Watching Tim Walz’ interview of Fox News made me wonder: What abortion policy do the different States have and who are they governed by? Here’s the breakdown. You can inspect the data and download the file here.
What’s the takeaway?
Walz was asked about the abortion policy in Minnesota (he’s the Governor) which puts no fixed time limit on abortion. His answer made him look a little like he dodged the question.
He was asked this at the VP debate already, so it’s odd he doesn’t have a better answer ready to go. I think a good way to handling this would be to frame it in terms of state regulation and split Republicans like so:
“You’re right, unlike Roe v Wade Minnesota doesn’t technically have a fixed time limit on abortion. But that’s because of a legal issue. Our state law and practise actually follow the idea of viability, which means that a fetus can only be aborted if it can’t survive outside the womb or threatens the life of the mother. On average that’s in week 23. That’s the same idea that underpinned Roe v Wade and that a majority of Americans support - which is probably why there’s similar laws in over 10 States governed by Republicans.”
In Switzerland, abortion is legal and a woman’s sole decision in the first 12 weeks. At a later stage, a doctor has to decide if the physical or mental health of the mother is at risk. The more advanced the pregnancy, the greater the danger must be (StGB, Art. 119).
How can you do that?
- I found the data on kkf.org, which you can download as CSV to import into Excel.
- I then asked ChatGPT to add to this table the names and political parties of the governor. You should always factcheck output by AI, but this worked surprisingly well!
- I then added this so Excel.
