Marc Thiessen and The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg joined the pod to talk about their article asking just the question above: What can pro-life and pro-choice Americans agree on? Three quick things from the podcast:
Civility, respect, and trust. That’s what is needed to discuss even the hardest issues.
Disagreement over abortion shouldn’t stop lawmakers from making critical improvements to maternal and child care.
It’s Congress’s job to get things done. Marc & Alyssa have given them a list. Do it.
Most of our nation’s editorial pages showcase right and left; but they rarely showcase right and left conversing, problem-solving, and cooperating. It’s something missing in journalism and politics… and in our lives. People who disagree are neither evil nor irreconcilable. And Marc Thiessen, Conservative with a Capital C and Alyssa Rosenberg, Liberal with a Capital L, both Washington Post columnists, set out to make that clear.
In a piece entitled We disagree on abortion. Here’s a pro-family agenda both parties can support, they forge a list of critical improvements that Congress could pass in bipartisan fashion. Highlights include making pregnancy less dangerous; helping parents afford babies; and supporting child-care needs.
In each case, Marc and Alyssa lay out the problem and offer a solution that has already been introduced in Congress, but has yet to pass. Many solutions have bipartisan authors who haven’t been able to take their plans over the finish line.
In the pod, we discuss the ideas and the issues behind them, shout out the sponsors, and underscore why people of goodwill on the left and right can agree to the steps necessary to make the lives of mothers, fathers, and children better in America.
Because Dany is incorrigible, the latter part of the pod turned to questions of abortion. You may not like these conversations, but they illuminate how people of goodwill can discuss very emotional questions with respect and clarity. The jumping-off point was Nikki Haley’s GOP debate argument that “we need to stop demonizing this issue. […] When it comes to a federal ban, let’s be honest with the American people and say it will take 60 Senate votes. It will take a majority of the House. So in order to do that, let’s find consensus.” So we tried… Let us know what you think.
HIGHLIGHTS
(Note: These are excerpts without questions as the pod format was different.)
AR: I think one of the things that is important about maternal healthcare is that, there's a lot of agreement that this is an argument that sometimes has been debated along racial lines. Because we should be clear, black women die during pregnancy and after childbirth at much higher rates than women of any other racial or ethnic group. But everyone agrees that we can do better on this. And so when a Republican like Chuck Grassley is teaming up with a Democrat like Maggie Hassan to say, "Let's get more women access to doulas. Or we need a review of how we teach obstetrics in this country. We need to look at maternal morbidity in addition to maternal mortality, to find out when women are injured or have longstanding health issues."
AR: And one thing that I think shows up a lot in this piece is that the federal government has enormous convening power. And so, the federal government can gather and publish data in a usable, clear way. So, even if you don't support a hugely expanded federal program to... Even if you don't support, for example, making pregnancy a preexisting condition that has to be covered at a 100% by insurance, you can still say, "Let's use the federal government's data gathering power to find out what is going on here, and also to find out where the successes are, right? Because there are doctors, there are hospitals that do a better job of this stuff.
MT: The problem we faced going into this was, it was both a negotiation between me and Alyssa in terms of our personal preferences. But there was also, we took into account the broader political situation. And the reality is that, the Biden administration since coming to office, has passed something on the bordering $5 trillion over 10 years in spending. So, there's not a lot of appetite on Capitol Hill now that the Republicans have taken over, for adding more spending. So, there was really not an option for... We were trying to do things that could realistically be passed.
MT: And there's not an option to have large spending programs for these things. I wouldn't have supported them anyway. Alyssa would have, but we're trying to deal with political reality. But there are things you can do. Like Governor DeSantis in Florida, has made all baby items tax-exempt in the State of Florid. The no-sales-tax on any of these baby items. There's things you could do in the federal level to do that, like making those refundable. So, there are smaller steps that you can take that if you're a poor single mother, maybe saving 20 bucks on your crib, maybe saving a 100 bucks a year on diapers. For most people, that's not a lot. If you're on the edge of poverty or at that, that's a huge life-changing difference
[Discussing the fact that tax free savings accounts for kids haven’t had their $5000 limit adjusted since 1986…]
AR: And that's insane. I mean, if you think that people should be saving more for their kids, but you aren't giving them opportunities to do it, and to do it in sort of directed ways, right?
