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I'll be the begrudging devils advocate for a decision that is sure to have devastating consequences for poor women in red states.
It is good for unelected bodies like the Supreme Court to allow such dividing issues be figured out democratically. The US house has bled power to the other 3 institutions and of them, the judiciary is the least democratic. Ofc, my support for this change assumes that this Supreme Court will show restraint towards political activism (in either direction) in general. Call it naive, but I'll wait and see.
States rights has always been a double edged sword. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The same state rights that allow gun control and homosexuality to be locally legalized before national concensus; also now lead to abortion legislation being a state issue.
The sad part of democracy is that it aims to represent the views of the voting majority. If the voting majority truly cares about access to abortion then we will hopefully see enough democratic traction to give them the mandate needed. Now, the rural republican votes counting for more in the senate is a huge issue and threat to democracy that the US needs to figure out if it ever wants to represent the views of the people. But, the Supreme Court should not be responsible for managing dysfunction in other branches of govt.
My personal opinion is that polarization has pushed both sides to be completely antagonistic towards each other. 'Own the libs, fuck the deplorables', no compromise. The jaded side of me says: vote in more moderates that are willing to strike compromises. Crazed jesus Republicans and hyperprogressive activists are terrible people to put into national office. They gain power by antagonizing and being unhelpful roadblocks for change, all while asking for the most stubbornly impossible outcomes.
In the long run, history will have a dim view of this era of global polarization with all political sides to blame.
Where you see delegating to the states, I see a minority (less than 30% of Americans agree with this) enforcing social views on the majority- and it will not stop here. Other things the Supreme Court has blocked state law using the same logic as roe v Wade (due process of the 14th amendment[0]) on are blocking contraception bans (grisewald), overturning anti-sodomy laws (lawrence), and giving equal protection to gay marriage (obergafel). Several states still have laws on the books banning those things and there could easily be a situation in 4 years where gay couples, legally married in California, are arrested for sodomy after the border to Texas when traveling. There are already laws on the books seeking to do this for abortion providers or people seeking abortions.
This is a small minority that just needs 51% of voter turnout in a particular state (or not even that in a heavily gerrymandered one), and they can control the lives of anyone living in or even traveling through an entire region of the US with apparently very little federal protection (and certainly no representation for the travelers)
This ruling is disastrous and shows the capriciousness of the current court in interpreting precedent to mean whatever is popular with their party. The 14th can amendment be limited but the second cannot, the first can mean infinite money in politics but the 5th does not mean Miranda warnings are required anymore.
Edit -[0] this link is not hypothetical, Thomas’s solo concurring opinion calls these cases out by name to be reconsidered by the court in light of this recent decision, and shows members of the court are absolutely interested in returning these to the realm of the states.
I think it would be wise to look beyond today's issues.
Earlier this month in Egbert v Boule, the Supreme Court said you have no right to sue a federal employee or the agency for which they they work over violations of your 4th amendment rights, as long as the agency has a complaint procedure (operated by that same agency). Yesterday in Vega v. Tekoh they decided that you don't have a cause of action against a police officer who doesn't read you your rights (although such testimony remains inadmissible).
In the months and years to co come, ultra-conservatives aim to eliminate birth control and install an overbearing theocratic government. They are not shy about saying so, nor are they a marginal fringe lacking influence. There was already one serious (albeit poorly executed) effort to interfere with the constitutional transfer of power. Conventional politics are very much over in the US.
This statement can be measured against historical data. Democracies have regressed in the past. Prominent examples are in Russia and India, but also in Poland (as courts were made political) and Hungary.
I do wonder if those trends actually deliver more turnout or less. I suspect less actually, as non-results are actually pretty demotivating in altering behavior.
I’m not a historian but hopefully someone here is, and is able to make an educated guess of what the actual trends are.
I think it’s hard to compare those countries to the US, culturally they are way way different than the US.
Russia didn’t really regress, did it? It experimented with 8 years of democracy after a thousand years of authoritarianism and went back to its comfort zone. Poland and Hungary as part of that soviet bloc once is affected by those old soviet ghosts still driving some of the culture. The US doesn’t have that long authoritarian past and is still pretty rebellious
India…well it’s an enigma anyway with such ancient traditions and culture, it’s going to be an outlier anyway.
Poland regressed in similar direction as US as the already very limited right to abortion there was severely restricted by government and Polish equivalent of Supreme Court that overtly subscribes to
Christian "morality".
India regressed because of a lack of another option. Because the other party is ruled by a single family for multiple decades and is unable to find a leader outside of that family.
Liberal democracy appears to be a metastable equilibrium that requires active management to resist authoritarian perturbations. The Roman Republic didn't have universal suffrage, but lasted almost 500 years, before gradually and then suddenly descending into authoritarian rule.
I’m not so sure about that. Modern societies seem to be trending towards more democracy rather then the opposite. There are a few notable exceptions (including the USA). But I would argue they are notable because they are rare. Today’s authoritarian regimes seem far more unstable then today’s democracies. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are falling to a coup, popular uprisings or legislative democratic reforms, all the time (notable examples include South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa and Argentina). Even today’s most prominent authoritarian regimes in mainland China and Cuba are enacting more and more democratic reforms (albeit very limited in the former case).
But then again, I’m not a historian. So this is just some guys on the internet’s interpretation.
I would argue racism has always been the element causing instability. Racism is why we don’t have universal healthcare, it’s why the inequality we do have is so punishing. Republicans are the party of white grievance since at least the 1960s, and even mentioning this fact is enough to send so-called moderates rushing to vote Republican because how dare I point this out.
I think that a lot of what we call racism is dressed up classism. If race A is poorer on average, people of race A will get treated as if they are poor--more likely to steal, more likely to break laws as they have less to lose. If race A is wealthier or the same, on average, the classism won't be intermingled in the same way with race.
Sadly, in the US, we have a terrible system where schools are locally funded, and poor people get poor schools. Under this system, socioeconomic class self-perpetuates.
Well, to me part of your point seemed to be that a lot of what we call racism has roots in classism, rather than in beliefs about inherent differences between races.
My point is that the resulting behaviors and discrimination can still be racist, even if they don't have their ultimate roots in racism itself.
From your link:
> also : behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief : racial discrimination or prejudice
> : the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another
Edit: Anyway, I do recognize that the distinction you're pointing out does have implications for the best way to address the problems.
That's possible, and it's difficult to disentangle class and race in the US, due to historical racism economically repressing many minorities. However, follow on studies to the famous resume name-swapping study found that the original study used stereotypical lower-class black names as its pool of stereotypical black names. When stereotypical lower-class white names and stereotypical upper-class black names were added to the randomized pool, a larger component of discrimination fell along class lines vs. race lines, for both white and black prospective interviewers.
I hope our discrimination problems fall more along class lines, because that's much easier to solve by implementing economic policies to reduce economic inequalities. Government programs won't change people's races (well, non-terrifying government programs, at least), but policies can change people's economic class.
It's also entirely possible that different areas of the country have different mixes of classism and racism. My wife is of a different race, and our son is mixed race, and my wife and I both went to top-tier schools, so my social group is almost certainly less racist and more classist than the US median. It's very difficult and dangerous to extrapolate my lived truth to the whole nation.
Class is cultural before it's monetary. You can give Billy-bob a million dollars- a rich hick, a hick remains.
Every class tranche uses fashion to differentiate themselves from the tranche just below, while imitating the tranches above. The upper class used to wear fancy clothes to differentiate themselves from the middle class; the middle class started wearing the clothes of the upper class to try and join them; boom, ghetto chic becomes popular among ivy-leaguers.
(They don't have to worry about being mistaken for actual lower-class people; the cultural differences are big enough that that isn't a concern).
This helps maintain in-group selection with all the wonderful effects it has.
idk. The USA didn’t actually become a full democracy (by modern standards) until the 1960s, after the civil rights act of 1964 when voting rights were (mostly) guaranteed. We are currently witnessing these rights being rolled back. One can just as easily say that the USA is ending a 60 year experiment with equal rights and regressing to the tried and trusted 200 years of slanted democracy.
But that’s not what I’m interested in though. False analogs and convenient distinctions are easy to come by. What I’m looking for is a historical trend of voting behavior during a democratic regression.
So, are you suggesting that only when something directly affects them or maybe a family member, do they start to care? Otherwise, little to no empathy or compassion for those "others".
This is one reason why laws need to apply to everyone equally, since only by doing so will everyone have a equal interest that it exist and get enforced. It is also one reason why government and religion need to be separated, since otherwise there will be a imbalance between those who belong to that religion and those that don't.
That is unfortunately always the case. And almost always it’s too late when they come for you (i.e you’re directly affected by something) and you finally feel like doing something about it.
What is voting going to use in gerrymandered or "stronghold" areas, which most of the US effectively is?
US democracy, at least from an European POV, is completely and fundamentally broken, to the point that it will need a civil war to reset it to at least somewhat sane levels:
- The GOP as a party is so far gone off the rails, so many actual Conservatives have left that there is barely any intra-party resistance left to the Tea Party, Trump and QAnon ideologues.
- A large enough part of the GOP voter base is similarly radicalized after decades of brainwashing. Seriously, the kind of stuff that Fox "News" airs daily is scary. They will keep preventing reasonable politicians to challenge people like MTG.
- The Democrat Party, which is center-right in its actual political doings from an European POV, has other issues: gerontocratic people like Feinstein or Biden who have long ago lost touch with the 99%, corruption, incompetence, and most importantly the lack of backbone. There have been many chances to codify access to abortions, everyone knew how thin the ice was, and the Democrats let many chances pass to permanently close that risk - only because they were scared of losing one of their major selling points.
- Wealth disparity. The US is just plain shocking - you have people like Musk and Bezos worth hundreds of billions of dollars, money they can't ever truly spend even if they have a dozen children... and at the same time people die because they have to stretch out their expensive insulin or can't afford an epi-pen. Or they freeze to death because even while employed they cannot afford a home.
- Climate change, assuming that the US will be able / willing to do anything past November, will need an awful lot of investments to handle. The Republicans won't grant any money (either because of "financial stability" or because "electric cars are for woke softies"), and the young people see the clock ticking. Some of them will radicalize, up to and including terrorism - why else were there snipers on the Supreme Court?
Add on top of that the aftermath of covid - which still isn't over! - and the costs of the Ukraine war... and there's a perfect storm scenario of enormously destructive potential.
From a European POV, I would say that US democracy is about as functional as European union democracy. Remember how EU declared natural gas as "green"?
It is difficult combining low population areas with high population areas when they got completely different culture, wealth, and natural resources. Mistrust, suspicions, polarization, alienation and otherism abound.
The trend is however not impossible to break, and there is scientific understanding of those forces if people were willing to take them in. A key finding is to not shove culture symbols into peoples face, a proposition that scarce few want to agree in the name of cooperation. When people feel that their culture is threatened the natural repose seems to be the opposite and display as much of cultural symbols as possible.
> I would say that US democracy is about as functional as European union democracy. Remember how EU declared natural gas as "green"?
Oh I do. And I know the reason behind that headline - the fact is we absolutely need gas infrastructure to allow diversifying from Russia in the short term while preventing dozens of millions of people from freezing in winter or to allow gas peaker plants to assist solar and wind so we can shut down coal and the decades-old nuclear clunkers.
HN in general tends to be on the pacifist, anti-militarist, technology-solves-everything side. Which is a pretty decent thing in general, don't get me wrong, but dogmatic followers of such attitudes got us Trump, the invasion of Ukraine and now this shit.
Si vis pacem para bellum, and there will be war. I honestly am unable to think of a scenario that will prevent a collapse of at least the US democracy, if not the rest of the world with it (because let's face it, the US picked up the tab to ensure the freedom of democracies while us Europeans stood aside). The only thing capable of stopping the spiral towards death is if the Democrats win a solid majority in November... but that is completely unrealistic.
I used to be a pro-American when I was a child blinded by US propaganda and television. Americans are heroes are what I always thought.!
Then the Iraq, Afghanistan wars, the coups in Libya and the Syrian War - encouraged via Obama's so-called 'moderate rapist rebels' completely changed my mind. What CNN said was completely different from what my Libyan and Syrian colleagues said. So Much Lying. It was around that time I did extensive reading of American history and realised I was a moron.
They're clearly talking about since WWII. When the US has definitely picked up the tab to ensure freedom for Europeans, Taiwanese, Japanese, Koreans, and former English colonies throughout the world.
Sure, the US was somewhat imperialist a century ago, but that's long gone.
I think we're in agreement about post WWII. The US was invited into Europe and paid a lot of money to hold off the Russians. It protected the Taiwanese, Koreans and Japanese. That's pretty much what I said.
I’d agree with you only if it was law that hospitals must turn you away if you are unvaccinated but deathly ill with COVID. That would be a horrible thing, however the difference here is that not being vaccinated does affect other people in a pandemic. Getting an abortion does not overload hospitals in the same way.
I mean, specifically there has been no national law mandating Covid vaccine use. There were some restrictions applied differently to vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
You are joking but laws dictating appropriate clothes is an infringement of bodily autonomy, and the definition of appropriate clothes was a hot topic concerning religious attires just a few years ago.
A human right for bodily autonomy would include the right to decide what and what not to wear on their own bodies.
No one is an island. You can't have total bodily autonomy if you want to live around other humans. It's an unreasonable and selfish stance. If you want to self-isolate in the woods, fine. We should have a way for people to do that.
There are a number of technical reasons why the mRNA vaccines should be safer than existing vaccines. In any case, there were non mRNA alternatives. I believe that most life-scientists are just curious and trying to do good work. I don't really trust corporate big (whatever), but pharma in this case. I do trust the individual scientists I know to be caring and empathetic people and to do their best to save lives.
Doesn't sound arbitrary to me. If something isn't contagious then there's no "automatic" effect on those around a person. If it is contagious, then the mere presence of the person can have a harmful effect.
It only seems arbitrary to me if I look at it from a narcissistic perspective.
We were talking about vaccines. It's somewhat disingenuous to start talking about abortion.
That said, the fundamental disagreement w.r.t abortion is whether or when a fetus is a person with the same legal protections as a born child, and to what extent to weigh this question, or these potential rights against the rights of the mother.
Abortion necessarily involves the killing of an organism. Anyone arguing otherwise is not basing their argument in reality. However, many commonly accepted and legal actions almost inevitably involve the killing of organisms: walking, driving, excavation, building. Our legal systems typically even allows for the killing of complex, almost-surely sentient creatures for food, and other purposes. This extends as far as the killing of humans under certain very limited circumstances. The essential disagreement on abortion is whether and when the killing that is an inescapable part of abortion is permissible, justified, lawful, and generally not murder.
No, it doesn't sound arbitrary. It sounds predicated on the possibility for contagion, an objectively measurable event. This is why various tests/vaccinations mandatory for immigrants, eg to prevent the spread of TB. Also, fetuses aren't people in legal terms.
According to the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, an embryo or fetus in utero is recognized as a legal victim. The law defines "child in utero" as "a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."
The bill has however an explicit exception for abortions, saying that regardless if a fetuses are a person, it doesn't mean abortions should be illegal.
Bullshit. You not getting vaccinated puts people around you at risk. A women getting an abortion at worst impacts her and in most cases impact her positively.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style and using HN for political/ideological battle? We're trying for a different kind of conversation here. Specifically, intellectually curious conversation.
I wish this comment wasnt so heavily downvoted.
Its a common perspective that US dems are a left party and I think HN is a great platform to tackle that illusion.
I live in europe and US dems are pretty much in line with our right leaning parties.
Except for a handful of extremes.
The US republicans are very unique to US in that their opinions are very close knitted to US specific laws.
So I cant really think of a similar party anywhere else.
But yea. A swedish left and US dems are very very far from achother politically.
Democrats are a right party with authoritarian tendencies.
Not left at all.
I explicitly wrote from an European POV. Stuff like not having mandatory and functional health insurance... even our far right doesn't want to question that.
It's just different. The American "left" has mostly abandoned economic issues, but it's gone much further on identity than the European left has. Like, I'd vote for a Euro-style leftist because they'd maybe give Americans healthcare, but they'd probably get called racist if they opened their mouth on Twitter. It's just a different world.
Maybe your views have been distorted by right wing news calling Biden “far left” which is an objective falsehood.
I’ve seen over half the nations on earth and I stand behind the OP assessment of the US Dem party as center right.
Do investigate a bit before knee jerk responding from a position of falsehood
This is probably the wrong time and place to ask, but I've been wondering: what is the definition of left vs right outside the US?
As far as I understand it, the fundamental and (seemingly) globally agreed upon divide is that Far Left = The State is in [presumably benevolent] control, and Far Right = The State is in [presumably malicious] control, while regular Left = The State knows what's best for The People (because it is derived from pure democracy) while regular Right = The People know what's best for themselves (and choose representatives for situations where multiple individuals are involved).
The problem is US has no health care for all. Minimum wage, especially as compared to average or the standard of poverty is very low in the US, the immigration stance of even the "far left" would definitely count as anti-immigration in Europe (yes, I know, despite the numbers favoring the US, and the US being ethnically far more diverse than Europe), US has the death sentence, and now the abortion stance ...
All of those are things that even the far right in Europe wouldn't dare suggest, yet the leftmost party in the US stands behind them, or is at least willing to accept them.
It's difficult to graph the ideologies, which are rooted in each countries culture and history, on to another's.
Voter ID is a non controversial issue in many countries. In the US I've seen arguments against it from both sides. Disparate impact concerns from the left, privacy and freedom from the feds on the right.
The problem with voter ID (and a whole lot of other issues like easyness of ID theft via SSNs) is that the US - as one of very few developed nations - has no requirement for a citizen to have a valid government issued ID card because of right-wing crazies.
The Left does not criticize voter ID per se, the Left criticizes that many people are effectively locked out from voting because obtaining ID cards can be an utter pain in the ass.
I think this view of right/left as an axis of government optimizing for freedom/control is only very prevalent in particularly right-wing commonwealth discourse.
The law and construction of social systems in the common-law English tradition stem from a position that one can do anything unless barred by law, including in situations where it hurts others. The law of equity, largely derived from religious canon law, existed as a separate system layered upon the common law court system of 'hard rules' to fix situations wherein the application of common-law would lead to morally suspect outcomes. The situation in civilian countries, by contrast, generally define a sphere of acceptable behavior which explicitly excludes abusive and intentionally harmful behavior - the restrictions on behavior are baked in. Civilian-derived systems are far more common than those from the commonwealth, and accordingly the types of discussions had in each are very different on this point.
The result is it's very rare to conceive of left and right in terms of freedom, because most other nations derive from systems in which freedom is already viewed as one element to be balanced against other considerations rather than the unmitigated chief virtue upon which all analysis is founded.
Even in the commonwealth, progressive discourse is not driven in terms of de-jure freedoms, it's driven by de-facto freedoms, largely economic and social freedoms. The government only needs to be restrained when it restricts social rights or maintain economic systems that strip dignity from individuals. Generally, however, these aren't discussed in terms of the degree of freedoms afforded, but rather in terms of rights and equality before the law.
As I said, you are deluded about 'knowing' half of the countries in the world.
I lived in America for over a decade before I could say that I begun to understand it. I have seen people like you who visit my home country and claim to understand it. All they do is project their faulty models onto our values and culture.
The result of my experience, which you question, is: not a single other nation would characterize the US Democratic party as “left wing”
I literally spent most of my rhetorical time abroad trying to convince folks that there was any difference at all between our two main parties.
You can scoff at me, but you will encounter this conclusion over and over again.
The world sees our two parties as beholden to corporate interests, as are centrist parties all over the globe. Money apparently makes the world go around
> The result of my experience, which you question, is: not a single other nation would characterize the US Democratic party as “left wing”
You sound like you didn't even go outside Europe.
There are two scales, nationalism-globalism, and capitalism-intervention.
Most countries have very little difference between their capitalism-intervention side, because there's only one country where someone who supports free markets and capitalism could move to, this results in the right wing of all the countries becoming purely nationalist supporting govt intervention facing globalist left wing supporting their kind of govt intervention.
For example my dad in my home country has very little opinion on capitalism/intervention scale. But on the nationalism/globalism scale he has a strong opinion. If I were to describe the economic policies of the Democratic party, he wouldn't truly form an opinion, but the moment I will start describing the social policies he would immediately understand it and call it 'the leftist party'.
Aah come on. Nobody said the Democrats are "adjacent" to stoning women. Sheesh.
From the perspective of a country that is to the left of the Democrats, yes, they appear centre-right.
I'm not sure you've can offer a truly global perspective from which to accurately determine whether the US Gov is left or right leaning, but if I had to predict such an answer I'd say it would tip right.
Check the bubble chart. The Dems are in fact globally left-leaning, according to the Manifesto Project described in the article. But check the relative positions from e.g. a British perspective (since that happens to be shown in the chart). The Dems are to the right of the UK's left-wing Labour Party, while the Republicans are right of the right-wing Conservatives. The overall British perspective of the US would be of a right-leaning country.
I've not looked at other perspectives since I'm in mobile and I've not going to deep-dive the Manifesto Project just now. But I wonder which are the nations which have an "overall" perspective of the US as left-leaning?
I'd say that the spectrum of a typical EU country covers the vast majority of the actual spectrum. You have actual communists on one end and stop just short of actual fascists/nazis/theocrats on the other.
Meanwhile, the US reaches as far right as the EU does, but in the other direction, it barely reaches the middle of the EU (i.e. total) spectrum.
So it's not that Democrats are adjacent to the far right. It's just that they're more right wing than left wing. They're obviously still much closer to the centre-left than they are to the far-right, but they are also further from the left extreme than they are from the right extreme
Wouldn’t the political spectrum be an utter lack of government on one end and tyranny on the other? That being the case, communism, fascism, Naziism, etc. would all be closely related on the totalitarianism side of the spectrum, rather than opposing ends of the spectrum.
The ancient attempt of a 1d embedding of political ideologies is doomed to fail, however anyone tries. It started out in revolutionary France in 1789 to distinguish between the supporters of the king (conservatives, on the right) and supporters of the revolution (revolutionaries, on the left). It was good enough for that, but it's not for very much else.
The most sensible minimal extension (to 2d) that I know of is to distinguish between how much you value personal freedom on one axis and economic freedom on the other. That still leaves out a lot, but is the best indicator of which side you'll likely to end up on regarding most political contentions, given the simplicity of the model.
There are actually two popular models of that kind, the Nolan Chart (example quiz [1], your spectrum is the vertical axis) and the Political Compass (example quiz [2], your spectrum is the secondary diagonal).
Such a spectrum would not be particularly useful for describing the behavior of politicians or voters. Consider that someone who usually votes for a democratic socialist party might sometimes swing further left and vote for a communist party, or further right and vote for a liberal party. But they're unlikely to vote for a fascist party. This fact is captured by a left-right spectrum, but not by the spectrum you're proposing, which would suggest equal likelihood of such a voter supporting a communist or fascist party.
Well, every model will have some weaknesses and I suppose it depends on what you want to know which one would be better. I know if I had to choose on the basis of one spectrum with whom I'd like to live in the same country, I'd strongly prefer gp's over the conventional one.
Also, btw, the fascist movement recruited much of it's ideological and political concepts and initial core activist base from syndicalist/corporatist socialist circles and was strongly anti-capitalist/pro-socialist and anti-conservative. Benito Mussolini was for a time chief editor of the Italian Socialist Party's newspaper "Avanti!" and member of the party's National Directorate.
>You WANT the representatives deciding the boundaries because they are ultimately beholded to the people
How are they beholden to people if they can disenfranchise people via gerrymandering? The primary check against arbitrary action of an elected official is to vote them out, but gerrymandering allows them to significantly lower the responsiveness of voting to their benefit.
You can't argue that you should support gerrymandering on the basis of democratic representation given that gerrymandering DIRECTLY MITIGATES the effectiveness of democratic representation.
> How are they beholden to people if they can disenfranchise people via gerrymandering?
Redistricting also ENFRANCHISES people by putting heavily democratic counties together into voting blocks and conservatives into their voting blocks. YOU DONT WANT 50/50 splits, you want 90/10 splits. That’s maximizing enfranchisement.
But this democratic lever is an impediment to power to the left. So the result is endless propaganda when the right is using it to contain the influence of the cities from suburban and rural areas.
The msm and leftist governments use redistricting (gerrymandering) to their advantage ALL THE TIME. When the left does it is called sex (redistricting). When the right does it is called rape (gerrymandering).
The leftist media is perfectly happy to celebrate any gain by the left to disenfranchise any conservative county by moving its boundaries into a city voting block.
The writers of the constitution new this. That’s why they built the resistricting laws right into the constitution.
If Gerrymandering was used to district people into exclusively 90/10 distribution segments, it wouldn't favor either party. But that's not what happens.
You're claiming gerrymandering is used to create the situation in option 1. I haven't seen any indication that this is the case from any reputable source. Most mathematical analysis of gerrymandering shows that option 3 is what's occurring, which does NOT enfranchise people.
