Emily Douglass of RHRealityCheck.org offers a suggestion to anti-choice firebrand Jill Stanek who acknowledges that with an Obama administration making judiciary appointments, not to mention anti-choice amendments failing even in conservative-bastion states like South Dakota, “the holy grail for pro-lifers is now gone.”

...if anti-choicers really do let Roe out of their sights in favor of other projects that actually will reduce instances of unintended pregnancy, there’s an enormous amount of progress people who oppose abortion rights can make alongside those of us who are pro-choice. Medically accurate comprehensive sexuality education, which gives teens the tools to prevent pregnancies? Access to contraception, including emergency contraception, proven to reduce the rate of abortion? A host of prominent pro-life voices have supported Obama’s position on these policy issues, staking out a more productive ground for people who oppose legal abortion than slinging accusations like “barbarian” and “murder” (which also feature in Stanek’s post). No one needs to give up his or her beliefs — but now there’s room for a distinction between private beliefs and public policy.

She makes these recommendations here.

Yup. Another welcome result of the most recent election was the death of the Atwater/Gingrich/Rove/Grover-Norquist “50% plus 1” legislative strategy that called for pushing measures far enough into right-wing territory that no Democrat had the stomach to vote for it. Among other things the strategy was intended to make Democratic irrelevant and therefore depriving them of lobbyist contributions. Another was to amend even critical legislation with intolerable riders so that votes against, say, mom’s apple pie (oh, and, say, a complex, hard to explain procedural amendment that would deauthorize, say, mine safety inspections) that could then be used to beat up “do-nothing” Democrats in subsequent elections.

Since some issues, such as queasiness about the whole issue of reproductive health**, were broadly supported by moderate and conservative Democrats it was sometimes necessary to push things to absolute extremes in order to forestall Democratic votes. Thus we wound up with intractable support for totally irresponsible fruitcake ideas like abstinence-only education and even-preventing-conception-is-abortion “conscience” regulations for pharmacists that were encouraged or pushed not because nominally conservative leaders necessarily believed it but because a 50% plus 1 strategy demanded it.

Ironically after this election lost support from virtually everyone but the kind of low-information types like Stanek who actually believed the shit they’d been shoveled.

Thus… it sure looks like… the end of the Repubican’s K-Street Project mentality (and, incidentally, of the corresponding mentality of their Democratic counterparts like Mark Penn who tied their anchors to the otherwise thoroughly admirable Senator Clinton and, consequently, sank her in the primaries… just as they helped sink her party in 2000 and 2004.)

Which leaves…? The possibility that without the failed all-or-nothing strategies of the previous administration people with very different preferences can work together to reduce not the supply of abortion services but the need for them. Emily Douglass’s list is an excellent and generally perfectly acceptable place to start.

[** Aside: Human/sex trafficking was another such casualty to this kind of Mayberry Machiavellianism. Since the issue actually originated among liberal Democrats like (then first-lady) Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Paul Wellstone they had to basically hijack to the point it ignored everything but routine domestic prostitution before moderates finally began to balk. —fl]