The news that the number of abortions being performed has declined has ignited a debate about who deserves the political credit. Are abortions declining because of legal restrictions on the practice enacted in red states across the country, or are they down due to increasing use of contraceptives and sex education? Is this good political news for the pro-choicers or the pro-lifers? Enter Jeff Jacoby who, in his latest Boston Globe column, argues that young Americans are less inclined to get abortions thanks to the efforts of those who have pushed gruesome images of aborted fetuses and distorted the issue by pretending that all abortions, at any stage of pregnancy or for any reason, are morally and legally equivalent. The pretense of moral equivalence is juvenile. The pretense of legal equivalency is flat stupid.
The 2016 race for the White House is starting to feel strangely familiar. It’s starting to feel a lot like the Massachusetts 2012 U.S. Senate race between Senator Scott Brown and Professor Elizabeth Warren. That race provided much of the impetus for the creation of MassPoliticsProfs, by the way. We launched the blog on August 15, 2011 and my very first post was an explanation of why Elizabeth Warren would be an excellent challenger to Senator Brown. On January 13, 2012, months before she had even earned the Democratic nomination, I flatly stated what I saw as the obvious…that Warren would in fact win both the nomination and the election. While a presidential election surely has more moving parts than a U.S. Senate race, and despite the fact that the election is still nearly 17 months away, I am awfully tempted to try to bolster my claims to “soothsayer” status by going national, dropping the CYA qualifications, and calling the 2016 presidential election for Hillary Clinton now.