[guest post by Dana]

If you’re looking to talk about something other than Dobbs or abortin, consider this:

A political shift is beginning to take hold across the U.S. as tens of thousands of suburban swing voters who helped fuel the Democratic Party’s gains in recent years are becoming Republicans.

More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year, according to voter registration data analyzed by The Associated Press. The previously unreported number reflects a phenomenon that is playing out in virtually every region of the country — Democratic and Republican states along with cities and small towns — in the period since President Joe Biden replaced former President Donald Trump.

But nowhere is the shift more pronounced — and dangerous for Democrats — than in the suburbs, where well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back. Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa.

Reasons cited as the catalyst for changing parties include: Democrats push for vaccine mandates, the no concrete solutions to decreasing violent crime, fear that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and the lurch toward the progressive wing of the party.

Exit question: The voter data that analyzed by the AP was done before Dobbs just a few days ago, so do you think any significant number of these swing voters will return to the Democratic Party as a result of Dobbs? And if so, do you think the number will be significant enough to worry the GOP?

–Dana

In discussing the Dobbs decision with Twitter leftists, I have noticed something unusual: if you got all of your abortion information from them, you wouldn’t even know that a second life (besides the life of the mother) is part of the equation. Many of them treat the decision to have an abortion as if it were a trivially easy issue about making your own health decisions, having no more moral significance than clipping your toenails.

It’s very common for them to refer to abortion as nothing more than an uncomplicated personal health care decision. It is a health care decision, but a unique one that involves another life. The Twitter leftists act like the baby is nothing more than an unwanted parasite, as if the mother played no part in its having arrived in her body. In their view, she just had bad luck, like getting struck by lightning.

The most obvious way to demonstrate the flaw in this position is to realize that, if you take it seriously, the mother may have a doctor stab her perfectly healthy baby in the head with a pair of scissors a week before the normal delivery date. She may do this on a whim, simply because she does not wish to continue “hosting” the “parasite” in her body.

I support an exception to anti-abortion laws for early-term abortions that are the product of rape. I would try to persuade a woman impregnated by a rapist to have the baby, but I would not have the state force her to do so, when she never took any voluntary action that she knew could result in pregnancy.

But if you chose to have sex, you knew that pregnancy was a possibility. You made a choice, and now another life is involved. To say the mother can end that life, unilaterally, even on a whim, at any point in the pregnancy, regardless of the baby’s health, strikes me as a morally monstrous position.

A popular one — on Twitter, at least (David French compares reading through the abortion comments on Twitter to taking a stroll through Berkeley). But monstrous nevertheless.