Almost every piece mathematically quantifying gerrymandering efforts in the states has indicated that it substantially favors the GOP. Here's one example centered on the 2016 election:
Some of the discussion is regarding how much of the bias is intentional (due to intentionally gerrymandered districts) vs. unintentional (due to the geographic clustering of democratic voters in urban areas), but I haven't ever seen an analysis that attributes an overall advantage to democrats as a result of districting at the state or national level.
It's unfortunate that you exclusively focus on the source rather than the argument when the information contained in the links I provided can be found in peer reviewed papers, other news publications, etc., all of which can be easily searched for online. The math isn't particularly complicated, nor is it controversial.
The NC2012 and NC2016 plots in comparison with the neutral districting is almost cartoonish in how much packing was performed.
As an aside, I don't understand why you're claiming that the AP, of all news sources, is a propaganda outlet (let alone one favoring democrats?). Do you have some reason to believe that their take regarding district policy is suspect? Or do you just have an nebulous distrust of news media in general?
You're more than welcome to post a reputable source that provides an analysis claiming that gerrymandering enfranchises people so that we'd have some subject matter disagreement to dig into.
Birth control is a wholly different issue than abortion and not nearly as galvanizing. There is of course some hard core Catholic groups opposed, but beyond that it’s generally a scratch issue among other evangelicals. Most folks moderate to conservative just don’t give a shit about it. They just aren’t big on tax dollars paying for it. So you won’t see state laws being created specifically to challenge its legality and big money funding the activism in the same way as abortion.
Same for same sex marriage, there is just not enough moderate political people against it. Repealing it won’t have the legs.
Pro life support spanned the political spectrum, I think you can even fairly argue that despite her rhetoric to the contrary, Speaker Pelosi’s deliberate inaction may have been due to her faith and passive action against something she wanted to publicly appear to be “for” for wholly political reasons.
> Only a quarter of evangelicals in the United States believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, according to a new poll showing that a majority of self-identified Christians in the U.S. identify as “pro-choice” and less than half of evangelicals identify as “pro-life.”
We are here because one party decided that abortion should be legal in any and all cases—well past fetal viability, with zero limits and restrictions and knew they would never have been able to achieve that legislatively.
The same political party then proceeded to rely on a court case about a physician’s privacy to practice medicine as a substitute for women’s body rights instead of creating legislation that could have at least guaranteed access to abortion in the first trimester, which would have received enough bi-partisan support to make Roe v. Wade a non-issue and relied on the 10th amendment and states to expand abortion access beyond the minimum guarantee.
But instead, they did nothing but talk, and here we are…
Huge asterisk on this. Can you point to any moment when doing what you suggest would have been politicially viable? Especially considering the fervor with which GOP are racing to pass bans that don’t include exceptions for rape and incest.
Say what you will about Roe but auto until Thursday it did strike a balance that worked for a vast majority of the country (60%). There were limits, there were restrictions. Why do you presume there were none?
Yeah, you hear consternation about the availability of late term abortions, but if you explain those happen in fewer than 1% of cases and often are medically necessary this concern often is ameliorated.
But now that’s all been blown up. Now there will be two Americas: safe haven America where women are free, and Gilead where women are forced to give birth to their rapists babies.
> Huge asterisk on this. Can you point to any moment when doing what you suggest would have been politicially viable? Especially considering the fervor with which GOP are racing to pass bans that don’t include exceptions for rape and incest
At multiple points in the last 50 years we have been in a place where our executive branch and congress has been controlled by the Democratic Party, and after presidential elections that were pretty solidly decided. At those points federal legislation could have been introduced that if crafted in a bi-partisan way—limited to first trimester, avoiding tax payer funding, limits on fetal tissue use, etc… the Democrats could have passed legislation with some basic bi-partisan support that could have provided access to abortion at a minimal level federally that would account for about 90% of the performed abortions out there. However, because the democrats either chose to die on that remaining 10% hill, or intentionally didn’t fight at all they lost the whole battle. People seem to believe that they were fighting all this time, in reality, they enabled yesterday to happen. I would argue, intentionally, because the only other explanation is that for 50 years the Democratic Party has been incompetent.
Roe never really struck a balance of anything, it was always weak and was always going to fall. It managed to simply pause the illegality question for a time, during which our congress could have and should have acted to affirm the rights.
Even RBG felt it was the wrong case for abortion rights because it didn’t focus on women’s rights, but rather physician privacy. If the most arguably liberal justice in the last 50 years is warning you that Roe is bad and going to fall, you might want to believe them.
> Now there will be two Americas: safe haven America where women are free, and Gilead where women are forced to give birth to their rapists babies.
Actually there will be 50 Americas—-which is really no different today than it was yesterday.
The 111th had the best chance in my opinion. I also think 105th ironically could have as well, despite it being GOP controlled with the right Clinton deal making. The current congress could have as well if they had focused right at the beginning of the term and not went off on witch-hunting and posthumously impeaching former presidents.
Current congress can’t pass anything without 10 Republicans on board, and given how the GOP is coalescing around total abortion bans. Which Republicans do you imagine beyond collins and Murkowski joining to break the filibuster?
Hard to fault Democrats in the 105th for what Republicans wouldn’t do.
That leaves one congress in 50 years’ time with even a shot. Could they have done it, maybe, but we saw how even when Democrats bent over backwards to accommodate Republican ideas into the ACA (inviting and incorporating over 100 amendments, basing it off of a heritage foundation plan implemented by Republican Mitt Romney in MA), they still got 0 Republican support.
Do you think a partisan abortion law would have solved anything? Do you think that wouldn’t have been appealed immediately after the 115th Congress? They failed to repeal the ACA by 1 vote. I can’t imagine how they could have failed repealing an abortion law.
And btw, impeaching Trump in 2021 for orchestrating an insurrection and coup was absolutely necessary. Unfortunately Republicans refused to convict, because as we now know, many of them were complicit in the coup and sought pardons for their roles (read: crimes). Had they convicted him, he would have been barred from holding future office and a huge problem would have been solved for the country. It was worth a shot. Unfortunately, now a man who sought to overthrow the US government is running for President again, and might win.
I think kcplate has a point here, though. The Democrats have had Congressional majorities before and squandered them one way and another, often because they were playing t-ball with the GOP.
even when Democrats bent over backwards to accommodate Republican ideas into the ACA
That's what I mean, the Democrats keep trying to appeal to the middle by saying 'look how bipartisan we are' and getting kicked int he gut. As a party, they want to appeal to the moral authority of a teacher or moderate voters' consciences, and so they continually aspire to good stewardship. The reality is that while that does appeal to some, American people in general don't respect weakness and reflexively distance themselves from losers. Culturally speaking, winning is more important than being right to many Americans, and even people who believe it ought to be otherwise have to balance their idealism with the logic of survival.
The GOP has been shifting toward a win-at-all-costs mentality since 1994 when Gingrich took Congress (after a long, long period of Democratic dominance) with the 'contract with America.' Despite many of these 'contractual' provisions not being serious (eg the commitment to balanced budgets has only ever been a talking/negotiating point for the GOP, when holding power they max out on debt), they provided a unifying agenda for conservatives whose object is power for its own sake, and such conservatives now dominate the GOP.
Democrats worry that whenever they drift too far 'left' the GOP will attack them mercilessly, and so they tend to huddle in the middle, where the GOP attack them mercilessly anyway. Centrist Democrats literally lose seats and console themselves that if they had put up more of a fight their margin of defeat would have been even more painful.
You're blaming the Dems for relying on a precedent staying a precedent, as if that's a dumbshit rookie move, as if what the Rs did (a series of nominees lying about their beliefs in order to overturn a popular ruling) is a normal thing to do that they should've expected. I don't think that's accurate. I think this is pretty unusual, and the main reason the Ds didn't work harder to pass a bill legalizing abortion is that it was already legal.
In any event, you seem to have missed the point of my post, which was that we can't assume that things like contraception, gay marriage, and interracial marriage are safe from being overturned just because a plurality support them. You said banning contraception is a "scratch issue" with evangelicals, and I'm pointing out, so is banning abortion, and yet, here we are.
> You're blaming the Dems for relying on a precedent staying a precedent, as if that's a dumbshit rookie move
Yes, I am definitely blaming them. Judge Ginsburg warned them, told them it was not going to survive certain challenges. The dems did nothing. If the smartest legal mind on your side (and she was not the only one BTW) is warning you that something you hold claim to hold sacred is in danger and you choose to do nothing to protect it, that is a dumb shit move. However, I’d argue that it may have been intentional—that to the democratic leadership abortion rights were not sacred, but only valuable to them for the political division it caused.
>You said banning contraception is a "scratch issue" with evangelicals
Contraception is simply different. There isn’t the “innocent third party without a voice” factor there that will motivate the activism and financial investment in that activism the same way. Same sex marriage is kind of the same, there is no third party component to it to protect.
I'm sure it's satisfying but I don't think it adds a lot to the conversation. Maybe the Ds don't play hard enough (blocking nominees, lying under oath, etc) but you shouldn't have to cheat to protect a popular long-standing precedent.
> Contraception [and same sex marriage] is simply different.
The belief that there's an "innocent third party" involved in abortion is a religious belief; I don't see why the court would enforce that but not other religious beliefs, like women submitting to their husbands and so forth. Your stance that D's were dupes for believing R's about Roe v Wade would appear to suggest that we shouldn't believe you about this either.
The theocrats on the court are young, they probably have 30+ years ahead of them, and the only sensible prediction is to assume that anything disliked by Fundamentalist Christians is in danger. That means not just contraception and gay marriage, but Obamacare, social security, trans rights, owning sex toys, gay adoption, domestic violence laws, spousal protective orders, womens' rights generally, Miranda and anything else predicated on Due Process, any gun restriction, and I'm not feeling super confident about the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, or interracial marriage.
Surely your "what a bunch of dumbshits, why didn't they see this coming" applies to those too?
> The belief that there's an "innocent third party" involved in abortion is a religious belief
That is mostly false. If a pregnant mother get harmed to the degree that it harms the unborn or kills it, the legal system (and "popular opinion" in my view) see it as being more than just harming the mother. In feticide, there is an third party involved. The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 is very explicit about that and it also gives an explicit exception for abortions.
If we view child in utero as similar to a cancer growth off the womans body then feticide does not exist. There would be physical assault, but not homicide, because no Homo sapiens would be killed. That view point conflict with how a lot of people feel in those situations.
I think you missed the phrase "in abortion" in the sentence you quoted. You may feel that those positions are contradictory or hypocritical, but it's disingenuous to act as if pro-choice people agree.
Edit: also, if you're going to wade in to an ongoing discussion, it's nice to respond to the thing we're generally arguing about; don't just pluck one sentence fragment out and start a new discussion over it. When someone says, "I think X, therefore Y", they're arguing that X is true enough in this context to support a belief in Y, not that X is always true in all contexts, which is a much larger (and therefore, easier to argue against) claim.
The reason I address that point is that its the central point of contention why abortion is different from contraception and same sex marriage. The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 illustrate that in some situation people, even non-religious people, want to to view unborn as more than just cells growing on the woman. It not just a religious belief but rather an emotional one.
My guess is that for popular belief, if a unborn dies because of violence to the woman then people emotionally see it as murder of an other human being. If the woman choose to abort then for social reason many/most people do not view it as a human being that died. This is however a conflict of views which has nothing to do with religion.
With contraception, even if it was done through force, no one outside of religious belief would see it as killing a human. How would even The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 be applied? Should each sperm count as a half human?
Similar with same-sex there isn't any direct situations where non-religious people suddenly would be in favor of outlawing it.
As for the exception written in the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004, what is say is that the legality of abortion is not effected by the definition of the that law. Nothing more, nothing less. We can have laws allowing abortion for social reasons regardless if we view the bunch of cells as being more than just a bunch of cells.
Also, I think you're engaging in a little historical revisionism about that law. My memory of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act was that everyone, on both sides, understood it to be primarily a way to further the cause of banning abortion by maneuvering pro-choice politicians into a corner. It worked, but it seems disingenuous to speak as if it had bipartisan support; extra penalties for crimes against pregnant women had bipartisan support, referring to the baby as a victim of the crime did not.
I agree that people who believe a fetus is a person ought to be more opposed to abortion than gay marriage or contraception; but it is also true that people who believe a fetus is a person ought to favor easier access to contraception (which provably reduces abortions), and they generally don't, so here we are.
A bit of insider info from the UK on this one :) UK Catholics believe that life begins moment of conception and therefore generally oppose abortion (apart from extreme cases e:g mother might die, baby might die anyway, baby will suffer badly). Opposition to abortion generally goes with desire for better support of troubled mothers, but whether in practice this practically results in improved services seems doubtful. Apparently the stats say 90% of UK married Catholics actually use contraception. And parents quietly say to their teenagers "If you can't be good, be safe" ;). Gay marriage is something some clergy go about but the "silent majority" of Catholics is liberal on gay and trans issues I think, believing that committed love for each other counts more than what gender a couple are. So what you say ought to happen, seems to me does happen in the UK in my experience. However, what happens in the USA is a different matter. :)
> The belief that there's an "innocent third party" involved in abortion is a vreligious belief; I don't see why the court would enforce that but not other religious beliefs
I think you missed my point on this, i was speaking in terms of things that drive they activist attitudes, not any specific legal distinction.
as belorn said in their comment to you, in certain legal cases we consider the unborn child as a person. You don’t have this sort of strange legal dichotomy with a innocent third party with contraception or gay marriage
I understand where you're coming from, but the position that religious fundamentalist activists aren't particularly interested in keeping gays from marrying would seem to be contradicted by their behavior over the last two decades.
edit to add: and most of the bible verses they quote to support that view also condemn divorce and sex outside of wedlock, so forgive us for not knowing what is and isn't in danger. You make a persuasive argument that we should be more concerned than we think we should.
> keeping gays from marrying would seem to be contradicted by their behavior over the last two decades.
Sure, but taking a position to prevent something from becoming legally recognized requires far less effort and commitment than taking something presently legal and making it illegal. Abortion was an outlier because there was a tangible victim to rally around in the pro-life activist’s eyes.
There simply isn’t a tangible victim they can point to for gay marriage and contraception. Those issues center around behavior they might regard as sinful, but in their eyes the sinner is the only one to suffer.
People may not approve…but will they care enough to work against them? I don’t think so. I know a lot of folks who are loudly pro-life, but I can only think of perhaps one that might actively work against gay marriage, and none that would have a strong opinion at all regarding contraception
Er, did you read the news between like 2005 and 2015? Opposition to gay marriage was fairly prominent. It certainly seems to have died down since then, but I would've said the same thing about the pro-life movement until this week. I don't think the view from within our bubbles is a good way to measure these things. For example, did you realize that "pro-life" was a minority view among evangelicals, before I posted that poll? I sure didn't.
As for the "victim," the most effective way we know of to reduce the number of abortions is giving young people easy access to contraception, and AFAICT very few pro-lifers are in favor of that. I think it's a mistake to think this is only or even primarily about the fetus.
> Er, did you read the news between like 2005 and 2015? Opposition to gay marriage was fairly prominent.
I didn’t dispute that. I said specifically that it’s easier to work against something that is currently not legal becoming legal.
> It certainly seems to have died down since then
Because…it’s now legal.
> is giving young people easy access to contraception, and AFAICT very few pro-lifers are in favor of that
They may not be in favor of it, but it’s legal for young people to use contraceptives, and has been for a long time and there is no where near the passion against it as there was for abortion. However, when you say “easy access” do you mean “free and government supplied”? That is wholly a different argument that has a more “taxpayer support of discretionary human behavior” driver against it.
> there is no where near the passion against [legal access to contraception]
I don't think you've internalized the thing that started this conversation. This is not a victory for the pro-life movement! The pro-life movement has never been less popular, even among evangelicals. In the battle to convince Americans of their cause, they have lost by any measure.
Roe was overturned not by "passion" but by a handful of ethically flexible judges. If they can do that with one unpopular thing, they can do it with a second and a third.
> However, when you say “easy access” do you mean “free and government supplied”?
Yes, but not as an ideological matter, just because that's the most straightforward way to implement policies. In general, "I support policy X" means "I want tax money to be spent on X". That's how governments do things, by spending money.
If you don't want to be involved I'm sure we can fund it privately, it's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. But it's not clear why would you be against spending tax money to prevent abortions, but okay with spending money to jail the women who've had them. If this were actually about preventing abortions and not punishing sin, it wouldn't matter.
in their eyes the sinner is the only one to suffer
You are applying utilitarian considerations of outcomes to religious dogmatists. Such consider sexual immorality (as defined by them) to be a corrupting influence on everyone peripherally connected to it, and an affront to God.
Hence the current moral panic of denouncing all LGBT people as 'groomers' and insinuating or openly accusing people who disagree as pedophiles, which is considered sufficient reason to kill in some peoples' eyes. Now while this moral panic is by no means universal among religious Christians, if you're not aware of it then you just aren't paying attention.
> Hence the current moral panic of denouncing all LGBT people as 'groomers' and insinuating or openly accusing people who disagree as pedophiles
I find it kind of strange that you are conflating marriage equality and concerns over sexualizing young children together. I don’t see people using this sexualization of children as an argument against gay marriage, I see it pretty hyper-focused on the sexualization of young children.
I am wondering why you are tying them together if the folks doing it don’t seem to be.
Sorry you feel that way, but I just find it a little disappointing that this thread went down this road and someone made this linkage. I don’t see it as a related issue.
I’m certainly aware that “grooming” is now a political weapon, but what I am not aware of is any concerted effort to try and use that to attack marriage equality. Your snopes article does not appear to be making that case either.
Conflating homosexuality with pedophilia has been a thing since before there was a gay rights movement. Has it occurred to you that maybe your outgroup hears more of your ingroup's worst arguments than you do?
Having grown up in a country where all contraception was illegal, I assure it's not that different. The arguments abortion are simply transferred onto contraception as 'interference with the divine will' and (implicitly) the price to be paid for sexual indulgence.
Among religious persons and societies, doctrinal considerations outweigh all others. If you are under the impression that the abortion issue is different because large numbers of non-religious folk are sufficiently motivated by the ethical issue to engage in activism and donate funding, I think you're quite mistaken.
Perhaps in a country with a homogeneous religious culture it’s easy to dictate dogmatism, and while the US might be religious compared to perhaps Europe, it is not homogeneous. I’d argue that you could take two different congregations affiliated with the same denomination and probably find topics or scripture that would create fierce debate between the two.
Birth control might be a big deal to some devout Catholics and some primitive/fundamentalist Baptists, but virtually every other denomination and congregation is literally not going to care.
I don't know if it would. There are a huge number of people whose political views are basically incoherent [1], and on top of that "moderates" are an actually mostly nonexistent byproduct of the many people who don't fit neatly into the current political order [2].
And surprise surprise, this was founded by an ex-GOP consultant. There’s no need to consume fascist propaganda as part of a balanced media diet. Most of the outlets on the far right don’t qualify as news, and CNN isn’t hard left no matter how much it makes Republicans shriek.
This is like a food chart and on the left we see fruits and veggies and on the right we see various animals droppings.
I don’t use it lightly. I used to defend conservatives from such slurs as unfair. After Trump, Jan 6 and their support of the coup , and this Supreme Court’s outrageous antidemocratic decisions, no longer. It is now a full on fascist movement.
This reminds me of all the educationally highly credentialed people I knew confidently predicting in 2016 that Trump would jail all democrats, declare martial law, and ‘women would be raped in the streets’.
I would recommend looking up American history, in the 70s, 50s, 20s, 1800s etc. Today is a milder form of the political polarization that is endemic to America, and ironically America’s strength.
If there was a betting market on a theocracy, I would bet the house in the opposite direction, but frankly so would everyone.
Relax and enjoy the weekend, America is going to remain America for a long, long time.
In the 1850s, I believe there was a serious political party with some concern that Pius IX would use Irish immigrants to dig a tunnel from Rome to Washington and send the Swiss Guards in to take over America.
Thank you. Same situation occuring with the exagerated outrage over the 2020 election shenanigans and resulting riot at the capitol.
Not a great look for the US by any means, but the whole chapter is a joke compared to past election turmoil, especially during reconstruction era post Civil War. In those years, you often had large armed militias battling it out with occupying federal troops over which election results.
>In the months and years to co come, ultra-conservatives aim to eliminate birth control and install an overbearing theocratic government. They are not shy about saying so[...]
Since you were kind enough to provide references to your other statements of fact, would you mind doing the same for this one? Because I've been seeing that exact sentiment repeated ad nauseum for a long while now and yet every attempt I've made to figure out where it came from, so far, has been from the claimant imputing intent upon a nebulous Other, with all such claims assuming the most malicious version of a strawman possible... and we all know that's against the rules, here. The sole argument I've seen sourced, in this specific case, hinges upon a very uneducated misinterpretation of a (relatively unimportant) concurrent opinion by Justice Thomas in which the hyperbolic clearly don't understand the concepts of "substantive due process" and are mixing it up with something else entirely.
You could start with a roundup from this non-sensationalist nonprofit for an overview of legislative action. An example of a candidate publicly expressing opposition to any form of birth control would be Jacky Eubanks, a Republican candidate for Governor in Michigan. And I include one example of politically motivated religiosity for a longer historical perspective.
Libertarians (reactionaries) took over the GOP, kicking out the conservatives. Koch, who is an atheist, et al allied with evangelicals to accomplish this.
Time will tell who will be left standing, the theocrats or the reactionaries.
There are many exposés, books, articles, etc. Here are two of the more recent:
These concepts I am familiar with, but both of these sources suffer from the same problem: third parties presuming and ascribing intent. Sure they might be correct eventually, and as you say, only time will tell. But I ain't overly interested in the opinions of third party, hyperbolic sooth sayers with axes to grind. If someone is going to claim a fact one way or the other, let's be factual all around. Assumption and doubt-casting may sell books, but they don't really persuade me.
You need it spelled out for you? So if I tell you “I love you and would never hurt you” while beating the shit out of you, you’re going to think “hm, I can’t assume his intent, I bet he does love me!”
Democracy in Chains' primary source are a cache of documents from economist James Buchanan's think tank, architects of the reactionary movement's strategy. By their own words and actions, they intend to end democracy and protect the rich. Disagree with the author's analysis, fine. But the thesis is not circumstantial, inferred, or speculated.
Whereas Dark Money is a standard whodunnit. Investigative journalism, following the money, ferret out the criminal conspiracy. If you have a different interpretation of the evidence, please share.
In Thomas' opinion he literally says that the supreme court should reconsider a number of cases including the one that prevents birth control bans. That makes me assume it'll come *before* the internment camps for brown people. (I can use tongue-in-cheek rhetoric too)
As an accomplished lawyer and long-time political commentator here, it's disappointing that you resorted to mockery by invoking hyperbolic comparisons.
In his concurrence with today's Dobbs ruling, Justice Thomas wrote: '[...] in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.'
(For non legal nerds, those cases are concerned with birth control, sexual privacy, and gay marriage respectively.)
You're surely also aware of legislative and electoral pitches to substantially restrict birth control. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic by simply mentioning the existence of ultra-conservatives and observing that they have some political influence. When one of the nine Supreme Court justices indicates a willingness to revisit multiple landmark cases only a foolish person would ignore the possibility.
It’s worth noting that Clarence Thomas may not actually disagree with any of the rights found in those cases. Thomas has been a long time critic of the use of the due process clause for the finding of substantive rights, and he adhered to the view that these rights should be found under the privileges and immunities clause that has fallen into disuse. He says as much in his opinion, but nobody quotes that part because it’s not a headline grabber. It’s in the same paragraph as the sentence you quote. Thomas has held this view for literally decades.
I'm less preoccupied with what Clarence thomas believes in his heart of hearts than what litigation strategies will be used to exploit his arguments, especially given the emergent trend of states passing 'trigger' legislation pendant on future court decisions. Thomas has indeed held his views for a long time, but then candidates for judicial office (including several who sit on the SCOTUS bench now) have been assuring us that Roe v. Wade was settled law for decades as well.
Mind, I also thing the Democrats are at fault for not erecting a legislative framework to put privacy and other rights on a more solid footing when they've had the legislative initiative.
I’m not a lawyer, so correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t challenges to those cases have to come from outside the court for the court to reconsider them?
If that is the case there needs to be some motivated and deep pockets out there to craft up a law that is designed to challenge those norms, then it needs to get passed in some legislative body and signed into law within a state. The law will need to read in such a way that would motivate an aggressive attack from a party with deep pockets and get it all the way up to the SCOTUS where it might get picked up or might not.
I honestly think that those issues simply do not have the same levels of passion behind them that abortion did. The general populace just doesn’t care enough to make them worth the effort. Abortion beyond the first trimester of pregnancy had significant opposition across the political spectrum and that opposition grew week over week beyond that first trimester. Birth control, gay marriage, sexual privacy…they simply do not evoke the same levels of passion beyond a few fringe ultra religious right-wing groups.