AR: Even if you doubled that savings limit from $5,000 to $10,000, you would allow parents to save pre-tax, the full cost of childcare only in some of the cheapest states in the country like Mississippi. But you would get much closer to what the actual cost of excellent childcare in the US is. And look, we have some differences of opinion on what you should do in terms of childcare licensing, and ratios of instructors to kids. I think in an ideal world, everybody would have access to really excellent childcare by providers who are better paid than they are now. We're a long way from that situation being a reality.
AR: There is a bill [to adjust the savings limit] Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania has introduced, that to me, is such a no-brainer. Especially at a moment when pandemic or childcare stabilization funding is going to run out on September 30th, that would be such a huge win. Not just for parents, but for people who do the work of taking care of our kids.
MT: And this is where we get into disagreements about spending. Because the pandemic spending, while it has helped... As we now have this situation where you have this childcare cliff coming, because the pandemic spending is about to run out. The pandemic spending is also what's unleashed the inflation in a large extent, right? And so you're kind of in a catch-22, because we spent too much, and so that unleashed inflation, which is increasing the costs. It's also increasing labor scarcity, and we don't have enough childcare workers, and we have an interesting solution for that.
[About businesses and supporting child care…]
AR: And this is an area where I think there is real room for a business to intervene. Because the Chamber of Commerce Foundation, right? The Chamber of Commerce is not big on government intervention and private business. But they have a toolkit for companies that want to get involved in making sure that their employees have access to childcare, so they can work. And what they say is, you are already paying for childcare, whether you know it or not.
I mean, you can pay for it by setting up a really excellent daycare center on your campus like Patagonia, and Goldman Sachs, and Disney and many other corporate giants do. Or, you can pay for it in turnover, especially among women. You can pay for it in absenteeism among your workforce.
MT: I think one of our most interesting solutions that we came up with, and then learned that somebody had introduced it in Congress, and who are no longer there. And I don't know if it has a sponsor now, is the idea of solving this paid parental leave problem. Which is, we have liberals obviously would like to have a mandated federal family leave paid for by the taxpayers. And there's some conservatives who try to figure out a way to do it. And they say, "Well, let people dip into their Social Security early. Of course, ignoring the fact that there is no Social Security trust fund, and Social Security is about to go broke anyway, and so that's not a solution. So, we were racking our brains, "What could we do that would be productive, that would help this?" And it was Alyssa's initial idea to come up with-
AR: From reading Mike Lee's Joint Economic Committee report of all place things.
MT: And so what we came up with is the idea of you've got 401(k)s for retirement, you've got tax-free savings for college. Why not set up a parental and family leave savings account? Where you start out working, people are having children later in life anyway, right? You start a job, you open up the equivalent of a 401(k) for family leave. And your employer can contribute to it tax-free, and they'll get a tax benefit from it.
MT: We were just talking about this before you came in, Dany, before the podcast started. Is just the devastation that has been done to so many children because of the pandemic lockdowns, and the loss of school time. And it doesn't seem like anybody is focused on making up the learning losses. And the learning losses, as we've talked about on this podcast with Dave Leonard and other people-
AR: Are huge.
MT: And they're regressive. And the racial disparities are enormous at that. Black and brown majority school districts were closed for much longer than white majority school districts. The costs, I think there was a McKinsey study that's more than $60,000 in lifetime lost earnings for some of these kids. So, it's a twofer. You can help fix the learning loss problem from the pandemic, and also help parents who, not everybody can leave at 2:30 or 3:00 to pick up their kids from school.
[And then, an abortion question… based on Haley’s GOP debate statements]
MT: So, first of all, what Nikki Haley was saying was not that she opposes a 15-week abortion ban, but that to do that, you would have to get 60 votes in the Senate, and that's not going to happen anytime soon. So, what she's saying is it's unrealistic to do that, even if it might be desirable substantively. Because I think if you look at some of the polls, something like 70 plus, or seven in 10 Americans basically support a 15-week abortion ban. That's roughly where it is. When you get down to six weeks like you have in Florida, you're more in the 50% range.
MT: …if you want to talk about abortion. Conservatives have been trying to overturn Roe for 50 years now, right? When Dobbs finally came out, it was like such a relief. They finally achieved a goal that they had been pushing for, for so long, and they now say, "Okay, now we're going to ban all abortion." And they want it to happen overnight. Because the fundamental disagreement between Alyssa and I is whether the unborn child is actually a human being or not.
