Not likely... There's a good chance she's alone with the kids and has to take on multiple jobs. Don't you think she will have sacrificed a lot of her own life for unwanted kids? Do you know somebody who's happy with a situation like this? I'm sure they exist but if you'll ask me for odds in a tough country like the USA I'll tell you they're bad.
Obviously having children changes your life completely, it is a huge burden and you have to "sacrifice" a lot. But almost nobody regrets it. Probably because we are hardwired to have children. The joy outweighs any sacrifices.
I don't know anyone that wishes they hadn't let their children be born, no matter how harsh their circumstances.
It's worth noting how taboo it is to admit that you hate your children, and thus how vastly under-reported this attitude ends up being.
> I don't know anyone that wishes they hadn't let their children be born, no matter how harsh their circumstances.
I, in contrast, know several children who wish they hadn't been forced to grow up in abject poverty with an absentee parent who has no time or energy for them because of how much they have to work.
> It's worth noting how taboo it is to admit that you hate your children, and thus how vastly under-reported this attitude ends up being.
Then how do you know anyone feels that way? Where do you get your information?
> wish they hadn't been forced to grow up in abject poverty
That's a different question altogether. We all wish we had been born in better circumstances, but that doesn't mean we resent being alive.
The solution to children growing up in abject poverty is not abortion, it's social safety nets. Nobody should have to live in abject poverty in a rich country.
> Then how do you know anyone feels that way? Where do you get your information?
Google for "I hate my children".
> [social safety nets]
One solution to children growing up in poverty is a safety net - a solution that is strongly advocated against as being "socialist" by our current government. i.e. It ain't happening in our lifetime.
Since that solution is not currently feasible, not having children if you can't afford them (i.e. it will put you into poverty, either from normal costs or advanced costs if the child is known to have a birth defect) is the next best solution. There are four well known methods for this, abstinence, contraception, abortion, and adoption.
Abstinence is not a realistic solution, this has been shown to be the case through the centuries.
Reliable contraception does not exist (or is effectively unavailable: see the crap women have to go through to get their tubes tied). It's also next up on some of the SC justices' hitlist.
That leaves abortion and adoption. The first is much more affordable and less likely to kill the woman than the second. And that doesn't count the already overloaded foster care system and adoption rosters we're subjecting the children to.
So the Democratic party are strongly advocating against safety nets to prevent children from growing up in abject poverty? Because that would be "socialist"?
Regardless of abortion laws, this would seem like a basic requirement for any civilised society.
I'm not sure why you would say that reliable contraception doesn't exist. Condoms are extremely effective, and cost nothing.
When it comes to adoption, it is my understanding that there is a huge demand for adopted children, outstripping supply by an order of magnitude. Are you saying this is not the case?
This isn't a partisan issue. Neither Democrats nor Republicans (the politicians, not necessarily the constituents) want safety nets. They have different reasons, but the end result is that neither side is willing to make it a reality.
> Condoms are extremely effective
Condoms have an 85% success rate† in the real world (98% if used perfectly, but humans are rarely perfect, especially when... emotionally compromised). That means a pregnancy a year is absolutely within reason.
> it is my understanding that there is a huge demand for adopted children
A case where research is easy, and worth doing. But here's what I found Google:
"Of the more than 440,000 children in foster care in the United States, there are over 123,000 kids available for adoption right now. According to the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, children in foster care can expect to wait an average of three years to be adopted and the average age of a foster care child is 8.5 years old."
"... roughly 20,000 children “age out” of foster care each year. This means they are now legally adults without ever finding a family through adoption."
That "huge demand" is for families who will only take babies, not fostered children.
Historically, 2% of families in the US will adopt, meaning that even if every previously aborted fetus was carried to term and put up for adoption as a baby, there still wouldn't be enough families.
EDIT: The cost to give birth, without complications, is between $5 and $15k. That's just giving birth. And the parent doesn't receive the adoption fees; that cost is on them. For the adoptive parents, a private adoption (how you get a baby) is in the $25 to $50k range††.
> If you use condoms perfectly every single time you have sex, they’re 98% effective at preventing pregnancy. But people aren’t perfect, so in real life condoms are about 85% effective — that means about 15 out of 100 people who use condoms as their only birth control method will get pregnant each year.
Why don't we consider the combined probability of condoms + birth control (heck, even + vasectomy, etc.)? It would seem a lot more reasonable to me to take that as a more appropriate measure of real-world risk.
It was you that said "our current government". I would have thought the Democratic party was in favour of a working welfare system, at least for small children.
You adoption numbers are not relevant, we are not talking about children, we are talking about newborns. Since there are apparently 2 million American couples wanting to adopt right now, and only 18000 being adopted each year, I'd say the demand is very strong.
I'm not sure what cost has to do with it, surely you are not arguing that abortion should be a way to save money by not having to give birth?
And I'm sure a lot of adoptive parents would be more than happy to bear the cost of childbirth. In a civilised country essential healthcare is of course socialised, but we are talking about the US here.
Here I thought we were talking about protecting lives in the world as it is. Not just babies in an idealized world that doesn't reflect the US' current or projected state.
That's what I am discussing. And I'm saying that literally millions of people are waiting to adopt. Pretty sure most of them would be more than happy to pay $5k for the birth. If not, adoption agencies should be obliged to cover it.
I'm sure you don't think that it's acceptable that women would kill their unborn children because they can't afford the cost of birth?
There is risk with everything in life. If someone is having sex, regardless of condom use, birth control use, vasectomy, etc., they are accepting the risk of an unplanned pregnancy.
Why is it that we push for the killing of unborn persons instead of taking responsibility for the consequences of one's actions?
Gen X-er here - born before Roe v Wade. My own mother told me she'd have aborted me had it been legal. She felt trapped into getting married to someone she ultimately didn't love. I witnessed several domestic violence issues growing up. The "good news" is I wasn't alone - I knew other kids that had similar home issues. It was way more widespread than people let on.
This whole narrative of I had children unexpectedly at 18 and it was a miracle that changed my life - yeah it happens, but it's the rare case. That's not typically how that ball rolls.
The reality is it really sucks to be an unwanted child. Let them live, my ass. It's more like let them suffer.
You are not actually saying that she regretted having you, only that at the time she would have killed you if she could. It's obviously a horrible thing to say, to even feel, but it's different from what we are discussing.
Let me make it clear - she regretted having me. Those are the cold hard facts. If she could have aborted me and had another child later when she was prepared to have that child then she may have loved that child. As it is, there's a very dark downside to forcing unwanted children into this world that isn't being discussed.
Nor can you project your naive thoughts of rainbows and unicorn farts on everyone living in Hell. It's extremely offensive. This is why nobody talks about it - tone deaf people like you trying to pooh pooh people's experiences and what they've watched their friends experience. Sorry. We're fighting back.
And I'm not doing that. I don't doubt that you had a rough childhood, your mother is clearly an unfit parent. I still maintain that preemptively killing children because they might end up in bad families is not the way to go. A working social safety net, adoption, financial support for those in need are the humane way to solve it.
Here's the thing - women getting an abortion is a condemnation of our system. We had the opportunity to do all those things you suggest. We failed. We had all the motivation in the world to make it happen - save the children. Provide a viable alternative. We failed. How you think continuing to fail in solving these problems and then forcing women to have unwanted children is going to lead to anything good - actually it tells me you're most likely to be evil and simply aren't aware of it since you're accustomed to thinking of yourself as a good guy. Lucky for you I think Hanlon's Razor applies.
I'm evil because I don't want children to be killed? That's a new one.
What do you mean "we failed"? Clearly it's not impossible to have a working welfare system. Almost all developed nations manage it, many of which are poorer than the US. Just try again.
I don't believe you're arguing in good faith any longer. I was giving you the benefit of being ignorant, but you persisted. Now I'm going with evil. You are tone deaf beyond the pale.
The moderate pro-life crowd should see this behavior as scummy and denounce it, as it taints their cause. IE take the high road to attaining their goals. Those in support of this behavior, have more deep ethical challenges, and I sincerely hope and believe are not the majority of pro-life voters..
(Using “pro-life” reluctantly here, to avoid distractions)
Edit to add: my intent by this comment is to depolarize. It’s frustrating to see child comments from the pro-choice side that don’t take my hint :/ Let’s not engage with the extreme on either side folks, if we want to better understand the opposing points of view. Yes, the loudest voices are often the most extreme, and no the moderates don’t denounce (on both sides!), but we can try to do better on our beloved HN.
> The moderate pro-life crowd should see this behavior as scummy and denounce it, as it taints their cause. IE take the high road to attaining their goals.
Why? To someone who thinks abortion is the murder of babies, what you advocate is priority inversion error. Your idea is a lot like saying the police in Uvalde shouldn't have gone in and (eventually) shot the school shooter, rather they should have "take[n] the high road to attaining their goals" and just talked to him until he stopped of his own accord.
Except that (virtually) nobody on the right truly believes that it's full fledged baby murder. They believe it's bad, but clearly, from their response, it's not anywhere near as bad as that.
If your government/heathcare/someOtherOrg was grinding up babies post birth at scale, or any equivalent, I'd expect the response to be more riots and bombs, and less "Let's campaign for fifty odd years to get the capability to ban it in a number of states".
Edit: Response to "of course they do": I strongly disbelieve that, simply because of their response
There were ~600k abortions in 2021. If the right truly believed in their hearts that an abortion is directly equal to a murder, they'd basically be giving a pathetic response to what would be an absolutely "Final Solution" level crime. Estimates of the Jewish death toll were ~6 million and was responded to by full fledged, hot war. If their response to a holocaust every 10 years was "we'll slowly eke forward over 50Y, and manage to get bans in just half the country", that's a hell of a pathetic response.
> Except that (virtually) nobody on the right truly believes that it's full fledged baby murder
Why would you think that? Clearly almost everyone that is against abortion believes that, that's the whole point.
Even most people who are in favour of abortion would consider it at least close to murder if say an abusive husband beats his pregnant wife, killing the baby.
The only difference there is that the mother wanted the child to live, how can that have bearing on whether it's murder or not?
I would agree with the second court here. Prior to 25weeks this shouldn't be a murder. But if the action have an effect on the woman ability to bear children in the future, this should be considered as aggravating circumstances.
And there is no case of abusing husbands causing miscarriage in the US. Even though i found study citing that 27% of miscarriage are caused by wife beaters in india, i couldn't find the statistics or any case in the US.
>> Why? To someone who thinks abortion is the murder of babies, what you advocate is priority inversion error.
> Except that (virtually) nobody on the right truly believes that it's full fledged baby murder. They believe it's bad, but clearly, from their response, it's not anywhere near as bad as that.
So? That doesn't affect my point at all. They don't have to think abortion is "full fledged baby murder" for what was advocated up-thread to be a priority inversion error. They just have to think of it as being more wrong than whatever persuasion tactics the "counseling clinics" use. Given that all but the most extreme persuasion tactics themselves typically rate from "not wrong" to "mildly wrong/annoying," that's not a hard bar to pass.
> Estimates of the Jewish death toll were ~6 million and was responded to by full fledged, hot war.
Unfortunately that's a very common misconception, but is completely false. Nobody went to war for the Jews. Nobody fought, or did anything of note really, to save them. Hell, countries, including the almighty USA, refused refugee ships with Jews, even after the war started and concentration (but not extermination) camps were well known.
Just read Szmul Zygielbojm's suicide letter on the matter.
Google "March for Life." Its massive (rivaling the "Women's March" a few years back), has happened every year for nearly 50 years at DC, and always has a media blackout talking about it. And everyone there believes without a doubt it is murder. Also the Gen Z presence is massive at these marches, much more so than the "Women's March" which is interesting.
Police are peace officers with sworn duty bestowed lawfully and transparently by the state and supported by agreed upon best practices. I see no ethical qualms with courageously taking out the shooter.
Private citizens conspiring to trick other private citizens, is not in the same ballpark or league.
