Every NATO nation has forged an abortion compromise their citizens can live with (both pro-life and choice). Abortion bans usually kick in somewhere between 16-20 weeks.
If Haley is willing to move in this prudent direction, she'd get my vote. I see no one else in the party with that message...yet.
Nikki Haley Gets Real on Abortion
The GOP candidate makes the pro-life case for political realism.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
April 25, 2023 6:24 pm ET
Republicans urgently need to sort out their political argument on abortion, and the best effort we’ve heard so far is Nikki Haley’s speech on Tuesday combining the moral case against abortion with a politics of persuasion and humility.
Ms. Haley called abortion “a deeply personal topic for both women and men,” and she treated the issue with the compassion and seriousness it demands. “I know how hard pregnancy can be” and “many women have it much harder.” A friend was raped and feared an unwanted pregnancy, “an anguish I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
Ms. Haley described herself as “pro-life,” both “unapologetic and unhesitant about it,” and cited measures she signed as South Carolina Governor. Judges in Roe v. Wade imposed a national abortion standard that “much of the country found deeply offensive.” Roe’s downfall last year was right on the legal merits and an enormous victory for the pro-life movement.
But she tempered that conviction with political realism. “The pro-life laws that have passed in strongly Republican states”—bills that ban the procedure after a heartbeat is detected at six weeks, for instance—“will not be approved at the federal level,” she said.
She’s right. A federal bill would need 60 votes to clear a Senate filibuster, and the GOP hasn’t held that many seats in the upper chamber since 1910. Her candor is all the more notable because Ms. Haley spoke to an audience from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “If we want to protect more moms and save more babies, we need more Americans to join with us,” she added.
Compromise and incrementalism are often unpopular in movements rooted in moral conviction, but the pro-life right can’t dictate the law when most voters still think abortion should be legal. Americans have grown more uneasy about abortion as ultrasound technology and neonatal care have improved, but a ban in the first trimester lacks majority support.
Americans can change their mind, but that will take time and persuasion. Meantime, Ms. Haley suggests federal action on “consensus” policies such as protections for doctors and nurses who decline to perform abortions. The GOP could also continue the tradition of preventing taxpayer financing of abortion, a once bipartisan policy that Democrats have abandoned.
Ms. Haley also said the GOP should tell voters what the left thinks about abortion. The Democratic position is increasingly that abortion should be available at any time up until delivery and celebrated as a social good. The party has abandoned Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” standard, but the electorate has not.
The press will call Ms. Haley’s remarks a straddle, and some GOP voters will agree. But Ms. Haley deserves credit for confronting the subject head on, with a speech that wasn’t sanctimonious or censorious. She told the audience about her husband, born into poverty, with an alcoholic father and a mother with a traumatic brain injury. He was eventually adopted. Ms. Haley asked: What if his biological mother had chosen “another path?” She added: “The world is better because of Michael Haley.”
Democrats and the press won’t let the GOP duck abortion in 2024, and Roe blocked real debate for decades. The party could do worse than Ms. Haley’s pitch for seeking discrete policy victories while building a broader cultural consensus.
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