What you regard as broad spectrum passion is (in my view) the product of sustained organization, not spontaneous grassroots opposition. Crafted legislation that gets passed and is then (perhaps by design) the subject of a test case is not such an unusual thing.
Consider for example the recent wave of prophylactic legislation forbidding the teaching of 'critical race theory' in k-12 schools, although CRT as such is a kind of structural analysis that has gained adherents among legal sociologists, mostly at the post-grad level. The anti-CRT laws are mostly an attempt to shape school curriculums that mention race by legislative fiat, and provide a cause of action to fire teachers who indoctrinate students with (or perhaps merely expose them to) opinions that are out of step with the popular consensus.
Certainly, this is no overnight process. But a few years ago, people who said Roe was likely to be overturned were dismissed as alarmist. Fringe positions become mainstream by degrees, and those who don't pay attention to them often underestimate the intensity and speed of such changes.
Consider Mark Burns, an ultra-conservative pastor and regular candidate in South Carolina who recently came in second in the Congressional House primary, with 11,000 votes (about 25% of the total). He holds some rather extreme views, and while he lost this time he might continue to improve his electoral standings in future.
> As an accomplished lawyer and long-time political commentator here, it's disappointing that you resorted to mockery by invoking hyperbolic comparisons
It’s not a hyperbolic comparison. I’m simply observing that other highly educated people (like the folks who thought I was about to be dragged to an internment camp) have built up conservatives as such a boogeyman, they don’t have a solid grasp on what’s within the realm of political reality and what isn’t. I detected the same hyperbole in your post.
The abrogation of Roe makes the Constitutional law of the US the same as Italy and still more liberal than Germany. Even if some states ban abortion, that just makes them like Ireland until a few years ago, or Poland now. The EU has some very religious places with extremely restricted abortion rights, and others with more liberal rights, and most in a mushy middle. Why isn’t that situation workable in the US?
Some of the other privacy cases might be on the chopping block too. You don’t have to be an “ultra conservative” to think substantive due process is a bunch of malarkey. That was my first reaction when I learned about it in law school a decade ago.
But say Griswold goes away. So what? Most European countries don’t have a similar right to contraception, yet contraception is legal there. 90% of Republicans support legalized contraception. Obergefell and Bostock are on firmer footing. But even then half of Republicans support same-sex marriage. Almost 80% support employment rights for LGBT people. The politics isn’t the same for those other issues.
Abortion is different because Roe was both legally infirm, and drew the Constitutional line in the wrong place. I’m not aware of any country that recognizes a right to abort an 20 week fetus without a medical reason, even if some countries like Canada allow it. Roe drew the line 10 weeks past where most civilized nations draw the line, and that made it a political target in the way contraception isn’t. Almost 30% of Republicans disagree with their party that abortion should be generally illegal at all stages. But even among most of those people it’s difficult to muster up a defense of Roe.
highly educated people [...] have built up conservatives as such a boogeyman, they don’t have a solid grasp on what’s within the realm of political reality and what isn’t. I detected the same hyperbole in your post.
I don't know whether your analytic powers are less good than you imagine them to be, or you're being strategic; but given that you now write as if such an outcome had been obvious and inevitable all along, I'm not inclined to rely on your estimates.
Even if your interpretation is correct, that's just one justice writing a separate and solo concurring opinion.
And that justice comes from a different generation than the other 5 who voted to overturn, so there's even less reason to assume the others share his views.
I am sorry you had to deal with hysterical people, but I’m just taking Thomas at his word when he says a court overturning Grisewald, Lawrence and Obergafel and would be prudent. It’s not the same thing at all.
Also, as an aside, we have internment camp like settings for brown asylum seekers and have mistakenly deported American citizens to them on multiple occasions, but this is an ongoing issue that Trump did not fix, rather than one caused by Trump.
Given your history on the issue[1][2][3], I don't think its reasonable to trust your judgement on how the court will vote.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that either you were disingenuous years ago, or you yourself have moved to the right over time as well, as not only do you badly mispredict the court (and even mispredict how extreme Thomas would be [5]!), assuming it would have a stronger respect for precedent than it did, but also you yourself seem to have changed from a supporter of roe[4] to, well, whatever you are now which seems to be someone who is willing to quote contradictory statistics in order to claim that Roe's 24 week line has less support than it does (per [6] and [7], both sources you've quoted to claim that most Americans want more restrictions than Roe show that >60% overall and 30% of conservatives support the line Roe defines).
If the conservative majority on the court is willing to overturn a ruling supported by 60-65% of the population, what's to say they won't revert a much weaker precedent with only 70% popular support? You seem to be highly content to be a boiled frog.
I said Robert’s wouldn’t overturn, and I was correct. I said Kavanaugh was a maybe. I got Gorsuch wrong. The Mississippi law was written to give the Justices an out at 15 weeks, but I didn’t anticipate how hard the Solicitor General would push to defend the full scope of Roe. In my opinion that was a tactical error.
In the 9 year old post you cite, I said Roe was wrongly decided, but I didn’t think it was necessary to overturn it. Nothing I said today is inconsistent with that.
As to your point about Thomas, you cite a comment correcting a misreading of Thomas’s concurrence in the Kim Davis case. I said nothing about how “extreme” he is or wasn’t. Also, that has no bearing on Roe. Anyone could have told you Thomas would vote to overturn Roe.
You say I’m wrong about support for second trimester abortions, but neither of your sources actually asks about second trimester abortions.
Most recently you said there were three votes (acb, Thomas, alito), and before that you said kav was "probably" not going to overturn. I don't think it's wrong to hold you to that. Either you were downplaying compared to what you really thought, or you're creating a justification now. I'm really just asking that you take a minute to reflect on that.
From the npr link:
> Allows abortions, but only up to the time there is viability outside the womb, at about 24 weeks
Has support from 30% of republicans and 40% of democrats. The remaining Democrats generally want less restrictions. That's consistent with 60%+ support for second trimester abortions.
Your Forbes link also mentions 47% support (and only ~40 percent against) elective abortion until viability, which may be well into the third trimester!
And I have a difficult time believing that "all or most of the time" doesn't include the second trimester.
I'm not relying on polling of roe. I'm relying on your polls! I agree that there's inconsistency here, but it's not cut and dry like you claim.
> As to your point about Thomas, you cite a comment correcting a misreading of Thomas’s concurrence in the Kim Davis case. I said nothing about how “extreme” he is or wasn’t. Also, that has no bearing on Roe. Anyone could have told you Thomas would vote to overturn Roe
My mistake, I thought that thread was about the draft opinion. But I'm not talking about roe, but revisiting Obgerfell, which between Thomas, alito, barret, and one of the others probably does get cert! And I can see Roberts ruling against it now since dobbs splits the precedent (I'm not saying thats likely, I'm just saying it's believable).
> In my opinion that was a tactical error.
For whom? Like it's obviously harmful, but it's correct jurisprudence and supports the federalist strategy of dismantling as much federal civil rights law as possible. Like I have a very hard time finding the consistent values you work from, since apparently this was an error despite you agreeing with the ruling in a technical sense and in a meta-political sense (in that whatever your opinion on abortion, you believe abortion law being defederalized is good for the social fabric). And it's obviously what Republicans, if not conservatives, want. Who is it a tactical error for, and why?
No. The answer is mostly that I've seen Rayiner discuss Roe before in years prior, and had a weak inkling recollection that his statements had changed. An HN search for "rayiner roe overturn" I think it was got to things pretty quickly.
For what it's worth (mostly in response to other comments), I don't think he's being disingenuous here, I think there's just a deep disagreement about values. In another thread, he says:
> As a foreigner, what I admire most about Americans is their ability to dispassionately accept the results of legal procedures. I truly think that’s what is responsible for the success of America and England before it. We have people who have high minded principles and notions of justice in Bangladesh. That’s not special. What we lack is a populace that will accept even monumental decisions contrary to what they wanted and move on. And that’s what I fear is being eroded.
Charitably, I think, this is "Americans are willing to accept the rule of law", which is perhaps true. Uncharitably, it's something like "Americans are privileged and/or apathetic enough that even as the law wildly vacillates, they don't care to act when their rights are impugned."
I also don't think it's true, given the long history of protest and sometimes violence in response to legal proceedings (Shay's Rebellion, the Civil War, anti-Abortion violence and murders in the '90s and today, etc.). But even taking it as true, I think there's a requirement that to respect the (appellate) judiciary we need to respect that the system is at least somewhat apolitical. I don't mean that judges aren't conservative or liberal, they obviously will be, but the actions of the Federalist Society, which preaches and advocates for a very particular judicial philosophy is, to many, a violation of the social contract that allows us to respect the court.
I think it's easy for someone who is a lawyer, especially an appellate lawyer to have "the institution" go to their head, to an extent. And I think that's what I'm seeing here: what the court is doing must be justified not in particular because rayiner agrees with it (though he does), but because the court cannot be questioned. He takes it as a given that the institution must be respected by virtue of what it is. I don't buy that, I think the institution needs to earn its legitimacy, and when you have justices doing what is charitably described as misleading Congress and the American people, and uncharitably described as perjury, well, it's difficult to see why the office remains deserving of respect.
> Charitably, I think, this is "Americans are willing to accept the rule of law", which is perhaps true.
Yes, that’s what I mean.
> I also don't think it's true, given the long history of protest and sometimes violence in response to legal proceedings (Shay's Rebellion, the Civil War, anti-Abortion violence and murders in the '90s and today, etc.).
It’s relative. Americans are incredibly orderly compared to say Bangladeshis, where there are violent protests after every election.
> I don't mean that judges aren't conservative or liberal, they obviously will be, but the actions of the Federalist Society, which preaches and advocates for a very particular judicial philosophy is, to many, a violation of the social contract that allows us to respect the court.
How is it a violation of the social contract to advocate for reading the Constitution the same way we read any other written document?
How is that worse than say law schools, which vigorously advocate reading the Constitution as loose guidelines to guide elite lawyers in dispensing Justice according to their own world views. That’s exactly what Roe was, seven highly educated white men overturning the will of the people based not on law, but on their personal notions of justice.
> I think it's easy for someone who is a lawyer, especially an appellate lawyer to have "the institution" go to their head, to an extent.
I respect the institution because I’m a foreigner who comes from a country where respect for institutions is conditional. I have a deep veneration for societies where people reflexively trust institution even when they’re in the losing end of a decision. A court could order a British person to jump off a bridge and they’d do it!
And I’m terrified of what I’m seeing in the US. There’s always been unruly mobs, but now elites are egging them on. Your accusations of “perjury” are exactly the problem I’m highlighting. Nobody perjured themselves. They said Roe was precedent, which it is. Precedent can be overruled—and there are clear guidelines for when to do so and Roe fit the bill on a lot of the factors. To say otherwise is to rely on the ignorance of the general public in an effort to delegitimize the institution in their eyes, and that’s irresponsible.
A government that disobeys the will of the people will eventually be replaced by one that does. A functionally unamendable constitution + judicial restraint + a electoral system that grows less representative by the day is not a recipe for democracy, its a recipe for a form of minority rule, and the unrest that comes along with it.
That's not an authoritarian stance, it's a rational, observant one.
> How is it a violation of the social contract to advocate for reading the Constitution the same way we read any other written document?
This is the wrong question. The constitution doesn't matter. It's deeply flawed (whatever your opinion on the second amendment, that what exactly it means is so deeply up for debate, and has been for 100+ years, goes to show that the document is flawed as a legal instrument!), but not going to change without bloodshed.
People respect the rule of law, have faith in their institutions, because they feel represented and respected and empowered. But the reasons for that faith is eroding as we see that so many of our institutions are biased towards conservatives or conservative demographics. It is increasingly difficult to have faith in a democratic institution that doesn't provide equal representation.
Respect for an institution is conditional! It must be! We should not respect a president who does illegal things just because they are the president, we should impeach them! The same is true of a court, it is not reasonable to to respect it if it fails to act consistently and, to many, the courts rulings are inconsistent. Perhaps they make sense to you, a constitutional lawyer who has two or three degrees and decade of ~indoctrination~ education on this particular subject, but to those normal people out here, a group of 9 (or well 6) of the most elite of the elites (lifetime appointments!) sit in their ivory tower and say "you need private guns to deal with unelected tyrants" (to quote a tweet I saw earlier), while rolling back life-saving policies and threatening others.
On the left, you have to do a huge amount of work to get people to vote, not because they don't care, but because they're so disillusioned by their vote mattering, and that sentiment grows truer and truer!
So why is it a violation of the social contract? Because the social contract is a fair and representative government. It is democracy with checks and balances. The less the government does that, the less people are going to want it. And the problem is that the SC is, or was, in a pretty crappy position: the constitution is flawed and encourages this inequality, but no one's going to change it because people (and here I'll absolutely call you out as an example!) venerate it far too much. And the next amendment will be written in blood. So the court can either let constitutional interpretation live and follow the will of the people, and make them feel represented, or it can not make any attempt to represent the people and only represent the law, and there's some merit in that too, but it's going to foment unrest. So the issue you're facing is that the way you want the court to work fails to respect the people, and so they fail to respect it.
Deportations, yes. Visas and green cards, why? Liberals seem to have this idea that Republicans are just blatantly racist and want to kick everyone that's not white out of the country. Once you get past the propaganda, and actually talk to them, you find that they simply don't want people here that snuck past the border.
If you legally obtained permission to reside here, nobody except for the KKK has qualms with you.
Everybody in government knew this case was on weak footing and knew it would have likely not survived at some point. That is why it was used as a litmus test for judicial candidates. The problem is most of the public had zero idea how shaky this law really was and bought into the rhetoric that it was settled law.
The ugly truth here is that the democrats own this defeat. All talk and ZERO action. They were content to let this be a flashpoint issue and did not take advantage of federal legislative opportunities to create some legislation to fix the issue. There has probably been enough bi-partisan support and the right political mix in at least 6 congresses over the last 50 years for a federal law to be introduced that would have reaffirmed the base intent of Roe v. Wade (basically allowing access to legal abortion in the first trimester) and would have invalidated the court case entirely as the definition of the issue. Blue states could have create state law to expand beyond the first trimester if desired. It would be a non issue, but instead…we get this. Shame.
i feel that you have made a post that will serve to misinform others so i want to offer some corrections under the assumption that you are not operating in bad faith.
>It’s a decision that enshrines as a right elective second trimester abortions
>State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. [0]
>This means, on the other hand, that, for the period of pregnancy prior to this "compelling" point, the attending physician, in consultation with his patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the State, that, in his medical judgment, the patient's pregnancy should be terminated. If that decision is reached, the judgment may be effectuated by an abortion free of interference by the State. [1]
>something that’s illegal in nearly every other developed nation
>second trimester starts at week 13
france allows abortions for the first 14 weeks (into the second trimester) and allows for medical exceptions even later
same with spain
>Current Norwegian legislation and public health policy provides for abortion on request in the first 12 weeks of gestation, by application up to the 18th week, and thereafter only under special circumstances until the fetus is viable
sweden allows abortions through 18 weeks and allows for medical exceptions even later
denmark allows abortions after 12 weeks due to various conditions including poor socioeconomic status of the mother
>In Great Britain, abortion is generally allowed for socio-economic reasons during the first twenty-four weeks of the pregnancy
germany seems the most severe of the large EU countries which allows for abortions in the first trimester and only after that in cases of unlawful sexual acts.
the US state of Ohio, for example, made abortions illegal at ~6 weeks today, so I feel your comparison to "other developed nations" leads the uninformed to believe that the US states are enacting similar laws to other developed nations, which is not the case.
also the overwhelming majority (>90%) of abortions in the US are during the first trimester
I’m not sure what you think is incorrect about the first assertion. I’m simplifying and using the trimester terminology because people are familiar with it and a lot of the polling is based on that terminology. The Casey standard is viability, which is close to the end of the second trimester.
As to the country laws, you’re ignoring my qualifier about “elective” abortions. Abortions based on health exceptions aren’t elective abortions. Roe requires elective abortions up to viability. Thus, the laws in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden wouldn’t be upheld under Roe. Also, you’re misleadingly suggesting that Denmark has some sort of permissive loophole for “socioeconomic conditions.” It’s actually a pretty standard that requires unanimous approval from a local abortion committee. Many applications are rejected: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2024321/. The rate of second trimester abortions in Denmark is much lower than the US.
You’re also being imprecise about the definition of trimester. A pregnancy is actually 40 weeks long, and depending on source the first trimester is 12 or 13 weeks long: https://www.ucsfhealth.org/conditions/pregnancy/trimesters. Regardless, “first trimester” is a developmental milestone. It’s the point at which a fetus has all its internal organs and looks lot like a baby: https://3dultrasoundatlas.com/13-weeks.
All but 3 European countries draw the line at 12-14 weeks: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268439/legal-abortion-t.... They’re all aiming at this “end of first trimester” milestone. Note that the Mississippi law at issue in this case was even longer 15 weeks.
Also, your second to last paragraph misrepresents my point completely. I didn’t say that US states are passing laws similar to European countries. I said that Roe, which requires elective abortion until viability, bans the roughly first trimester line that most of the first world has drawn. The only EU abortion laws that would be acceptable under Roe would be the UK’s and the Netherlands’.
Put differently, you’re correct that there’s a big gap between Ohio or Texas at 6 weeks, and the 12-14 weeks in France or Germany. But it’s also true that there’s a big difference between those countries, and the 22-24 weeks mandated by Roe.Roe draw the line at a place that makes even the French and Norwegians uncomfortable.
The point about “90% of abortions being in the first trimester” doesn’t carry the water you think it does. That’s over 60,000 abortions annually at a stage of development that most developed countries have decided is advanced enough that the fetus should be protected.
How are small conservative states enforcing their social views on the majority?
In states where there is a majority for abortion, abortition is legalised by law, not by court, i.e. the way it should be. It is in states where there is no majority for abortion that it is not. How is it not democratic?
For things to be done at the federal level, it needs a broad consensus across the country, not a 51% majority where the 49% is dead against. The EU has similar safeguards where you need effectively 3 keys to enable a law (European parliament, European commission, and the Council), not a simple 51% majority. Nothing prevents you from legislatating at a state level, but if you want to impose your views on other states, it needs to be a broad consensus. What you seem to complain about is that voters in California cannot impose their social view on the inhabitants of Utah.
The Texas law forbids people from getting abortions in other states, where people have no representation in the Texas legislature by giving Texas citizens the right to sue them in Texas courts.
More generally problematic, your view would let any state persecute a minority of voters in that state and bind the federal government from guaranteeing equal protection to all Americans. We’ve run this experiment and found a long history of enforcing slavery, segregation, and persecution of gay people. Minority rights need special protections from the local majorities in states, and the 14th amendment is in no small part representing the will of the majority recognizing the rights of minorities are vulnerable here. Restricting a women’s ability to get a medical procedure a heavily gerrymandered state legislature finds distasteful is the latest in the long line of states rights consequences here.
Most of the examples you mention are actually protected at the federal level, through the constitution, i.e. people voted to protect those rights. No one voted on abortion at the federal level.
And abortion is not just a medical procedure, there is a third party involved: the baby. Now I find the religious view that a baby exists as soon the sperm touches the egg ridiculous. But I find equally ridiculous the dismissal of a viable baby's life implied by calling it just a "medial procedure".
The reality is that there is likely a broad consensus in the US for legalising abortion up to 12 weeks, the way it is in most of europe.
>The reality is that there is likely a broad consensus in the US for legalising abortion up to 12 weeks, the way it is in most of europe
Yeah, that's true, but there's also been a broad consensus in the US for federally legalizing (or even just decriminalizing) cannabis for well over a decade, and we haven't even managed to get that done due to the minority party overwhelmingly blocking even the most popular legislation if it goes even remotely against their moneyed interests.
Just because there's broad support doesn't mean that it will happen. At this point the Rs are going to have to be thoroughly crushed in congressional elections for a while, like what happened in the 30s through 60s, if any popular legislation is going to be passed.
"""
hold thatRoe andCasey must be overruled. The Con-stitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such rightis implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, in-cluding the one on which the defenders ofRoe andCaseynow chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
...
is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue ofabortion to the people’s elected representatives. “The per-missibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are tobe resolved like most important questions in our democ-racy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and thenvoting.
"""
https://www.scribd.com/document/579588941/19-1392-6j37
That it's rooted in the court's idea that there is no inherent constitutional protection against abortion bans, and therefore lower tiers of law (including federal US code) instituting arbitrary bans. Currently it looks like a states' rights issue because the bans are only in state code at the moment. The door is left open for federal code to fully ban abortion however, and Republican leaders have been messaging that this is their next step. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/05/mitch-mcconnell-ackn...
> That it's rooted in the court's idea that there is no inherent constitutional protection against abortion bans,
I don’t think they went so far as to definitely say there is no federal right to an abortion under any circumstances. I think they’ve left open the possibility that the due process right to life entails a right to an abortion when necessary to save the life of the mother (and possibly even when necessary to prevent severe long-term harm to her health-such as if continuing with the pregnancy was highly likely to cause her to go blind, for example). I could certainly see a future ruling (even by the current SCOTUS majority) upholding a federal right to an abortion in those very restrictive circumstances. All it might (sadly) take, is for America to have its own Savita Halappanavar
Additionally, regarding left or right federal legislation: this would very likely be struck down by the same court under the reasoning that the constitution does not grant the federal government the power to regulate abortion.
Any federal legislation would have to come in the form of an ammendment.
> Additionally, regarding left or right federal legislation: this would very likely be struck down by the same court under the reasoning that the constitution does not grant the federal government the power to regulate abortion.
I think, if Congress enacted a narrow federal right to an abortion – such as the right to an abortion to save the life of the mother – the current SCOTUS majority would be likely to uphold it - the right to life (including that of the mother) is arguably "deeply rooted in the nation's history" – and "life" is even explicitly mentioned in the text – and so such Congressional legislation would arguably be a legitimate exercise of the Section 5 power to enforce Section 1. Plausibly, they might even uphold a statutory federal right to an abortion to save the mother's health, since the right to health has an obvious connection to the right to life.
We’re going to need a new-deal level mandate unfortunately and my understanding is that will has only been built off catastrophic events as large as two world wars and the Great Depression.
And keep in mind that was before Fox News/other right wing propaganda networks highjacked a third of the nation's critical thinking abilities with scare tactics and conspiracy nonsense.
As long as D's continue to push unpopular initiatives like "racial equity" (reverse discrimination), banning gas cars, and increasing taxes to pay for social programs, they're never going to get a mandate. The reality is, whether you like it or not, even California rejected ultra left-wing "racial equity" initiatives at the ballot (Prop 16), people like their big gas cars that pollute the environment (or they can't afford a $50k EV/$30k hybrid and think D's are out of touch), and there is a widespread notion that the government is notoriously inefficient and incompetent. Agencies like the DMV and SSA don't exactly work to dispel that notion either.
Where's the common sense stuff? Where's the stuff most people would vote for?
I recently learned that being a kidney donor has lower fatality rates than birthing. With that in mind I absolutely can’t see any reason to override someone’s bodily autonomy on any reason whatsoever. The not hyperbolic analog would be to force someone to be a kidney donor in order to save a live (one who actually lived on the Earth for decades) - on which I’m fairly sure noone sane would agree.
Would you be willing to have an unwanted fetus transplanted into your body to carry it to term, and have all associated parental ties transferred to you
It was, though I initially read your comment as suggesting that since kidney transplants were lower risk, that pregnancies should always be carried; missing the significant cost of carrying it out.
On a closer reread I can’t tel what your actual point was. Though it’s not what I thought.
>On a closer reread I can’t tel what your actual point was.
The point was that since carrying a pregnancy to term has a higher risk profile than having an organ removed, a pregnancy should be voluntary in the same way we wouldn't coerce someone into giving up their kidney for someone else.
A bit of a weak argument. The biggest dangerous part of removing a kidney isn’t the act of removal, it’s the long term lack of having it.
That being said, I think it is perhaps noteworthy to say if women lose the bodily autonomy for carrying children, it is outrageous that dead people should retain the bodily autonomy to not be organ donors.
>The biggest dangerous part of removing a kidney isn’t the act of removal, it’s the long term lack of having it.
So? You wouldn't mandate mandatory kidney removals if we could mitigate the long term risk of not having one because that risk isn't the reason we don't unilaterally harvest organs from people against their will.
Regardless of where the risk is clustered (at the event or in the long tail following it), it is the harm to an individual via a non-consensually driven medical event.
If you read around, you'll see that tribalism mode has fully engaged in many here. People aren't reading/thinking, all over in this comment section. Or, as the top level comment does, criticize those that are thinking about/being critical about certain aspects.
