Personhood, goalposts and subversive voting

But this pendulum is swinging so strongly that I don’t think we can draw any conclusions. It’s all about reaction. And that, unfortunately, makes elections little more than a holding pattern (at best) at a time when the status quo is killing us.

The defeat of Mississippi’s fetal personhood bill was a particular relief. Similar bills are set to go around the country and if it can’t get traction in Mississippi they are probably dead everywhere. Unfortunately, it didn’t keep Mississippi from also voting to suppress the vote and electing a new Governor who said that opponents of this personhood law were, “the evil dark side that exists in this world is taking hold. And they’re saying, what we want you to be able to do is continue to extinguish innocent life. You see, if we could do that, Satan wins.” But, still, good news.

It was interesting, however, to see how different the polls were from the final tally. Amanda Marcotte observed in this piece that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen such a disparity between polling and results in abortion cases. It happened in South Dakota, ground zero for extreme forced childbirth legislation, as well. She points out that many people who call themselves pro-life are, in practice, pro-choice, they simply don’t want to identify as such. There’s a scale of belief on this complicated issue and most people fall somewhere other than the two extremes.

She surmises from these votes, and I agree, that there are quite a few professed “pro-life” women who tell pollsters they will vote for an extreme bill (or are undecided) but when they are alone in the voting booth will vote against it. Many “traditional” women have been doing this sort of subversive voting forever, one of the reasons men didn’t want to give women the vote in the first place. (My own conservative mother told me she voted for Gene McCarthy and begged me not to tell my military father. She had a draft age son.)

Irin Carmon wraps up her great coverage in Salon by asking an important question about all this, however. Have the goalposts just been moved again?

It helped that it was true to say, as they did over and over again, that it wasn’t “just about abortion” — Initiative 26, at least judging by the intentions of its supporters, was also about banning common forms of birth control, making IVF impossible, and hampering doctors trying to save women with life-threatening pregnancies. But it was also manifestly about abortion. Initiative 26 may have gone down, but Mississippi is still a state with a single abortion clinic, staffed with a doctor flown in from out of state a couple days a week, and with abysmal rates of teen pregnancy and infant mortality. Will any of that change now that even “pro-lifers” have made common cause with the state’s small pro-choice contingent? Or is this just a temporary redrawing of the lines around the reproductive rights most palatable to conservatives, like rape exceptions, just to play defense against increasingly audacious Republican threats?

Most “pro-life” people still believe that abortion should available in the case of rape and incest. If you stop and think about it even for a minute, you simply have to understand why it is so cruel to force women to give birth to their own sibling or be reminded of the violent assault they suffered every day of their lives. Life is complicated and even the most stalwart anti-abortion crusaders used to recoil a little bit when confronted with the reality of such pregnancies. But it’s becoming increasingly common for mainstream conservatives to deviate from that and say “no exceptions.” The goalpost is moving toward “saving the life of the mother” being the only exception (and even that is being challenged.)

This is standard Overton Window stuff and I think it’s probably working at least to some extent. The good news is this:

On the No on 26 Facebook page, people who seem to have been previously unengaged have been excitedly talking for days about continuing their work after the election.

“It’s so helpful to know that you’re not alone,” Hemmins told me just before the election. “There’s been some talk of staying together after the vote as a group, I’m not sure for what purpose or to what extent… The religious right seems to be coming at women from so many different directions. Unfortunately, I can see us needing to rally the forces in the future.”

Indeed. On the Personhood Mississippi page, they’re already talking about taking the cause to the legislature.

We seem to be entering a new age of civic and social engagement and these battles are training activists for the demands of citizenship. Even in Mississippi. That’s unequivocally a good thing.

Update: Pema Levy at TAP also asks if there’s a Bradley Effect for abortion here.

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