Plotting the wiser course

Last week’s voting in red-state Ohio, coming after public-initia- tive votes in red-state Kansas and red-state Kentucky, provides strong evidence that there is an American aversion to extremism against abortion.

It ought to make clear—even to any unafraid Republican legislators who might still exist—both the political reality and the wisest policy direction after repeal of Roe v. Wade.

The U.S. Supreme Court removed a federal guarantee of a woman’s right to an abortion, but, otherwise, merely turned the issue back to states. So, it’s up to the folks at home.

Blue pro-choice states seem solidly inclined to remain that way. But, in votes last year in Kansas and Kentucky and last week in Ohio, red-state voters have indicated (by 57 percent in Ohio, 59 in Kansas and 52 in Kentucky) that absolute no-exception local bans on any possibility of abortion are not favored.

It seems obvious that a wide and decisive swath of American voters oppose abortion-on-demand and lateterm abortions—or just abortion generally—but do not go along with policies that declare abortions forbidden altogether, period. These voters are reasonable and compassionate, not zealous to the extreme, if the pregnancy results from rape or incest or if a mother is extended no right to decide whether to carry to term a fetus with a fatal anomaly.

This is yet another occasion when the political middle would hold the power if only it was organized to the extent of being able to use it. But moderates tend to be passive, merely reactive to—usually against—whatever the extremes are preaching.

If we could wend our way to an America in which blue-states had solid abortion rights and red-states did not provide those rights except in the aforementioned cases, then majorities of people might become content enough at home to make individual political decisions specifically without the abortion issue compelling them generally in a pre-determined way.

The voter who says, “I’ll tell you one thing—I’ll never vote for a Democrat again as long as Democrats are for killing babies,” might find in a settled local-control environment that there are other things to consider, like public education, or library freedom, or racial equity, or climate, or infrastructure choices.

And that’s what contemporary politicians fear. If they could no longer count on automatic votes for themselves and against their opponents based on an abortion issue that had lost its scale-tipping power, then they’d have to make their cases more broadly, more thoughtfully and with more accountability.

Republicans are in a planning stage for a post-abortion political arena. They’ve been busy teeing up replacement wedges. They call it wokeness or critical race theory or boys being girls and girls being boys, and a bathroom crisis arising therefrom. They’re good at force-feeding those kinds of cultural dividers. But I’m not sure they’ve got things fully set up quite yet for an abortion-settled political battlefield.

I give some Arkansas Republican legislators enough credit to believe that their opposition to reasonable, compassionate abortion exceptions is based on fear of being beaten in a primary by an anti-abortion zealot’s overly simplistic rhetoric.

Rep. Nicole Clowney of Fayetteville, a Democrat, had a bill this year to give a grieving mother personal health-care decision-making rights if her unborn child was medically doomed. It went nowhere. Surely there were Republican legislators who were controlled in their opposition by damnable fear of losing a precious primary rather than innate cruelty.

But here’s the final analysis: As long as Republicans give in to abortion absolutism, they will continue to face even red-state complications such as those evident in last week’s outcome in Ohio.

Now, to be more specific about what happened in Ohio: The actual question defeated 5743 percent was whether to require proposed constitutional amendments to receive 60 percent voter approval, rather than the current simple majority.

That was, first, the abortion issue by proxy, since an abortion-rights amendment is coming on the general election ballot. Republican legislators wanted to hamstring it by moving the goal posts back into the end-zone seats.

But, beyond that, this is an emerging national Republican objective—limiting the voters’ direct-democracy rights state by state.

What’s happening, you see, is that Republicans are locking down voters in red states on cultural wedge issues like abortion, but losing those voters on specific ballot issues such as raising the minimum wage, or legalizing at least medical marijuana, or opening casinos.

This attack on the people’s right to rule has begun to appear another loser for Republicans. Even Arkansas, irreparably red, voted against that 60 percent threshold last November.

That’s why Republicans currently double-down on radical-left agendas, open borders and the sorry state of Hunter Biden.

Amid all that, accepting a few reasonable and compassionate abortion exceptions would be a wiser and more-direct course to continued political viability.