Sure, and we need a federal law clarifying this to protect us against selective court interpretations of the 14th amendment, on that much we are in agreement. But that’s not what this decision is about, it is no coincidence that there are trigger laws across the country in anticipation of this, that even attempt to ban abortions in other states (the Texas law). States rights has long been the motte of all kinds of minority social opinions in the Bailey. The broad consensus is being held hostage by a minority
in some state legislatures, and in the senate and now Supreme Court. By any measure the functioning of the government is divorced from the will of the majority and this is a symptom of that. To celebrate it as returning powers to a democratic process is a crazy distraction to me in light of that.
Tumorectomy is not just a medical procedure, there is a third party involved: the cancer. Now I find the religious view that a cancer exists as soon the cell starts replicating uncontrollably ridiculous. But I find equally ridiculous the dismissal of the cancer's life implied by calling it just a "medical procedure".
I think it's fine. The cancer is not able to survive in it's own and has a significant negative impact on the person carrying it. To make medical removal illegal even in cases where continuing to carry the cancer threatens the life of the one carrying it displays reckless disregard for their safety.
You would have a point if cancer had a heart and a brain and was observed to develop into a sentient being after 9 months. Or if cancer was the result of a deliberate and voluntary action that the vast crushing majority of people older than 15 years understand its inevitable consequences.
Alas, none of that is true, and your remark can only win you a comfortable position in the mental gymnastics Olympics. And a 1st place in the moral bankruptcy competition, for comparing infants to a disease.
So, I should be forced to give blood if someone’s life is at risk and they need my blood (or, kidney)? There is a 3rd party to consider here and they are already living and breathing. So, blood or organ donations should be made mandatory.
And if the argument is that the woman is responsible for getting pregnant then apply the above logic to a person you accidentally injured in a car accident. Now, anyone who causes a car accident should be forced to give blood (or any other part of their body) to ensure the victim is saved.
>anyone who causes a car accident should be forced to give blood (or any other part of their body) to ensure the victim is saved.
Yes.
>So, I should be forced to give blood if someone’s life is at risk and they need my blood (or, kidney)?
If that someone being in risk was the inevitable biological result of your actions, then yes. You should be forced to save him/her. Because you put him/her there.
>So if you gave someone Covid and their lungs failed, they have a right to one of your lungs
Yes, if you can
1- Prove that I infected them
And,
2- Prove that no other solution would save the infected person, and organ donation would
>Should men be required to donate organs to women they got pregnant
Not if the impregnation was consensual. The person infected with Covid or hit by a car didn't consent to those actions, but a pregnant woman consented to impregnation unless she's raped, therefore she should accept responsibility for the associated risks. Rape is one of the very few reasons where abortion should be allowed. But it's something like 0.1% or so of abortion reasons, the vast majority of abortions are morally indefensible.
> Most of the examples you mention are actually protected at the federal level
In many cases, like abortion until today, under the Supreme Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence, and in some cases building at least in part on Roe which was just overturned.
It's erroneous to use slavery and segregation as a template for any social issue you can frame as involving a "minority." It's especially ridiculous in the context of women, who are a majority.
Slavery and segregation were a sui generis issue because Black people are not only a minority, they are a discrete and insular minority. That is not true of gender and sexual orientation. Women and gay people are born into all families at predictable percentages. That drives social change as to those groups in a way that does not apply to a racial minority group.
The U.S. has a unique history with respect to slavery and segregation, but it does not with respect to women's rights or gay rights. Nearly every other developed country has left those issues to the democratic process. The European Court of Human Rights came to the exact opposite conclusion as Obergefell a year after that case, finding that the EU Convention on Human Right's marriage article did not apply to same-sex couples. Switzerland did not allow same-sex marriage nationwide until this year, and Italy still does not. Yet the EU continues to stand.
> The European Court of Human Rights came to the exact opposite conclusion as Obergefell a year after that case, finding that the EU Convention on Human Right's marriage article did not apply to same-sex couples.
The European Court of Human Rights, and the Council of Europe under which it operates, are actually not EU institutions.
Your thesis seems to be "countries and states can oppress people and society won't totally collapse", which seems like a very weak position to take. I'd hope you don't think "not collapsing" should be our goal. We want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, right? Not life, liberty, and happiness for some, and well, at least the government remains standing, for the rest.
Like, in some sense, an oppressive government standing is worse than it failing, right?
Taking away a society’s right to decide the scope of social institutions like marriage, or questions of when life begins, and giving unelected judges power over those questions is a serious infringement on democratic self determination.
In the long run, it jeopardizes the possibility of ordered progress because people perceive it as a serious intrusion into society and culture by elites—which judges are—and will resist and eventually revolt. That’s exactly what you see happening in the US right now.
> That’s exactly what you see happening in the US right now.
No, with the January 6 riots? we see a minority no longer interested in the democratic process now that they don’t feel they are winning anymore.
How can you look at this Supreme Court, where multiple appointments were the result of heavy lobbying by large wealthy conservative faith groups to a president who lost the popular vote, and parliamentary tricks to keep the seat open, and see it representing a return to majority rule from rule by elites.
At a guess because it results in a country that is closer to the one desired.
Never mind the fact that not a single abortion will be stopped on account of this. What will change is that there won't be any safe abortions, essentially this will cause the same number of fetuses to be aborted, it will also result in the death or in complications with a fairly large percentage of the mothers. It may (will?) even result in suicides.
This is in my opinion the real tragedy, the 'pro life' (I use their moniker but I disagree with it) groups are essentially 'anti mom'.
> No, with the January 6 riots? we see a minority no longer interested in the democratic process now that they don’t feel they are winning anymore.
That minority is now in jail, and according to the laws in the US, those people have also lost their ability to vote. The people who active participated in the riot is no longer even an minority vote, but outside the voting process altogether.
Seems like the root cause of this is that boundary lines of states are drawn wrong, and now encompass a diverse group of people who fundamentally can't agree on what their "society" is or what it should look like.
Time to abolish the states, perhaps, and move to a loose confederation of city-states + regional rump-states that encompass former rural areas, bound together by a Common Economic Protocol. Let the blue areas in Austin, downtown Houston, Miami, Pittsburgh & Philadelphia, etc. be blue, and the red areas surrounding them be red. Conversely, let the red areas in Jefferson (northern California + southern Oregon), eastern Washington, upstate NY, etc. be red, and the dominant metro areas in those states be blue.
Red/blue divides exist within states, but there's a lot more common ground. For example, half of Black people in Georgia oppose abortion. Folks in Atlanta might vote Democrat, but they don't see deeply religious people as aliens the way folks in San Francisco do. In another example, folks in San Francisco would have called Larry Hogan a fascist for sending in the Maryland national guard in response to the Freddie Gray riots. But his approval rating in majority Democrat Baltimore shot up to 70%. The bigger problem is having New York City/San Francisco in the same union with rural Georgia and Alabama. It's not workable.
> In the long run, it jeopardizes the possibility of ordered progress because people perceive it as a serious intrusion into society and culture by elites—which judges are—and will resist and eventually revolt.
It's reasonable to say that the purpose of the judiciary is to protect rights, even when doing so is unpopular. If the judiciary was consistent in how it did that (for example: providing equal deference to the rights created by Roe and Heller) we might see less revolt. The issue is not "elite intrusion" but inconsistency.
Society's "right to decide" does not impugn my right to life and liberty. And the court is deeply inconsistent about whose rights, lives, and liberties it protects.
> Taking away a society’s right to decide the scope of social institutions like marriage
What gives El Paso residents the right to decide what the scope of marriage is in Austin? Indeed, what gives the government the right to regulate the "scope of marriage" at all?
> The Texas law forbids people from getting abortions in other states, where people have no representation in the Texas legislature by giving Texas citizens the right to sue them in Texas courts.
There is no way this can be upheld, right? How on earth can citizens of state 1 go after citizens of state 2 for something that's legal in state 2?
> More generally problematic, your view would let any state persecute a minority of voters in that state and bind the federal government from guaranteeing equal protection to all Americans.
Who decides when the will of a state's majority is "democracy at work" and when it's "persecution of the minority violating equal protection"?
> There is no way this can be upheld, right? How on earth can citizens of state 1 go after citizens of state 2 for something that's legal in state 2?
I'd suggest reading about the run up to the civil war. "State's rights" in that context was the slave states demanding that the free states capture and return escaped slaves outside of the slave states. Put simply, they wanted to enforce their fugitive slave laws on states that were completely uninterested in enforcing those laws.
The idea that "state's rights" in US political discourse reflects some principled division, rather than just being another lever people in power used to fight other people in power, is fiction. This has and remains fundamentally about a minority asserting their views over the majority, including outside the borders of their state.
I think you and cm2187 above are making similar arguments, but to my thinking it doesn't really matter: with the time and money it takes to rectify the situation, unconstitutional laws do serious damage regardless. I'm not a lawyer, but oh what I would give for legal review on the constitutionality of laws as a precursor to implementation rather than post-mortem.
As another person suggests below - these states don't care anyway, they are following the same game plan as 1859.
Police departments are also very happy to arrest people over unconstitutional laws. The charges may not stick, but a solid tackle, some tight cuffs, and a rough ride can result in life-altering injuries. They also get the chance to keep the victim in jail for a bit, stick on more charges, and attempt to win convictions via plea bargain.
> There is no way this can be upheld, right? How on earth can citizens of state 1 go after citizens of state 2 for something that's legal in state 2?
Yes, it’s insane. But I don’t have faith in our courts to not split this hair and allow it for abortion specifically because they are so clearly partisan on social issues here.
Even without the insanity of the Texas law though, it’s still a huge issue for poor women in red states.
> Who decides when the will of a state's majority is "democracy at work" and when it's "persecution of the minority violating equal protection"?
The federal government passes laws, or a constitutional convention passes amendments, and federal courts interpret them. The 14th amendment was interpreted to apply this protection before but now it is not.
>There is no way this can be upheld, right? How on earth can citizens of state 1 go after citizens of state 2 for something that's legal in state 2?
I'm pretty sure it will be seen as a violation of the constitution's interstate commerce clause, which gives that authority exclusively to the federal government. However, it is possible that a pro-life administration would institute an order that does make it illegal to cross state lines for an abortion, similar to how sex tourism is illegal.
Such a law actually being enforced, then the enforcement upheld, is (quite simply) "the end" for sane rule of law.
States have no jurisdiction outside their borders. Just like, say, Wisconsin having a law on the books that makes it illegal to leave the state (while "intending" to continue living in the state) to get married elsewhere, where the marriage wouldn't be legal in Wisconsin (https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/document/statutes/765.04) is ridiculous, likewise claiming that you get to apply your law somewhere else that you have no legal jurisdiction is insane.
...not that that stops the US government from doing the same thing if a US citizen travels to another country with a lower age of consent to bang some 16-year-old. It's this magic "intent" which we don't know how they can possibly know - were you over 21 and did you go to France to fuck that 15-year-old you've been playing video games with, or did you just go to France and happen to fall for that 15-year-old that you've been playing video games with hard after they showed you the tourist sights you've always wanted to see, ...then fuck them?
Does it get prosecuted often? No. Is it another bullshit law, waiting to conveniently be used to make you guilty when the powers-that-be need a reason to make you guilty? Yes. Oh-so-yes.
Particularly interstate matters are handled by federal institutions set up by Congress. Which is why Texas police cannot prosecute you for crime done in California, but they can report you to the FBI.
As such, Texas is overstepping its jurisdiction. And sidestepping the law by making it civil cases... Which they can adjudicate.
So, states can get into their mess by staying civil cases, when do we see an escalation?
Wrong. You can be prosecuted for a drug conspiracy hatched in California where the drugs are shipped to Texas. Federally, in Texas, California or all three "separate" sovereigns.
Interstate travel is specifically protected federally and incorporated against the states. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion specifically says this is an easy question to answer and it would be presumably unconstitutional to prevent people from having abortions in other states. Suggesting otherwise at this point is fear-mongering in very bad faith.
> who decides
More like, what laws decide. If the majority is infringing on protections from federal or state constitutions or federal or state legislation, the majority doesn’t win. Otherwise they do. Majorities can affect the laws given enough time and sustained effort.
>Interstate travel is specifically protected federally and incorporated against the states. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion specifically says this is an easy question to answer and it would be presumably unconstitutional to prevent people from having abortions in other states. Suggesting otherwise at this point is fear-mongering in very bad faith.
Sure, but if they throw someone seeking an abortion in jail or tie them up in the court system, it may be irrelevant whether is is legal because that person still can't travel. That of course assumes they have the money and resources to travel, and that the health care systems in those neighboring states is accessible.
I don't have the stats in front of me, but we already know there is going to be a flood of people from Idaho into WA seeking services and we have very few clinics east of the Cascades as it is.
I think you may need to take a closer look at these numbers, there is no poll indicating that anywhere near 49% of US citizens are "dead set" against abortion being legal.
My understanding is that the number of US citizens who believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances is less than 15%.[0] Indeed, looking at this poll more than 75% of the people fell short of believing abortion should be illegal ("legal in only a few circumstances").
With the percentage so low, I find it hard to believe that the people in _any_ US state would like abortion to be banned. Again, it would be interesting if you had any data to back up this statement.
> I'd understand if "the left" was trying to take away some other person's right, but this is the opposite. They're trying to preserve rights.
The thing that makes these discussions so frustrating is that people often seem to be completely deer-in-the-headlights ignorant of the other side's arguments.
The argument of pro-life people is that there are two human beings involved in the abortion: the mother, and the child. Making abortion legal gives the mother the right over her body by removing the right of the child to not have her life taken away. In the eyes of pro-life people, "taking away some other person's right" is exactly what "the left" are doing.
Now you might not agree that there is a child in this case; you might think that children begin existing and having rights once they pass through the birth canal and not before. Or you might think that even if there is a child that has rights, the mother's right to bodily autonomy trumps the child's right to life. But you can't say "I don't understand where they're coming from; 'the left' isn't trying to take away some other person's right" without being profoundly ignorant of the basic views of the people you're arguing against.
> Now you might not agree that there is a child in this case; you might think that children begin existing and having rights once they pass through the birth canal and not before. Or you might think that even if there is a child that has rights, the mother's right to bodily autonomy trumps the child's right to life. But you can't say "I don't understand where they're coming from; 'the left' isn't trying to take away some other person's right" without being profoundly ignorant of the basic views of the people you're arguing against.
I think people want to make it about that, and that's fine. But should we force people to donate their livers, kidneys, bone marrow because someone will die otherwise? Oh, and the person you are donating to has Alzheimer's and you have to take care of them until either one of you die.
Forced birth is kinda/sorta/almost the same thing. The woman is forced to donate aspects of themselves that will affect them forever (more than just 'organs' in some ways), they may not even live through the event, and then take care of it for the rest of each others lives.
Long ago, I dated a woman who had broken her hip in such a way she could not have a child without losing the ability to walk for the rest of her life. She couldn't get her 'tubes tied' because she was too young. Think about that for a minute and the position she was in and now think about a position she might be in if she were in her early twenties today. She wouldn't be able to have a normal life and even back then, she never wanted to be unable to run with her child. IIRC, she's "tied" her tubes and her and her husband have adopted a child. But damn, it isn't always so black and white.
> I think people want to make it about that, and that's fine.
Well, from a moral perspective, it is about that. I'm not sure which of those two positions you take (not a person / mother's rights supersede children's rights), but if you're going to be honest you've got to figure out which it is and why.
And for the vast majority of people who vote pro-life (at least, all the ones that I know), that's what it's about too. And I note that you haven't really challenged the core logic I've put forward there, but rather on some of the sticky implications.
> Oh, and the person you are donating to has Alzheimer's and you have to take care of them until either one of you die. ...The woman is forced to... take care of it for the rest of each others lives.
And, here's again where there's a basic ignorance that a five-minute conversation with someone who's pro-life would clear up. Nobody who's pro-life would say that women should be forced to raise the children; they can be put up for adoption.
> But should we force people to donate their livers, kidneys, bone marrow because someone will die otherwise?
There's a difference between causing someone to die by action, and allowing someone to die by inaction. Pushing someone into a raging river is different than failing to dive in to rescue them.
> Forced birth is kinda/sorta/almost the same thing. The woman is forced to donate aspects of themselves that will affect them forever (more than just 'organs' in some ways), they may not even live through the event...
This is your strongest point. I mean, yeah, birth is crazy. And it would totally suck to go through it if it wasn't something you'd chosen to do. But it's not like the child was able to choose this either. It's a terrible situation for both people.
> Long ago, I dated a woman who had broken her hip in such a way she could not have a child without losing the ability to walk for the rest of her life.
So first of all, this sort of situation is quite uncommon; and while there are zealots who would take a hard line, lots of people would be willing to compromise in this sort of a case. Secondly, there are lots of people worldwide who are OK with abortion in the first trimester, but not the second and third. I think there are reasonable justifications for this.
But thinking about it from a moral perspective, let's try this scenario.
You're taking a tour of some tall factory with a bunch of people you don't know. While you're on a catwalk 4 stories up, something catastrophic happens, and at the end of it you're holding for dear life to a railing, and a stranger is dangling over the factory floor, holding for dear life to your legs.
You're not afraid of falling yourself; your arms are wrapped firmly around the railing, which you're pretty sure isn't going anywhere. But you have some sort of a degenerative joint disorder in your hips. You can already feel the tendons stretching from the stranger dangling below you; you're pretty sure that by the time help arrives to pull him up that enough damage will be done that you'll never walk again. You're also pretty sure that if you kick him hard enough right now, he'll let go and fall to his death, leaving your legs intact.
Is it moral for you to kill the stranger to save your legs? Should it be legal to kill the stranger to save your legs?
I'm going to ignore most of your response for now, I'll come back to it.
> Is it moral for you to kill the stranger to save your legs?
Is it moral? I think you might be mixing morality with ethics. Whether it is moral or not is highly dependent upon my culture and upbringing, whether it is ethical or not ... see the speeding trolley problem, because it is remarkably similar, where instead of "saving a bunch of people" I'm saving my future.
> Should it be legal to kill the stranger to save your legs?
How would a police officer know the difference between slipping and me kicking? I'd have to admit that it ever happened. Even if there are witnesses, it would be unreliable accounts. This gets into how Roe vs. Wade came about in the first place. I have some right to some privacy: the ability to keep my mouth shut, for one. You can say it is illegal all you want, but you also have to enforce it. Are police officers going to come give my wife random pregnancy tests to see if she stops being pregnant? How will they know the difference between a miscarriage and an abortion?
> I mean, yeah, birth is crazy. And it would totally suck to go through it if it wasn't something you'd chosen to do.
I venture you don't have at least one child? There is no way to explain having a child, and raising a child to someone who hasn't done so. There is life before ... and then there is life after. It is hard. I've been to boot camp, I've been to war, I've saved lives and ended them. And you know what ... having a child was initially, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. It is quite sudden, even though you have some 7-8 months to prepare. I wouldn't wish those first few months on my worst enemy. If I were a single mom/dad, it would have devastated my career, especially because as a father, I had TWO DAYS of vacation after the birth. Hell, it did negatively affect my performance for years.
It was worth every second because I loved my child, especially because my first one died during childbirth. But if I resented my child, I can't imagine the psychological torture that child would have to live through.
> Nobody who's pro-life would say that women should be forced to raise the children; they can be put up for adoption.
And who the fuck is going to adopt them? The foster care system is already overrun and under-funded. So, good luck with that...
> I venture you don't have at least one child? ...And who... is going to adopt them?
On the contrary, I do have a child, which I adopted. I know a little bit about the birth mother's situation; I'm pretty sure a lot of people would have recommended to her to have had an abortion. I'm very thankful that she didn't -- she chose to take a risk, and there's a beautiful precious life as a result.
I don't know the situation in the US at the moment, but I can tell you that in my country, there is absolutely no problem finding adoptive parents for healthy newborns. Obviously if there's significant risk of damage due to alcohol or drugs, or significant health issues or genetic abnormalities, it's more difficult; but the last time I looked into it, those cases represented a very small fraction of the total number of abortions done in the US.
Regarding raising children: apparently all 50 states in the US have "Safe-haven" laws [1], which allow parents to drop off infants at designated locations. There is absolutely no reason for anyone in the US to feel trapped into raising children.
None of that change the fact that pregnancy itself can be terrifying and even dangerous, of course.
> The foster care system is already overrun and under-funded.
Let's expand this argument a bit: "The foster care system is overrun and under-funded; we can help reduce pressure on the system by killing children who might go into it." I mean, if you're OK with killing children to reduce pressure on the foster care system, wouldn't it make more sense to kill the older children? Say, those who haven't been adopted by the age of 5?
If you're shocked / disgusted / horrified at the idea of killing innocent 5-year-olds, then you know how genuine pro-life people feel about the argument that we should use abortions to reduce pressure on the care system. You should 1) reflect on what moral justification you have for not feeling the same way; 2) have more respect for people who do feel that way.
That's a really good point but unfortunately its just a surface level argument. Same states that demonize abortions also cut health services for children and mothers. All states that had a trigger law to ban abortions also do not have paid family leave.
So they only kinda sorta care about the child in the womb but not about the mother or the child when they are born.
If folks are going to ban abortions they should at least expand child and mother care, in my opinion.
On the other hand, pre-Roe, the maximum tax rate was 70%, with 25 different tax brackets. I'm guessing that folks that support today's decision are probably okay with the tax increases and big government that will follow.
Put another way, the case several days ago that allows child school credit to be used for Catholic school ALSO allows the same credit to be used for the Church of Satan School of the Gifted. The unintended consequences of all the rulings during the past week are going to be an interesting things to observe.
> Same states that demonize abortions also cut health services for children and mothers. All states that had a trigger law to ban abortions also do not have paid family leave.
Suppose for the sake of argument that you're a person who thinks health services for children and paid family leave are important; but you also think that abortion is the moral equivalent of murder. You can vote for:
* Team Blue, who will increase children's health services and advocate for paid family leave, but slaughter millions of innocent children [Remember, I'm not claiming this is true, I'm trying to put you in the mind of a hypothetical person who believes this way]
* Team Red, who will decrease children's health services and family leave, but restrict the slaughter of innocent children.
I mean, if that's what you actually believe, then it really has to be Team Red, doesn't it?
I don't pretend to know what politicians think; it seems pretty likely that a lot of them are cynically using abortion as a ploy to get people to vote for policies that favor their rich donors. But I can tell you that an awful lot of people who actually vote are genuine in their opposition to it. If you want people to vote differently, you have to understand where the voters are coming from, not where their politicians are coming from.
That’s a really good point and thanks for sharing. Definitely food for thought with regards to this sensitive topic.
Personally, I believe anti-abortion is a double edged sword that I don’t know how to traverse. I respect everyone’s right to choose but I also understand how politicizing the issue is favorable for politicians as they can yank at the heart strings and at the same time effect specific class of citizens more than others. And that last part bothers me.
It’s not so much the belief but the use of that as a belief to disenfranchise communities who are most vulnerable. I don’t know how to reconcile that fact, internally.
Team Blue has fewer abortions than Team Red, thanks to contraception. Team Red just has their abortions as safe for rich people while poor people use coat hangers.
Team Red is only opposed to abortions for other people.
I think the issue with your particular stance is: you are right, with regard to Red politicians, but not when it comes to the ever-day-joe. The suburb soccer mom doesn't believe abortions should be only for the rich, and supports maternal and child care.
However, the Red politicians are tugging at those heart strings for the votes but have interest of expanding child or maternal care.
The problem aren't the people, it's the POS politicians, in my opinion. Since 2008 or so, politicians have been driving a divide between the voters of the different teams, getting re-elected by showcasing their wedge, and constantly screwing the people on both teams. I believe empathy for voters is the path forward.
I still think about Ted Cruz waving good bye at the dude who was pissed that kids got killed and he's dining at a restaurant. That's the issue. That dude is probably Team Red, probably doesn't agree with me, but fuck me if I don't support him going after a POS politician for not doing their job.
Empathy for voters; Re-examination of our politicians. It's not Team Red or Team Blue. It's the politicians of both sides that failed everyone.
> Team Blue has fewer abortions than Team Red, thanks to contraception.
...and states run by Team Blue tend to have fewer abortions, in part because of easier availability of contraception, but also in part because people are less desperate and feel more able to cope with unplanned pregnancies. (And the country as a whole has fewer abortions after seasons where Team Blue is in control than Team Red.) Many pro-life people who saw what a danger Trump was made exactly this case to their peers, both in 2016 and 2020.
Additionally, most Team Red people I talk to actually do believe in a social safety net; they just want to make sure it's not wasted on "lazy people". They don't have an accurate picture of exactly what it is that Team Blue and Team Red are both doing with the social safety net. (They don't even tend to have an accurate picture of what Team Blue and Team Red are doing in terms of abortion.)
Rather than slagging these people as regressive hateful backwards bigoted hypocrites, it's better to engage with them: Take their preferences into account, make sure they're informed of the actual situation on the ground. (Again, I'm talking about the individual voters, not politicians, who may well be hateful backwards bigoted hypocrites.)
