I get that the abortion debate is only going to remain relevant to the electorate as long as the right is making mountains out of molehills
The opposite. They only stand a chance as long as they emphasize vague, hypothetical, rare, and/or probably-imaginary situations. They start emphasizing shit that actually happens and they're dead in the water.
This should be the kind of outlier where they're pointing to this case and saying "Hey, we're not against ALL abortion!" and propping themselves up as being totally reasonable.
But they're not.
The fundamentalists who are driving the abortion debate, the ones who actually think that the most important threat facing America is a 1973 Supreme Court decision that women should have control of their own bodies (also: gay marriage) -- this is what they really believe.
The parental notification stuff, the "no driving across state lines", the tighter restrictions on when a woman can get an abortion, the ridiculous "partial birth" debate -- all those are window-dressing, death-by-a-thousand-cuts things. "No abortions, ever" is what these people really want; it's not an exaggeration or a strawman.
I'm not saying a majority of Republicans feel that way, but it is, absolutely, a mainstream position in the Republican Party.
Anecdotally: I've known some crazy pro-lifers. Been friends with some. "It's absolutely terrible if a woman is raped, but it's not the baby's fault" is a common refrain.
What you have to understand is, they believe that abortion is literal, not-hyperbolic, actual baby murder.
Framed in those terms, you can see where they're coming from -- I don't think anyone would advocate killing that baby if it were actually born. The problem is that they consider a zygote to be exactly the same thing.
And that's the thing -- that may be a mainstream position in the Republican Party, but it's certainly not a mainstream position in America. Even among people who declare themselves pro-life, the vast majority are immediately willing to make exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Drill it down from there and you can probably get most people to agree that if the child is severely deformed or unlikely to survive and giving birth will do permanent damage to the mother's health, that's good justification too. And from there, most people can reach common ground and start talking about ways to make abortions less common and less necessary.
But there's a fringe -- and a very loud, influential one that is a MAJOR force in driving Republican policymaking -- that won't concede any of that shit, that believes zygotes have souls and abortion is murder.