Because tons of children will be born to parents that do not want them. They are not guaranteed to be adopted, and could be tossed into a foster system that is rife with physical and sexual abuse. There are many paths here that can lead to destitution, homelessness, lack of education, lack of compassion, lack of guidance, and exploitation.
Once the baby is born, the people who forced that baby to be born no longer care about them. They are no longer a political pawn. In fact, they will continue to attack the social safety nets and programs that they could end up relying on to survive. Safe sex education so that this child doesn't have a baby? NO! That goes against the Bible.
This is advantageous sometimes to the Christian nationalist cause, as they may be adopted by large fundamentalist families or lured towards religious charities that ARE subsidized through the state. Sounds crazy, but you should hear how some of these extremists talk. It's borderline child trafficking.
It's funny you mention cutting up your insides. That's propaganda. Most abortions are done with pills, up to more than 12 months. What happens? It comes out as a heavy flow. That's it. Most people don't wait until they have an noticeable baby-bump to have an abortion. Most propaganda about the operation is dishonest, exaggerated, and straight up propaganda.
Another fun fact is that these abortion laws are extremely draconian. Some have no exceptions for rape and/or incest. Meaning that rapists will and have been given parental visitation rights. Children victims can even be forced into this situation, disgusting.
Had a miscarriage? That can now be investigated as a crime. Police can now get your messages, location data, search history, hard drives, and search your house.
This is theocratic insanity, in America. Feels like Iran.
Christians don't always behave this badly in other countries, but in America we've *really* sipped on the GOP/Christian propaganda Koolaid and we look like absolute clowns.
Let's take it a step further. Shouldn't women be broodmares for the state, producing as many children as possible since all those kids will be glad that they were born. Their sacrifice during their childbearing years is worth it for the utilitarian benefit of more happy children.
This is obviously not a serious suggestion, just calling into question the right of unborn children to have claims of an adult (or sometimes non-adult) woman.
Not conceiving children is clearly not the same as killing them after conception.
That said, there are plenty of people that would agree with the idea that we should have as many babies as we can. Utilitarians for example, and many traditional Christians.
Almost no acorns would have turned into trees, so the comparison falls down. If we look at saplings, we'd be closer, and obviously killing a sapling is more or less equivalent to killing an oak tree. We don't tend to talk about "murder" when it comes to plants.
Peanuts and caviar are the same, or even more silly. Only with potatoes does the question make sense, and clearly the answer is yes, potato plants die when you harvest them. But almost nobody thinks that is an issue, since they are not even sentient.
> So what you're saying is, only things that are born matter if you kill them?
No, I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying your analogies are idiotic, since acorns don't correspond to foetuses - almost no acorns end up as trees.
> Also, that's now how potatoes work. You harvest them after the plant has died.
It was your analogy, not mine. If potatoes are only harvested when dead, how could eating them possibly be murder?
Getting back to the actual question, I don't think a baby is more alive or more human because it has left the womb, or because you've cut the umbilical cord.
If someone stabs a pregnant woman in the belly so that her foetus dies, but she survives, would you agree that he has killed her baby, or has he only harmed her?
> So you're saying that if more pregnancies ended in miscarriage abortion would be moral?
Not saying that at all. Just like last time, we are still just discussing how bad your analogies were.
> If your curious ~60% of embryos do not make it to a live birth,
I'm well aware of this, and although most of this is accounted for very early on, it's still pretty high. And of course in many cases the embryos were not viable.
> Why does the number or miscarriages matter at all?
I haven't discussed this, it was you that brought it up. With acorns, only 1 out of 10000 becomes a tree, so killing an acorn is substantially different from cutting down a tree. Not even taking into account that these are different forms, an acorn is not a small tree.
You speak as if the issue was black and white, clearly it isn't. Even you think that killing an 8 month old foetus, which has a heartbeat, can dream and even recognises its father's voice, is fundamentally different from taking a morning after pill and stopping a 4 cell cluster from turning into a human.
From a religious point of view, it's entirely reasonable to believe that anything after conception is sacred, since it's the beginning of a specific human being, but even progressive atheists realise that an 8 month foetus most definitely is a complete human.
There is a difference between a conceived person and an unconceived one.
We assume an unborn person would prefer to be born than killed. An unconceived person doesn't exist at all, so there is no moral/ethical issue in not conceiving them.
The exception maybe is biology, but there is still an upper limit to personal resources which one wouldn't want to exhaust due to the impact on their other (if any) children 's quality of life.
> We assume an unborn person would prefer to be born than killed.
A clump of cells doesn't have enough coherence to have a preference. In fact, babies don't have the kind of brain development necessary to comprehend this question, let alone form a preference until years after being born.
Of course, but obviously when left to nature, that newly created clump of cells, which is a new person in a primitive state, will eventually gain cognition and develop preferences.
Your argument seems to suggest that a comatose person would have the same entitlement to life and an unborn person.
You do realize you can feel before you are born, right? Verbal communication and feeling are not the same. It is well established that newborns remember the sounds they heard prior to birth.
I respect your question and have the same question from the reverse side. I similarly have difficulty understanding how Christians who follow a doctrine that appears to be so kind can behave in ways that seem so cruel and heartless to the rest of us.
I suspect it is down to unbridgeable axiomatic differences.
You see a fertilized egg as a human with rights, I see it as a cell with interesting potential, not particularly more deserving of rights than any other cell with potential.
Even if I accepted that a fertilized egg has human rights, I don't understand why those rights outweigh the autonomy of the donor/host. What if I told you that your blood, bone marrow, kidney, or even lung could save another human's life at relatively minimal risk to your survival? (It's true, and I recommend everyone reading this be an organ donor and sign up for bethematch.com) But should the state be allowed to legally compel you to undertake these risks to save another human life?
Judging the stories of pro-life advocates who get abortions while convincing themselves that "their situation is different" my assumption is that there is a basic lack of human empathy. I've found that this squares with the fact that many people oppose benefits and rights for others but then begin to support them when it personally impacts them.
> helping save the lives of those babies who are now likely very glad they were born
I have met many people who hated their lives for many reasons. What makes you think these children won't?
Some of the reasons include:
- parents didn't want the children
- children grew up poor
- children grew up with disabilities
- children were put up for adoption
- the world is becoming uninhabitable for the children's children
I can't imagine how someone could feel good about birthing a baby without also giving all of the necessary safeties. And that's just looking at the children's perspective. What about the parents'?
Can you imagine having been raped, then being forced to carry an unwanted child to term, and then also being forced to pay child support to the rapist?
Can you imagine wanting a child but then discovering that the child will be stillborn or worse: born with debilitating defects that you aren't capable of dealing with?
If you want children then go have children. If you don't want children... then why should you be forced to?
> my default is that you really shouldn’t be killing your offspring or cutting up your insides unless you are removing something like cancer or shrapnel.
Indeed! Sometimes the baby is literally dying for reasons outside of your control. But without Roe v Wade then we cannot legally abort. A dying fetus can cause sepsis and death to the mother. That's certainly "something like cancer or shrapnel" in my book.
I had a lot of head-burying opinions too until I had a long and deep conversation with a female friend about politics. She had the patience to listen to what I had to say with the knowledge and experience necessary to provide alternate views. I suggest that you ask the women around you what they think. Don't stop at one or two. Really listen to them. Listen to their perspectives and their opinions. Try to put yourself in their shoes.
You will find that their perspectives and opinions differ from yours. You might even find that they enjoy things that you think should be sacred. You're not wrong and neither are they. But what is wrong is to force your morals and opinions onto them.
The overturning of R v W left substantive due process in tact, so there is still room for abortions when the unborn child threatens the life or serious health (blindness, etc.) of the mother.
What if instead of presuming whether the children will hate their lives, we let them grow up to a certain age, say age 9, and then ask them if they hate their lives? If they say yes, kill them, if they say no, let them live. There is no moral difference between this solution and abortion if the fetus is a baby. If the fetus is not a baby then there is a moral difference though, so... I guess the real question is whether or not the fetus is a baby.
My point is, any open-minded debate about abortion will always return to this question. As long as pro-abortion people ignore this question, they are talking past the pro-lifers and will never understand us.
Instead, we let them kill themselves off in droves. 1.21 million attempted suicides per year in the US alone.
I understand the pro-life POV quite well, I just have no respect for them when they drop off all support (aside from the occasional church donation) for children once they're outside the womb. I have no respect for those who value the life of a fetus (alive or dead) over that of the woman (miscarriages don't always clear themselves).
And let's not count those who die from a lack of a blood donation, organ transplant, or postmortem organ donations - things a pro-life advocate could do themselves, but "that's totally different".
Maybe we have a different idea of what "scummy" means, but I find using a bait-and-switch tactic to emotionally manipulate a teenager into birthing twins that they likely do not have the resources to raise (let alone the maturity) to be "scummy".
Have you talked to young people? Stats and meme culture strongly suggest the opposite, and it's for economic reasons and reasons like loss of personal freedoms such as "women's bodily autonomy".
> I can’t imagine anything LESS scummy than helping save the lives of those babies who are now likely very glad they were born
So would it be ethical to rape someone and force them to give birth? Because the babies would be happy to be born and experiencing life? That's the same logic you're using.
A fetus isn't a person. It's not sentient. It doesn't have hopes and dreams. Personally, I feel guiltier eating pork than having an abortion. Because unlike a fetus, pigs are highly intelligent, social and emotional beings.
On the other hand, a woman is a person. She has the right to control her own body and her own life. If she doesn't want children, she should not be forced to have children. Even if she has sex! Yes, I know that's radical, but I believe that women should be able to have as much sex as they want, with whoever they want, even outside of marriage, without being punished with unwanted children.
I know, and I'm sure you know, that's the real issue. Lots of people are uncomfortable with the concept of consequence-free sex. Christianity, the largest religion in the western world, teaches that sex outside of marriage is wrong. That's why so many people who are against abortion "just happen" to be socially conservative. That's why they "just happen" to be against LGBT as well even though that has fuck-all to do with 'saving babies.' That's why they oppose comprehensive sex education and birth control access, even though that's the most obvious way to reduce unplanned pregnancies.
A fetus isn't a person. It's not sentient. It doesn't have hopes and dreams.
Defining a person as someone with hopes and dreams is nice poetically, but not great legally. Quite a few adults go through life without hope or dreams, but are still people. A one month old child isn't developed enough to have hopes and dreams, but is a person. Stepping away from the metaphor of hopes and dreams, you can start to observe REM movement in utero at 28 weeks. So in a literal sense, it is likely fetuses do dream.
This isn't an easy issue with a clear science driven answer. A clump of four cells isn't a person, but there is a very reasonable case for 39 week old fetus being as much of a person as a 1 day old infant born at 38 weeks.
> Stepping away from the metaphor of hopes and dreams, you can start to observe REM movement in utero at 28 weeks. So in a literal sense, it is likely fetuses do dream.
> A clump of four cells isn't a person, but there is a very reasonable case for 39 week old fetus being as much of a person as a 1 day old infant born at 38 weeks.
But only 1% of abortions in the US happen after 21 weeks [1]. So there's a blanket ban despite 99% of abortions happening before that 28 week cutoff? How does that track?
> I know, and I'm sure you know, that's the real issue. Lots of people are uncomfortable with the concept of consequence-free sex.
Hard disagree that the abortion issue is primarily about consequence-free sex. You stated the issue in the first line:
> A fetus isn't a person.
Pro-life people vehemently disagree about this, and it's not coming from a place of prudishness. They are outraged because they feel like babies are being killed.
> It's not killing someone. A fetus isn't a person.
Isn't a fetus kind of like a tadpole? Sure, we may quibble that it isn't a person, but it is still a living being on the way to maturity. Killing a tadpole is killing _something_, right?
I'm outraged because nobody in this thread is as interested in drawing a line somewhere between "postcoital contraception" and "aborting a nearly-viable fetus" as they are in holding the line on either side of "fertilized embryo" and "infant".
