3 Troubling Trends Among Anti-Abortion Pundits Calling for Post-Roe 'Shift in Priorities'

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"The criminalization of reproductive healthcare is a looming disaster, not a mere policy distinction," writes @Repino1. "We should treat it like one, even if it means telling certain people that dialogue with them is a waste of time."

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3 Troubling Trends Among Anti-Abortion Pundits Calling for Post-Roe 'Shift in Priorities'
In the early ’90s, my Catholic grade school hosted a guest speaker, a member of the Pennsylvania state legislature. After giving our eighth-grade class a basic civics lesson, he opened the floor to...
9:04 AM · Sep 22, 2022

https://religiondispatches.org/3-troubling-trends-among-anti-abortion-pundits-calling-for-post-roe-shift-in-priorities/

In the early ’90s, my Catholic grade school hosted a guest speaker, a member of the Pennsylvania state legislature. After giving our eighth-grade class a basic civics lesson, he opened the floor to Q&A. And, in the excruciating hour that followed, every last question consisted of some variation of, “What are you doing about abortion?” You see, my classmates and I had been so marinated in anti-abortion rhetoric that we couldn’t understand why someone in his position could waste time with tax codes when there were so many babies to save. By the end of the session, our local representative was visibly shaken. I wonder whether he ever agreed to speak at a parochial school again.

That episode has been at the front of my mind since news broke of the Dobbs decision, “among the Court’s worst decisions in history.” While there would never be a good time for the Supreme Court to take away a half-century-old constitutional right, there could hardly be a worse time than right now, with major news outlets still committed to a pernicious bothsidesism.

It didn’t take long for the horror of forced-birth policies to become obvious. Less than a month after Dobbs, a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio had to leave the state to seek an abortion. That story, along with many others, convinced some conservatives to recalibrate their message, even if that meant downplaying or—in the case of senate candidate Blake Masters—denying their anti-abortion stance.

A peculiar assortment of anti-abortion pundits has stepped into this morass. Unlike my classmates, these more sophisticated activists hope to salvage some civility from the shitstorm they helped to create.

*snip*