The Democratic Party’s sharp leftward pivot on abortion has been led by its most vocal mainstays over the past few months. But now it seems as though the party infrastructure itself is purging all but the purest of pro-choice ideologues. The House Democratic Campaign Committee canceled a fundraiser for Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., a pro-life fixture in the House for nearly 15 years.
The DCCC’s decision comes just days after Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., promised to ice out those who don’t follow the new party line on abortion, echoing the oaths of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to purge heterodox Democrats through the primary process.
“You can’t say you’re a Democrat if you’re against immigrants, if you’re against abortion, if you’re against gay marriage, and LGBTQ rights,” said Jayapal. “I’m not sure what it means to be a Democrat if all of those things are true.”
Jayapal and the insurgent left-wing of the party don’t just want to oust the likes of Lipinski and those ardently pro-life. They wish to end a decades-old tradition of promoting abortion as a safe, legal, and rare procedure of last resort. They instead endorse abortion up until the point of birth as a positive moral and utilitarian good.
The most ardent activists on both sides of the escalating abortion war are overplaying their hands. The average American doesn’t necessarily have a philosophically logical opinion on the matter, but one stemming from perceived empathy. Abortion, the majority of the country supposed, ought to be legal in the first trimester, but the majority also believes that aborting a pregnancy for purely personal purposes is immoral. When Republicans in Alabama push to outlaw abortion at any stage for rape victims, they’re pursuing a policy nearly eight in 10 Americans oppose. When Democrats back third-trimester abortion, they have the support of even fewer Americans — just 13% of the country.
Beltway politicos are severely underestimating how apolitical and emotionally charged the abortion issue is for vast swaths of the country. The Democratic governor of Louisiana just signed stringent abortion restrictions into law. That happens to be because many people in Louisiana, regardless of political affiliation, view the unborn as human lives with human value. Democrats have a serious strategic calculation to make: would they rather have ideological purity across the country, or would they rather win elections?
Convincing the average American, even one extremely uncomfortable with abortion on a personal level, that a 15 year-old one month into a pregnancy should have legal access to an abortion as a last resort is a potentially sympathetic argument. It’s an entirely different matter to convince the average American to let a wealthy adult woman terminate a baby with a heartbeat, the capability to feel pain, and in the case of pregnancies after 20 weeks, the ability to survive outside of the womb.
Since Democrats reclaimed the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has been forced to oversee a growing schism — a sheer microcosm of the intersectional, socialist, and utilitarian revolt against the neoliberal tradition of the Democratic Party. It seems that the DCCC has begun to take a side.