Another part of the pro-life/conservative mindset is that positive rights (freedom to) and negative rights (freedom from) tend to be treated very differently, leading to no inherent contradiction between believing in the unborn child’s right to not be killed, and believing that same child has no right to free care.
> All states that had a trigger law to ban abortions also do not have paid family leave.
So they only kinda sorta care about the child in the womb but not about the mother or the child when they are born.
Or they’re more capitalist in their thinking and expect people to take care of themselves as opposed to leaving it up to the government.
Who is right and who is wrong comes down to opinion. But I don’t believe it’s as simple as “the other side doesn’t care as much as we do”
That's a fair counter-point. If we had to create a model to test my hypothesis, what do you believe is the best way to go about it?
My proposal is as follows:
Take the GDP, per capita, per state and compare expansion/contraction of before Roe and after Roe. We can measure % change in the 10 years pre Roe to 10 years post Roe. The hypothesis is that states never cared about children and as such, post Roe, GDP expansion in states that had abortion abolished experienced a much higher GDP, per capita growth than before.
Information can be sourced from St. Luis FED.
If you have another idea, please let me know. I'm personally curious about this and would like to explore so feel free to pick apart my post as it will just render a more thought out experiment.
Thanks.
edit: If someone is a data scientist that can comment on what is the correct methodology to take or what pitfalls to consider, I would highly appreciate it.
Honestly, if the Supreme Court had ruled unborn children as having rights beyond this I could take you seriously, but they literally have nothing beyond the right to a womb.
Do they count in the census? Can I say they're a dependent?
Heck, why don't we make periods and ejaculation illegal. After all, those eggs and sperm are viable! Men shouldn't be allowed to pull out, wear condoms, or masturbate. Won't someone think of the children?! Oh, I almost forgot to ban sodomy too! Good heavens!
And what about contraception? That's coming next. What is your argument then?
The thing is, we have evidence based ways to reduce the need for unnecessary abortions, but the "right" isn't concerned about that. We know, for a fact, that access to contraception and sex education dramatically reduce abortion levels.
We know for a fact that making it illegal does not, it merely causes dangerous abortions to increase.
How do you square that? The "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd somehow can't grasp, or refuse to grasp, the consequences of their actions.
I'm also interested in how you feel about the rights of rape victims. Perhaps you'd like to carry the baby for them?
It isn't an inference or extrapolation either. From today's decision, citations my own:
> For that reason, in future fases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold[1], Lawrence[2], and Obergefell[3].
The decision advocates for re-ruling on each of these cases. If these should be decided against their current status, expect states to outlaw contraception, gay relations, and same-sex marriage.
The other five Republican-aligned justices have amply demonstrated that they’re lying liars when it comes to their publicly-stated vs. actual intentions.
Yeah, right.
Like those liars didn’t say in their confirmation hearing that Roe vs Wade was an established precedent and wouldn’t be touched.
Either you are so gullible that you still believe them against all the evidence or you are in bad faith.
Tertium non datur.
You didn’t watch the handmaid’s tale?
The commanders were pretty much forced to rape their handmaid to procreate.
This is what they want, a continuous influx of cheap poor laborers that are pretty much slaves.
He's talking about the US Senate, which legislates national issues. Because each state gets two votes, the more rural, conservative states end up acting as a bloc, giving them (often vastly) disproportional power over the majority.
What needs to be fixed is the cap on the House. Remove that and the larger states get more power in the House. For example the Democrats could get a majority to push legislation to protect abortion at the national level.
People need to fix the issues in the system rather than relying on the courts to legislate for Congress.
Don't misrepresent the "point of the compromise". The Senate exists because of slavery and for no other reason. The constitution would not have been ratified by the slave states without the disproportionate representation of the Senate, because even in the 18th century the overwhelming majority of voting people would have voted to abolish slavery. Jefferson and the other slavers knew this. The Senate is not some kind of beautiful compromise between the city and the country. It is a capitulation to Jefferson, who was really, really super into slavery.
This is patently false. Small, slave free States existed during the authorship of the Constitution. They were afraid of being steamrolled by their larger northern neighbors just as much as the antebellum South. It was the carrot to bring such states into the new Constitutional union.
Did the slave States like this compromise, yes. Is that the only reason for it? No.
"To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a "necessary fence" against the "fickleness and passion" that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives." - https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_C...
The small states had obvious reasons to support the great compromise, but that's not the question. The question is why did Virginia agree to it, when they were more populous than half the other states combined, and therefore would have naturally wanted proportional representation, as indeed was the original Madison plan. And the reason is: slavery. It's completely central to the entire constitution, from the senate to the 3/5th "compromise" to the electoral college.
Texas, like most "conservative" states is gerrymandered to all hell. So it's very very simple how conservative minorities are enforcing their social views on the majority.
You’re assuming the legislatures of the states reflects the views of the majority. Which gerrymandering and voting suppression has long since assured it does not.
The Dems held a gerrymandering advantage for one year of the past 50 gaining one 'underserved seat' advantage over republicans. This is no longer the case...
> The EU has similar safeguards where you need effectively 3 keys to enable a law (European parliament, European commission, and the Council), not a simple 51% majority.
It's even more than that. In the council (where the governments of the member countries are present) you need majority based on number of citizens in the countries and also votes from a number of countries, so that few big countries can't overrule the small ones, but you always need support from small and big countries.
> What you seem to complain about is that voters in California cannot impose their social view on the inhabitants of Utah.
What nonsense. This is not about state's rights.
Just yesterday the Court decided that no, California doesn't have the right to restrict guns. That's the inhabitants of Utah imposing their social view on the acceptability of guns on the residents of California.
It's about states rights when it comes to things you don't support, like abortion, and it's about the constitution and the rights it gives everyone, when it comes to things that you support, like the right for every nutjob to kill children with AR-15s.
There is no logical reasoning behind these decisions aside from a vindictive, right-wing court, imposing its social will onto the entire country.
Because there is an explicit provision on guns in the constitution. No mention of or allusion to abortion in the constitution. If the US wants to protect abortion through the constitution, they are free to do so. The US constitution has been amended many times. But that takes an even broader consensus.
The constitution doesn’t enshrine the right to a gun. It enshrines the right to a gun for the sake of a well regulated militia. The NYC ruling was pure judicial activism
I love these arguments that still want to pretend that Well Regulated means lots of regulations instead of the actual "Well trained and in good working order". And Milita which is really just any able bodied adult that can fight for defense of self or state...
But ignores Heller 2008 and McDonald 2010 which both, for a long time, have ruled that this word argument is complete nonsense. That regardless of what you want to believe, 2A is an individual right.
Heller v DC - It's an individual right to own a firearm. You can't ban handguns or anything else just because you say so.
McDonald v Chicago - You can't just not issue permits to carry. 2A includes the right to carry outside the home.
NYPRA v Bruen - You can't say you MIGHT issue a permit, you will if they meet the legal requirements established by your state.
Please stop with the intellectually void argument that 2A is how you see it because you think the first few words invalidate "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".
It's weak, and more importantly, it's over. It has been nail in the coffin settled for 12 years now.
And abortion being a woman's right up to the moment of viability was "nail in the coffin settled" in 1973.
The court's analysis that 'keep and bear arms' implies an individual right to carry a handgun (or a weapon 'in common use') for self defense purposes is exactly the kind of drawing of 'legislative-style' boundaries that the court railed against in today's ruling overturning Roe and Casey.
You don't do this, but any arguments by any anti-gunners regarding US v. Miller should be taken as "arguing in bad faith" immediately - the "why?" becomes obvious as soon as you look at the circumstances of the case and quotations in the ruling.
Basically, if the court had been told (i.e. someone had actually been present to argue, which your attorney won't do if you disappear and stuff) that an NFA weapon was of the kind used by the militia/military it should've come out differently. The court said:
"The Court cannot take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon."
Judicial notice is messy but given it was a criminal case, with a right to argue about everything that might be used to convict, a competent lawyer - hell, even an incompetent lawyer - should have challenged everything, and by that time "trench guns" from WW1 would have certainly, easily been identifiable as the kind of weapon suitable for militia use.
I don’t know anything about Muslims being denied in TN but suspect there is more to it than their religion because TN has been a SHALL ISSUE state, and is now a CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY state.
So whatever it is you are talking about does not apply like it does to CA, NY, NJ, HI, MD, and others being MAY ISSUE states.
In TN now, you need no permission to concealed carry, so unless prohibited by other laws or statutes anyone is free to do so, regardless of religion or what the local police think your rights should be.
> The constitution doesn’t enshrine the right to a gun. It enshrines the right to a gun for the sake of a well regulated militia.
IIRC, you need private gun ownership to have a militia (as the founders understood them). I believe the idea was regular citizens would organize when needed and bring their own guns.
One of possible interpretations, which AFAIK was even on the books in some state for a time, was that second amendment meant compulsory obligation for each voter to buy, out of their own money, a military rifle and stand for militia training periodically - essentially, mandatory militia service.
Lots of ways to wring hands about a very badly written amendment.
>The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State) and its operative clause (the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed).
I've had this question for a while but why can I not own a functional tank or MLRS system and just drive them around wherever I want? Why are explosives regulated? Nothing in the constitution seems to suggest "Arms" must mean "guns and only guns", so where else is the line drawn?
In many states you totally can own a functional tank, missile system, or explosives -- you just need the right $200 stamp from the ATF and maybe a background check. (Each tank shell or missile would require an additional ATF stamp, this is where things become different from owning a normal gun and ammunition.) Driving them around - outside of your property - would require them to be properly licensed and road-legal, that's something your local motor vehicle agency would have to decide.
Here's the first Google result for your entertainment:
You Can Purchase a Fully Functional Army Tank Online Because This Is America
> In many states you totally can own a functional tank, missile system, or explosives -- you just need the right $200 stamp from the ATF and maybe a background check.
I'm aware and my point was explicitly about being able to drive them around wherever I like, under the guise of it being the rough equivalent of concealed carry for an MLRS.
You can't; there's restrictions. At the minimum, it's likely that people would argue they're heavy and would harm infrastructure (or outright destroy it in the case of some tanks).
Separately, explosives are also tightly controlled, but are still a key part of armaments.
I think if you looked deeper, you'd find that the restrictions for where you could and could not drive tanks are more restrictions on the _roads_ than the _tanks_
The government owns the roads, ergo can sidestep a lot of the what might otherwise be mandated under strict scrutiny for their usage with rational basis tests. E.g., "the roads are rated for <x> class of vehicles, and a tank is <y> class."
I'm aware and my point was explicitly about being able to drive them around wherever I like...
But you're wrong, while I couldn't drive my tank around, I could certainly load it onto a tractor trailor and show it off around town. I would argue that's functionally the same thing.
In theory states could write a new law that forbid carrying any explosive on public road as a matter of road safety. Ammunition would be non-road-legal, making concealed and non-concealed carry impossible on public roads.
You absolutely can own a tank. With functioning cannon. Because of the NFA, you have to register the cannon as a destructive device, although at the 1776 ratification, cannons were explicitly legal. So there is your tank and cannon.
A multi rocket system, is not a gun. It's ordnance. So this argument is weak and I don't need to extend into that except for.... ALSO LEGAL. Again, you are going to need to follow the rules of the NFA, and ATF's explosives requirements. The larger issue will be to get Lockhead Martin to sell you one! Which they will not. But you come up with the cash for 1000 of them, and I bet they do.
Explosives are regulated because they have no defensive purpose. I mean, they do, but it's tough to use them defensively and accurately. If you cite Heller vs DC, they are dangerous AND unusual, key point to use "AND" there.
Arms do actually mean arms. Arms meant cannons too. But bombs were never really arms.
The line in this case is drawn rather inconsistently by the federal government agencies, and more fairly but even increasingly restrictive by congress.
I'm aware you can own a tank, the issue was with the restrictions on its use. It was probably a poor analogy, but the concept is:
Legally, how is:
> You can purchase a tank but not operate it anywhere off your own property.
functionally different than:
> You can purchase a handgun but may not carry it concealed on your person off your own property.
Emphasis on Legally. In both cases these are allowed weapons for people to own, which, while not exact parallels (Tanks can cause infrastructure damage and such) at their core seem very similar from a legal perspective, especially because of the NFA requirement for tanks. That latter is important to consider because the NFA largely deals with guns of varying sorts in its rules.
Also context: I'm an ignorant Canuck who occasionally lives stateside.
>at their core seem very similar from a legal perspective especially because of the NFA requirement for tanks.
There is no NFA requirement for the tank itself. Only for the cannon, and the ammunition if it has an explosive payload. The tank is just a vehicle. If you can make it street legal, you are free to drive it anywhere you like.
The more interesting thing you bring up inadvertently is "on your own property". If that's the case, I should be able to own all the machine guns I like without NFA stamps on my own property right?
The NFA is an unconstitutional law that sought to put a tax on rights. Then extra double unconstitutional when in 1986 they said "Oh, we longer accept the tax for certain still legal things". We specifically deny behavior that elsewhere, like voting. All handguns were supposed to be included, and all rifles with barrels shorter than 18". 18" stuck for shotguns, but rifles were moved to 16" for silly reason I can't recall exactly. Pistols got dropped because even in 1934 the public reaction wasn't going to fly.
It doesn't matter though. The point of all of this is 2A is an individual right, enumerated, and verified with previous and recent court decisions. Abortion is not, so people using the BUT STATES RIGHTS comments about the NYRPA decision vs Roe overturn are being completely ignorant of the realities here.
>Since you seem to know a lot about "arms," is a sword an "arm?"
Knives and swords are arms, yes. This was most recently seen in states that tried to ban switchblades outright. Switchblades are pretty poor fighting knives, but have the same public reaction fueled by media as pitbulls.
I talked with a lobbyist responsible for the switchblade deregulation in my state. After her research it came to "What makes a weapon will always be up to the judge, but the easy test is can you swing it?". Which is fair I think. That said... I also trained with my state's swat unit for a class and they talked about their justification for getting their gun out according to dept policy being "Any time a weapon is involved", which can mean gun, knife, sword, folding chair, sharp pencil or really big box of hot dogs depending on intent.
You're right about the tank. So long as you have the right markers, mirrors, vision, licensing, etc. You're good to go. Although you won't enjoy it as a daily driver after the initial buzz wears off.
Driving motored vehicles on public roads is a privilege retained by the states under the Tenth Amendment. You can drive a tank on private property, if you can legally acquire one (Commerce Clause).
Unclear on explosives.
As far as "arms," the line is drawn at being able to be operated by a single person. So it would appear unconstitutional to prohibit keeping and bearing cannons and tactical nukes, though Congress can prohibit sale and interstate transfer.
The US is party to various treaties governing fissile material. Whether those treaties can be construed to override amendments as opposed to the original Constitution is a good question.
The militia (as opposed to the army) would use personal weapons that they owned for defense of the home, and the Supreme Court has held that those are the arms protected by the 2nd Amendment. From Heller, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf page 59,
"As the quotations earlier in this opinion demonstrate, the inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right. The handgun ban amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of “arms” that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose.
The prohibition extends, moreover, to the home, where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute. Under any of the standards of scrutiny that we have applied to enumerated constitutional rights, banning from the home “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family,”, would fail constitutional muster."
If people had commonly used cannons to protect their homes, maybe tanks would be protected under the 2nd Amendment by their logic.
Modern judicial activism which clearly goes to the heart of the matter: the conservative bloc in the SCOTUS doesn’t care about even the text of the constitution
Whose right is gun ownership? It's the people. The Constitution explicitly says that the Government will not have the right to infringe on that right. The inference is that they can infringe on all the other non-enumerated rights.
Edit: to pull context from another comment here.
"The 'militia' was the entire adult male citizenry, who were not simply allowed to keep their own arms, but affirmatively required to do so.… With slight variations, the different colonies imposed a duty to keep arms and to muster occasionally for drill upon virtually every able-bodied white man between the age of majority and a designated cut-off age. Moreover, the duty to keep arms applied to every household, not just to those containing persons subject to militia service. Thus the over-aged and seamen, who were exempt from militia service, were required to keep arms for law enforcement and for the defense of their homes."
This issue is that the States became lazy once the Feds got their standing military. All States should require citizens to muster for arms and disaster training at least twice a year.
Firstly, the supreme court decides what the 2A means and they decided it does not mean that. The NYC law spit in the face of a previous supreme court decision. That can't be allowed.
You can argue that the previous decision was wrong all you want (I personally think it was), but you can't allow the states to just ignore the supreme court and do whatever they want or all constitutional protections are meaningless.
In fact the ruling relies, for purposes of establishing that restrictions on abortion are an established part of the American tradition, on pointing to the existence of a bunch of state abortion laws that existed in the 1860s, which were all ruled unconstitutional in Roe.
It's effectively saying 'the existence of state laws that attempt to restrict a right, even ones which have been rule unconstitutional, is itself evidence that it's okay for states to impose restrictions on constitutional rights.'
Which seems like a very odd argument to make the day after striking down a 100 year old NY State law restricting gun carry rights on the basis that there's no evidence of a long tradition of such restrictions being passed by states.
An extension of my first point is that the supreme court decides what is constitutional and what isn't. My point was that only the supreme court can be allowed to overturn the supreme court. That's how it works. If the court decides that a previous court was wrong, then that's fine. That's how the system is designed.
tl;dr we have a really dogshit system that essentially puts 9 people in charge of everything
It puts them in charge of interpreting the constitution, I thought. What a stretch to make them seem like on a whim law makers or tyrannical.
Governments tends to become tyrannical especially as they scale and gain more power. That's what the fabulous constitution was drafted after for the most part: to protect people against the government(s). Not put by Trump or other conservative to exerce more control over people. Here quite the opposite.
I see in this overturn a move to re-establish distance and reduce the over reach of governance, federal legislation here, the supreme court attacking itself. The constitution still somehow works in the U.S, and supreme judges doing a great job at keeping it honored.
> What a stretch to make them seem like on a whim law makers or tyrannical.
It's not a stretch. They are literally "on a whim law makers." They decide what issues they want to take up and change the way they interpret the constitution depending on how they want to rule on an issue. In theory, they could be held in check by congress, but in practice that is impossible. Especially since the justice's are political weapons of congress. There's a reason the supreme court nominations have been huge campaign points for the last few elections. They have basically unchecked power.
> The constitution still somehow works in the U.S, and supreme judges doing a great job at keeping it honored.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. They choose how they want to interpret it depending on how they want to rule. There's no consistency and it's frankly a disgrace. Has been for a while too, this isn't something new to this current court.
I have to concede, a long series of rulings are a disgrace. In the long run of this institution, not sure on the ratio of questionable vs rightful vs plain calamities judges have come up with historically. I stand on my previous comment and as you say would agree to disagree: the supreme court system _still_ works, somehow. Institutions at large are in chamble in the West, we could make a special case here but no obvious dissonance that I can see or hear from these judges. On this ruling. Politically biased? Of course. Corrupt? Not quite, but indirectly, very likely.
Thanks for your thoughts. Agreed on them not being kept in check by Congress, not sure how the balance of power work in details, it would naturally more sense that congress gets at least some electing power and surely an avenue for dismissing
them for misconduct, by 2/3 of votes or whatever. That would sound more balanced than the whichever passing president given the election or some judges who then sit on their thrones for life.
It would be useful to provide at least a concrete example. Sounding very undoubtul doesn't imply being right or argumenting based on the truth. I will however do further reading and find out what may be so outrageous this court might have been up to.
The supreme court spat in the face of a previous supreme court decision. That's the reality of what's going on right now.
If the supreme court cannot respect precedent or at least provide a very good reason why precedent should be overruled, then what we have is a country ruled by a set of god kings with zero accountability. When faith in the system crumbles as a result of extreme partisan decision making, what you get is balkanization.
> The NYC law spit in the face of a previous supreme court decision. That can't be allowed.
Yet what we recently learned is what the supreme court decides is of little consequence. It's just the temporary whim of whatever political party happens to be in power. In 10, 20 or whatever years it takes to get a liberal court back, then roe v wade comes back and the court reinterprets a "well regulated militia" to mean, ah, a "well regulated militia".
This "well regulated militia" stuff is so disgustingly ignorant. And people keep parroting it like it is some kind of "gotem".
First of all, what do you think a militia even is? It is a group of CITIZENS that form an ad-hoc fighting force.
Secondly, the amendment says "the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms".
It doesn't say "the right of the military". It doesn't say "the right of the militia". And it doesn't say "the right of peace officers."
When the Declaration of Independence was drafted, "We the People" did not mean "military".
Thirdly, the Bill of Rights explicitly grants rights to people, NOT the government and NOT the military. Yet somehow, conveniently, that is different for the 2A?
You might not like the 2A, but the meaning is clear and supported by history. This "well-regulated militia" nonsense is the climate-change-denial of the 2A.
> Firstly, the supreme court decides what the 2A means and they decided it does
not mean that. The NYC law spit in the face of a previous supreme court decision. That can't be allowed.
I'm always surprised by how few people realize that the SCOTUS doesn't make laws for states. I'm also surprised at how deeply convinced the notion of "the federal government and SCOTUS supersede state laws" is ingrained into our culture.
The SCOTUS only provides opinions and jurisprudence on matters. They don't "make laws" and can't command anything with any sort of enforceable power. Abortion could have been abolished yesterday, last month or even last decade if any state wanted it to.
Any state level Supreme Court can run contrary to the judgements of the SCOTUS without having to fear enforceable retribution. We've seen this recently with the case of interstate "travel bans" during COVID, "Sanctuary Cities" during Trump's first couple months of presidency and the spotty legalization of marijuana in certain states.
"The 'militia' was the entire adult male citizenry, who were not simply allowed to keep their own arms, but affirmatively required to do so.… With slight variations, the different colonies imposed a duty to keep arms and to muster occasionally for drill upon virtually every able-bodied white man between the age of majority and a designated cut-off age. Moreover, the duty to keep arms applied to every household, not just to those containing persons subject to militia service. Thus the over-aged and seamen, who were exempt from militia service, were required to keep arms for law enforcement and for the defense of their homes."
This issue is that the States became lazy once the Feds got their standing military. All States should require citizens to muster for arms and disaster training at least twice a year.
> All States should require citizens to muster for arms and disaster training at least twice a year
Or how about, since we banded together in order to create a more perfect union, and so that I, as a citizen, can focus my time on pursuing happiness, rather than mustering every six months, we agree, through our democratically elected representatives, to just pay some money into a kitty and out of that fund a professional police force, fire department, and a state national guard. That way we get sufficient people trained in the use of arms to secure our liberty, and we don't have to act like we're a bunch of 18th century farmers any more.
No, the Federal government having a standing army is what leads to us invading other countries. This is a terrible, terrible thing. It is far harder to forward deploy individuals that are only required to defend their homeland.
Also, we've seen all the institutions you mention collapse in the face of disaster. It would be far better for the citizens to be responsible for themselves in a collation with larger bodies than be dependent upon those larger organizations. For example, in Florida it makes sense to have the community trained on preparation and local response. People need to know what to materials to gather and what is already stockpiled locally. In the face of a hurricane, the community guard, i.e. the people, would be responsible for triaging the situation until reinforcements arrive. As it stands, the people huddle together en-mass hoping that the Federal government, or even the State will come to their rescue.
The provision (Second Amendment) explicitly says "well regulated", and talks about gun rights in connection with being for militias. This is how that right was read until 2008. This is all about conservatives on the Supreme Court picking and choosing what they want the Constitution to say.
tbf, that's only how it had been read from 1934 to 2008, and only by some -- it was not read that way prior to 1934, and 1934's decision in US v Miller likely wouldn't have arrived at that reading but for an extremely peculiar set of circumstances, including the fact that the defendant was dead, and the attorney didn't show up to correct false testimony from the government, which was extremely wrong in its assertion that the firearm used had no connection to military service
If you read the original papers about this, it's clear that "well regulated" refers to "To adjust (a mechanism) for accurate and proper functioning." as defined in https://www.thefreedictionary.com/regulated, not "subject to arbitrary Government control".
In a plain reading, it makes sense in context for this to mean "well trained". It would be rather odd for it to both say, in a supporting clause, that it's subject to arbitrary Government control, and also in the main clause that the right "shall not be infringed".
The difference is that one inures to state governments rather than the federal government. The concern at the time was that the federal government would take guns away from people in order to neuter the States' power to defend itself. The States themselves free to do what they wanted to regulate their citizens and militias.
There are already plenty of types of guns that you cannot buy (machine guns, grenade launchers, etc.), and that seems to be fine and legal. We're just talking about adding more to that list.
>How far do you want to go? P90s? RPGs? Stinger missiles?