I guess I'll add to the chorus of people who "just don't understand the other side" in saying that I don't understand either side. Arguing for fertilized embryo rights makes no sense to me. But arguing in favor of abortion and not even mentioning where the line is drawn makes just as little sense. Oft-repeated phrases like "a fetus isn't a person" sound scary to me. It's casual dismissiveness that falls back on pure terminology, and the thing being dismissed might have a brain comparable to that of an infant. Specificity is extremely important here.
If people are going to act like abortion rights are the most obviously ethical thing in the world, I really wish they'd stop using the word fetus. The obvious, strong argument for abortion only applies to abortions before the fetus is morally person-like. Once a fetus is sufficiently person-like, we must at least admit that the moral calculus is complicated, since at that point there's more than one significant outcome for a feeling, thinking thing.
> But arguing in favor of abortion and not even mentioning where the line is drawn makes just as little sense.
Because it's not really relevant—the laws making it illegal are making it illegal across the board, no matter how early. The only reason for the heartbeat style laws was to make abortions as a whole as difficult as they could be under Roe. But now that's no longer a concern, the bans are across the board.
> The obvious, strong argument for abortion only applies to abortions before the fetus is morally person-like
Late term abortions are rare, and both expensive and unpleasant enough that you don't go through it unless there's a strong medical need.
So it's not discussed much because it's not a big part of what happens.
> Because it's not really relevant—the laws making it illegal are making it illegal across the board, no matter how early.
This doesn't make any sense. Since the recent SCOTUS decision, laws are surely being drafted in many states right now. People may still be discussing, writing, overturning, and re-writing abortion law twenty years from now. Having a coherent moral position on the issue is absolutely relevant.
> But now that's no longer a concern, the bans are across the board.
This is just completely false. There are fifty states, and most of them have now and will continue to have threshold or multi-threshold laws. By my count six states have blanket bans, and the percentage of the population living under those blanket ban laws is extremely small.
And this is exactly what's bugging me. I think there is a vast middle ground of people who believe all these things:
1. Aborting a fetus with a functioning brain is wrong.
2. Forcing women to carry pregnancies to term against their will is wrong.
3. (1) becomes more wrong the further developed the fetus is.
4. (2) becomes more wrong the greater the harm or risk of harm to the mother is.
And these are the people writing most of the laws in most states. They're also the people that drafted the original Roe v. Wade opinion. These people fall on a spectrum between pro-choice and pro-life, because it's a complicated moral question.
> So it's not discussed much because it's not a big part of what happens.
I think these are Internet goggles. I think it's discussed a lot, given how many different laws there are throughout the world and how detailed many of them are in their timelines and conditions. But for some reason on message boards, it's all Christians unsubtly implying that aborting a fertilized embryo is like making somebody who exists not exist anymore, and on the other side people saying "you're so dumb, a fetus isn't a person" as if that completely settles the question. And the same people act like it's equally obvious that's it's a horrific atrocity to kill an infant that only gestated for 24 weeks, just because its using its lungs and its location in space relative to the mother has changed.
Does it make sense if I say that I'm just as appalled by the simplistically-pro-choice disregard for somewhat-cognitively-developed fetuses as I am by the simplistically-pro-life disregard for a mother's burden? Why is it sufficient that late term abortions are just "rare, expensive, and unpleasant"? Aren't they just as wrong as keeping an unwilling mother from aborting a microscopic blastocyst?
Often the same groups opposing abortion also oppose the most effective policies to reduce abortions (proper sex ed, free birth control and family planning services, etc.). So while I agree there is an impasse on where the human life line is drawn, I would say it's fair to argue that prudishness/puritanical beliefs are a large factor in the opposition to legal abortion
It's interesting. I'd bet money that if pro-life people accept all those things, pro-abortion people will go with: "what about rape, incest, etc...?" and if they allow specifically those scenarios, they still won't accept.
Bet money this is the scenario that will play out if such things were to be pushed.
Accountability is kryptonite for pro-abortion people.
I'm a little confused, on the one hand you appear to be arguing that victims of rape and incest should be required to bear their abusers children but on the other arguing that pro-choice people aren't holding themselves accountable. In cases of rape or incest how is the victim in any way responsible for their situation?
I can't imagine the physical and psychological damage women that were raped have to deal on a daily basis. We should castrate those men and let them in prison for the rest of their lives but the baby is not responsible of this heinous act.
You know that less than 1% of abortion cases are because cof these evil acts. Even if there's an intent on having a discussion (you could do a quick search on yt) on the premise of allowing abortions for those cases, pro-abortion people use rape and incest cases to justify the 99% which are not because of that.
If you believe abortion isn’t about consequence free sex I encourage to listen to this interview with a conservative intellectual about conservative philosophy generally and abortion and sex specifically. For her there is a bold bright line connecting the two https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
TL;DR: abortion enables casual sex, casual sex is bad for society and women specifically, therefore being pro-life is being pro-woman.
Do you find killing a new born baby reprehensible?
If no this is a _very_ minority view you have.
If yes what is the difference between the new born to a 9 month old fetus in the womb? Then what about an 8 month old? Most would protect it too against abortion. And so on.
A compromising time limit solution for which elective abortions before is permitted and after is forbidden is the only pragmatic solution.
Because of this ethical question the freezing of fertilized eggs is illegal in Germany. So cautious people can come to this conclusion.
But this is the other extreme endpoint. With "a compromising time limit solution" I meant something like the around 15 weeks common in European Countries.
Let's just say that it is murder/abortion of 6 fertilized eggs. However, many people are fine with such murder, as they are with the murder of lettuce leaves.
It seems the issue is always what is being murdered. The more human-like the thing being murdered is, the more outrageous it is. Plan B, not so outrageous because it's just a few cells. 20+ weeks, people are getting outraged. A dog? Pretty human-like, people don't like dogs being murdered.
Plan B is not an abortifacient. It prevents fertilization from ever taking place. Anyone against Plan B is entirely making an argument about casual sex.
> So would it be ethical to rape someone and force them to give birth? Because the babies would be happy to be born and experiencing life? That's the same logic you're using.
People happen to be in a bad situation. There are poor people, ill people, robbed people, raped people, etc.
Forcing people that happen to be raped to not to kill is ethical, and not by Christianity, but by virtually by every moral and ethics that exist.
> So would it be ethical to rape someone and force them to give birth? Because the babies would be happy to be born and experiencing life? That's the same logic you're using.
How could it possibly be ethical to rape someone? Your line of reasoning is really out there.
Depends at what stage. Current abortion friendly states do allow killing unborn babies at 7-9mths pregnacies. They follow your definition of fetus isnt people even though these "fetus" can survive even back 100 years ago without modern healthcare interventions. With modern healthcare, the number can dip as low as 4-5mths. Essentially you are ok with exterminating babies (the moment this fetus pull out of the world they are babies and can survive and actually some do cry but executed in abortion clinics). Not every pregnacies are at the first few weeks of pregnacies. Those if you choose to consider as non people fetus, a lot will agree. Unfortunately majority of pregnancies are terminated in the range of 4-9mths. I suggest you do a bit of research a dark market exist of those fetus organic materials that these clinics are engaged in. Think for a second, these clinics are not free to operate. The people coming in for the service isnt paying exorbitant fees like those in typical hospitals charging patients or insurance. Something else must befunding these...if you say tax, then isnt it weird, people getting forced to pay for others misadventure? The ruling is exactly that. Some states that are pro can go on as usual. Some states that are not pro, can stop funding it. At the end of day each states behavior dictate by the people votes. Why a small minority groups insist everyone else to food their bills?
>>She has the right to control her own body and her own life
You know, the sad thing is the party whose mantra has been 'my body my choice' for the past 40+ years, completely lost that moral high ground when they started demanding that people get vaccinated against their will - and yes, there were plenty of people talking about forcibly injecting people, even though it never happened, and yes abortion vs vaccines are not the same thing - but its either 'my body my choice' or it's not - the message and meaning was crystal clear, up until 2 years ago.
The were no shortage of pro-forced vaccine people who were saying 'yes, the government can force you to do things to your body against your will' - and now in light of the abortion debate trying to make the 'my body my choice' argument again just rings a bit hollower.
I said it to my spouse the first few days when you had mainstream politicians and talking heads on TV calling for forced covid injections, I said 'this is going to blow up in their face', and, imo, it did, the absoluteness of 'my body my choice' argument, is no longer as clear.
Did this directly cause the SC to revoke RvW, certainly not, but imo, the 'my body my choice' argument has been tainted.
A fetus isn’t a person like a black person or Native American wasn’t a full person, like children weren’t full people, or like women weren’t given the same rights as men?
I mean, i do know a odd full-vegan (no harm to even insects, whereas most vegan i know draw the line to living being with fully formed nociceptors) pro-life, and i respect it, at least he isn't hypocritical. He is also very religious, ardently non-violent, and his life choice are based on his faith (that i won't name here).
Mammals are more conscious of themselves than embryos, are aware of and can recognize themselve in a mirror (baby do not recognize themselves until 14 to 24 months btw). They do have fully formed nociceptors, and even when those aren't triggered, are aware of being mutilated, of their brethren being mutilated or killed.
I cannot take seriously a "pro-life" who eat mammal meat. I don't really care what you eat, but at least your diet should follow your "convictions".
There are plenty of birthed people that are in that state. Mostly infants, but many with developmental disabilities or other conditions. Eugenics had the same idea. Do you want To be the arbiter of the minimal set of bodily functions required to be human? What if you end up in a state with one less than the value chosen, should someone else be able to decide whether you live or die?
There is no "one less than the value chosen" in this case - the embryo is 100% reliant on the mother for every single possible life function - circulation, respiration, digestion, homeostasis, everything. The only "babies" that are "born" in that state are early miscarriages. This is the slippery slope fallacy writ large, in the same way as comparing a minority to an embryo was.
You think that a 20 week old child has no chance of living outside a womb? The current earliest premie is 21 weeks. It will only go lower with better technology. The slope slips to its logical conclusion: conception.
Here’s a thought exercise: take whatever you would consider a viable human and rewind to one developed cell earlier. Is that a human? Repeat until you can guarantee it is not a human. How far do you have to go until that is true for all instances of all fetuses? I came to the conclusion that an embryo, which can live and grow outside of a womb is the earliest logical point to consider the organism a human and make subsequent opinions accordingly.
There won't be any middle ground since you already think fetuses are not "human beings" .
Let's not use religion and go with science. Which biologist, scientist, or doctor is willing to acknowledge and let alone prove that a fetus (unborn human per oxford dictionary) is not human? Take in consideration that the whole scientific community has to acknowledge these assumptions after lots of tests, etc...
Even news outlets are broadcasting women who are saying "hookup culture would be decimated" meaning they are using abortions as birth control.
There's no angle (scientific vor otherwise) to defend abortions other than convenience and lack of accountability.
R vs. W literally hands on the vote to states. California, NY, etc... won't change their policies.
how someone can feel not able to raise a child? how about trying to understand why this person feels not able, and what needs to change so that they will feel able?
i don't see anyone working towards a society where people are actually supported to raise their children.
people are promised help, but when the baby is there, no help is actually forthcoming.
to help save lives, we need to work on our society to be helpful and welcoming to the children when they are actually born, and not just feel good about convincing someone to not have an abortion, with complete disregard for what comes afterwards.
If you want those children to be born, you could also vote for better child/parent support. Ensure those women that are pregnant have confidence that they can carry the responsibility of raising these children for 18 years. Ensure good affordable healthcare is provided for those that can't afford it, ensure good affordable education is provided, ensure good affordable childcare is provided for.
Try helping instead of forbidding. And accept some children should not be born due to health, abuse, rape, etc.
I find this whole thing so puzzling. In the UK, not so different from the USA, this is not really a thing at all. Even amongst Christians I have never heard it brought up. Is it a political thing, and if so how did it become so?
