in the third trimester is a homicide. Contradictorily and for no good reason I can think of, many people seem to say it shouldn’t be called a murder if done in the third trimester in some cases, as if the baby resulting from a rape or incest is less of a person. It’s the reason the Democrat position is the more extreme one by far.
I can’t figure that notion the event leading to conception can slight the humanity of the baby, personally, and the question of when an abortion is murder is paramount to the feelings of the mother; I you disagree, I demand you support my right to kill those who’s existence I find to be inconvenient, let alone intolerable.
The GOP should abandon it’s current human life amendment plank, and instead adopt one stating no fetus which has gestated only 90 days is a person in federal law, and federal courts can make no ruling to the contrary, any baby which gestated more that 181 days is a person and their life cannot be ended without due process, and that federal courts shall obey the jurisdictions of the state in which a question of law arises with regard to a pregnancy for the 90 days in between.
With regard to national politics, this largely takes abortion off the table and defangs the Democrats. The fringe socons who think any abortion by any means for any reason at any time after conception is a murder–these will not be satisfied by any result the political process will provide. They should be assured that if it becomes possible for a majority of the public to support them with respect to a different amendment, the GOP will not oppose them.
If this dissatisfies them intolerably, all 5-10% of the GOP of them should be told to go pound sand, it is hard enough winning with them, we’ll try winning without them. I expect it will pick up enough moderates to make up for them if they go, and it’s more Biblical to boot.
In contrast to this “moderation” the GOP should double down on questions of fiscal conservatism.
The Roman Catholic perspective comes from the Blessed Virgin Mary, who identified herself to some children unfamiliar with the terminology as “the Immaculate Conception”, not “the immaculate clump of cells.”
And you want the government in everything except for the bedroom. Tell you what, since you want the government out of the bedroom, you get no birth control pills on the taxpayer’s dime nor allowed to have an abortion unless the act of sex happens outside of the bedroom. On the upside, that leaves plenty of places to have sex and you won’t have to worry about the government having any interactions with the results of activities in the bedroom.
You must be arguing with yourself and losing. I stated the government should be out of the abortion business. That means no taxes used for abortion, for or against.
Abortion is a wedge issue and this country will be divided as long as it remains a wedge issue. You had 56 million people vote against Obama, few of whom think abortion is something good and a lot, if not most, think it something very bad. The 59 million who voted for him? Most of those black ones are social conservatives.
The first step in uniting this country is getting rid of Roe v. Wade. The first step in getting rid of Roe is recognizing that the political class in both parties likes wedge issues as they allow them to acquire power and personal wealth by running up $16 trillion debt.
You know what another wedge issues is? Immigration. The first step in ending this as a wedge issue is overturning Plyler v Doe. You let government agencies like school districts and SNAP do residency background checks on those applying for services hence joining the enforcement of our immigration law as one would thing government agencies would and the situational amnesty plans become much less contentious.
The Supreme Court is responsible for 90 percent of our country’s problems, and historically has been.
Yeah, you get it! No government/abortion complex. Repeal its involvement back to Roe and beyond.
One has to ask: did the far right sabotage Romney with this issue by yelling fire in a crowded theater when it dawned on them that he might win?
No, it was the local versions of the MSM asking the pro-lifers about the wing link (abortion for rape), while not asking the anti-lifers about abortion for sex selection.
Can someone get to someone at Fox and get people to ask this? Not that the news division is so conservative.
weak link
It wasn’t just the abortion/contraception/ladyparts wedge. It was also Voter ID initiatives presented as a racist caricature. It was continuing to blame GWB for the current sorry state of the economy. It was firing up the labor union base to preserve their perks and privileges in the face of right-to-work challenges. It was playing the politics of envy by asserting that “the rich” had to “pay a little more” in order to satisfy some unspecified “fare share”. And it was the successful portrayal of the Republican challanger as an out-of-touch rich plutocrat more concerned with the bottom line than anything else, substance of his stated positions notwithstanding.
The politics of fear and division are still alive and well. They are the sole province of the left today.
I saw somewhere yesterday that UN election monitors wer shocked that we did not require voter ID. Does tis mean the UN is racist? Their reaction should be spread widely, especially through black communities.