I don't think anybody who is pro-choice believes that you're actually killing a baby. And so we just disagree over that fundamental issue. Conservatives are now at the beginning, not the end of a process of trying to convince and persuade the American people of the humanity of the unborn child. And that's going to be a debate that we're going to have, and that we need to have with compassion, and with understanding, and with goodwill. And one way you can show that and win that debate over time is by building what Pope John Paul II called, "The culture of life," which embraces life from conception to natural death.
And so by embracing these kinds of policies and showing our goodwill, more people will be open to our arguments over these things. So, I think it's very important for the pro-life movement to get behind these policies, because it's showing the heart of the pro-life movement.
AR: See, I think the question is not necessarily, is a fetus a person? Is it a human? I want to suggest a totally different framework for the conversation because... And I have not really talked about this publicly that much, so you'll forgive me if I am a little halting about it. But I mean, for me, pregnancy was an amazing experience, but a really hard one in some ways. Not in that... I didn't have any of the really scary pregnancy complications that people have, but I had gestational diabetes twice, which means I have a lifetime elevated risk of type 2 diabetes. And birth was awesome, but also the craziest thing I've ever experienced.
AR: But I'll also say, I was so excited to be pregnant. I felt so attached to my children long before I felt them move, before I felt any quickening, anything. And to me, those two ideas sort of aren't incompatible. That there is something there that I felt that attachment. That, to me, my children were alive and they were my children. But I cannot imagine making any woman go through pregnancy, and labor, and delivery.
AR: I think part of the enormous political and moral challenge is reconciling two worldviews that don't fit together neatly, and that maybe can't be reconciled neatly. I mean, there's a reason that abortion is such a bitter and painful aspect of American political life. Because, for me, my children were my children as soon as I knew I was going to have them. But if it came down to it, I would've always chosen... If it came down to it, and thank God it never came down to that, I would always choose the life of that someone is out in the world living over the potential. And I hate that that choice exists, that people feel like it exists, but just that is the sort of bluntest way I can say it.
MT: The struggle that we have in this debate is that, where does life begin, right? That's the debate. And so I would think that if you ask most Americans, and I think the polling shows this, that at the moment of birth, before the moment of birth in the ninth month, everybody agrees it's a child even though it hasn't exited the womb.
AR: I think in an ideal world, we would have the set of policies and social supports, and a medical system where... I mean, look, the reason that the six-week date is part of the reason it is repugnant to liberals, is because of the state of healthcare in this country. If you're realistically can't certainly get into your doctor before then. And it's hard. That makes it very hard for people to set the cutoff, and say that that's fair in some way.
MT: So, then if we were having this negotiation over this policy as opposed to another one, maybe I don't suspect we'll have another piece on this. And I can't see where we agree. But I say, "Okay, you don't like six weeks. What about 15? What about 20?" This is the problem becomes, the pro-life movement is laying out positions that they consider to be compromised positions because most conservatives believe that life begins at conception. Most pro-life people believe that. I believe that. And so six weeks is really, it's a heartbeat bill, they call it. It's around six weeks when there's a detectable heartbeat.
AR: Fetal cardiac activity, because the heart isn't actually formed yet.
MT: All right. If you don't like six weeks, okay. Well, Mike Pence is saying, which Nikki Haley is criticizing, 15 weeks. That's a 70% position. It's one that most on the left don't accept, so where is it?
AR: I understand the reason on the pro-life side for looking for sort of a hard deadline. But to me, the fact that we approach this conversation from trying to sort of pick a week and stick to it, as opposed to looking at the larger social conditions that create demand for abortion, speaks to a sort of collective lack of faith in our political system to get something larger done.
MT: Well, that's why we're doing what we just did here.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
We disagree on abortion. Here’s a pro-family agenda both parties can support.
Why Congress should pay grandma to mind the kids (Washington Post, July 3 2023)
758 doctors for 19 million kids. The safety net for kids is gone. (Washington Post, June 6 2023)
Child Care Cliff: 3.2 Million Children Likely to Lose Spots with End of Federal Funds (The Century Foundation, June 21 2023)
US Ways and Means: American Families and Jobs Act Tax Package
Oregon opens applications for new paid family leave program (Axios, August 15 2023)
Prime-Age Women Are Going Above and Beyond in the Labor Market Recovery (The Hamilton Project, August 30 2023)
$122 Billion: The Growing, Annual Cost of the Infant-Toddler Child Care Crisis (Strong Nation, February 2023)
The Cost of Thriving Has Fallen: Correcting and Rejecting the American Compass Cost-of-Thriving Index (AEI, June 22 2023)
Parenting in America Today (Pew Research Center, January 24 2023)