It's a wedge issue where neither side will give any ground, which makes it exploitable. If you figure out a way to tie a wedge issue to the rest of your political platform you're virtually guaranteed support from one side or another. IMO one side has been much, much better at exploiting this fact and has has achieved great power despite representing less than a plurality of voters.
It’s a divisive issue because it represents fundamentally different world views. As an asian, the idea that the government can’t regulate abortion, which is prevalent among a large minority of Democrats these days, is remarkable. Even if abortion was a moral issue, and not about preserving human life, nothing precludes states from legislating morality. It’s illustrative to compare to Japan or Germany, which have “liberal” abortion regimes insofar as it’s widely available. But in both countries it’s still technically illegal. The state has the power to regulate, but simply tolerates abortion under certain conditions.
When people deny that power altogether, you’re dealing with fundamentally different notions of how society works, and that predictably produces conflict. And people perceive that conflict as involving more fundamental issues than what the marginal income tax rate should be.
And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?” Republicans won a majority of the Congressional popular vote in 2016. They got a million and a half more votes than Democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_Re.... They’re on pace to do it again this year. They’re also a couple of points ahead in the generic Congressional ballot.
It’s an error to rely on the Presidential popular vote. Because it doesn’t count nobody is trying to win it. It’s easy for Democrats to campaign in big cities in red states, but the GOP has no incentive to spend resources in rural areas of blue states. But they can and do field Congressional candidates in those areas, which is reflected in the Congressional popular vote.
Government does and should regulate behavior. But, morality based on religious beliefs becomes a problem, when the beliefs of particular religious groups are imposed on others who don't believe as they do. Effective government would find the correct balance, where the laws reflect what's best for the majority and protects individual rights and freedoms within reason.
> The state has the power to regulate, but simply tolerates abortion under certain conditions.
The issue the U.S. will now be running into, is that various states will have conflicting laws on abortion, adding to chaos and confusion.
The extremism involved in total or nonsensical abortion bans by various states, like even in cases of: rape, statutory rape, teenage/child pregnancy, incest, life of mother in danger, high percentage chance child will have major birth defects, various contraceptive measures (IUDs, abortion pills) etc... Then becomes a matter of showing a callous attitude of destroying and endangering the lives of various women and even the children they might be forced to bear.
As someone who wishes this was codified in our constitution, I'm afraid the 'concept' is held relatively weakly.
Clarence Thomas has stated, regarding the Establishment Clause: 'The text and history of this Clause suggest that it should not be incorporated against the States.'
I wouldn't be surprised if there is concurrence among the conservative justices sans Roberts.
IMO, it's held "weakly" because there's a christian majority in the government at large (and the SC in particular). As such, the morality they advocate for just happens to also align with morality as defined by their faith.
If you hold a different morality (in particular the Jewish or Muslim views on abortion rights), you're just SOL because you're not a majority.
The Supreme Court has fewer deeply religious people than the country as a whole, because of the appointment process. The religious wing of the Democratic Party (conservative Hispanics and Black people) is excluded, while the religious wing of the Republican Party has to share appointments with economic libertarians (Kennedy, Roberts, etc).
That's besides the point regardless. The "Establishment Clause" prohibits the creation of a national church: https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/inte.... That's what "Establishment of Religion" means--creating an official, established Church. Several states had an established church around the time of the founding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state.... For example, Massachusetts had "disestablished" its official church less than 10 years before the Constitution, and continued public funding of it until 40 years after the Constitution. The "Establishment Clause" prohibited the federal government from creating such an official religion.
The Establishment Clause does not prohibit people from voting for laws based on their religion. That is to say, it does not put a thumb on the scale in favor of beliefs based on secular philosophy versus religious philosophy. Voters (at the state level) can close stores on Sunday based on Christianity, no different than doing so based on secular beliefs about workers needing a day off.
So, none of that actually challenges my statement - that our politicians' morals are based extensively on those of their religion, thus avoiding any conflict of interest in their mind (i.e. Who doesn't view abortion as murder?), while still creating a "tyranny of the majority" for those who don't share their religion.
Legal or not according to the intent of "separation of church and state", it's holding us back as a country.
No, you're confused. The US has the Establishment Clause (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause) and the Free Exercise Clause, and they don't preclude religious people from using a religious basis to choose between secular policies. Abortion regulation is a secular policy area.
> The extremism involved in total or nonsensical abortion bans by various states, like even in cases of...
IIRC, most of those bans were passed when they had no hope of being enforced because of Roe v. Wade (e.g. they were for show). Now that case has been repealed, as things shake out, I expect many of those laws will be revised.
Religion is a red herring in the abortion debate. Abortion is illegal in Poland (Catholic) and Bangladesh (Muslim), and is technically illegal (though available) in Japan (Shinto and Buddhist). Regulation of abortion is therefore not something specific to a particular religious tradition.
In the U.S. specifically, moreover, abortion is best described as an internecine conflict between different branches of Christianity. The pro-choice movement is an outgrowth of mainline Protestantism, with its focus on individual self determination. The notion that the morality of extinguishing a fetal life "is between a woman and her doctor" and society has no say is uniquely Protestant. It's quite alien even to other societies that permit abortions, which tend to do so on utilitarian grounds like overpopulation.
And all that is fine, because "separation of church and state" does not mean that the government cannot regulate behavior "based on religious beliefs." The U.S. does not have French-style secularism, where there is a separate body of secular philosophy animating government and religious belief is actively excluded. It doesn't matter what people's reasons are for voting a particular way, as long as the end result is otherwise permissible.
> The U.S. has the concept of separating religion from government
Realizing that this is getting more deeply into politics...
GOP Rep. Boebert: ‘I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk’ - https://wapo.st/3u7AkGL
> Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who faces a primary election Tuesday, says she is “tired” of the U.S. separation of church and state, a long-standing concept stemming only from a “stinking letter” penned by one of the Founding Fathers.
> Speaking at a religious service Sunday in Colorado, she told worshipers: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.”
And then there's Mary Miller (R-Ill) who celebrated the ruling as a victory for white life. She claims it was just a mistake, but she's also the person that used a quote from Hitler in a campaign speech so "who knows." IMO it's an example of what I'm talking about: using the wedge issue of abortion to move folks closer to white nationalism and fascism in general.
>And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?” Republicans won a majority of the Congressional popular vote in 2016. They got a million and a half more votes than Democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_Re.... They’re on pace to do it again this year.
This coupled with Presidential votes, even though technically only the electoral college counts, makes it quite fair to imply it is the Republicans that represent less than a plurality of voters.
The House popular vote more accurately reflects nationwide sentiment because both parties have an incentive to campaign in every state. Indeed, the leaders of both parties in the House are from California.
But both parties lack an incentive to try and win statewide "winner take all" contests in opposite-color states. Cross-referencing those results against polling suggests that this effect hurts the GOP, with their geographically more spread out base, slightly more than it hurts Democrats.
Rayiner. Dude. First, using the word 'plurality' the way you introduced it is confusing at best, and possibly just wrong.
Second, the 538 poll aggregation has massive margin for error. Filter down to just the polls rated A+ and you only get an half point advantage for Republicans. Change the filter to the polls rated B+ and above and you get a full point advantage for Democrats. Also, consider the changes over time. How confident are you that a 5% swing from Democrats to Republicans over the past year represents an actual ideological change mapping directly to abortion ideology?
> Rayiner. Dude. First, using the word 'plurality' the way you introduced it is confusing at best, and possibly just wrong.
The polls literally show Republicans with a plurality in the generic ballot.
> Second, the 538 poll aggregation has massive margin for error.
And in the last several cycles, polling error has undercounted conservatives.
> How confident are you that a 5% swing from Democrats to Republicans over the past year represents an actual ideological change mapping directly to abortion ideology?
I didn't say any of that, and I don't think that's true. My point is refuting this idea that Republicans are some sort of minority party. We're a closely divided country, as demonstrated by the fact that the GOP has won an absolute larger number of votes in more than half of House elections since 1992, and regularly pulls ahead of Democrats on the generic ballot.
> > Rayiner. Dude. First, using the word 'plurality' the way you introduced it is confusing at best, and possibly just wrong.
> The polls literally show Republicans with a plurality in the generic ballot.
I missed that the first comment you responded to was the one that suggested the Republicans didn't have a plurality. Thought you brought up a question of who has less than a plurality when both Republicans and Democrats clearly have at least a plurality.
> But in both countries it’s still technically illegal.
It would be nonsensical for activists in Japan to spend time advocating that abortion become technically legal without regard to practical situations where it could be performed.
This is essentialist reasoning ascribing some kind of soul to the law, which feels out of character for you. I suppose you could argue that sodomy is
'technically illegal' in many states, but that Lawrence & Baker carved out situations where it is tolerated.
Does the technicality of being prosecuted for non-consensual act of sodomy vs. an explicit sexual assault crime actually mean anything to the perpetrator if the penalty is the same?
> And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?”
Party affiliation and political ideology are far from an exact match. That's why there are a handful of Republican governors posturing to uphold abortion rights.
Abortion is often a singular issue for pro-life advocates, who have had a particular motivation to mobilize built up over the past half-century. I personally have met a handful of people who hated everything about the Republican platform except for its stance on abortion, and that was the sole issue that decided their vote. Polarization has progressed to the point that there's only one
The pro-choice movement doesn't have the same fervor at this point, and I think a backlash is not going to be rapid due to a combination of:
- those who are pro-choice but happy to rationalize that it's now a state level issue and that the reversal of Roe v Wade was simply the correction of improper judicial activism.
- defeatist stances by those who feel disenfranchised and that voting is ineffective, particularly when done strategically to 'win' instead of based on a hard ideal
- those who would vote for abortion rights if a ballot was set in front of them but who personally find abortion repugnant or deserving of severe restriction
> It would be nonsensical for activists in Japan to spend time advocating that abortion become technically legal without regard to practical situations where it could be performed. This is essentialist reasoning ascribing some kind of soul to the law, which feels out of character for you.
I'm simply pointing out the difference between the government tolerating certain conduct, and the government lacking the power to prohibit that conduct. Abortion in Japan and Germany are examples of the former--legalization happened without denying the power of the government to have made it illegal in the first place.
Roe (and Lawrence), by contrast, not only legalized certain conduct, but declared that the government never had the power to make it illegal in the first place. That's actually quite radical compared to how most advanced countries view the issue.
> The pro-choice movement doesn't have the same fervor at this point
I don't think that's accurate. For a significant chunk of the pro-choice movement, it's a moral issue as much as it is for dedicated pro-lifers. They believe that the purpose of life is fulfilling one's individual hopes and dreams in the same way pro-lifers believe that the purpose of life is to be fruitful and multiply. For dedicated pro-choicers, the possibility of derailing individual aspirations is so unthinkable that it justifies ending a nascent human life. For dedicated pro-lifers, reproduction is such a clear mandate that it justifies derailing individual ambitions and aspirations. That's the fundamental conflict in world view that I'm talking about.
Not that I support this ruling in any way or form, but the 2016 election led to the current slate of justices who came up with this ruling. It is probably good and by design that we don’t change justices with the popular vote.
The House of Representatives is fully inconsequential to the selection and confirmation of Supreme Court justices, and the only Republicans on the ballot nation-wide lost the popular vote by a substantial margin.
As a legal matter, the Presidential popular vote is also “fully inconsequential” to the selection of Supreme Court Justices, or anything else.
We’re only talking about the popular vote insofar as Democrats try to delegitimize Republican administrations by insisting that they are a minority party that can gain power only through the quirk of our voting system. But in doing so they conveniently ignore the House popular vote, which Republicans routinely win.
You shouldn’t drink your own Kool-Aid. This Nixonian “Silent Majority” thinking is bad for Democrats, insofar as it causes them to get over their skis. In 2010, Democrats lost the House popular vote by almost 6 million votes. They lost it by 5 million in 2014 and 1.5 million in 2016. The House popular vote is a far better proxy for where the parties stand with the electorate.