The GOP hands abortion to the Democrats to exploit it in cynical GOTV.
NewYork 2010 was the test run, to drive turnout in a low enthusiasm governor’s contest. Worked so well even the NYT-endorsed GOP candidate for State Comptroller lost.
It’s like watching Mutually Assured Destruction.
The GOP will keep losing on this, and the Dems can keep spending the USA into the abyss.
So money is more important than human life?
We’ll spend ourselves into an abyss as long as abortion is legal and twenty years thereafter, on account of the slaughter of would-be taxpayers.
Bunch of Pavlov’s dogs. None so blind as he who cannot see. If y’all insist in repeating the abortion screaming points, you insure GOP becoming losers permanently.
But better to remain self-righteous than win, huh?
My Master once said, “What would it profit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his soul?” If we forsake the unborn, we lose our souls, and our “victory” would be a total loss. We’ll either outlaw abortion or die trying, and if the American people love abortion more than liberty, they deserve to lose all their liberty, and I am happy to hand them over to the enemy for destruction.
Perhaps someone could hold a symposium with people from other western countries on the topic of abortion and how it is restricted elsewhere. Many Americans would be suprised to find that other countries do have some rstrictions, and Europeans would be surprised that Obama supports the abortion of full term babies. It woul be intersting to see this as a topic in Der Spiegel.
It’s disturbing that the female vote can be so cheaply bought with the issue of birth control and abortion. No wonder the Dems find them usual idiots.
Congratulations young female Obama voters. You won’t find a guy with a decent job in the Obama economy, so at least you preserved the power to flush his kid down the toilet.
More here: http://mskochin.blogspot.co.il/2012/11/hope-after-romney-nine-replies-to-hans.html
and here: http://mskochin.blogspot.co.il/2012/11/abortion-halacha-and-jobs-issue-reply.html
It has never ceased to amaze me that libs are so gungho for abortion on demand. They embrace the brutal murders of the most innocent of life and yet are vehemently opposed to the death penalty.
It never ceases to amaze me that the fundamentalist left insists in hijacking the party reputedly supporting smaller government and personal freedom under the Constitution. And the GOP lets it continue.
I agree with Anonymous. We can have all of the best answers for the economy and the course of the country…but abortion and our stand against evolution will make us unelectable in modern day America. Believe what you will, it must be kept out of the platform if there is to be a reasonable shot at regaining any Presidency or Senate seat. We lost this election because of abortion. Face the stupid, immoral, shallow, idiotic truth. Abortion rights were the only reason the libs that still tlk to me gave as their reason for voting for that other ticket. And we need to teach everyone Americanism and what it means before it’s too late.
We are against evolution?
May your money perish with you! If the only way we can win is by abandoning the unborn, then we deserve to lose and fade into obscurity, just like the Whig Party. We must abolish abortion, even if it requires a civil war to do so.
People won’t even show up to vote, but you think they’ll show up for an armed revolution. Get out much?
The Revolutionary War was supported by a minority of Americans, but that didn’t matter. The Civil War was supported by a minority of northerners, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was strategy, tactics, discipline, moral, firepower, courage and a few good men answering the call.
Terrible things come from forcing your religious views on others. The best example in American history is the Civil War. Northern Christians forced their beliefs on Southerners. Maybe the abolitionists could have avoided the war if they just said, “If slavery is wrong, we’re gonna let the free market decide. Some plantation owners will decide to not destroy the human rights of blacks, and good people will only buy their cotton.” What Akin said was stupid. What Mourdock said was terribly worded, but ultimately he was trying to be intellectually and ethically consistent and honest.
For the record, a unique human organism is created at conception. Whether that organism constitutes a person with rights is a completely different question. The answer very much depends on your worldview.
“But he was the best candidate we could have this year, and he campaigned well. He campaigned like he wanted it.”
Slavery is no better than continual rape and the threat of rape. You want to stick up for it, go ahead. Dixie delenda est.
The copy paste still had the last string in it. Quote should have been. “Terrible things come from forcing your religious views on others.”
The problem is not that the Democrats succeeded in making abortion a wedge issue; abortion is and should be a wedge issue. The problem is that the Republicans didn’t show up for the fight.