Sex, IVF, Republicans, Conservatives

  Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Abortion was a big issue in the 2022 midterm. It will probably be a big issue in 2024.

Alice Ollstein at Politico:

The Alabama Supreme Court ruling granting legal personhood to frozen embryos could set up a political and legal backlash against conservatives heading into the November election.

The decision not only threatens GOP efforts to court suburban women and other constituencies uneasy about abortion bans, but also complicates the party’s standing with millions of people who may oppose abortion but support — and in many cases use — in-vitro fertilization and other forms of fertility care. The ruling also demonstrates how the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has made previously theoretical policy and legal battles over the most intimate aspects of American life far more immediate and high-stakes.

GOP strategists warn that pursuing curbs on those treatments risks exacerbating the backlash that has cost Republicans several races since the fall of Roe. One in six Americans who struggle with infertility — millions of people each year — turn to IVF, according to the National Infertility Association.

“It certainly intersects, badly, with general election politics for Republicans,” said Stan Barnes, a political consultant and former Republican state senator in Arizona. “When a state, any state, takes an aggressive action on this particular topic, people are once again made aware of it and many think: ‘Maybe I can’t support a Republican in the general election.’”

Sarah Fortinsky at The Hill:

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley says she did not endorse the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said frozen embryos and fertilized eggs should be treated as children under state law.

Instead, Haley told the hosts of CNN’s “King Charles,” that she agreed an embryo is an unborn baby.

“Well, first of all, I didn’t, I mean, this is again, I didn’t say that I agreed with the Alabama ruling. What the question that I was asked is, do I believe an embryo is a baby?” Haley said Wednesday evening. “I do think that if you look in the definition, an embryo is considered an unborn baby. And so, yes, I believe from my stance that that is.”

“The difference is — and this is what I say about abortion as well — we need to treat these issues with the utmost respect,” she added.

Her remarks come after she faced pushback to an earlier interview with NBC News, in which she said, “I mean, embryos, to me, are babies.”

 

Heritage Foundation is the lead organizer of Project 2025 (which I called Project 25, below). 2/ https://t.co/7G4FPNp1ix

— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) February 18, 2024

Roe Update

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

Abortion will be a big, divisive issue in the 2022 midterms. 

Republicans are not getting their messaging stragith.

Mychael Schnell at The Hill:

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) on Sunday said a national abortion ban floated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is “inconsistent with what we’ve been fighting for.”

McConnell told USA Today in an interview published on Saturday that a national ban on abortions is “possible,” as the country reacts to a drafted majority opinion from the Supreme Court that shows the bench poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Asked by anchor Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week” if he would oppose a national ban on the medical procedure, Hutchinson said such a move may have “some constitutional issues.”

“I think it’s inconsistent with what we’ve been fighting for four decades, which is that we wanted the Roe v. Wade reversed and the authority to return to the states. And so as a matter of principle, that’s where it should be,” Hutchinson said.

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert at Business Insider:

Blake Masters, a GOP Senate candidate running on an anti-abortion platform in Arizona, is also taking aim at the case that established the right to access birth control on his campaign website.

"I am 100% pro-life. Roe v. Wade was a horrible decision. It was wrong the day it was decided in 1973, it's wrong today, and it must be reversed. But the fight doesn't stop there," Master's campaign website reads. It goes on to pledge the candidate will "vote only for federal judges who understand that Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion."

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey established and protected the right to an abortion in 1973 and 1992, respectively. But the Griswold case, decided in 1965, overturned a statewide ban on birth control and protected citizen's rights to privacy against state restrictions on contraceptives.

Masters identifies himself as a Catholic father of three on his campaign site. The Catholic Church has had an official ban on any "artificial" birth control methods, including condoms and diaphragms, since 1930. Since birth control pills were invented in 1960, the church has maintained its stance that the medication should only be used for non-contraceptive reasons.


"I don't support a state law or federal law that would ban or restrict contraception — period," Masters said in a statement emailed to Insider. "And Griswold was wrongly decided. Both are true."

In a Twitter thread criticizing reporting that pointed out his conflicting campaign positions, Masters stated that his problem with the Griswold case was that the Supreme Court justices "wholesale made up a constitutional right to achieve a political outcome."