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David Brooks: Dems Need To Back Off Abortion So Trump Isn’t Elected Again

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Grace Carr Reporter
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Democrats’ support of late-term abortions is actually hurting the party ,and abortion advocates are largely the reason President Donald Trump was elected, New York Times contributor David Brooks charged in his Thursday op-ed.

In his “The Abortion Memo,” Brooks asked Democrats if they “want late-term abortion so much that we are willing to tolerate President Trump?” positing that without single-issue, pro-life voters, Trump would never have been elected.

He mused that if Democrats loosened up their general hardline stance of late-term abortion access at virtually all costs, the pro-life movement would turn its attention away from national elections, meaning that single-issue, pro-life voters would no longer be automatic Republicans. “The abortion debate would no longer be an absolutist position on one side against an absolutist position on the other,” he writes.

He continued by charging that Roe V. Wade has been bad for America and for Democrats because it split the country in two. “Roe v. Wade polarized American politics in ways that have been fundamentally bad for Democrats,” Brooks wrote, citing the size of elected Democratic majorities in 1974 as it compares to the much larger Republican majorities in 2018. Brooks added that without Roe v. Wade, it is highly likely that Democrats would hold much larger majorities than they currently do.

He posited that states would likely make abortion legal in the first months and difficult after that, given that is the policy most Americans support. Seventy-six percent of Americans want significant abortion restrictions, including making abortion illegal after three months in pregnancy according to Marist Poll’s “Americans’ Opinions On Abortions” data released January 2018. More than 60 percent of Americans are also in favor of banning abortions after 20 weeks in pregnancy and six in 10 Americans also oppose using tax dollars to pay for abortions. (RELATED: Over 75 Percent Of Americans Support Abortion Restrictions, Poll Says).

He went on to explain how millennials do not see the pro-choice movement as integral to feminism like Boomers did, and that their votes shouldn’t be taken for granted. Nearly half of millennials support banning abortion for women who are past 20 weeks in pregnancy, according to a Jan. 2017 Quinnipiac poll. Forty-nine percent of 18 to 34-year-old Americans said they would support a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy if the policy were enacted in their state.

“For those Senators who voted against the bill, millennials will be asking how they can embrace such an inhumane procedure for infants who soon can survive outside the womb, and the pro-life generation will hold them accountable,” Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins said after the U.S. Senate failed to pass the 20-week abortion ban Monday, the Washington Post reports.

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Brooks urged Democrats and pro-abortion advocates to rethink their priorities because it will positively benefit them. “What does America need most right now? One of our talking points is that late-term abortions are extremely rare. If they are extremely rare, why are we giving them priority over all of our other issues combined?” he asked.

He also pointed to scientific advancements that have allowed doctors and nurses to birth healthy children at 22 weeks, causing some health professionals to debate whether the medical community should change the threshold of viability that currently sits at 28 weeks according to Roe v. Wade. “It could be that one of the current behaviors that future generations will regard as most barbaric is our treatment of fetuses,” Brooks wrote.

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