The entire point of life appointments is to remove partisanship from judicial decisions. If the judges were up for election, their performance would most certainly suffer.
For example, look at the Federal Reserve. They are supposed to be independent from politics, but their head is appointed by the president every X years, and so they naturally make the decisions that guarantee them reelection and not the decisions which would maximize economic stability/utility.
> Even if abortion was a moral issue, and not about preserving human life, nothing precludes states from legislating morality.
Not nothing -- we have a constitution that guarantees rights, many of which are rights to behave immorally (in the eyes of some). In fact that's the core of the Democrat's argument.
> And people perceive that conflict as involving more fundamental issues than what the marginal income tax rate should be.
Agreed, and that's pretty much my entire point.
> It’s an error to rely on the Presidential popular vote. Because it doesn’t count nobody is trying to win it.
I see this argument a lot but I don't find it convincing. There are plenty of senate and representative seats that are not competitive and yet we still count their votes when discussing the balance of power between the two parties, despite the fact that one side is less likely to try to win.
Your answer begs the question. Yes, abortion is a wedge issue, but why is it a wedge issue? Why are people against abortions in the US when most people aren’t against abortion access in other countries.
Right. It seems to me that both sides would be better off at advancing their so called goals if they could compromise and offer concessions, but that never happens.
That's what makes it a wedge issue: there isn't much room for compromise. If one side believes abortion is literally murder, they're not going to say "well, a little bit of murder is OK if we get <foo>".
It's just tacked on to identity politics. It doesn't really matter what the issue at hand is, only what stance is taken with the group the people identify with.
There is no logic on the issue itself at all, trying to find any logic will only result in conflicting results. (i.e. being against governmental influence, but wanting the government to control people's bodies; or having death penalties and weekly school shootings and not helping people to survive with basic living standards, but forcing childbirth wherever possible)
Unfertilized eggs are not human and have no capacity to become human. Should “lesser” humans have fewer rights than “full” humans? I think we’ve already been through that a few times in history and it has always turned out to be the wrong choice.
They don’t need the capacity to become human they are human. How else would you describe these unfertilized eggs except as living organisms, species human? Unless you want to suggest your ancestors are egg, human, egg, human, egg, human …
If you want to give all humans the same rights then they should clearly qualify. Of course giving an egg, fetus, or baby the right to vote in an election is going to run into some practical problems.
I'm not conceding any other part of whatever argument you're making, but saying that unfertilized eggs are individual humans is completely ludicrous. They aren't separate organisms. They might eventually be used to create one, but it's not likely. This is like arguing that every skin cell is an individual human just because you could theoretically extract DNA from it and make a clone.
Eggs are happy to sit frozen for decades outside a human body after the donors death then be implanted in someone else. That’s a living organism though less hardy than a HeLa cell line. Sure they aren’t viable on their own, but apparently we can’t apply that standard to a fetus.
Clearly someone should not be considered alive because theirs frozen eggs still alive. That’s independent.
Eggs that are sitting around like that presumably have vastly higher odds of being implanted than one of your random skin cells. Something like 15 orders of magnitude or more.
Despite what is sometimes said, the moment of fertilization isn’t suddenly creating life both cells where alive before that point.
Maybe if the state enforced birth crowd adopted some post-birth childcare policies that weren't pure social darwinism and rugged individualism, less people would want to abort...
In the UK, the largest Christian denomination is the Church of England, with Her Majesty as the figurehead - and while they oppose abortion, their stance is [1]
"The Church of England's stated position combines principled opposition with a recognition that there can be strictly limited conditions under which abortion may be morally preferable to any available alternative. "
I assume that being an Established Church makes a difference too. We don't do separation of church and state the same way over here, after all that was one of the things the newly independent states of America decided to make very clear they were going to do differently from Britain, so the UK and USA are very different in this regard.
Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued roe v wade was a mistake because it placed abortion rights into constitutional law rather than letting democratic institutions decide an issue like this.
The reason it’s not an issue in Europe is because opposing sides all get a say in this and arrive at a compromise, namely abortion allowed up to 12 weeks which is fairly standard in most European countries.
But because row v wade basically said abortion has to be allowed in the US, the issue has had no real democratic debate just massively polarized arguing.
I’d argue the current situation will be better for almost everyone a few years down the line. Democracy works in resolving these issues. And why not have stricter laws in more Christian states? And free for all in California, if that’s what democracy decides?
> Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued roe v wade was a mistake because it placed abortion rights into constitutional law rather than letting democratic institutions decide an issue like this.
That's an oversimplification of a very nuanced and pragmatic view that is better explained here:
"What Ruth Bader Ginsburg really said about Roe v. Wade", Washington Post https://archive.ph/jJENv
It's not that she felt the rights granted by Roe were wrong to grant, she was worried that it would not be insulated from legal challenges.
Essentially, the pro-choice group scored a tactical victory, that turned out to be a strategically vulnerable position. And in turn, the can got kicked down to our era.
“Roe v. Wade, in contrast, invited no dialogue with legislators. Instead, it seemed entirely to remove the ball from the legislators’ court. In 1973, when Roe issued, abortion law was in a state of change across the nation. As the Supreme Court itself noted, there was a marked trend in state legislatures “toward liberalization of abortion statutes.” That movement for legislative change ran parallel to another law revision effort then underway-the change from fault to no-fault divorce regimes, a reform that swept through the state legislatures and captured all of them by the mid-1980s.
No measured motion, the Roe decision left virtually no state with laws fully conforming to the Court’s delineation of abortion regulation still permissible. Around that extraordinary decision, a well-organized and vocal right-to-life movement rallied and succeeded, for a considerable time, in turning the legislative tide in the opposite direction.”
Yet we see religiously-inspired laws everywhere. Any laws relating to alcohol sales is probably reflective of local religiosity, as is the state philosophy on criminal justice. These are not 1st amendment violations. Going deeper, religion created a culture which we have inherited: marriages, government holidays, even the official work week being seven days long. These do not violate the 1st Amendment.
> Any laws relating to alcohol sales is probably reflective of local religiosity, as is the state philosophy on criminal justice.
My guess is these don't inconvenience people enough to make it to the Supreme Court. And there's also the fig leaf of "crime reduction".
> as is the state philosophy on criminal justice
Can you give some examples? I'm not familiar with this.
> religion created a culture which we have inherited
Which of these restrict individual freedoms by law?
> even the official work week being seven days long.
You'll be surprised to learn that pre-Christian and non-Christian cultures have also had 7-day weeks, likely because they divide a lunar month so well.[1]
The Constitution does not enumerate a federal power to govern alcohol. That is left to the states, and it is not a violation of an ammendment.
Though the federal government did coerce every state into moving their drinking age from 18 to 21 under threat of withholding federal highway funding to states that had drinking ages set lower than 21.
That case went to the Supreme Court and is also in dire need of overruling in my opinion.
> That is left to the states, and it is not a violation of an ammendment
Not alcohol specifically, but any law that appears to promote a state religion. Like I said, alcohol sale restrictions are hard to prove as being motivated solely by religion. There are crime reduction, public health and safety, labor safety considerations too. I imagine the bar/restaurant lobby is also influential.
Can you provide an example of a law that is motivated purely by religion? And can you explain how that differs from legislation/policy crafted based on how someone feels, or even data?
The point of the 10th ammendment was to allow people to self govern from the bottom up, realizing that not all solutions are universal because people have different preferences.
With regards specifically to abortion, abortion bans are not necessarily motivated by religion. Many people believe life begins at conception, regardless of religion.
> Can you provide an example of a law that is motivated purely by religion?
Certainly.
The Pledge of Allegiance. [1]
There's no non-religious basis for finding gay marriage objectionable. But it was not legal everywhere in the US until only 7 years ago. And appears to be in jeopardy again.
These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
> There's no non-religious basis for finding gay marriage objectionable. But it was not legal everywhere in the US until only 7 years ago. And appears to be in jeopardy again.
Yes there is. You can easily argue that marriage is a cultural or legal system based on making it easier for families with children in a society. Giving them tax benefits, beaurocratic benefits (so one person can represent an entire family for example). Because whatever the fashion in 2022, societies need children to survive and want to incentivise it.
Now there might be edge cases in terms of children + gay couples in 2022, historically you can easily make a non religious case for marriage being between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreating.
> You can easily argue that marriage is a cultural or legal system based on making it easier for families with children in a society
And families headed by a non-hetero or non-couple can't raise children? What about other non-traditional family types? (E.g. a grandparent and a parent, two or three adult siblings raising their younger siblings without parents, a couple raising their nieces/nephews/godchildren, the family in Full House etc.) You gonna make those illegal too?
> for the purpose of procreating
If that were really the case, what about couples who can't have children due to age or infertility? Should their marriages be illegal too? Should hetero couples divorce the minute the woman hits menopause, if they don't already have kids? Are widows over 50 not allowed to remarry? Seems like a heartless society to me, and also contrary to "tradition" (whatever that means).
Maybe we can admit that marriage in today's society is also about love, companionship, and deep emotional bonds. Not just raising children.
> And families headed by a non-hetero or non-couple can't raise children? What about other non-traditional family types? (E.g. a grandparent and a parent, two or three adult siblings raising their younger siblings without parents, a couple raising their nieces/nephews/godchildren, the family in Full House etc.) You gonna make those illegal too?
There is raising children and there is the creation of children. The argument was that the government incentivized marriage because it led to both the creation of children as well as their raising in a stable home.
Non-traditional guardians (homos, grandparents, etc.) can obviously raise children, but they cannot make them.
That is likely how marriage ended up governed by the state. You are correct that it was rooted in religion, so thanks for the example.
Imo, marriage should not be regulated by the government. It is a derived of and should remain in religious institutions.
Instead, the government can come up with a private partnership, which would easily do everything marriage does without the underlying religious debate and exclusions.
> the government incentivized marriage because it led to both the creation of children
Except this part is false. Because, as I mentioned previously, not every hetero marriage could lead to creating children. There have never been any strong religious restrictions on old people, or people with known infertility getting married in Western society.
> the government can come up with a private partnership, which would easily do everything marriage does without the underlying religious debate and exclusions.
So...marriage? In US law at least, there aren't any religious components to marriage. No religious body needs to be involved to have a marriage be legally valid. You go down to city hall, get a marriage license, and you're done. There's no legal requirement that a religious institution that objects to a marriage, for any reason, has to perform that marriage. Can divorced Catholics remarry in a Catholic church now, without getting a dispensation?
Now if your objection is to the use of the word "marriage" to refer to partnerships that certain religions don't agree with...I don't really know what to say. That's everyday language at work. You can't stop people from using words the way they want. And it's not a real problem that the government should be involved in.
> E.g. a grandparent and a parent, two or three adult siblings raising their younger siblings without parents, a couple raising their nieces/nephews/godchildren, the family in Full House etc.
These can raise children obviously, and do it well. But it’s not called a marriage. Thanks for making my point for me.
Your point was a "marriage" is a requirement for raising children well. And a "marriage" is solely for procreation. I proved that both are false by providing countercases. You didn't even attempt to engage with the second point. And in fact you seem to be agreeing with me on my first point.
I don't think you understand how a debate works. This ain't YouTube, there's no partisan audience that will clap when you say "So then you agree with me" for something completely illogical. I can't help you any further and I wish you luck.
I think this completely ignores the moral issues of later term abortions. I am an atheist, and I am disturbed by the idea of a voluntary abortion after 20 weeks. Voluntary meaning no medical necessity.
I think Republicans have latched onto this issue and Christianity in America has adopted it, but there is far more at play here than just Christian nationalism.
Yes, they've taken the extreme view of "aborting a baby right before it's born" which doesn't fit the majority of cases and used it to argue against the norm, but if that were actually the case they would be limiting abortion to "reasonable" limits, not straight up "snitch on your neighbours if you think they've had an abortion" laws.
