Anti-choice in every sense

Losing on abortion, trying to ensure it doesn’t matter

Another election, another expected loss for anti-abortion lunatics, probably: Polls show that in next Tuesday’s Ohio referendum a pro-choice amendment to the state constitution is heavily favored to succeed — despite intense Republican efforts to require the amendment achieve a supermajority to pass, obfuscate the amendment’s wording and meaning, and throw presumably pro-amendment voters off the voter rolls.

Maybe I missed it, but it seems the anti-side is working harder and dirtier now than their equivalents did in the previous seven states where reproductive rights have won since the overturn of Roe made such battles necessary.

This suggests to me these conservatives are beginning to emerge from their post-Dobbs euphoria and realize just how hated their program is in just about every part of the country. And, knowing what they’re like, we can expect them not to back off, but rather to double down.

I mentioned their earlier cluelessness after the first — and, to many people on both sides, most shocking — pro-choice victory in blood-red Kansas in August 2022:

…when the Federalist Society’s tradcath infiltration of the courts finally reached critical mass and overturned the right to abortion, there was rejoicing across the conservative movement — churched and unchurched, urban and rural, high and low — because here was a blazing signifier that they were paying their debt to the evangelicals.

But they’d forgotten: To actually pull the wagon over the finish line, they need some independents — some people who are not in on the death pact. You could tell they’d forgotten because they’ve been talking since Dobbs as if the death pact were all, talking about how they would win over even the women they were turning into brood-sows by professing to them a Christian love which, everyone could plainly see, they neither felt nor believed in.

Tuesday night was their first punch in the mouth showing that even in red states, normal people aren’t going for it. And like Mike Tyson says, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And they got more coming.

I still certainly believe all that. But their response in Ohio suggest that conservatives have since Kansas come up with, if not a plan, then at least an instinctual resort to vote-rigging — in the spirit of the gerrymandering and voter suppression that keeps them alive in many red states and the U.S. Congress despite the will of the voters.

Look at another state with a prospective abortion referendum: Missouri, which currently has a strict ban in effect. Pro-choice forces hope to have it on the ballot next year. But the state attorney general moved to block it on absurd pretexts (such as that the amendment would cost the state $51 billion). He got knocked down by the state Supreme Court in July, but the Republicans are still contesting it.

If they didn’t know they’d lose the fight, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop it.

True, some conservatives still pump out the increasingly unbelievable cover story that abortion bans are actually not unpopular, or at least not too unpopular, or only seem unpopular for unrelated reasons — like the National Review guy who wrote, “Young women have only become more liberal in recent years, and it’s not far-fetched to say the ‘trolling’ streak in some corners of the Right is a turnoff” — as if it had more to do with mean jokes than with the conservative movement’s determination to turn them into chattel. This week Steve Deace, who I understand is famous in some circles (presumably of Hell), screams at The Blaze about the “baby-killing” Ohio amendment, blames its chances of victory on conservatives’ “negative energy,” and brushes off the notion that abortion has anything to do with Republicans’ weak performance since Dobbs thus:

Single women did vote in droves against Republicans last year, but single women vote in droves against Republicans every year.

All very amusing for connoisseurs of authentic rightwing gibberish. But it’s important to remember that even they know it’s gibberish — just fascist happy talk, a tonic for the shock troops. Everyone knows this isn’t what most of us want. But consent of the governed is only meaningful in a democracy, and our real struggle — of which the institutional misogyny of their abortion policy is a large part but not quite the whole — is over democracy itself.