Abortion "debate"

 "You like killing babies."

"Dude, you're part of a party that believes in fucking over refugees, in poor people dying for lack of healthcare, in destroying the environment, in a violent gun culture where everyone's on a hair-trigger all the time...and hell, you don't even support government-sponsored prenatal care and also your beloved President pardoned a literal serial killer, and you don't care, if you're not actually super in favor of it, as you probably are because you're cool with murdering brown people.  The idea that you're super seriously concerned about this nebulous concept of 'life' is just grotesque."

"Well...you like killing babies."

SIGH.  We've all been there, maybe, before we realized how pointless it was to even try to argue.  I do have to hand it to them--whoever decided that opposition to abortion was going to supersede open racism as the central cultural issue: it was a great choice.  Evil, but more effective than anything they could possibly have imagined.  Opposition to killing babies washes away all other sins.  Sure, we can point out that their other policy positions, such as they are, make it very obvious that they don't actually care about it on any deep level, but where does that get us?   Abortion is a religious issue, by which I don't mean a specifically Christian thing (though it's often couched in those terms), but that it's a belief based on faith and not amenable to any kind of rational 'debate.'  If they insist that they really truly see legal abortion as being equivalent to the Holocaust...well, it's grotesque and everyone knows that on some level, but what can anyone DO about it?  And you think giving them facts about gestation times will help?  Give me a break.

I don't know; it's just that you keep seeing articles with titles like "Supreme Court to strip away women's rights," and I suppose that's not specifically aimed at anti-abortion people, but it seems at least partially so, and certainly people do use the "how the fuck DARE you take away our rights like that?" argument.  And I don't feel like there's enough acknowledgement that these arguments have less than zero effect on anyone--never have, never will. 

So, you have to find something better.  Or so I want to say, but I have no idea what.  I feel like the only way to potentially turn around an anti-choicer is if they have a friend or loved one who has an abortion and the whole issue becomes less abstract to them.  Of course, that won't necessarily work either--we all know the endless anecdotes about anti-abortion activists surreptitiously having abortions while justifying that in their case, they really need it, unlike those other sluts.  But it might!  In some cases.  But you also have the problem that no women has any responsibility to talk about something that isn't your goddamn business if she doesn't want to, and I just don't see any way around that without descending into fascism myself.  So not a really practical solution on a widespread societal level.

I think what's going to happen is this: assuming climate change doesn't obliterate society (always necessary to preface predictions with that), the atrocities will start to mount and become more and more visible and people who were too young to remember pre-Roe-v-Wade times will be horrified, and in, like, 2060 or something, the Supreme Court or whatever equivalent exists at the time will re-legalize it.  I guess that might sound sort of optimistic, as it suggests that in the long run the good guys aren't completely fucked, and maybe it is, but either way, it ain't THAT optimistic: no matter what, we are in for a grim, ugly, cruel near- and medium-future.  I never thought of myself as what anyone would call "patriotic," but the rage I feel at what these monsters are doing to my country indicates that I actually sort of am on some level.  Go figure.