Silencers/supressors are currently banned in the US (requires a tax stamp and long waiting period) but legal in other highly restrictive countries like England/UK. They're basically mufflers for guns and not like in the movies. Short barreled rifles would be nice too; we have those now but it's a "technicality," where anyone who owns them for recreational shooting can, on a whim of a bureaucrat, become a felon sentenced to decades of prison. That's not how a free society based on laws should work. Pot falls under the same category. It's still not legal at the federal level and if the DEA decides it wants to start raiding people's homes looking for pot, it certainly can, and people can be prosecuted for it.
>What would the societal benefit be there?
We're a society of individuals, not a society of Borg. Freedoms of the individual are the greatest benefit a society can have.
It's sad that the extent of your dialog is just name calling. Perhaps you should look in the mirror when you do it, just to make sure you aren't projecting.
It's pretty obvious you are trying to sound intelligent by claiming to be an "actual libertarian," (is there a certification for that by chance? Social or economic?) and using a cliché, but the content of your dialog is pretty thin.
Here's the summary: you asked a question, I answered, you went into a mindless rant and starting name calling. I'll bet you even started to type "LINO" then thought better of it. I don't even know what your position is, your dialog was so thin. Maybe take a deep breath and take time to collect your thoughts. Who's the one suffering fools again?
>Silencers/supressors are currently banned in the US (requires a tax stamp and long waiting period) but legal in other highly restrictive countries like England/UK. They're basically mufflers for guns and not like in the movies. Short barreled rifles would be nice too; we have those now but it's a "technicality," where anyone who owns them for recreational shooting can, on a whim of a bureaucrat, become a felon sentenced to decades of prison. That's not how a free society based on laws should work. Pot falls under the same category. It's still not legal at the federal level and if the DEA decides it wants to start raiding people's homes looking for pot, it certainly can, and people can be prosecuted for it.
Those aren't rights.
Those are (whether you agree with them or not) laws.
Those are different things.
What you advocate is license (definition 3)[0], not liberty.
Those are wildly different concepts.
>We're a society of individuals, not a society of Borg. Freedoms of the individual are the greatest benefit a society can have.
That we are, but we still all need to live together. Unless, of course you want to move to the middle of the desert or atop a mountain, the rights of others must also be respected.
I'd point out that you never did answer my question: "To what end?"
I'll clarify, since a good faith reading of your response would make me think you didn't understand the question rather than ignoring it in favor of your trained-in prejudices.
What would be served (other than you being able to kill people with impunity) by removing restrictions on, say P90s or RPGs?
If your intent is to have the means (and the desire?) to kill lots of people, then I get your point.
But if you wish to live in a free, peaceful society based on the rule of law (rather than the rule of the gun), I don't see your point at all.
As a (small 'l') libertarian, I note that I can only exercise my liberties freely in a society governed by the rule of law.
Having folks around with the means and will to kill anyone they feel like in large numbers isn't a libertarian principle.
Rather, it's a delusional state fed by this idea that your whole life is only the result of your actions, when 200,000+ years of human existence shows us that liberty comes from collective action to protect those liberties.
Having a bazooka doesn't make you more free. Nor is it a "right" per se.
What gives us liberty is the actual work required to maintain a free society.
"I've got guns, so back off asshole!" isn't a libertarian idea. Rather, it's a backward, "might makes right" authoritarian idea.
If you want to be completely isolated from other humans, go ahead and do whatever you want. But if you're going to live in a society, you need to work with your fellow members of that society to maximize individual rights and liberty.
What you propose does none of those things and are more appropriate to a street gang or mafia. Or is that your desire?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons" means something, doesn't it? "Self defense" is nowhere in the constitution either but that didn't stop this court's radical right wing from establishing it as some kind of new right.
> Because there is an explicit provision on guns in the constitution. No mention of or allusion to abortion in the constitution. If the US wants to protect abortion through the constitution, they are free to do so. The US constitution has been amended many times. But that takes an even broader consensus.
The constitution is short and vague on many things. People read between the lines. That's just as true of abortion as it if of gun rights.
If you read the constitutions as written, there is no right for individuals to have guns. It's very clear, this is for organized militias. If you read the constitution as written most of what the federal government does today isn't allowed, it's all mostly approved by an incredibly wide reading of the commerce clause.
The Court is picking and choosing rights. They force Maine to give priority to their religion, they force California/NY/MA to give priority to their gun rights, they force everyone to abandon reproductive rights. That's a choice in how to interpret a very vague document.
>The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State) and its operative clause (the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed).
You are picking and choosing an out of context citation and twisting what the 2nd amendment means.
"Many historians agree that the primary reason for passing the Second Amendment was to prevent the need for the United States to have a professional standing army. At the time it was passed, it seems it was not intended to grant a right for private individuals to keep weapons for self-defense."
So no. Your quote is not what the 2nd amendment means at all! It is a modern twist reinterpreting it.
The key question as it pertains to the law isn't the intent, but the meaning of the words (informed by context, intent, etc). It is the meaning of the words written that form the law, and the meaning of the words is clear. The operative clause clearly is not limited to the context of a standing army.
>They force Maine to give priority to their religion,
They force Maine to not discriminate against religious schools. Maine can choose to not pay private schools at all or Maine can choose to pay all private schools.
Maine is not allowed to say that the local Catholic school is bad but a non religious local school is good. That is, in effect government choosing that religion is bad.
> they force California/NY/MA to give priority to their gun rights
They force CA/NY/MA to follow the guidelines the court has set around the 2nd amendment. Notably in this case, you can not require someone to prove they have a need to exercise a right.
The NY law stated that you had to prove you needed a gun in order to get a license. That is opposite of how a right works. Let's re-frame this as a 1st amendment issue.
There is a large amount of misinformation in the world, this is causing civil unrest and issues(i.e. vaccine, elections). When the constitution was written, the founders could not conceive the internet, radio and TV or even large scale printing presses. Therefor, in order for you to publish a book or post a comment on a site that has to possibility of receiving over 200 views, you need to submit an application to your city hall in order to do so.
We would call any such law absurd on it's face.
>they force everyone to abandon reproductive rights.
They are doing the opposite of forcing. They are saying that each state has the ability to decide what rights their citizens have.
This is not in conflict with the earlier gun control decision as the 2nd amendment defines the gun rights at the federal level. The supreme court has not found any text that defines reproductive rights at the federal level.
As has been pointed out by others the NY law was arbitrary. The local law man decided if you were worthy of getting a concealed permit. This would be like if the local law man decided if area women were worthy to be allowed an abortion.
The US would be better with fewer guns, but this was a badly written law.
Well, really, any state that has a similar law on the books. But yesterday's ruling was specifically about a NY law. CA and many other states will also be impacted.
>Well, really, any state that has a similar law on the books. But yesterday's ruling was specifically about a NY law. CA and many other states will also be impacted.
I'd also note that the Sullivan Act[0] was put into law 111 years ago, and was perfectly fine until last week.
SB-8 helped create a framework for bypassing constitutional “rights” and I think it’s time that California, with its direct democracy, bans guns altogether.
The supreme court just said abortion is not constitutionally protected so SB-8 isn't bypassing constitutional rights.
You might disagree with the court, but that doesn't matter since any law similar to SB-8 related to guns would be handled by that court.
That said, I think CA/NY and others should absolutely do it. They should be super aggressive and start using the tactic created in SB-8 on all kinds of issues if for no other reason than the ridiculousness of relying on civilian enforcement of laws.
You know they won't just magically disappear right? They will still exist en masse. Guns are mostly banned in Mexico, but the cartels use them to control the government. Careful what you wish for.
That view was NOT reflected by this same Supreme Court the other day when they threw out New York’s concealed carry limiting law.
States rights? Ha.
Hypocrisy and blatant power grabs by the Federalist Society .
Shameful and likely the downfall of America.
Such extreme power grabs continue to be railroaded through by an extreme right wing unconcerned with the 300 million living Americans whose rights they are stomping upon.
1) we must eliminate the filibuster.
2) we must eliminate the electoral college
3) we must impeach the seditious conspiracy and cut the head off the snake that spawned it. The federalist society must be investigated for installing Supreme Court judges and we must impeach every last one of these criminals.
Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh are also both subject to serious sexual crimes accusations that were steamrolled right over by the Republican juggernaut.
We cannot allow this theocracy-in-waiting gain absolute power, and to ignore their machinations to this end is no longer possible.
This is a really poor comparison and shows a major lack of understanding of process. For better or worse, gun rights are specifically guaranteed by the constitution, abortion rights are not.
California needs to separate into more States, or people should move to help turn Red States purple.
Edit: Since HN is rate-limiting me. There have been proposals that try to either give a Red State advantage, in particular, the electoral college. However, California could reasonably be split into 7 states (2 Red, 5 Blue) that would still have greater populations than Utah, netting +3 sets of Senators.
Jefferson would mostly be blue. The emerald triangle is left/libertarian and a lot of boomers there have no access to Fox News and are still salty about the time Regan landed a helicopter on their ranch to shoot up their weed crop. Jefferson only sounds red because only crazy right wingers with hybrid Confederate/Jamaican flags on their trucks support the idea. The reality is they would still need to live and vote with their neighbors who drive Subarus.
I don't know how true that is. It's hard to say which counties "would be" in that state since it will never exist, and some of the counties which its supporters say would be included have already affirmatively rejected the idea, such as Lake County. But as for the supposed California counties, the Trumpy ones like Shasta went 2:1 for Trump in 2020 while the large "blue" ones like Butte went 50/50. The ludicrously empty ones like Modoc were 3:1 Trump in 2020.
Jefferson will never ever happen because there's no mechanism for it to happen, and because it would be by far the poorest state with the absolute worst economy in the nation, so I'm not even sure why we should discuss it.
Oh and by the way the Jefferson plan specifically excludes the Emerald Triangle.
I'm not necessarily opposed to splitting California into multiple states, but if we do that then we should also split Texas, Florida, and New York because they have comparable population sizes. In order to split a state, both the state's Legislature and Congress (both House and Senate) would have to vote in favor. So it's possible, but politically difficult to get all three of those bodies to agree.
This is always such a non-sense argument. The civil war showed that you can't secede and lose the battle. Do you think the Federal government would start a bombing campaign against the People's Republic of California? No. Would there be some really uncomfortable trade negotiations? Yes.
Texas v. White established that states cannot unilaterally leave.
Would the federal government carpet bomb a state that tried? No. But there are other means to exert force and stop secession. Besides, the U.S. Government has no reason to ever willingly let California (or Texas, or really any state) leave the union, so why would they ever sit down at the negotiating table?
Then they would be at a stalemate/armistice much like the Koreas. How would the Feds trade with PRC? They'd have to either allow it full market access as a wayward child, which would mean PRC would get all the benefits of trade without having to pay Federal tax, or they would have to freeze out PRC, which would damage the Federal economy. Given California's economic pull around the world, I could see a great number of countries in the West aligning with them for "freedom reasons".
> I see a minority (less than 30% of Americans agree with this) enforcing social views on the majority- and it will not stop here
It depends on how you define "this." Polls that ask "do you support Roe v. Wade are useless because it's a legal decision and the public doesn't necessarily understand its legal effect. More granular polls show that the public is on both sides of Roe. Most Americans support some sort of abortion right, but most Americans also think that right should be narrower than Roe: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort.... In particular, 2/3s of Americans think that second trimester abortions should be generally illegal, but under Roe's trimester framework, there is a nationwide right to elective abortions in the second trimester.
> This ruling is disastrous and shows the capriciousness of the current court in interpreting precedent to mean whatever is popular with their party. The 14th can amendment be limited but the second cannot
The difference is not the Court's "capriciousness" but instead the text of the Second Amendment, which specifically addresses the "right to bear arms," versus the text of the 14th amendment, which says absolutely nothing about "privacy" or "abortion" or anything of the sort.
It's disingenuous beyond belief to try and make a false equivalency between an expressly enumerated right written into the Constitution 233 years ago, with one divined from "penumbras" and "emanations" of the Constitutional text in the mid-20th century.
> It depends on how you define "this." Polls that ask "do you support Roe v. Wade are useless because it's a legal decision and the public doesn't necessarily understand its legal effect. More granular polls show that the public is on both sides of Roe.
None of this supports that the 14th amendment’s right to privacy under the due process clause doesn’t exist though?
> It's disingenuous beyond belief to try and make a false equivalency between an expressly enumerated right written into the Constitution 233 years ago, with one divined from "penumbras" and "emanations" of the Constitutional text in the mid-20th century.
Sure, we can ignore the well regulated militia clause as meaningless, everyone seems to. Then, to pick another example of capriciousness, my understanding is that this court ruled in Egbert v. Boule and that the explicit right against unreasonable search and seizure in the 4th amendment should actually be interpreted that there is no right to sue the government for redress of these violations, only the complaint processes that government agencies provide to decide the unreasonableness for themselves. There is another 233 year old amendment being so narrowly interpreted to slowly defang it while another “shall not be infringed”
> ...under Roe's trimester framework, there is a nationwide right to elective abortions in the second trimester
Dobbs overturns both Roe and Casey, which replaced Roe's trimester framework with the undue burden standard [1]. Trimesters are completely irrelevant. Please learn this; I feel like half of your abortion comments push this in order to setup your 2/3s Gallup stat, which is also problematic.
> and something 2/3s of Americans oppose
We've also talked about this before. Here are some countervailing stats from the same poll [2]:
- Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision concerning abortion, or not?: 53% No, not overturn
- If the Supreme Court were to overturn its 1973 Roe versus Wade decision concerning abortion, it would mean there is no constitutional protection for abortion rights and each state could set its own laws to allow, restrict or ban abortions. Do you think overturning Roe versus Wade would be a good thing or a bad thing?: 63% bad thing
- Do you favor or oppose [A ban on abortions after the 18th week of a pregnancy]?: 56% oppose
18 weeks is well into the 2nd trimester. Again as we've discussed before, polling on abortion is very difficult. Mostly they show Americans' ignorance of the issue, which you even acknowledge.
In particular, most Americans don't know that providing elective abortion access is crucial as so many things can go wrong--especially in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters [3]--and you really can't enumerate them all.
Why do people have second trimester abortions? Ironically, it's mostly an access issue [4], but there are other reasons [5] [6]:
- microcephaly and other fetal anomalies are typically only detectable in the 2nd trimester
- many people can't get the time off or can't get the funds (abortion is expensive for many people)
- waiting periods can force people into the 2nd trimester
- delayed recognition of pregnancy and delayed confirmation of pregnancy with a pregnancy test
- logistical delays occurred in arranging insurance to pay for the abortion
- problems locating a provider and time lost due to an inappropriate initial referral (abortion clinics are busy)
Your argument is that Dobbs moves the US closer to what Americans want by making "that right... narrower than Roe." But in truth, we already mostly have what Americans want [7]:
- 79.3% of abortions were performed at ≤9 weeks’ gestation
- nearly all (92.7%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation
And the other 7.3% aren't due to evil or cruelty, they're the result of the US' restrictive abortion regime and intense tragedy.
And what Dobbs does is not to preserve the right to abortion in the first trimester, but to give States the power to proscribe it. Here's what the dissent says [8]:
"Today, the Court discards that balance. It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs."
This is plainly not what Americans want. If your argument against Roe is that it was out of step with public opinion, mustn't you also level that argument against Dobbs?
"Other things the Supreme Court has blocked state law using the same logic as roe v Wade (due process of the 14th amendment[0]) on are blocking contraception bans (grisewald), overturning anti-sodomy laws (lawrence), and giving equal protection to gay marriage (obergafel)."
One odd thing about this is that there is another case with the same 14th amendment reasoning which no one seems to be discussing: Loving v. Virginia (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/395).
I wonder if that's because Clarence and Ginni Thomas have been committing miscegenation for years?
No, it's because Loving v. Virginia has a clear textual basis in the 14th amendment's Equal Protection Clause, while Roe and Griswold are divined from "penumbras" and "emanations" using the hook of the 14th amendment's Due Process Clause. Loving v. Virginia relied on both bases, but the Equal Protection rationale would have been adequate standing alone.
If Slaughterhouse is reopened, do you think the right will see the attempt to resurrect privileges or immunities (as per RBG) and raise (counter) with the holding against birthright citizenship in it?
The equal protection clause is different from the due process clause, and Thomas can easily split his decision over that. As an originalist too, he would likely ask if the 14th amendment was meant to protect the rights of black people to at the time, and it was clearly meant to protect the rights of recently freed slaves so it isn’t much of a stretch, you can basically trip into this interpretation.
So I think he would be wholly unbothered making that distinction, knowing that _his_ rights are protected under a different clause. I guess it does show some of the fragility of judicial precedent, you could imagine an even more conservative justice who was not Thomas restricting the interpretation of this clause to mean only the narrow rights the majority of people in 1868 would have liked and not include miscegenation through some horribly tortured logic. But Thomas can draw the line before that and after himself.
You have problems eating thinking of "`races` mixing" ?
What about this: the entire humanity is, that is all specimen, including yourself, is the outcome of in and outbreeding between countless ethnies, groups of different skin colors, cultures and even religion/folklore followers.
If you have a digesting problem with this, we may just call it nature but your comment is what could put many not at ease. That being said, I would at least guess we agree on the ruling that it gets us closer to nature and some commonly accepted ethic with regards to human life and procreation.
I support your position, but I'm pretty sure he was cracking a tasteless joke at the thought of the specific people of Clarence and Ginni getting it on rather than all people of mixed races.
It's a reddit-level comment that doesn't add anything to the discussion.
> Other things the Supreme Court has blocked state law using the same logic as roe v Wade (due process of the 14th amendment[0]) on are blocking contraception bans (grisewald), overturning anti-sodomy laws (lawrence), and giving equal protection to gay marriage (obergafel).
Also, non-discrimination in public schooling, with mandatory integration (Brown) but even before integration was understood to be essential (Plessy, permitting “separate but equal” education.) Without substantive due process, state public education which is separate by race and makes no pretense of equality would be fine. Also, the incorporation of much of the Bill of Rights as applicable against the states, as a whole.
Substantive due process is enormous, and Thomas has explicitly stated that the entire jurisprudence in that domain should be uprooted in his concurrence on Dobbs.
(Ironically, this includes the applicability of the 2nd Amendment to the State.)
"This is a small minority that just needs 51% of voter turnout"
I'm unclear what definition of "minority" you are using here. That sounds like a majority to me.
Comparing with poll numbers is not an apples-to-apples comparison. A lot of polls are highly motivated to support a particular outcome, but when you look into the details and ask questions a number of different ways, you get a more complex picture.
For instance, if you ask "how long should elective abortions be legal?" you may get an answer that seems to contradict "do you support Roe?". And then if you start to define "elective" (or even use different words) you might get a different answer still. I'm not saying which one is the "right" question to ask, but I am saying that it's not reasonable to reject actual vote totals in a free and fair election.
> I'm unclear what definition of "minority" you are using here. That sounds like a majority to me.
It is a majority of a smaller area but the minority of the larger area. Majority of a gerrymandered district for state representation. Majority of a purple state senate race, or one that has winner take all electoral vote allocation, as most do.
And of course, majority in Texas when the views held there are a minority for the overall country but they still pass laws letting people bring charges in Texas courts for abortions, even performed outside of Texas by people without representation in Texas state legislature, though I have some hope that this is a bridge too far even for the current partisan 6-3 court. No reason they wouldn’t allow it here while saying it couldn’t be used as precedent as many members for the current court argued in Bush v Gore.
> "Where you see delegating to the states, I see a minority (less than 30% of Americans agree with this) enforcing social views on the majority".
That's not true, only 26% of Americans support abortion in almost all cases. Most support some sort of restriction. This ruling forces the States to determine what those restrictions are.
This is an extremely complicated and nuanced cultural issue. The debate that's happening now is one that was cut short by Roe—one that the rest of the West has had. Few other countries allow abortion with "no restrictions". States should be allowed to decide, individually, where they want to draw the line.
I'll add that this is in no way an endorsement of an anti-choice position. But there's no way to view this as "a minority enforcing social views on the majority."
The primary civic problem in this country is the neutering of our State and Federal legislatures. The Courts should not be legislating. The Executive should not be legislating. Force our Representatives to do their damn jobs.
> The primary civic problem in this country is the neutering of our State and Federal legislatures. The Courts should not be legislating. The Executive should not be legislating. Force our Representatives to do their damn jobs.
This is just another symptom of the disease of the disproportional representation everywhere in our systems, most importantly the senate. The senate confirmed (or in the case of Garland, refused to confirm) these justices, and the senate refuses to pass laws the majority of Americans want.
> But there's no way to view this as "a minority enforcing social views on the majority."
How can you interpret the Texas law as anything but? This decision and those laws are all the product of concerted and focused lobbying and maneuvering by conservative Christian groups that make up a minority of Americans.
> This is just another symptom of the disease of the disproportional representation.
Hard disagree. Those issues have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Legislators have learned that the best way to guarantee re-election is to loudly wring your hands and ask "won't somebody do something" every election season. If they actually do their jobs, people might hold them accountable. It has zero to do with "disproportional representation".
> ...the senate refuses to pass laws the majority of Americans want.
This is by design. That's literally what a Senate is designed to do. Preventing the mob from ruling the country by popular decree.
> How can you interpret the Texas law... that make up a minority of Americans.
Because a majority of TEXANS support it: only 28% of the state thinks abortion should be legal in all or most cases [1]. You can't look at nationwide polls and make statements about local politics.
Claims about disproportional representation are almost always based on presidential election results, ignoring the midterm elections, even though the midterms are equally important for the Senate.
The 2014 election shouldn't be ignored, because it explains why Garland wasn't confirmed and Trump's appointments were. That year, Republicans won the popular vote by a margin of almost 6%, and won 9 seats in the Senate.
That election gave them control of the Senate until 2020, and that outcome was representative of the popular vote.
Nobody is enforcing social views on anybody. The Roe decision invented a Constitutional right where one did not exist, and today's decision corrected that. Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg was on record saying that the decision was flawed!
The real tragedy here is that it took 50 years for this egregiously bad ruling to be thrown out. And despite your fear mongering, today's decision went out of it's way to say that it is not meant to apply to any of those other issues that you mentioned.
The Supreme Court's job is to interpret the Constitution, not to invent rights.
> The Roe decision invented a Constitutional right where one did not exist
Bodily autonomy is not a constitutional right, but self defense is?
> Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg was on record saying that the decision was flawed!
A misrepresentation of what RBG was getting at. She was very much of the opinion that legislatively it should have been codified as a right. She's right, but it's pie in the sky, as much as her desire to be replaced by a woman President.
> today's decision went out of it's way to say that it is not meant to apply to any of those other issues that you mentioned.
Thomas specifically called out those decisions as being up for review. Alito mentioned it in his leaked opinion. (it may have been bargained out of the opinion, or maybe he chose not to be explicit as to not raise pressure in the political sphere, which seems likely given the nature of this court) Four of the justices who voted against Roe today within the past decade are on the record as saying that this was settled law. They are liars, and people are right to mistrust the court.
Exactly correct, and today's ruling still doesn't prevent Congress from acting. They had 50 years to codify Roe into law, but they didn't. And now they'll come out and try to deflect the blame onto the Supreme Court, which is beyond absurd but will work to convince a whole lot of people.
I have my own personal feelings on abortion, but as far as laws on it go I honestly don't care one way or another. So if all of these Congresspeople want to come out and say that the majority of the country wants abortion to be legal nationwide, then they need to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS and pass a law to make it so.
A law isn't enough as it will be in conflict with the consitution. A constitutional amendment is required.
To get enough Senate votes to pass a constitutional amendment, you're looking at 75% of the country voting for Democrats. Not going to happen. The Senate imbalance is ridiculous.
> you're looking at 75% of the country voting for Democrats
A constitutional amendment ought to have support from more than one party, not just Democrats. You might be able to get that if you took a more oblique approach, for example with an amendment explicitly upholding the natural right to control over one's own body, as opposed to one narrowly focused on allowing abortion.
People would argue that your natural right of control over your own body would be in conflict with the baby's right of control. Now we're back to square 1 where we're debating the limits of abortion and nothing has changed.
The fetus clearly has no right to control the mother's body, only its own[0]. Extricate it without otherwise injuring it and see if it can survive on its own, or with whatever degree of medical intervention the "pro-life" crowd is willing to pay for.
[0] Assuming fetuses had rights, of course, which is obviously absurd. That requires the capability for deliberate action and the ability and willingness to take responsibility for the effects of your actions on others. Without that you may be alive and biologically "human" but you're still more an animal than a person--at any age.
It's not 'obviously absurd' because a significant amount of the pro-life people pushing the anti-abortion rhetoric believe no abortion should be allowed and that all fetuses have rights, period. Like the fact that this debate still exists even after this constitutional amendment supposedly crosses both aisles does not fix the problem at all.
The point was that even if you take the absurd position that fetuses have rights, a constitutional right to bodily autonomy would--among other things--make it obviously unconstitutional to force the mother to continue to serve as a host against her will.
