To model “principled loserdom” while indulging in a “kink for losing”: this is the establishment Republican’s beating heart. And on July 1, Republicans in the New York Senate wore their hearts on their sleeves. 

The week before, the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that states are free to regulate abortion. The Constitution is once again considered to be “scrupulously neutral” on abortion, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it. And so, after fifty years, the legal funhouse of mirrors that began with Roe v. Wade came to an end. 

Allowing abortion is the worst thing America ever has done. It has been far worse than slavery. There were four million slaves in 1860 out of 31 million people living in America. That’s one in eight. Today, when the American economy struggles with an aging population that for fifty years has failed to replenish itself with a minimum of new births, one in five of the few pregnancies that still occur here end in abortion. Since Roe was decided in 1973, more than 63 million American children -- that’s a fifth of America’s present-day population -- have died in abortions. The slaves we freed. The slaughtered babies we discarded in blue plastic bags and then burned. 

Dobbs disappointed manyтБа -- many Republicans, that is. Many Republicans wanted the Court to rule that the Constitution prohibits abortion altogether, a true reversal of Roe. Yet a mere days after Dobbs, Republican loss-fetishists in the New York Senate joined leftists to do even worse than Roe and install an unlimited abortion guarantee into the state’s constitution. Should the proposed amendment pass, when popular opinion in New York turns against abortion -- and it will -- untold millions of babies will continue down the conveyer belt into the furnace until New York voters can put the slow machinery of constitutional amendment into reverse. 

Although a small majority of Americans sometimes report in polls that they prefer a limited right to abortion, they really don’t care. Abortion causes great national harm, but only a small and continually shrinking minority are responsible for it. Roughly half of all abortions are committed by women who have already had one. About a fifth of women who get abortions have several. 

Since 1999, only six percent of women who become pregnant ever commit even one abortion. And most abortions are committed by women destined to remain childless. A vast majority of normal Americans, men and women, intend never to procure an abortion, never do, and instead want to start a family. They rarely think about abortion; and, when they do, they use a shorthand moral reasoning to justify it that’s easily dispelled. 

In the same way that some Americans two hundred years ago felt little moved by blacks in chains under whips, some Americans today feel little moved by children in the womb caught between forceps. The reason is the same: they hardly ever see the victims of the barbarous practices they tolerate; and, when they do, the victims look too unlike themselves or the ones they love for them to care. That’s why some whites once cared little for blacks enslaved out of sight on plantations. That’s also why some Americans now care little for babies discreetly slaughtered behind blinded windows in suburban office parks. 

A massive change in popular opinion is as inevitable on abortion as it was on slavery. Once citizens take enough time to see the victims of abortion for who they really are, they never look away. 

Leftists know, then, that in their sally toward maximum abortion, they must cover their attack -- and attack quickly, before enough people have enough time to realize where they’re headed. In the New York Senate, seven Republicans (out of the twenty there) helped them do just that. They are senators Mike Martucci, Sue Serino, Phil Boyle, Mario Mattera, Anthony Palumbo, Alexis Weik, and Edward Rath. To trick unwitting voters into approving their proposed amendment, the amendment text that would appear on the ballot says nothing about guaranteeing abortion. The creepy euphemism they use instead is “discrimination” based on “pregnancy outcome.” They plan to hide this unrestricted abortion guarantee among other new categories of prohibited discrimination, such as discrimination based on sexual orientation and so-called “gender identity.” 

The summary of the proposed amendment even talks about making sure that women “control... decisions in childbirth” -- which probably means permitting partial-birth abortion. That’s a barbaric bloodbath in which a newborn baby, just as it emerges into a cruel world and brightens its eyes to first light, has its skull crushed. 

In eight days, some New York Republicans went from enjoying a fifty-years-in-the-making recission of Roe to voting in favor of unrestricted abortion. What losers. 

Establishment Republicans nervously crumple sheets of polling crosstabs, dripping sweat onto the numbers they’re sure spell their doom. Then they stuff the papers down their throats, taking each question that polled better than fifty percent, dropping the question mark, and saying “that’s my position.” “Do you like me now?” they squeak. But when the poll numbers change -- when, as has happened, masses of blacks, Hispanics, young men, unlikely voters, and blue-collar unionists repudiate the Democratic Party and become Republicans -- it’s because of someone outside the Republican establishment, like President Trump. It sure as hell ain’t because of Republicans who vote for abortion. 

The marrow of America is revolution. It’s her leaders’ duty to point to a north star and urge her people onward toward it -- as the Republican Party’s first President, Abraham Lincoln, did. When Republicans point to the right star and argue wisely, they win. When they point aimlessly and argue lazily, they lose. Loss begets loss, but winning begets winning. 

If a New York Republican -- or any Republican, for that matter -- cannot convince a majority of voters that a vote against killing babies is right and good, then he’s a loser. And losers should lose to make way for winners who can win. Lives depend on it. 

Image: NY GOP