Late term abortions are almost all wanted babies where something has gone horribly wrong for the baby, the mother, or both. There are also vanishingly few of them.
What issue? What are the numbers on non medical necessity abortions post 20 weeks?
Why 20 weeks? Are the voting populace or politicians knowledgeable enough about pregnancy to be able to legislate these things without exposing doctors and women to unnecessary legal risk? And again, back to the numbers, does the is even need legislating? Are women or doctors haphazardly running around killing perfectly viable fetuses for fun?
There are over a million abortions performed every year in the US. If your belief is that these are humans with all the rights of any other human, that’s a staggering human rights issue.
The concept of viability is legal fiction. Given the technology, there’s no reason a fetus couldn’t live at any stage of development and likewise, until about age 3 or so, no child will live without external support. Culturally, we celebrate “birth”, but that event has nothing to do with life.
On the other end is the necessity to support the life of a mother. While unfortunate, I think that’s a rare time that terminating a pregnancy is appropriate. That doesn’t mean lifestyle or convenience, though. That’s situations where only one or fewer people will make it alive if nothing is done. This represents a fraction of one percent of abortions. Other abuses may fall into this category.
> Given the technology, there’s no reason a fetus couldn’t live at any stage of development
This cannot be true, and just because a fetus could live does not mean the quality of life is worth living. Not to mention the staggering costs of NICU healthcare.
The numbers I was asking about were specifically post 20 week, as a reply to parkingrift’s concerns.
Babies survive outside the womb prior to 20 weeks. That will continue to go down as technology progresses. What does cost have to do with whether someone is a person?
Sorry, I misread “given the technology” as today’s technology. But then I do not see how the concept of viability is legal fiction. Medical science can keep fetuses born after x weeks alive with y probability, and that y is near 0 or 0 before x weeks.
Cost had to do with practicality. It does not seem reasonable to expect a society to invest $10M into raising a 1 week old fetus that will need 24/7 support to live. Point being that there are limits real life and a purely philosophical exercise is not useful.
It’s legal fiction in that the concept was created in a court to justify why a person at a certain developmental stage wasn’t really a person. It’s not a scientific definition, a “law” of nature, or previous cultural definition. The idea was created to advance a legal argument. It’s fiction in that the value chosen was arbitrary then, is not a discrete event or time period, and by the same standard, is earlier than when defined and will continue to be earlier as technology advances.
The practicality of saving a life is certainly different than the legal justification to end a life. The point of technology being able to support development outside of a womb is evidence, imo, of the organism being independent from the mother. If that organism is individual and human, (s)he should have the full rights of all persons.
To me that means finding options that don’t involve terminating lives when the mother decides they are not prepared to parent. Right now the options outside abortion place significant strain on mothers, but as a society, 50 years have been spent not investigating alternatives and going all in on abortion. It’s already possible to transfer embryos fertilized in a lab successfully into an unrelated host.
Ultimately it is a philosophical argument. I can’t find any argument that has convinced me that a human is a human regardless of the stage of development or capabilities of the person. I’ve argued that “viability” will continue to be earlier for the past 20 years and haven’t been wrong about that yet. It’s currently limited by technology, but that shouldn’t impact the rights of individuals (in this case the unborn).
> And again, back to the numbers, does the is even need legislating? Are women or doctors haphazardly running around killing perfectly viable fetuses for fun?
1% of the abortions occur in week 21 or later, of a total of 625.000-930.000 abortion per year. So about 6250-9300 abortion per year in week 21 or later. Assuming a number of these are health related, "livestyle" abortions is probably less than 9300 per year.
You're trying to make a scientific or analytical response to what I've just said is a moral issue. You can surely disagree, but many people find late term abortions repugnant. Some people find any abortion at any term repugnant. You can have these feelings without associating them with religious views. I'm not religious, as I've said. However, my broader point here is that people are making a mistake directly associating views on abortion with religiosity or conservative political views. It's not that black and white.
I live in New York. Abortion is legal for any reason up to 24 weeks, and then legal for any medical reason beyond 24 weeks.
Nationally, about 1.3% of all abortions are after 20 weeks. I don't have further data as to what percentage of that 1.3% were due to medical reasons. Big round numbers here 1.3% is roughly 8,500 20+ week abortions in the US per year.
> Why 20 weeks?
With current technology it is roughly where viability starts to climb from 0%. Possibility of feeling pain and/or terminating a living, viable, being. At 24 weeks the viability can be as high as 70%. It is okay that you do not find this disturbing, but I do find it disturbing. It's disturbing to me to think about voluntarily terminating a pregnancy after 20 weeks with no medical issues for the child or mother.
If given an option this is how I would vote. Unfortunately, there is no nuance in most American political issues. I don't have a choice to vote on allowing abortions for any reason up to 20 weeks, or for any medical reason afterward. I typically get to choose between "ban all abortions" and "allow almost all abortions."
And after 25 weeks one really needs to consider that the fetus may have a misshaped heart and no chance of survival outside the womb, requiring an abortion.
I am also pro-choice - I have thought the viability standard was always going to be a moving target thanks to
medical and technological advances that could topple at some point too - even if you defined it as something like NNth percentile.
It does seem to me that setting an arbitrary (but flexible) point of no return was going to be necessary (probably around 18-24 weeks)
The trimesters have absolutely 0 actual meaning here, as this is fundamentally putting an arbitrary line on a continuous process. Yet this is probably the only way you're getting anything, as they're at least a useful Schelling point that can get some compromise.
Regarding your second statement, I don't think anyone would consider aborting babie(s) after carrying for 20 weeks. These cases are outliers & it is mostly due to medical conditions.
> I think Republicans have latched onto this issue and Christianity in America has adopted it, but there is far more at play here than just Christian nationalism.
Yes, and polarization-fueled straw-man memes really obscure that. I swear some people's only understanding of "the other side" is a twisted view of the distortions of some overheated partisan bomb-thrower, stupefied into slogan form. But you kind of need something like that to feel confidently self-righteous.
I'd wager than many are talked to abortion, specifically that late in the cycle, out of a desire for organ harvesting from newborns and not out of necessity.
What’s the context? What is the research of? Is consent required / has it been received? Is this a common practice? Is it common to sell non-fetal tissue for research purposes? Etc etc
Linking to a cryptic 575 page long PDF file is too conspiratorial to take seriously.
> I'd wager that the vast majority of abortions post 20 weeks are performed with extreme reluctance and sadness, and only out of great necessity.
My point was specifically aimed at this parent comment. It is easy to make baseless wagers about motivation. I find it an equally compelling narrative that, given research and financial incentives, there is great motivation for abortion clinics to persuade individuals to abort children. Especially late-term abortions since developed infant organs are likely demanding a premium due to their rarity.
Not really, no. You're spouting random conspiracy theories. You provided unverified primary sources. Any rando can make a website and post a PDF on it for $10.
If the SCOTUS did that, then they would be legislators, not judges; it is up to congress to decide where that cutoff should be, and then pass a law if they want - RvW didn't outlaw abortions, it just punted it back to the correct body to act if they wanted; I suspect they (congress) will be forced to pass a law, and it will likely set at a date that makes nobody happy - not the abortion at any time crowd, and not the 'zero exceptions' crowd. Most of Europe seems OK with a ~12 week cutoff. I suspect something around that, with narrow set of exceptions, would satisfy all but the most extremes on both sides.
My assumption is that it caused by the fact that democracy is broken in the US. They have only two parties, whereas most countries in Europe have many.
With only two parties the differences get exxagerated and causes polarisation. With only 2 parties is often a question of "them or us".
People are forgetting we're a union of fairly sovereign states. In 1969, as you have today, some states allowed abortions, and other prohibited or restricted them. Thus it was decided democratically, as it is in most of the rest of the world. But when the federal government can come in and preempt state law, because the USA as a whole has a different idea, or in the case of Roe v. Wade, the unelected judges had a different idea, that is going to cause friction.
Also, the power of the federal government to impost laws on all states is highly controversial, and its history full of other supreme court cases carving out the definition.
You see the same friction with EU freedom of movement laws and immigration.
Do you find it puzzling that some people think it's wrong to kill unborn babies? You might think it's fine, but anyone can understand that people can think it's wrong.
Just like I as a meat eater can obviously understand that there are vegetarians that oppose the killing of animals.
The USA is very different from the UK because of puritans.
American Christians are much more puritan than Brits (this is true for abortion, but also for tee-totaller movements, and other things)
A lot of American Christians are anti abortion, for the simple yet totally valid reason that they truly believe that embryos are human lives, and that as such they shouldn't be "murdered".
The question of the threshold is central here. Noone in their right mind is pro abortion past 30 weeks of pregnancy. Similarly, no one is really against the morning-after pill.
This issue has been whipped up by the right wing, but they did it IN ORDER TO get more voters (who deeply cared about that issue), and not the other way around.
Similarly, no one is really against the morning-after pill.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A lot of people, including elsewhere in these comments, believe that “life begins at conception” and that therefore any action taken to stop the process post-fertilization is murder. That includes the morning-after pill.
It also includes IUD’s and IVF technology. Ironically, the latter actually enables some couples to have children.
This goes back a long way. Many of the early American colonies were founded by religious extremist sects being pushed out of wherever they came from. The US and UK both experienced the First Great Awakening, but the Second Great Awakening was unique to the US. This led to entirely new sects like the Adventists and Latter Day Saints. It led to an extreme backlash against Enlightenment ideals. Post-millenialism spread rapidly and many Americans were convinced the return of Christ was imminent and American society needed to be purified, which resulted in the first tight intermingling of religion with politics. Religious organizations needed political clout to accomplish their social goals, which were not restricted to their own followers. This was heightened all the more by the reality that the outlying territories didn't have real governments and religious leaders were the only leaders around. Revivalism mixed with frontier folk libertarianism to produce what would eventually become prosperity gospel teaching that the strength of one's adherence to strict behavior and love of Christ would lead to material success, and thus the rich must be pious. The Third Great Awakening gave us American Christian organizations that became increasingly all about social reform in light of the belief that Christ's return was imminent, leading to the very earliest alliance of the Republican party with activist Christians, which was the effort to abolish slavery. That alliance eventually dovetailed quite nicely with the American GOP's post-New Deal long game to cut taxes, business regulation, and social welfare spending, thanks to those earlier seeds of prosperity gospel. This also explains the largely unique to the US "god and guns" phenomenon, which is more about identity politics than religious doctrine because revivalism was tied so tightly to the frontier, where personal firearms ownership and proficiency was all but mandatory.
All in all, I think you get a nice picture of how something well-intended can end up in a bad place. The righteous fervor to make society better resulted in ending slavery, fighting against tenements, but then they ran out of the most obvious evils and we got prohibition, anti-homosexual laws, and this mobilization of single-issue voters that judge all office holders solely by whether they'll try to abolish abortion and don't care about anything else they do. Tack that onto the naked charlatanism of prosperity gospel and you more or less get everything wrong with 20th-century American evangelicalism.
Opposition to abortion in the USA was originally largely driven by Catholics. Which, incidentally, meant that most American Protestants didn’t especially object to it, including the majority of the Justices who issued the Roe decision. Eventually, for a number of reasons, many other Christian denominations, especially the poorer extra-urban ones, came to agree with the Catholics that maybe killing unborn babies really is murdering an innocent human life.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Catholics haven’t been a major political power in the UK since the Jesuits were expelled.
As for why it’s a “political thing” in the USA? Ironically, that’s largely because of Roe. Roe removed the abortion debate from the elected branches so that instead of working something out in a healthy democratic fashion, we got a naked exercise of judicial fiat.
This next bit is personal. I hope people will read it as a desire to satisfy curiosity rather than an attempt to debate a subject that, frankly, has adequate firebrands. For Catholics and those others who agree with our moral reasoning[1], abortion, the killing of smaller helpless innocent human beings, is an intolerable enormity. It’s completely impossible for us to knowingly condone it without falling from a state of grace. And doing nothing is condoning.