Again, they would simply either argue that the rights of the fetus supercede the rights of the mother, or that even though the mother has a right to bodily autonomy she would be committing murder and could still be put on trial for murder.
These are lines of arguments they already use. A constitutional right to bodily autonomy doesn't change the math at all.
> argue that the rights of the fetus supercede the rights of the mother
The whole point of the amendment is to make it explicit that they don't. That isn't how rights work anyway; it's never a matter of priority, one right vs. another. Any positive action which would infringe on someone else's rights is forbidden, including in particular using someone else's property, including their body, without their consent. But merely not doing anything for them--non-action--is always an option. The fetus is the one taking from the mother--that's the action. The mother merely wants this to stop. There is no conflict of rights. The fetus's rights, such as they are, are not being infringed.
> even though the mother has a right to bodily autonomy she would be committing murder
This line of argumentation would prove far too much. Refusing to serve as someone else's life support system is not murder. And again, the point of the amendment would be to make that explicit.
> The whole point of the amendment is to make it explicit that they don't. That isn't how rights work anyway; it's never a matter of priority, one right vs. another.
This is exactly how rights work, how they're debated and how the supreme court rules. Like the constitution says you have freedom of speech, but you don't have an absolute right to freedom of speech. You cannot go on someone else's property and start yelling because they have the right to kick you off, violating your right to freedom of speech.
What you're trying to do is frame it in a way that makes sense to yourself, which is great, but is not how things are decided by the judiciary. Which is my entire point: It doesn't matter if you explicitly say bodily autonomy is sacred in a constitutional amendment because ultimately the supreme court is whom interprets that. The only way you could in theory do something like this would be to have an amendment that outright says abortion is legal, but that wouldn't pass for obvious reasons.
You really need to go and try to debate more pro-life individuals because these are all things I've encountered while debating them. The idea that this line of thinking is 'too much' when that's literally what's happening in places like my current state of Texas means you really need to experience what's actually going on.
> You cannot go on someone else's property and start yelling because they have the right to kick you off, violating your right to freedom of speech.
No, that does not in any way violate your right to freedom of speech. You aren't being punished for the speech. It doesn't even matter whether you were speaking. You were violating their rights with respect to their property by trespassing, which is exactly why they can kick you out. As I said before—any action which infringes on another's rights is forbidden. That includes actions which involve speech, when they also infringe on others' rights. It's not a right to speak, it's simply recognition that speaking, per se, does not infringe on others' rights and consequently is not a just basis for punishment.
That's the natural right to freedom of speech. The 1st Amendment, of course, adds extra constraints against the government interfering with speech, which shouldn't even be necessary in the first place but that's what happens when you grant some privileged entity the power to "legitimately" infringe on people's rights with impunity–natural rights just aren't enough any more, you have to spell out when you're going to respect them and when you're going to ignore them. That's not something you have to worry about when you just do the right thing and respect natural rights all the time without making special exceptions.
> Which is my entire point: It doesn't matter if you explicitly say bodily autonomy is sacred in a constitutional amendment because ultimately the supreme court is whom interprets that.
If you assume from the start that the court will ignore the text of the law and the intent of those who ratified it and simply rule whichever way they want based on their personal feelings then I don't see any point in even having a Constitution. Or a legislature, for that matter. Or this discussion. So let's assume the court at least pretends to do its job and take the text and intent of the amendment into account. Anything less is just defeatism.
> The only way you could in theory do something like this would be to have an amendment that outright says abortion is legal, but that wouldn't pass for obvious reasons.
No, it doesn't need to mention abortion at all. An amendment stating that no person can be compelled to provide life-saving medical support to another against their will would have that effect without being specialized to just abortion. Sure, motivated individuals would try to argue their way around it, but there is no way to reconcile forcing a mother to continue a pregnancy with the mother not being compelled to serve as involuntary life support. Would the SCOTUS do their job and enforce it? Who knows. I don't have that much faith in them, to be honest. But if not, an amendment explicitly stating that abortion is a legal right wouldn't fare any better.
What's happening in Texas is equally absurd, of course. I fully expect it to get struck down eventually, if only because it involves interstate commerce and threatens the federal government's exclusive prerogatives, but it hasn't been in effect long enough yet to work through the system.
How is what I said a misrepresentation? I used the word "flawed" and I think it perfectly represents her opinion. She acknowledged that the reasoning behind it opened up the door to it being overturned, which is something that many if not most legal scholars agreed with. And she was clearly correct, as evidenced by today's ruling.
Of course she wouldn't have voted to overturn it, but I never said or meant to imply that she would have.
You might want to read the document you're talking about. It's quite explicit that the rights it mentions are not are comprehensive list, but rather a floor. Penumbra and all that.
The City of New York is not a corporation, and is one of many municipalities that has forced public employees to take the experimental immunotherapy or be fired. For the record, I have taken the experimental immunotherapy, but that has no bearing on the fact that the government should never be allowed to force people to undergo medical procedures, much less experimental ones.
To be pedantic, the City of New York is a municipal corporation. They are allowed to have conditions of continued employment. They cannot force vaccines upon anybody under the threat of jail time but they can certainly not continue to employ anybody they don't want to. NY is a right to work state.
This is such a nonsense talking point. No right that you have compels any other private citizen to do anything. You do, however, have plenty of rights that prevent people from doing things to you. And no, you don't get twist it around and say that people have to do something to prevent them from doing something to you. Sorry.
Oh sorta like how people in restaurants don't have to wash their hands. Or doctors don't have to wash their hands. And others don't have to pass their drivers license test to drive on the roads. And public school students don't have to get vaccines. And people who serve in the military don't have to get their vaccines. And factories don't have to provide safe working conditions. And landlords don't have to inspect and maintain their properties. And drivers don't have to replace their tail lights when they're busted. And you don't need to clear your sidewalk after snowstorms. And McDonald's doesn't need to keep their coffee below a certain temperature and display hot warnings on their cups.
If you'd consider for a second, you can come up with some of your own to debunk your own previous hypothesis.
There are _countless_ examples where when you want to exist within society, you must act in order to prevent harms to others.
You can when the two ways have different contexts.
> force you to take injections of experimental immunotherapies
Leaving aside the misleading "experimental" part, the bodily rights context here was "being part of a society" - this was a huge public health crisis - people not having the vaccine impacted on a greater part of society than just themselves.
The bodily rights context for abortion is "a single person".
No. You either have bodily autonomy (My body, my choice!) or you don't. For the record I happen to support abortion (and in fact think society would be better off if many of the people in Washington DC had been aborted), but I oppose hypocrisy and logical fallacies.
> You either have bodily autonomy (My body, my choice!)
You don't think there's any situations where the state (in its role of protecting society) might be ok overriding someone's bodily autonomy? That would preclude any vaccinations, prisons, etc., no?
So, the government never forced you to take a vaccine. You were only mandated to do so for employment purposes and public health. Persons are/were at risk of spreading disease to unwilling participants. Your freedom ends at my nose. Now, that being said, I agree, it was pretty heavy handed. Constitutionally breaking? Probably not.
This is using the power of the state to compel women to give birth to a child after having carried it for 9 years. Your right to alcohol and other risky behaviors is also revoked as that is child endangerment. Now what about the child for the next 18 years? That is truly constitutionally problematic.
> This is using the power of the state to compel women to give birth to a child after having carried it for 9 years.
Those women can simply get their abortion done in another state, they're not "forced" to give birth to a child in much the same way a person threatened with losing their job wasn't "forced" to get a vaccine. Hey, you said it.
You, with a straight face, are trying to say that a government restricting your rights is totally the same as the policy of an employer?
And you're telling me that a vaccine which is obscenely safe, you are more likely to die from tripping down the stairs in your own home than you are to die from the vaccine, is totally the same as childbirth? Where nearly 1000 women die every year, many are left with serious conditions, where women are left in poverty where they can't care for those children.
My position is that you cannot claim women are “forced” to give birth (they have options) if, like the parent, you claim that no one was “forced” to take a vaccine they didn’t want (they have the option of losing their job).
It’s a matter of double standards here. People get all up in arms when you point out that you can still get an abortion if you just travel out of state. But if you point out that your only way to avoid taking a vaccine you don’t want is to lose your job, well no one is “forcing” you to take it! Likewise, I say it’s disingenuous to claim you’re forced to have an unwanted child. You just have to travel to another state. That’s a helluva lot easier to swallow than losing your job.
Just drop the phrase “forced to” around abortion is all I’m saying.
Texas has specifically enabled random citizens as third parties to cripple the futures of women who get abortions across state lines by suing them in Texas civil courts.
This is a disingenous line of argument and you demean yourself with it to support an absolutely brainwormed kind of conspiracism.
There is a lot of misinformation packed in two small paragraphs. Let’s try to unpack.
First, are you aware that the right for individuals to bear arms was not considered a right by judicial opinion for most of US history until 2008? For instance, in US v Miller 1939 it was decided one didn’t have a right to own sawed off shotguns because it bore no “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” You see, many read the amendment as the right for states to have a militia, not the right for individuals to bear arms for self defense. In fact, I believe most founding father documents support that interpretation. Interpretation matters as much as the document itself.
Second, the US government hasn’t tried to force injections of experimental immunotherapies. It was no longer experimental after it achieved approval. No US government mandated the vaccine besides in situations where vaccines are already mandated. They strongly encouraged through rewards, but they always provided alternatives to requiring vaccination. For example, masking and testing have been at times adequate alternatives. The government has required vaccines for public school and the military for decades (centuries?), and it has been widely regarded as saving millions of lives, so it’s very weird that it’s an issue now. Oh right, culture war.
Actual that’s what all these cases were about. Roe v Wade- some states wanted to treat abortion as murder and control women’s bodily autonomy. Lawrence was about keeping sodomy laws which could be used to legally discriminate against gay people. Griselwald is clearly about social views on contraception.
> egregiously bad ruling to be thrown out. And despite your fear mongering, today's decision went out of it's way to say that it is not meant to apply to any of those other issues that you mentioned.
The main opinion did not rule this out, or if I did I absolutely missed it. Thomas’ solo concurring opinion calls these cases out by name as worthy of reconsideration by the court - “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”
It’s hard to take this argument seriously at all. It feels like you are not paying attention, saying everything is fine while the 14th amendment is on fire.
> today's decision went out of it's way to say that it is not meant to apply to any of those other issues that you mentioned
Thomas's opinion pretty specifically cited some of those other cases. It wasn't joined by all the others who voted with him, but then again, Kavanaugh claimed that Roe v. Wade was "settled law" during his confirmation hearing, which clearly doesn't seem to be what he's saying now. I'm not surprised that this is his real view, and I won't be in a few years if suddenly he also votes against some of those other rulings.
It turns out that the justices spoke very carefully and nothing they said precluded them from making a decision like this. Dishonest, yes. Perjury, no.
Yeah, I certainly wasn't trying to say that they committed a crime or anything; I'm just saying I'm skeptical of the claim that there's no intent to overturn those other cases mentioned just because most of the justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade didn't explicitly state it at this time.
It’s not like perjury is enforceable at that level anymore anyways. I’m not a lawyer but I am not so sure he was even that careful in a legal sense. I think he was mostly saying things to not give a sound byte to opponents who would block his nomination like Bork. The conservatives who backed his nomination know the game and what he was put on the court to rule on, they don’t need to be told again. Enough to wink at it.
There isn’t any actual legal teeth there anymore as far as I can tell. Countless examples of presidents, justices, etc walking past perjury charges.
"The right to abortion is not explicitly defined in the Constitution, and therefore does not exist."
"The right to _purchase_ firearms is not explicitly defined in the Constitution, but somehow must also exist, because how could you bear arms without it?"
The sad reality is that this shit is all just twisted to convenience.
Why did Thomas exclude interracial marriage as a state decision, while calling out same-sex marriage as being a state decision?
Why do several Supreme Court Justices state that they are originalists, and the Constitution is sacrosanct, when the people who wrote it said that it wasn't, and was to be "reviewed and updated to the needs of the times as a living document"?
There's no way to interpret the Constitution without "inventing rights" since time moves forward. The founders knew we had progress so they built in ways of accounting for that such as the 9th amendment. The problem only comes when people ignore progress and ignore the parts of the Constitution they don't agree with to dismantle rights they don't like.
> The Roe decision invented a Constitutional right where one did not exist,
So did the ninth amendment, FWIW: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Appelate courts decide on what a "right" is. That's arguably their most important function. Huge, huge chunks of modern constitutional law are based on subjects not enumerated in the constitution. The constitution doesn't speak about miscegenation laws, or miranda rights, etc... Yet those are still "rights" that you'd be awfully horrified to have destroyed, right?
This argument doesn't really work, basically. The argument you're making is, if you really think about it, not what you actually want.
No, you still have the right to remain silent. You still have the right to an attorney. They removed (rather, neutered) the notification requirement; the police aren't required to tell you your rights. That's bad, but not remotely as bad as legalizing forced interrogation without representation.
Exactly, there is no miranda right (miranda being the notification of your right to remain silent and obtain an attorney).
And there is, as of yesterday, no remedy for violations of your right to remain silent. So, you better hope your lawyer can have anything you say suppressed before trial.
> there is, as of yesterday, no remedy for violations of your right to remain silent.
Explain this, please. You still have the right to remain silent, you still have the right to an attorney. The police still have to stop questioning you when you invoke these rights. Literally the only thing that changed was the notification requirement. That's it.
Basically, the Court removed any remedy against state actors who fail to uphold your right to remain silent.
Prior to Vega, if the state ignored your right to remain silent, you could seek redress with the courts.
Post Vega, that right to seek redress no longer exists.
On paper we still have the right. But, we have to no way to hold the state accountable when it fails to uphold that right. Is a right really a right if the state can ignore it with impunity?
The right you keep referring to is the right to be notified of your rights. You are blatantly incorrect in continually stating that there is any change at all in your right to remain silent, or remedies against state actors who violate it.
You can still sue a cop who continues questioning you after you have invoked your right to remain silent. Literally nothing about that has changed. The one specific thing that has changed is that you can't sue a cop simply for failing to read you your rights.
That does not impact your right to remain silent, or any remedies available in case of violation of it, in any way.
From the parent post:
The constitution doesn't speak about ... miranda rights... Yet those are still "rights" that you'd be awfully horrified to have destroyed, right?
And my response:
I have some bad news for you. SCOTUS blew that one up yesterday.
There is no longer a right to be Mirandized. That's what I said.
Officer Vega locked Tekoh in a room and threaten him and his family in order to coerce a confession.
That confession was used in the trial.
Are you saying there is some other way to recover damages from Vega? At best, had Tekoh been found guilty, he was looking at years of appeals. He still wouldn't have been able to sue Vega under the current ruling.
As I said above, yes, you still have the right to remain silence. But you no longer have a way to seek redress against a LEO who ignores that right.
No, it can't. Literally the only thing that changed is that you can't sue a cop for not reading the Miranda warning to you. Your actual Miranda rights are unchanged, and cops still have to read the warning.
> And despite your fear mongering, today's decision went out of it's way to say that it is not meant to apply to any of those other issues that you mentioned.
Oh you read the whole judgement?
Perhaps you missed this nugget on page 118
> For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell.
Thomas wasn't part of the majority? He wrote a concurring opinion - he agrees with the main decision and went out of his way to further explain his thoughts, including that he disagrees with any of the rights created under the auspices of due process. But, he conveniently left Loving v Virginia off the list, which was also decided (partially) on due process grounds - I guess he's not quite so sure about his principles that he'd blow up his own marriage.
quite a bit, the votes are likely there to overturn those things as well.
what thomas did is a little gauche, the court generally avoids opining on cases that aren't actually in front of them because the facts and specifics of the case matter, but, yeah, the votes are probably there, thomas just likes to say the quiet part out loud.
who do you think is going to vote against it? thomas, who has outright stated he's a yes? kavanaugh, who said roe was "settled law"? Barrett, the actual handmaiden cultist? Alito?
Thankfully the founders had some thoughts on "inventing rights".
"Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Bodily autonomy is more complex than just womb to birth. So, at what age is a mother no longer required to use their body to provide life for a child? ie. If a 4 year old needs a blood transfusion, can the state force the mother to provide their blood for their child? What about a kidney transplant? When does the states interest in the potential life of a child end?
Bodily autonomy aside, since Rowe v. Wade was primarily a decision about medical privacy, and was part of the foundations of many other precedents and laws, is HIPA still valid? What is the new line between medical privacy rights and free speech rights.
> since Rowe v. Wade was primarily a decision about medical privacy
And it got thrown out for precisely this reason. Although cocaine can be prescribed in very limited circumstances, my doctor cannot just write me a prescription for cocaine. That's a "medical privacy" issue too, right?
The privacy portions of HIPA were a balanced between a persons right to privacy vs a persons rights to free speech. Much of the foundations of a right to medical privacy is based on Rowe V. Wade. Without a right to medical privacy, HIPA could be an unconstitutional constraint on medical personnel's rights to free speech. I'm not being absurd, the second order consequences of this ruling are going to be vast.
Second, I think you have a very deep misunderstanding of how all of this works. HIPAA is not in any danger whatsoever, and really has nothing to do with Roe.
It's complicated. States can't just limit a persons rights because they aren't explicitly enumerated in the constitution. The federal government does have an expressed interest in making sure states don't legislate away peoples rights, whether they are explicitly enumerated or not.
You don't understand how law is made. Legislation is only one source of law. Others include judicial rulings, customs and expert testimony accepted by a court.
I understand how law is made quite well, which is why I specifically said that Roe invented a "Constitutional right" and not a "law." Of course, for the last 50 years Roe was part of our law. Now it's not, because it was determined that the Constitutional right it was based on doesn't actually exist.
They are. The constitution explicitly stated that rights outside of those explicitly listed exist. The right to chose is one of those rights. There was nothing wrong with the ruling except that the supreme court majority personally disliked it
So why do I not have the right to X, where X is some random thing I want that doesn't violate the other rights?
Simply going "Oh, there are more rights" isn't a good answer. I'm pro-choice myself, but Roe vs Wade was terrible legislation, and is a fantastic example of tactical victory, strategic defeat.
Sigh, not this. The bill of rights explicitly says that there are other rights not enumerated in the constitution that exist and (presumably) need to be enforced. The whole idea of Strict Construction flies right in the face of the obvious text of the ninth amendment.
Really, why is the ninth amendment even there if it's supposed to be ignored?
No, they actually did exactly the opposite. They had to splice in a paragraph explaining how, despite all the logic in the piece seemingly being applicable to any such Strict Constructionalist argument, they really, really don't mean it and this is "only" about abortion, because... reasons, basically. It's like they put a pinkie swear into the opinion because they knew the ants nest they were stepping in.
What we actually saw was the end of stare decisis. Any excuse is good enough now. For almost three hundred years, the court only overruled itself in areas of overwhelming public consensus. Now? It's just politics, man.
Not really. Roe was one of a bunch of decisions of that era making findings of "civil rights". In particular, and libertarians like to forget this part, the core finding is actually based on the fourth amendment, and it says that no matter how firm it may believe the moral argument may be, the government doesn't have the right to decide for someone what medical procedures should be possible within her own body.
I genuinely don't understand all the HN libertarians lining up on the site of Government Power here. This is absolutely a libertarian issue. Is it just knee-jerk tribalism? Have you guys all decided you don't really care so much about individual rights? Or is it just that you don't have a uterus and are disinclined to align yourself with those who do?
Well since there is no federal statute on it, and the Constitution doesn't assign it to the federal government, it goes back to the states. That's how everything works, by default.
There's nothing in the ruling that I'm aware of that would prevent Congress from passing a law on it. But I haven't read the whole ruling, and I'm certainly not an expert. So I'm open to being shown otherwise.
Any legislation passed by congress will get challenged by the states that want to restrict abortion. This court will side with the state challenging the federal law.
The US Constitution is so thin and void of specifics that many modern ideas can be considered "unconstitutional". To interpret that is by definition inventing rights where it's not written down.
The Constitution doesn't "only talk" about militias, and doesn't mention muskets (or any other specific type of arms) at all. Indeed, muskets weren't even "state of the art" when the Constitution was written, so a belief that the Founders were only referring to them would definitely seem to be mistaken.
To me (and six Supreme Court Justices) the Constitution says you have the right to keep (own) and bear (carry) arms (firearms) and because of this, laws that put an undue burden on this right are unconstitutional.
It's important to note that 4 of the 9 justices on the court, and 4 of the 6 who voted in favor of this decision were appointed by presidents that lost the popular vote.
To say nothing of the M. Garland nomination defeated by shameless parliamentary tricks, simply refusing to bring it to a vote while rushing ACB’s nomination through in the last year of the Trump presidency.
It's important to note that most Americans don't agree on letting the states enforce this because abortion is a particularly sore issue for everyone. Pro life people believe abortion is literally murder, and therefore, no state should allow it. Pro choice people believe that banning abortion is oppression, and therefore, no state should be allowed to ban it.
That kind of suggests that the states are the right place to handle the issue.
As I wrote elsewhere, states rights has long been the motte of all kinds of minority social opinions in the Bailey. The broad consensus is being held hostage by a minority in some state legislatures, and in the senate, and has now trickled into a 6-3 Supreme Court with lifetime appointments of comparatively young justices.
As I understand it, the "correct" position that is held by the majority of Americans is that we should have safe, widely-available abortions up to about 12-16 weeks. That's how it is in Europe. Right now, we have two parties full of nutjobs: one party wants state-subsidized free abortions available up to point of birth, and the other party wants to completely ban them. The reasonable group has left the building.
One member since it is a Solo opinion. Also all those other cases have a real right to privacy aspect to them because they involve acts between consenting adults. There Isaac point in pregnancy where an abortion ceases to be an act between consenting adults and instead becomes a conspiracy to kill a minor and where that point is needs to be legislated rather than conjured out of thin air by the judiciary. I say this as someone who is a big fan of abortions (they have killed so many future criminals if skewed the crime stats, which is awesome.) because I am an even bigger fan of the constitution.
> Where you see delegating to the states, I see a minority (less than 30% of Americans agree with this)
Provide the source and the question that was asked on it. The majority of Americans think it should be up to the states, whether the state is for or against
Trigger laws in places like Oklahoma make it illegal in basically all cases after fertilization. Texas law is going to let Texans sue people for providing or getting abortions out of state. Framing this as a states rights issue didn’t work for slavery, segregation, gay rights, etc and it won’t work for women’s reproductive rights either.
> CNN reported the number has never been above 36% for “should roe v wade be overturned”
the poll said "completely overturned", which is the more radical position. roe v wade being completely overturned is not the same as "delegating to the states" per your original comment, because the federal protection could be weakened to only support specific cases or require an earlier termination which would leave more room for state laws.
You're framing the issue in a way that's misleading, because while the majority of americans oppose completely overturning roe, another majority could support weakening roe or limiting it to specific cases
Could you please at least do two minutes of research before coming in here with this take, using a brand-new burner junk account no less?
This is the most polled issue in American politics and has been for half a century. We know with certainty that a large majority of the public supports abortion rights. We don't need to talk about what "another majority could support". That theory has been shot down thousands of times over the last 50 years.
For republican-leaning women (which will be white women based on the female black vote numbers), it is basically 50-50 in support/opposition for Roe V Wade. For Dem-leaning it is 85-15 roughly.
Roe V Wade is the most important women's right won in the courts in the last 50 years, and women voted to overturn it effectively.
Finally, this is the culmination of the liberal justices refusing to step down or retire. Ruth Baider Ginsburg is held up as a pinnacle of feminism, and yet her stubbornness to continue serving despite health problems and battles with cancer resulted in Trump getting a crucial third justice.
The most stalwart feminist justice handed the overturn of Roe V Wade to a president with a known record for sexual impropriety if not outright assault.
Obama sat on Merrick Garland.
The baby boomer generation ushered in sexual freedom when it was their time to be young and free, and then shut the door on it in their old age crapping over all the other generations.
For the record, Ginsburg thought that Roe vs Wade was a mistake, for this exact reason. Momentum was lost to get actually good legislation in, and the vulnerable Roe vs Wade was put in instead.
She wanted a privileges or immunities clause (in 14th Amendment) based argument instead. The issue there is that reopening the Slaughterhouse cases (which shut that line of questioning down) will reopen the obiter dicta therein on birthright citizenship. Pick one, abortion or birthright citizenship?
This court will never say a federal law allowing abortion is constitutional. Thomas is 74 and Alito is 72. A lot of stars need to align so that anything can be done about this. The lone thing I see changing the calculus is if women in red states stage a mass protest by actually moving to blue states in massive numbers.
> mass protest by actually moving to blue states in massive numbers
That actually makes the problem worse. You can't undo this without changing the court. You can't change the court without the senate and you can't get the senate of team blue continues to isolate it self in a handful of states.
In what way would it not be constitutional? Wouldn't a petitioner have to cite the preexisting implied rights or explicit laws violated in order for the case to even have standing?
