” Most people wouldn’t starve or lose their job and possessions over an unknown, unborn baby.”
If you look at things on a macro level, the loss of 55+ million babies over the past 40 years has had a tremendous impact on our society.
For example:
When larger families were the norm rather than the exception, as is the case in this post Griswold, post Roe world, the care of the elderly could relatively easily be accomplished by the elderly people’s adult children. Now, rather than the expenses, both in time and in dollars, must be borne by one or two kids. That’s a whole lot different.
The cultural attitude from parents to children also has changed. Again, with fewer kids, parents are free to obsess over their one or two offspring. All of their dreams and hopes are embodied in that kid. What happens? The kid is materially spoiled and never has to share with anybody...the kid is pressured to be perfect...constant structured activity leading to obsessiveness. The kid must be a success because otherwise the parent is a failure. No second, third, our fourth chance to get it right.
And then we can look at the loss of bodies for the labor pool. We don’t have enough people, and those that we have are self serving as a norm. The result: we import aliens to do the shut work for slave wages.
While the loss of one child to abortion may not have a huge impact on society, if you look at it on the macro scale, that has done more to ruin our society than anything else. And yes, I would include, in many cases, jobs and possessions
Good analysis and we agree. We’re on the same team as regards abortion. My only point is the shortsightedness and low self-esteem of the average voter limits the ability of conservative candidates to win on socially conservative issues alone. We’re too easily painted as extreme and our ideas marginalized.
On the other-hand imagine if the three of us ran on a pro-growth, pro-jobs platform. That could be a winning ticket even in many Dem areas. Now we implement our policies and get growth going again along with jobs.
The voter, seeing the pocketbook issue being addressed, is now grateful. Over time we would then be able to implement socially conservative initiatives over time. Those same initiatives would improve pocketbook issues by reforming welfare, strengthening families and reducing out of wedlock births. This would all act to keep conservatives in power for generations.
We tend to be too all or nothing. I live in a heavily Democratic area. I work hard to get a little bit each time using moral suasion and publicity to move the conservative agenda forward. I never get everything, but in bits and pieces I’ve succeeded greatly.
As for abortion I don’t believe that God would allow those innocents to suffer the crimes of their parents. So despite my disgust for abortion, I believe that long term we can only hope to ban late term abortions and reduce the number by implementing adoption reforms. People throughout history have always had abortions. That’s not a rationalization for an evil, just the reality of this world. Remember that the god of this world is the Devil.