[1]. Premise 1: killing innocent human persons is wrong. Premise 2: pre-born babies are innocent human beings. Conclusion: killing pre-born babies is wrong.
The argument is simple enough to follow. Note that, due to the structure of the argument, adding additional premises like “the father is a rapist” doesn’t change the moral calculus unless we add an additional premise like “at least some offspring of rapists are not innocent merely due to their paternity.” Since the argument is structurally sound, we must challenge the premises. Challenging 1) is possible, but permitting killing innocent human beings opens a big door to all manner of atrocities. Challenging 2) is the more seemingly reasonable approach. Catholics believe that the human person comes into existence at fertilization, when the diploid human organism begins. One can reasonably use some other event like heartbeat, or some more vague concept like viability, and claim the human person doesn’t begin until then. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument though. I personally lean toward the fertilization point, because when getting the call wrong means murdering an innocent person I prefer to err on the side of caution.
The most popular arguments against protecting an innocent and dependent human person though are completely unprincipled and not properly even arguments at all. Rather, they they reduce to some kind of hedonic assertion on the level of “I’ll do what I want!”
Edit: Please don't reply trying to goad me into some low-brow argument. I am not interested in poorly thought out analogies or any other simulated ratiocination. For the purposes of this discussion I am only interested in the ethics. So by all means please provide clear moral reasoning about why it's OK to kill innocent human persons sometimes but not others. Please explain why it's OK to make it a legal requirement to care for some vitally dependent human persons but not others. And please fully think it through and discuss the potentially unintentional consequences of adopting that ethical system.
An accident occurs and I need 5 litres of blood and a new kidney. You are in the hospital in a coma, should the state be able to require doctors to take your kidney and blood and put it my body without your consent?
It’s because the Supreme Court has imposed for 50 years an extremely liberal abortion regime on an extremely conservative country. Roe guarantees elective abortions up to viability, which is around 22-24 weeks. But by 13-14 weeks, the fetus looks like a baby—it has hands and feet and a face. It can suck its thumb and kick. Most of Europe draws a line for elective abortions (absent exceptions) around that timeframe: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268439/legal-abortion-t.... The UK is an outlier in this by the way, in drawing the line at 24 weeks. That’s the longest in Europe.
Meanwhile, the US is vastly more religious than Western Europe. In terms of people who pray every day, it’s up there with Poland and Iran (both countries where abortion is illegal). On the religiosity front, the United States is more like the rest of the Americans (minus Canada) than like Western Europe.
Sounds like nonsense. Can you explain how it was ‘imposing a regime’, when nobody was forced to do anything? If you didn’t want an abortion you just…didn’t have one.
Kinda sounds like religious people are the ones actually trying to impose a regime to me. Because I couldn’t possibly care less what anyones preferred god thinks, yet religious beliefs are being used to drive political changes that affect everyone.
Religious people in the US get very uncomfortable when other people violate their religious tenets. It's this feeling of discomfort that religious people feel the need to eliminate.
Then why didn't they ever try for a federal abortion ban when they had control of Congress and the presidency? "Murder" isn't suddenly ok just because it happens in another state, right?
I said analogous, not identical. Clearly they see it as bad, but not nearly as bad as murder. If it was literally mass murder to them, I'd expect more bombs and riots, and less "campaign against it for 50 years to repeal it".
If it's "somewhat less than murder" all these states with anti-abortion laws would have carve outs when the mother's life is in danger. You'd definitely allow someone else to commit an evil act that's "less than murder" to save a person's life, wouldn't you?
Imagine you are in a people group that the court decided are free to be killed at someone else’s discretion and you have no legal recourse or advocate. Would you accept that for minority groups, groups of any other association? If you are not the one killing or being killed does that mean it affects no one?
There already are that group - recipients of organ donations. If you or I decide to sign up on a match list, are tested for compatibility, and are selected, we have no legal obligation to proceed with the donation. You or I could be in the operating room side by side with the recipient and object moments before being anesthesized. Again, no legal obligation. Even if it should mean the recipient dies. It doesn't mean you are an asshole, or that it violates your ethical code, but still no legal obligation. So yes, we already have the concept, it's simply not evenly distributed.
In that situation medical professionals are doing everything they can to keep that person alive. If there is another option besides the one donor found it will be used.
Fetuses aren’t granted the right to “pursue happiness”. Abortion doesn’t absolve a mother of obligations while giving the child a chance to part ways amicably. As the potential organ donor you cannot choose to actively terminate the life of the recipient, they are free to continue on until they can no longer.
Those have no bearing on the autonomy of the donor. The ethicalness of declining to donate isn't contingent on support of medical professionals nor the concept of active or passive action.
What does supervene on the ethicalness of the action is autonomy. Bodily autonomy gives a donor the right to back away at the last minute, not the concept of passive action or medical support. I'm not disagreeing that those exist, but they don't lay the foundation for the ethicalness of the action - bodily autonomy does. No one, not even the government, has more say over one's body than oneself.
Parents have an obligation to the care and development of their children. There are plenty of parents who are found guilty of negligence. That is more appropriate than the donor concept.
Parents are not legally obligated to donate their organs to their children even if it would result in saving their child's life. The reasoning behind this is that people, including parents, have bodily autonomy.
The donor concept is a perfectly valid parallel. I can understand that someone wouldn't like it if it challenges their conclusions, but that's sort of the point. No one, not even the government, has more autonomy over ones body than oneself.
In what way, exactly? The historical idea that some people groups have less rights than others? That certainly seems to be what the pro-choice position is. Can you prove the exact point of “viability”, because I can assure you that it is much earlier than was thought in 1973. Do you think it’s a good idea to argue that even though society has continually made egregious mistakes in assigning personhood to humans that we definitely have it right this time and this group of people is, in fact, not really people?
Edit to add: racial minority is just one way that in power groups have oppressed out of power groups, but that is not a unique delineation. Often it’s the most visibly obvious, but humans have done a great job of dehumanizing others based on just about any demographic feature you might want to choose. In American history there is ample example of racial discrimination, but there is also religious, gender, age, physical or mental ability, political affiliation, etc. I don’t really see this as any different from those. Choose a reason why some group isn’t “human” enough and that makes them fair game to do whatever you want. It’s your choice to pick and choose the features you think are necessary to treat a growing group of human cells as human or not. I just think it’s pretty regressive to exclude someone because they aren’t developed to your standard of worth.
I bet these places will start to threaten folks now that their state likely lets them.
"Well, now that we have your data, we'll track you since births are public knowledge. If we don't see a birth, we'll turn it over to the police, and make your identity public (no private medical data needed, just that we have reason to believe you had an abortion) so that anyone in a state with a Texas-style law can sue you for $10,000 apiece, making your losses unlimited. Are you sure you want that abortion now?"
Regardless, Texas cannot hold you liable for an abortion that you get performed in another state.
So Texas can try all they want, but they have no jurisdiction over what happens in California, so they will never be able to write legislation that makes it illegal to travel to another state for an abortion.
> Regardless, Texas cannot hold you liable for an abortion that you get performed in another state.
Texas can do whatever the US Supreme Court allows them to do, and if you think well-established Constitutional precedent is a firm guide on that...how do you think they have the ability to ban abortion in Texas in the first place?
But even under established precedent, I don't think it's at all clear that they cannot punish you for anything you do while in Texas with the intent of getting an abortion, even if the actual abortion is performed outside of Texas.
And even if they can't (based on what the courts will eventually decide) punish you, they can arrest you, charge you, try you, convict you, sentence you, and send you to prison, possibly awaiting execution, before your case is even ripe for appeal.
Your last paragraph is true, but the former are not. States are not allowed to restrict interstate travel, and they must uniformly apply the law. And they cannot punish you for a thought-crime, meaning they cannot arrest you under the supposition that your travel is arranged with intent to get an abortion outside their jurisdiction.
> Texas can do whatever the US Supreme Court allows them to do, and if you think well-established Constitutional precedent is a firm guide on that...how do you think they have the ability to ban abortion in Texas in the first place?
The Constitution is exactly what gives Texas the power to regulate abortion. It does so by not explicitly enumerating that power the the federal government.
> States are not allowed to restrict interstate travel,
States can restrict interstate travel for...well, lots of reasons, and preventing what state law defines as murder is certainly one of them, but there are limits on the burdens they can impose on travel.
> And they cannot punish you for a thought-crime, meaning they cannot arrest you under the supposition that your travel is arranged with intent to get an abortion outside their jurisdiction.
States absolutely can punish for the combination of intent and action.
They can also punish under their laws a crime whose culmination happens outside of their borders when some part of it occurred within their borders.
If a state can define a fetus as a person who can be murdered, they can absolutely make it illegal for someone to transport that person to any place (inside or outside the state) for the purpose of killing them.
> The second, expressly addressed by the first sentence of Article IV, provides a citizen of one state who is temporarily visiting another state the “Privileges and Immunities” of a citizen of the latter state.
Furthermore, of the abortion is performed in the destination state, the citizen would be covered by the privileges and immunities of that state, and the former would have no recourse.
> States would have to prove intention, which would be very difficult.
Its not all that difficult, there are plenty of specific intent crimes and states prove intention all the time.
> States cannot restrict interstate travel as mentioned in the Articles of Confederation.
Your link supports the existence of the right to travel, but that’s not in dispute; the right to travel is not an absolute; like other fundamental rights, the test applied in the strict scrutiny test, such that state actions impinging on it must be narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest.
I was under the impression that the Texas-style 10k lawsuit law was mostly meant as a way to circumvent the protections protected by Roe v. Wade, and that Texas might enact something more direct now.
Texas actually has a criminal trigger ban that has already automatically gone into effect because of Roe falling, but that doesn't repeal the private enforcement law.
Correction, it has a trigger ban that has not yet gone into effect for administrative reasons but will next month barring some intervention, but also has a pre-Roe (1920ish, IIRC) criminal law that went back into effect when Roe was struck down.
I find it disgusting that any place that purports to be an "abortion clinic" has nothing to do with medicine, and is actually a thinly veiled evangelical NGO that pressures young women to have children.
What are these resources and support you talk of? Do they provide housing for a homeless mother? How able food to make sure the mother and child is healthy? Health care during or after birth?
No? Sounds like these places are just predatory abuse centers, masquerading as "help"
I don't think that's where the front of any sort of meaningful battle lies, both are often a term of convenience or familiarity and not necessarily from an underlying agenda around abortion rights.
Further, attempt to stick to those words when consoling someone who lost their wanted pregnancy would come across as needlessly callous. . "I'm so sorry you lost that fetus, that's really tough experience for many formerly-pregnant people"
Context matters. It is a non-trivial issue when used in the context of terminating early pregnancy. Manipulating a teenager by telling her that she is a mother and she shouldn’t kill her baby is far more insidious than treating abortion as a women’s health issue, which it is.
The choice of words has a tremendous effect both on an individual and on the society. Ignoring this fact only leads to more misunderstandings.
Bluntly, "we" warned "them". We said, "hey, maybe you don't want to encourage mass surveillance of your life in exchange for 'free' stuff; it could go poorly." It's now going poorly and I don't know that it's even possible to undo the damage now...
Are you asking, "aren't left-wing groups saving the information of right-wingers to the later deploy state power against them after changing relevant laws", or "doesn't every ideological group occasionally dox it's opponents"? I think those are different questions.
Doxing wasn't my question; I was just presuming aloud that everyone made use of the tools that Big Tech was selling. I don't see just one side being aware of the possibilities of buying data (nor do I think there are only two sides... it's a spectrum with many fronts).
Makes sense, thank you for clarifying. For what it's worth, I don't think there's really room for a comparable strategy on the left; most of the work being done in social policy on the left is oriented _against_ proscriptive laws, so it wouldn't make sense to similarly collect the information of people doing things now that might be in violation of laws passed later. That is to say, part of the definition of left-wing social policy is that it tends to increase the space of things society allows, rather than reduce it, and so gathering lists of undesirables is not really going to help. I'm sure the Marxist-Leninists would love to try, though.
