askchapo

I don't think anything should be labeled as common sense. The language assumes that if you agree, your opinion is the same as everyone else and must be correct. If you disagree with something labeled as common sense, you're obviously a dumb dumb and don't deserve to exist.

You didn't hear about the fetus blender? It's like a little immersion blender thing that fits through a tube, blends the little thing up and then slurps out the blended fetus through the tube directly into the Adrenochrome©™ lotion bottles.

This is a pre-Dobbs poll, for one, and for two, Dobbs and its aftermath proved quite clearly that theoretical and actual political preferences can diverge rather sharply. I wouldn't assume these numbers are accurate anymore, nor that they really show who would and wouldn't support specific policies even as of the poll date (it's one thing to support a policy to a pollster and something else altogether to be ok seeing your relatives' and friends' lives threatened by that same policy).

Is there evidence that the currently existing laws you refer to are doing this?

The context under which the laws were created can change the overall effects of implementing the law, even if the exact text doesn't change. The 24-week laws were most likely created just as abortion was moving from illegal/grey-area/taboo to legal/generally accepted, so it would read more so as a law to specifically allow abortions up to 24 weeks for any reason, rather than a law which is meant to specifically restrict something. Given that it is very rare for abortions that fall under this law to actually be carried out, there hasn't be a real reason to look for it historically, so it is effectively unenforced.

However, if such a restriction was newly created, it would be moving away from a situation where abortion being legal is the status quo, so it would in effect be a law which imposes additional restrictions, rather than a law that mostly removes pre-existing restrictions. The creation of a new restriction indicates that there was no enforcement before, and thus implies that new enforcement is required. How do you create an enforcement mechanism that isn't trivially bypassed (i.e. having a given doctor just lie about the age of the fetus or level of danger towards the mother) without placing a burden on abortions that supposedly would stay legal (like some sort of verification requirement)? Especially when the religious right will try to push restrictions as far as possible? The status quo of "effectively no enforcement" (at the federal level and the state level in most blue states anyways) seems vastly preferable to the most likely results of trying to enforce anything.

Seems like a political freebie to dull the point on a polarizing wedge issue.

I don't think this is true. There is a momentum to public opinion, and adding a new restriction would push momentum in favor of the anti-abortion movement, whereas currently existing 24-week laws were created in a context where momentum was moving in favor of the pro-abortion movement. I think it's hard to deny that a newly created law is easier for right-wingers to capitalize on compared to an old law that has always been pretty much unenforced.

Even if this was passed, the right-wing media would still lie and say that millions of fully-formed babies were being killed. The only people this would convince are those who 1) would not fall for the aforementioned lie 2) consider the 24-week mark to be the most important moral distinction with respect to fetal personhood (i.e. do not believe in "life at conception" or "first heartbeat") 3) do not consider 0.05% (likely a huge overestimate) of abortions being "unjustified" to be acceptable in the name of protecting abortion rights. I don't think there are many people that fulfill all of those criteria.

Given that the benefit of such a law is pretty minimal even in the best case, raising the issue seems like a bad idea so long as the religious right still exists.