I think that characterizing the previous situation before Roe got dumped, as an "extreme", isn't quite appropriate. Nor is anyone that I've seen ever really advocating for late term other than health and safety of mom stuff.
But as for your discussion, I think what you lay is quite acceptable..maaaaybe I'd say up to 20 (or 18).
In fact, whether legal or not, wasn't that essentially how abortion was being provided for in the US.... I mean...really?
When I did social work, the "oops" women I know didn't sit and consider for months. They knew RIGHT away they should NOT be a mom.
I mean, I think every single prochoice person I knew to the tee would advocate for that. I'm not sure that's the "centrist" position many think it is.
As I've noted before, the top pro-choice advocacy groups and lobbyists in the country have branded "safe, legal, and rare" as unacceptable, and have taken objection to the notion that we should be trying to make abortion as "rare" as possible, and have labelled that stance "anti-choice" and "anti-women"
It's not that what was happening pre-Roe-reversal was "extreme", it's that there were high profile calls for expanding abortion in ways that people viewed as extreme.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...9af73c-01a4-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html
Today, Democrats use the phrase at their peril. The party’s base appears unwilling to tolerate a slogan that suggests abortion ought to be “rare,” hearing in it too much of a concession to abortion opponents. As a result, most Democratic candidates have erased from their rhetoric any hint that abortion might be a subject on which reasonable people can disagree, and they’ve altered their policy proposals to match — endorsing the repeal of all restrictions on paying for abortions with federal money, for example. These moves might excite the party’s progressive base, but they put candidates out of step with the average American and even with many of their own voters.
Evidence of just how taboo it has become to use the phrase “safe, legal and rare” came in the most recent presidential primary debate, when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) uttered the fateful words, giving a nod to Hillary Clinton as she did so: “When she said abortion should be safe, legal and rare,” Gabbard said, “I think she’s correct.” The candidate favors abortion rights early in pregnancy and would codify the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, but she’d prohibit abortion during the last three months of pregnancy “unless the life or severe health consequences of a woman are at risk.”
Left-leaning critics quickly descended. The Ohio affiliate of NARAL Pro-Choice America tweeted: “This is a position — making abortion ‘rare’ — not supported by pro-choice advocates.” A headline in Vice said Gabbard was “stuck in the ‘90s,” and the article’s author, Marie Solis, argued that the candidate had revived a “decades-old talking point that pro-choice supporters say only further stigmatizes abortion at a critical moment.”
She quoted Amelia Bonow, a co-founder of the pro-abortion-rights group Shout Your Abortion, who said, “I cannot think of a less compelling way to advocate for something than saying that it should be rare. And anyone who uses that phrase is operating from the assumption that abortion is a bad thing.”
In 2012, the Democratic Party excised the word “rare” from its official platform, writing instead that it favored “safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.”
I think much of the "renewed vigor" that we saw from the die-hard pro-life camp was, in many ways, a response to what they saw as "the left moving further left" on this issue, and when the top pro-choice advocacy groups of today were suggesting that the Clinton-era pro-choice stance was "stuck in the 90's", and "anti-choice"...
Hey there! If you care about abortion access—and we hope you do—you probably don’t want to use stigmatizing language about abortion. Our “Destigmatizing Abortion” series breaks down some of the mistakes a lot of us can make in our advocacy journey. Today, let’s talk about the phrase: “abortion...
nwlc.org
There is a compelling case that perhaps the left did move further left on this issue. NARAL and NWLC aren't "fringe voices" within the pro-choice political sphere. They're every bit as influential on the abortion issue on the democratic side, as the NRA is to the gun issue on the republican side.
For instance, today, there's no widespread access to fully automatic weapons, they're very restricted and very few have access to them. However, if the NRA and other high profile gun lobbies were advocating for expanding gun rights to allow for people to access to machine guns as easily as they could be a 12 gauge shotgun, it wouldn't be surprising if the other team started ramping up their advocacy for much stricter gun laws as a preemptive strike against what they saw as "the writing on the wall" and "what's gonna happen if we don't step it up a notch and reign this in now"
When you take something, that the other side is already holding their nose to barely tolerate, and suggest that "it's not good enough, we want to take it much further in the next 5 years", I think that's when you can expect the strongest counter-efforts to emerge.