The cheapest somewhat predictive model for the other humans is that they're just you.
This is why young children fail the Smarties test. They now know the tube has a pencil in it, therefore under this simplified model other children know the tube has a pencil in it and that's the assumption they report when asked.
But under this model if I believe something then that's what you believe too, and if you deny it then you are definitely lying. Loads of Americans resolutely believe that all humans know the Christian God is real, and it follows (under the too simple model) that whatever it is they believe about that God is necessarily apparent to everybody in the world, therefore anybody who says otherwise must be lying.
Yes. Enforcing hate speech laws doesn't involve mass surveillance of an entire class of people, because by definition most hate speech laws only apply to public speech. Enforcing anti-abortion laws, on the other hand, does, or at least these anti-abortion groups think it should and are taking that into their own hands.
> Aren't left-wing groups changing relevant laws, then saving the information of right-wingers, then deploying state power against them?
This does not describe an analogous behavior to that discussed in the OP.
- If you live in a state with the ability to report abortions, gather a Republican list and report random names. This creates a lot of noise in the system.
- Do what these clinics are doing. Take pictures of people who work at them, create a page on the location listing all employees, and put it in a searchable database. I'm normally against doxxing or public shaming, but this is actually dangerous and deceptive.
- I am pretty sure what they're doing is also a HIPPA violation.
Earlier times did not have lightning fast communications and global online tracking tools. The conservative crusade against abortion is also a recent phenomenon, historically speaking. Benjamin Franklin gave instructions on at-home abortions in a book in the 1700s [1]. And the ancient Romans used a plant called silphium for birth control, to a point where the plant went extinct. [2]
Alternatively, you could say we are progressing to understand that outdated concepts like viability have no scientific basis and human rights should be extended to all humans, even those in early developmental phases. The idea that some humans can be killed because they are “less” is a very primitive and prejudicial idea.
We already deprive entire categories of humans of human rights: minors. And that's just fine. Minors can't vote or exercise many rights that adults can.
I see no problem with depriving fetuses of all human rights.
A pregnancy may not be viable. That's just a fact. A fetus can die inside the womb. Miscarriages happen.
"We had a woman with an ectopic walk in at 11:30 pm last night. We had to basically sit on her until the doc could speak with a lawyer. Her ectopic ruptured. She then did not get her procedure done for another 9 hours bc the doc was working with the lawyer for so long trying to work around the laws and not lose his license. By the time she had her procedure she had over 600cc of blood in her abdomen. She almost died."
I cannot imagine myself letting a woman die through no fault of her own because of an abstract principle.
This is why we have the bodily autonomy argument as a strong proponent of abortion rights. Fundamentally the argument's validity does not depend on the humanity of the fetus.
I think arguments that depend on proving that the fetus is less human are fundamentally doomed to fail.
I think much confusion comes from miscommunication and unclear meaning of words.
Embryo -> until the ninth week after conception, inner organs are not yet present.
Fetus -> from the ninth week (heart, hands, feet, brain and other inner organs are present) until birth.
While a nine week old fetus is very small and the size of your big toe, it does grow very fast after that point. Anyway, even a nine month old unborn is still called a fetus.
Does anyone actually address how religion is a big factor at play here? It's skipped over every time but this is very much a religious war happening here. The Catholics in the Supreme Court are overturning human rights because it goes against the recent dogmas their faith prescribed them to believe.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory. Even atheists and pro-abortion people have been complaining that the ruling in Roe vs Wade was a huge stretch. At the end of the day, its not a constitutional issue. So either amend the constitution or leave the decision up to the states.
The thing that the "progressive left" doesn't want to admit is that Roe can be bad law AND that the right to be secure in/have control over your body needs to exist.
> The thing that the "progressive left" doesn't want to admit is that Roe can be bad law AND that the right to be secure in/have control over your body needs to exist.
Yeah. The rhetoric on this is so overheated that I'm convinced that some people actually believe Roe v. Wade is the Third Amendment [1] or something like that. IHMO, this debate would be a lot better if people could distinguish between policy and the law/legal reasoning as separate things.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved abortion, but thought Roe v Wade was a trash decision that actually risked being thrown out for how sloppy it was. She was right.
No she didn't and no it wasn't. RvW ruled that in order to be free, people have an implicit right to privacy when making personal medical decisions. Obviously moral busybodies don't like that so they're calling it "overreach".
>> Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved abortion, but thought Roe v Wade was a trash decision that actually risked being thrown out for how sloppy it was. She was right.
> No she didn't and no it wasn't. RvW ruled that in order to be free, people have an implicit right to privacy when making personal medical decisions.
Eh, not so much. It's probably an overstatement that she thought it was a "trash decision," but she definitely believed it was a tactical mistake and that its legal reasoning left it vulnerable, which is another way of saying it was weak.
> As if any of that mattered in the end. The Supreme Court ruled how it did because it's dominated by religious conservatives that don't like abortion.
Or its dominated by legal conservatives who have different ideas about constitutional interpretation than the Warren Court, put there by politicians whose constituents oppose abortion.
To me at least Roe v. Wade seems to have, in effect, been a constitutional amendment via means that bypassed the normal political process for such things. Unless you're a very "ends justify the means" kind of person, that raises concerns that would introduce a vulnerability into anything accomplished that way.
>Or its dominated by legal conservatives who have different ideas about constitutional interpretation than the Warren Court, put there by politicians whose constituents oppose abortion.
Exactly, those judges were determined to stop abortions, it didn't matter how strong or weak the legal arguments of RvW were, or whether or not the legislature codified it in law or not. They would have jumped through any number of legal hoops to stop people from getting abortions.
Morality plays in some way. Basically, Roe tried to rewrite and ignore some history, according to the court, in order to establish an implicit privacy principle in the constitution. Where the morality comes in is that the court clearly fears things like hooking and drug use (which they mention explicitly in the ruling) and they tie this to Roe and Casey's arguments about privacy and autonomy while also demonstrating that Casey tried to eschew many of Roes arguments. They kept referring to this as "ordered liberty" which I took for morality.
Therein lies the rub though, as Alito said. Without a right to privacy - or explicitly stated "liberty" the court then has to review what the people want. Half the country is on a spectrum within a spectrum about morality, and the other half is on a different spectrum within a spectrum. He also called out a third group, which wants abortion under certain circumstances. Thus, the court then reverts to history, which abortion has been historically highly illegal.
So, some technical, some historical, some moral.
Would an actual privacy amendment really provide a pathway for abortion is my broader question.
> They kept referring to this as "ordered liberty" which I took for morality.
I don't think that's what that meant. I think the meaning was more along the lines of "liberty, but not everything-goes liberty." It's defined in the dictionary as "freedom limited by the need for order in society" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/legal/ordered%20liberty), and appears to be legal/political science jargon with some history behind it.
> I understood that, but wouldn't the limits also involve moral interpretations?
Perhaps, but you seemed to be saying you took is as synonymous with morality, which doesn't seem like a correct reading. Morality doesn't seem to be very key to the concept, if it's even there at all.
> Ordered liberty is the desirable condition in which both public order and personal liberty are maintained. But how can liberty and authority, freedom and power, be combined and balanced so that one does not predominate over the other? This was the basic problem of constitutional government that concerned the founders of the United States, and it has continued to challenge Americans as democracy has evolved and expanded throughout the history of their country. Early on, James Madison noted the challenges of ordered liberty in a 1788 letter to Thomas Jefferson: ‘‘It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the Government has too much or too little power; and that the line which divides these extremes should be so inaccurately defined by experience.’’
> Thus, the court then reverts to history, which abortion has been historically highly illegal
Which history? Under English common law, abortion was allowed until 20 weeks, and that persisted in the US until the mid-to-end 19th century. Then a century of bans, then Roe v Wade, and now blanket bans. There is far more "abortion is allowed until X" history than anything else.
I believe they're referencing the first ~150 some years of US history. Again, I'm just pulling from the ruling. They accused Roe of rewriting history, and Casey eschewing it as a result.
Also, this is not a "blanket ban", that would be a misinterpretation of the ruling. Instead, states now choose (aka "the people"). Not that I support it, but words matter.
Their point was Alito rewrote history in this ruling. And they didn't say the bans before Roe or after Dobbs were from the Supreme Court. States passed blanket bans.
For what it's worth, a major source of annoyance for traditionalist Catholics is that there are many people who identify themselves as Catholic but don't subscribe to the more controversial moral teachings of the Church. It's probably about 50/50, just like the rest of American society.
It is also a major annoyance for progressive Catholics, that traditionalists pick and choose which Church teachings they agree with. Immigration being a big example. Also working towards the "common good" is something conservative Catholics balk at. And they dismiss the Pope's encyclical on respect for the environment, and some even don't think the Pope is a good pope. Let's face it, both sides pick and choose. The Catechism is hard to live by fully.
Justice Roberts is "Catholic" but has voted against his religion every time on this issue, and would have spared Roe in his opinion if possible.
Justice Sotomayor is also "Catholic" but has also voted against her religion every time on this issue.
Justice Barrett is "Catholic" but is a member of "People of Praise," a group which many Catholics find suspicious on both sides, both for not being progressive but also being very charismatic and untraditional in its liturgical style.
Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh are all Catholic, but aren't really voting the way a full-on Catholic-everywhere would. Alito and Kavanaugh have said they aren't interested in revisiting the constitutionality of birth control and same sex marriage at this point, and Kavanaugh voted 6-3 with the rest of SCOTUS that gender orientation was protected by the Civil Rights Act which upset many more devout Catholics.
Religion isn't enough to be the primary driver here and it's becoming less important with time.
We've raised a 2-3 generation on popular dogma in which human life is the most sacred thing imaginable and now we have a society full of people do not generally posses the requisite mental faculties to have adult discussion about subjects that involve harm to people (or apparently fetuses). We're reaping what we sowed.
You see this same "arrive at an obviously sub-optimal solution because we can't nut up and cause a little quantifiable harm to get to the better solution" problem across many subjects. Abortion is just one of the most obvious.
True that religion isn't the primary driver anymore. There is a huge indisputable overlap but to say it is religious dogma doesn't adequately identify the "problem". I believe current polarization is much more relevant that this has become a topic again.
Every culture does inflate the value of human life and a society is well served by doing exactly that. Technically this is ideology or religion too, but so is everything you put on a pedestal instead. But that isn't at all a detriment for the argument for abortion even from a purely utilitarian point of view that acknowledges reality that abortions will happen if they are legal or illegal. I do think some societal and cultural problems do increase the number of abortions significantly and there are significantly less arguments against those that want to reduce abortions.
> can't nut up and cause a little quantifiable harm to get to the better solution
This is impotent reasoning. What is sub-optimal? From which perspective and for whom? Acknowledging reality does also mean that there aren't that many people that wish they were aborted. It is a gray decision but "nutting up" is no solution.
I get your point, but at the same time realize that "a little quantifiable harm to get to the better solution" is a _really_ steep, slippery slope. (I could make the argument that precise rationalization led to the Holocaust and World War 2.)
Isn’t it interesting how it’s not even a popular Catholic point of view? [1]
It seems that the path of money is from laity to church to dark money group(?) to political campaigns for judges or buying support for judge’s confirmations. However it happens, people should know their tithes are being used against them.
National Catholic Reporter was actually denounced and ordered by bishops almost 50 years ago to stop using "Catholic" in its name for its heterodox views and viewpoint. They refused because Catholic is not a trademark and the bishops could not enforce it, but one should not view them as a source of faithful Catholic news of any kind. It is not uncommon for priests to refer to them as the National Schismatic Reporter.
These places are very careful to stay on the legal side. There’ll be little “not medical advice” disclaimers in all the right spots, and there’s not much privacy protection folks can expect in the US for this sort of thing outside California.
These scummy tactics work, or people wouldn't do them.