Dump Punts

Apparently realizing that they were caught on the horns, as it were, the dumpsters handlers wrote a statement for him in which he tried to split the baby by saying that abortion policy should be left entirely up to the states. Presumably he agreed to this although his dementia is too far advanced for him to have written the statement.

The whole issue has never been anything but opportunism for him. He proclaimed himself to be a strong supporter of abortion rights until he decided to run for president as a Republican, and then he had a very difficult time articulating exactly what he thought about the entire question until the religious fanatics in his campaign trained him on what to say. He continued to go with the fetal personhood line until the handlers figured out that it was unpopular with the voters, but obviously he can't repudiate the zealots who think he is the Messiah so the brain trust, if it deserves that label, came up with this attempt to escape out the back door.

I doubt that it will work as a campaign strategy, and I expect we'll see it amended pretty soon. But I'm not about the horse race. What I will say is that this makes absolutely no sense from any moral position. If you believe that a blastocyst has the same moral status as a baby, as most of the cult does, then you're just saying that if people in California and New York want to legalize murder it ain't nobody's business but their own. And obviously the reverse, if you think banning abortion violates a fundamental human right then you're just fine with Mississippi legalizing slavery if that's what they want to do. The position that it should be up to the states is the position that it isn't really morally important either way. Good luck with that.

And a quick note about the Christian health ministry scam. As part of the sausage making process that produced the Affordable Care Act, a carve out from the individual mandate was inserted that allowed groups of people with a vaguely defined affiliation, but really meaning a shared religion, to opt out and form what are essentially health care buyers' cooperatives. These are exempt from insurance regulations, and yeah, they're usually cheap compared to real insurance. But that isn't particularly because they don't cover abortion or contraception or whatever satanic medical procedures they don't like, it's because they aren't actually insurance. If something really expensive happens to you, like cancer or an autoimmune disease, that their cheap buy-in doesn't produce enough money to cover, you're shit out of luck and you're infinitely precious human life will be over. So good luck.