Doesn’t your argument apply also to state abortion legalization laws under equal protection? Are those getting struck down? I haven’t been keeping up with this topic.
Republicans have been floating a national ban on abortions; if the Republicans take the legislature in November, it is likely to be the first item on the agenda.
This ruling has zero effect in my state where abortion is protected under the state constitution, and there’s near zero chance of a constitutional convention being formed in my lifetime, much less enough consensus being found at such a meeting.
I'd imagine if you combined the age demographic information, the female vote that may actually be able to get pregnant and so be affected by this is going to swing even harder away from Trump.
The combined male and female vote swings 30% to the red between the 18-29 and 65+ demographics.
Also, what happens with rape victims? Or you know, women often know about their pregnancy weeks after the event?
Also, you are literally less likely to die from donating your kidney then a women giving birth. Do you really have no empathy whatsoever? Giving birth is brutal, you have a no matter how disgusting it is to write but technically a parasite growing inside you sucking out every resource you have causing often life altering changes. And we are not even at birthing.
I am also a guy by the way, but that is exactly why I believe that the only opinion we should have on the issue is to listen to women, and the only voice we should have is to shout over old men deciding on a topic not concerning them.
They should be able to get an abortion. I'm not anti-abortion in all cases.
> Also, you are literally less likely to die from donating your kidney then a women giving birth. Do you really have no empathy whatsoever? Giving birth is brutal, you have a no matter how disgusting it is to write but technically a parasite growing inside you sucking out every resource you have causing often life altering changes. And we are not even at birthing.
Let me quote a paragraph from [0]:
When a woman is pregnant, the situation is different. In the usual case, where pregnancy did not result from sexual assault, the child himself, and his need for shelter and nourishment in the womb, is a direct result of actions taken voluntarily by both parents. The need to live in the mother’s uterus for approximately forty weeks is also not an extraordinary measure, in the way that the term is generally used. It is a basic human need — every single person who has ever been born required it. Just as the newborn has a specific claim against his parents due to the fact that they created him in all his helplessness, so too did he have a claim against them before he was born, for the same reason. It is true that the heavier burden falls on the mother during the prenatal period. Men simply cannot directly provide what their children need during the first forty weeks of their lives. (I would advocate requiring fathers to indirectly provide as much as they can by compensating mothers for their medical bills, lost work time, and other expenses during pregnancy.) The fact that women must shoulder more of the parental obligation during pregnancy than men is regrettable, but does not negate the obligation.
If someone claims that “women will always need abortion,” note the implicit assumptions. The first is that our ability to bear children is, and always will be, a handicap. The second is that we can never hope for our society to adequately adjust to the needs of mothers so that women will not feel the need to abort. The third is that violence against certain of our fellow human beings is an acceptable, even necessary way to solve social problems.
[...] But I find the acceptance of abortion as a response to a sexist society to be inconsistent with humanist ideals. Humanism values the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. It affirms that moral standards should be based on the effect of our actions on our fellow human beings. It embraces the use of reason and repudiates the use of violence to settle disputes. Abortion is an ancient, backwards practice which is not worthy of those ideals. Legal or not, we must progress beyond it.
> I am also a guy by the way, but that is exactly why I believe that the only opinion we should have on the issue is to listen to women, and the only voice we should have is to shout over old men deciding on a topic not concerning them.
Oh please, not this argument again. First of all, there are women who are also against abortion, this has nothing to do with "old men". Second of all, we are all human and are capable of empathy (well, except the psychopaths) and just because you are not a woman doesn't mean that you can't reason about things that affect women.
> The need to live in the mother’s uterus for approximately forty weeks is also not an extraordinary measure, in the way that the term is generally used. It is a basic human need
Just as possibly the most basic human right there can be - bodily autonomy.
There is no monetary help supplied by the father that can even measure up to the health implications of a pregnancy, money can’t buy/fix health.
Very convenient of you to leave out the important sentence that came before:
>> In the usual case, where pregnancy did not result from sexual assault, the child himself, and his need for shelter and nourishment in the womb, is a direct result of actions taken voluntarily by both parents.
> Just as possibly the most basic human right there can be - bodily autonomy.
You have bodily autonomy. You can choose to have or not to have sex (which may or may not lead to pregnancy). Abortion is a medical procedure and is not a human right.
On the other hand, when it came to the COVID vaccine, the Dems were very quick to ignore the bodily autonomy argument based on bogus claims.
An example from the Australian Human Rights Act:
> No-one may be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation or treatment without his or her free consent.
My neighbor had an IUD in place when she conceived a 4th child in her early 40s. The pregnancy was ectopic (or misplaced in some way) and the doctor said it would “resolve” on its own. It did not and now she has a disabled 5 year old.
while less than 30% support it, I wouldn't be surprised if the share of that 30% vote more than the other 70%. remember something like only 35% of eligible adults vote in midterm election. apathy toward our civic duty is killing our country just as much as radical polarization.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
We want curious conversation here. If you would please review the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and make your substantive points thoughtfully, we'd be grateful.
So, aren't you reinforcing his point, that the court is not a reliable place to make law? Today's decision is exactly that: the court acknowledging that its prior decision was an overstep in its power.
No, it's not. The Court has "acknowledged" no such thing.
This court will use its power however it wants. It recognizes absolutely no concept about "overstepping". It will do what it wants. That has been made abundantly clear.
Are they having sex at the border of Texas? They should probably be arrested for that. Your assertion is obviously ridiculous, traveling gay men will not be arrested simply for being gay. It’s the young gay men trapped in the state we should be concerned about. It’s really not just as easy as moving to whatever you state has the laws you like as most of us are trapped by the locality where our support networks are.
> Your assertion is obviously ridiculous, traveling gay men will not be arrested simply for being gay.
Your assertion is oblivious to the modern sensibilities of "Law and Order." Gay men will be arrested on "reasonable suspicion" of having had gay sex. And even when the suspicion is not found to be reasonable, there will be zero ramifications for the arresting officers.
Are you like....completely unaware of recent(last century) history? Like....at all??? Gay people were being arrested on charges of sodomy all the time, even if they were never caught in the act.
There is a conspicuous lack of education around modern civil rights movements. WW1 and WW2 suck the air out of the history classroom leaving room for little else. I was 35 years old when I first learned about the MOVE bombing[1] and this year years-old when I learned about the Three Articles[2] rules. Anyone else unaware of these until recently? If not, where did you learn about them?
That is definitely a bigger problem, but the original poster seemed already ready to write those people off when talking about the impact of poor red state women as a sacrifice for a democratic process. I am arguing that doesn’t give the gay couple traveling through any democratic rights and absolutely does restrict their rights. The abortion bans in Texas has ample precedent for criminalizing behavior that occurred in other states. Sodomy laws also have a history of selective enforcement specifically to persecute gay people.
While I personally have strong pro-choice views I think this was correctly decided for the reasons you state.
Abortion is a case where there is genuine disagreement among the public and at its core exists a genuine moral question. Most partisans talk past each other, but the core of it is about the rights of the unborn and at which point that becomes relevant.
It's different because of this from gay rights and contraception which don't have this other element in question (for contraception specifically those against abortion because of rights of the fetus should be in favor of easier access). It's also why European laws around this are more strict, Denmark allows abortion without cause up to 12 weeks and with cause after.[0]
It's better for these questions to be decided by states and democratic process than SCOTUS - the latter which we've seen cause extreme polarization. If you hold the view that the fetus at some point is a life with rights than the political activism here is consistent. Where this occurs I think is a legitimate question (big difference between zygote and day before birth).
There is a lot of bad faith, sloppy reasoning, and motivated reasoning arguing here from partisans across the board.
There are also real tradeoffs and young women will be the most harmed in states with bans because they have the least autonomy, but I can at least understand the strongest arguments from the other side [1]. Something like the laws in Denmark being passed at the congressional level is probably the desirable compromise outcome. At the moment at least SCOTUS thinks states cannot ban the ability to travel to a different state for abortions, the ability to exit is important.
Don't you think it's better if morality issues are left to individuals?
Don't want an abortion? Don't get one.
Care about fetus rights? Start help centers for pregnant women, engage in education and activism, provide social nets for new mothers and children. It's not like we have mandatory abortions.
To me, the abortions is similar to the right to chose to end your own life, ultimately, you can't outlaw killing yourself.
The critical difference is the individual rights of the fetus.
If you hold that at some point the fetus has rights of its own then this becomes more difficult.
I think that’s the fundamental question and what makes this issue challenging.
For a provocative example, we don’t allow infanticide to be left up to the individuals moral decision, and then suggest those that care about it engage to help stop infanticide. We decide at that point the infant has rights and we care about suffering.
I think for societal pragmatic reasons women should retain the right to terminate pregnancy even though it does result in ending a life and in some cases suffering of the unborn (depending on stage). But I don’t pretend that tradeoff isn’t a real thing, I just think that’s the best outcome on net.
I also think contraception should be widely and easily available to reduce the likelihood of this happening generally.
I can understand how a reasonable person could disagree and have stronger views about when the fetus’ individual rights should kick in.
> The critical difference is the individual rights of the fetus.
Theoretically yeah, but the stats [0] pretty much moot it. Some quick clips:
- 79.3% of abortions were performed at ≤9 weeks’ gestation
- nearly all (92.7%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation
The point here is that "nearly all" abortions occur very early in development. It's hard to imagine that something the size of a chocolate chip has "individual rights", especially when balanced against the rights of the pregnant person.
This is important because as you move through the trimesters, cases become crushingly tragic [1]. We're talking things like "we probably thought your fetus was abnormal in the 2nd trimester but you couldn't bring yourself to do it until the 3rd", cancer, fetal death, etc.
There's this myth that it's like Celebrity Deathmatch out there: women vs. babies, but the stats are clear: nearly all abortions happen in the 1st trimester, and then when they don't it's typically scheduling or something very tragic happened.
All of which should force us to ask: what's the urgent need for regulation on this?
I think the position that the zygote is where the rights start is bad. I concede it is where life starts, but life is just not a very good designation for that. If anything it should be about suffering or a nervous system - something beyond just replicating cells.
Since vast majority of abortions happen in the early stages anyway, often the late stage ones are particularly tragic situations where the mother wanted to carry the baby to term, but can't for health reasons. It's why I'm in favor of broad rights and think that despite the fact it is ending a life, we're better off on net for women to retain that capability (the state shouldn't be getting involved).
I can understand a reasonable person disagreeing and thinking at some point the fetus is developed enough and shouldn't be terminated without cause (basically the law in Denmark, France, etc.). I think that's why it's probably healthy to have this fought out democratically rather than legislated via the courts.
There isn't a constitutional right, there's a good-faith disagreement, and the finding of a constitutional right in Roe was always a bit tortured [0] and the blow back from this has been unhealthy for our democracy (imo).
This is a nuanced position that doesn't fit well into partisan politics, it's also a third rail topic - but it's where I've ultimately landed (for now).
I get where you're coming from; people who make careers out of abortion ethics zero in on conception as the question. But as you and I are playing out in this thread, it's really unsatisfying to try and answer. We don't agree on what life is, and as a result we're forced to decide what the default is:
- people are forced to give birth against their will
- people are not
Saying this is a State issue or that it should be decided legislatively ignores that this is a fundamental human rights issue for people who can become pregnant. No legislative regime should be able to force someone to give birth against their will.
There's a "but what about the rights of the fetus" argument, but here again you're faced with two unsatisfying possibilities:
- you allow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the pregnant person, thus subsuming the right of life of the fetus to the rights of the pregnant person to self-determination based on circumstance, which is wildly inconsistent
- you allow no exceptions, which is wildly extreme
So again, granting individual rights to a fetus is a radical position that our society largely won't accept. It moots the conception of "when does life begin", or, I would actually argue that society has pretty much decided this already:
- Society does not support killing children
- Society supports abortion in the case of rape, incest, or to save the life of the pregnant person
- Society agrees abortion does not kill a child
(again see here that deciding that a fetus is a child if it was not the result of rape/incest, or its carrier will survive the pregnancy is wholly irrational)
> "you allow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the pregnant person, thus subsuming the right of life of the fetus to the rights of the pregnant person to self-determination based on circumstance, which is wildly inconsistent"
I'd actually push back on this - I don't think it's that inconsistent. There's obviously a real different between a fetus at various stages of development and a child, but that doesn't mean it has to be binary yes or no. It's possible to try to have policy that understands the tradeoffs here and tries to get the best outcome we can despite them even though it's messy. It's why I think "life" isn't the right determinant.
So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.
That said, again my personal position is it's better on net for society to allow women full discretion here - but I don't think these kinds of casual constraints are irrational or inconsistent.
> I'd actually push back on this - I don't think it's that inconsistent. There's obviously a real different between a fetus at various stages of development and a child, but that doesn't mean it has to be binary yes or no.
Oh, I personally believe that and I think most people do. Sorry, maybe we've lost the plot on this a little:
> The critical difference is the individual rights of the fetus.
I argue that society has already decided this. Nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. This is all squarely within what Americans support.
> I think that's why it's probably healthy to have this fought out democratically rather than legislated via the courts.
I argue that the constitutional rights of the embryo/fetus (such as they are) do not outweigh the constitutional rights of the pregnant person. If someone thinks an embryo/fetus has rights, they have to contend with a bunch of unpalatable things [0] (criminalizing many popular forms of birth control, IVF, the morning after pill, miscarriages, stillbirths, etc.). At the most extreme end--personhood--they have to either defend a brutal no exceptions regime, or an inconsistent exceptions regime where you're deciding whether or not an embryo/fetus is alive based on some irrelevant circumstances.
> So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.
But again, I also argue that society has already decided this. We actually agree with the current regime: nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. Why do we need to punt this to the States? Why are States rushing to put stricter and stricter controls on abortion?
The answer is that Republicans fomented a moral panic in the 70s in order to pull evangelical votes. They proceeded to push misinformation into the public about abortion, the kind of people who get abortions, and why they get abortions. This distorted the public view. Again, in reality the state of abortion is what the vast majority of Americans support. There's no need for this to be an issue anywhere. It's a wedge issue pushed by a craven political party in order to gain power. That's literally the beginning and end of it.
> - people are forced to give birth against their will
Birth is caused by pregnancy. Pregnancy is caused by sex.
There’s a simple way to avoid being “forced” to carry a pregnancy to term: either don’t have sex, or use one of the many contraceptive methods - use two if you are really worried!
Yes this doesn’t work in all cases, in cases of rape for instance - but that is why abortion laws often make exceptions for rape, fetal abnormality, risk to life of the mother, etc. Abortion is not the binary black-and-white issue that is presented in American politics, most countries have quite some nuance in their law on abortion.
Returning to the case of merely undesired pregnancies, restricting those abortions does not force anybody to do anything, it commits them to the logical consequence of their action that resulted in the creation of a new human.
Balancing the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn is the responsibility of the law. It is not satisfactory to cede all rights to the mother, nor to cede all rights to the unborn child, as the two extremist positions in the US seem to want to do.
Oklahoma's ban doesn't have such exceptions. None of the new trigger bans allow for abortion in the event of fatal fetal abnormality. These laws don't countenance the facts of pregnancy; instead they essentially frame it as slut shaming, which you're also doing here. Contraception fails. People are assaulted. Pregnancies often go awry. The issue transcends promiscuity.
Roe and Casey actually both balanced the state's interest in fetal life with the mothers liberty, Roe with the trimester framework and Casey with the viability line. I urge you to actually read them.
the unborn have no rights. their existence is attached to an already autonomous and free human being. I can choose to kill the bacteria in my body. I can choose to kill a parasite. I can choose to kill an unborn fetus.
Gender as separate from sex is not a thing. Those links are supposed medical professionals (there is no evidence a medical professional wrote that feces, actually) who should know better spinning in circles and bending backwards to contort reality to fit "how cultural groups see themselves", apparently referring to the one mass-deluded cultural group that invented the concept of sex-independent gender.
>science
What you call "Science^TM", I actually call a bunch of ideologically motivated sophistry with no hard evidence behind it. Science isn't based purely on authority, a bunch of "Science^TM" organisations spouting nonsense on their public facing web page doesn't make the nonsense science, it just reduces the organisations' credibility.
>politeness
Politeness is just what true believers call conformity. Its not a good trait to be polite to delusions.
I also find it amusing you invoke politeness on what is supposedly to be a factual matter. Is it a matter of "politeness" to say the earth is round?
> What you call "Science^TM", I actually call a bunch of ideologically motivated sophistry with no hard evidence behind it. Science isn't based purely on authority, a bunch of "Science^TM" organisations spouting nonsense on their public facing web page doesn't make the nonsense science, it just reduces the organisations' credibility.
Science has prestige nowadays, so many people (including many actual scientists!) are motivated to associate unrelated ideological positions with it in order to exploit that prestige for the benefit of those other positions. IMHO, when someone says something like "I believe in Science," they're usually talking about that unrelated ideological stuff.
>Okay. Why you do you feel the need to tell everyone that?
I hate delusions.
>women are people
I thereby propose that all nouns be cancelled, since everything in the universe is a Lump Of Atoms, we don't need any more nouns to express ourselves.
A Lump Of Atoms sat on a Lump Of Atoms to eat a Lump Of Atoms with a Lump Of Atoms on the side.
Just kidding, I know how language works. It works by assigning names to patterns. If several names are assigned to the same pattern, the most specific and distinct one is used. Women is the most distinguishing name for the pattern "people who spawn people", and refusal to use the name is associated with a lower critical thinking and higher conformity to ideological fashions.
Nor does the law treat fetus as equal to post-birth babies in other areas - You can't claim a fetus as a dependent on taxes. Now does one have to pay child support for a fetus. So what gives, christians?
It might surprise you to learn that all states have some form of laws requiring 'child support for a fetus', or more commonly, prenatal child support: https://personhood.org/2020/02/07/america-prenatal-child-sup... In many cases, proof of paternity must be established (though it's hard to argue with that.)
It might also surprise you that these laws tend to be strongly supported by Republicans. For example, this bill cosponsored by all Rs that (failed) to make it enforced Federally: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s3236
> It's hard to imagine that something the size of a chocolate chip has "individual rights", especially when balanced against the rights of the pregnant person.
Clearly it is not hard for a lot of people in the US to imagine this, since that is what they believe.
> Clearly it is not hard for a lot of people in the US to imagine this, since that is what they believe.
Well if they do, they're not acting like it. For example, miscarriages are pretty rampant. If there were a disease that affected people the same way miscarriages affect embryos and fetuses, it would be a bonkers plague that reduced our population to a a fraction of what it is. I imagine people would be acting differently than they are if we really equated humans with fetuses on this level.
Or we can go full personhood. How do we discern the will of a 14 week old fetus? What constitutes child abuse? When do child support payments start? Can fetuses sue for damages? What do their free worship rights look like? Do fetuses have a right to medical care? Can a fetus earn income and pay taxes? Do fetuses count towards population for apportionment?
I don't doubt the sincerity of people's held positions on abortion. What I do doubt is the rationality, and the more I dig into it, the more I find tons of ignorance about women, fetuses, and pregnancy.
I don't like defending opinions of straw-men, and particularly opinions I don't agree with, but I'm not sure your argument holds up. There is a important difference between a tragedy like a miscarriage versus a chosen act like having an abortion. That would be a bit like equating seeing someone being hit by a car with murder. Particularly if you come from a theological background there is a dramatic difference between a plague and a murder (not suggesting that's what abortion is, but that's the rationality).
I think fossuser got it exactly correct: there is a good-faith disagreement here. The disagreement is "when does a citizen come into existence?". This is what lawmakers are supposed to decide - we elect them to draw a line in the sand. Denmark's line seems extremely reasonable.
> There is a important difference between a tragedy like a miscarriage versus a chosen act like having an abortion.
Fair! Well, a couple things.
First, many abortions are not chosen. We can go a little further and say many conceptions are not chosen (assault), but it's a little irrelevant, so I'm just noting.
Second I'm not comparing abortions to miscarriages. I'm comparing miscarriage (a thing that affects embryos and fetuses) to a disease that affects born people. In doing so, I note the different reactions people have to miscarriage (it's natural and unavoidable) to the reactions people have to a disease that statistically killed as many born people as miscarriage kills embryos and fetuses (the vast majority of us die, it's very very bad).
To me, this is strong evidence that we value embryos and fetuses differently than born people.
How many? There is a survey floating around the Internet that asked ~2000 women in 2003 about abortion reasons, and about 80% or so said what amounted to "Pregnancy was too inconvenient". Was that updated ?
>many conceptions are not chosen
Again, how many? That same 2003 survey had 0.1% as the percentage of women who reported rape as the reason they aborted. People are arguing against the common case, the common case I'm seeing is celebrities and middle class women writing op-eds about how without abortion they would have never gotten that raise and pregnancy demolished their career.
>I'm comparing miscarriage (a thing that affects embryos and fetuses) to a disease that affects born people.
I think pro abortion folks have this common failure mode where they notice the non-linearity of the brain's moral response on abortion, and think that it points to a deeper hypocrisy or contradiction somewhere in the anti abortion stance.
Here is a couple of examples of things where people believe something but "don't act like it" :
- Vegetarians and Vegans (I'm one of them btw) believe that hundreds of millions of sentient, moral-consideration-worthy persons are murdered in the most brutal and cowardly fashion each year, and that doesn't turn them catastrophically mad or into genocidal terrorists.
- Climate Change believers (I'm one of them btw) believe that our (in)actions now is setting the stage for the death of tens of million and the suffering of hundreds of millions of human and non-human animals, as well as uncountable billions of damage in material resources. They don't seem to be doing much except shouting, just like standard politics.
- Believers in the harm of smoking (I'm... Ah screw it) think that 1.1 billion people are actively killing themselves by poisoning, and slowly poisoning those around them, 7 million people are killed each year due to this mass voluntary poisoning, more than 1/10 of WW2. And yet, I don't see any crusades (except the usual advocacy).
The point is, what you're describing isn't new. It's what I called the brain's "Non Linear Moral Response" above, your brain saturates. One death makes you cry, two deaths make you scream, 3 make you want to gouge your own eyes off, but 10 just make you numb. And beyond 50 or so its just meaningless data. Your brain isn't equipped to respond meaningfully to tragedies at scale. That's probably for your own good.
I'd love it if you can link it, until then I'm gonna ignore it.
> Here is a couple of examples of things where people believe something but "don't act like it" :
I'm actually sympathetic to this! Humans are pretty great at tolerating outrageous things. The effective altruism movement is essentially all about this, or yeah, like your last paragraph.
My point isn't simply "they don't act like it". My point is that there are lots of other, easier things pro-life advocates could do to reduce abortion rates, but they focus on controlling women. My hypothesis here is that the pro-life movement is fundamentally misogynistic, and wholly uninterested in measures that would reduce abortion rates while allowing women to be 1st class Americans. The point is to make women 2nd class Americans again.
I couldn't find what I had in mind, but here's a visualisation of a 1998 meta study[1], where the reasons for abortion are broken down. In the US, abortion due to fears about the mother's health is (eyeballing it) less than 2%, fetus defects? less than 2%, "other" (which presumably include rape)? Less than 1% and that's being generous.
So, the 3 reasons where I support, grudgingly as the lesser evil, abortion account for about 5% of total abortions. 1/20. 19 out of every 20 abortion is because abortion defenders have made baby killing an acceptable contraceptive solution. More than 60% of the cases is one variant or the other of "Baby is too inconvenient", the rest is slightly more defensible versions of it ("mother was too immature", "partner was not ready"). You're, essentially, killing something extremely, dangerously, close to a human, because the very people who brought it to life changed their mind. Why, why did they bring it to life in the first place?
>My point is that there are lots of other, easier things pro-life advocates could do to reduce abortion rates
You don't have the right to tell people how they should fight for their principles. An animal rights activist might choose to educate, or save street animals, or campaign against raising cattle, or blow themselves up in a slaughterhouse. People enact their principles in a variety of ways, you just notice those who choose the methods you find most reprehensible. But this doesn't mean other people aren't doing other things.
>My hypothesis here is that the pro-life movement is fundamentally misogynistic
I'm trying to be charitable here but you're making it extremely difficult, so here are some facts
1- I'm not American, but I can be described to have moderately pro life views, in that I think abortion should be always banned, except for the 3 reasons I listed above, which (after proof) would bypass the ban at any moment in the pregnancy.
2- It's not misogyny to hold women accountable for their actions. Pregnancy is the direct result of the women's actions, it is fair for the woman to bear responsibility for it. Indeed, countless contraceptive variants (male variants soon to exist in mass production) have decoupled pregnancy and consequences of women's actions to a very high degree, so it's even less defensible or justifiable to get pregnant then change your mind. As Progressives are extremely fond of saying in other contexts, "Freedom Doesn't Mean Freedom From Consequences", irresponsible women are as free and as first-class as anyone, they are just not allowed to kill babies for their convenience, especially when they had every chance to prevent that baby from being born in the first place, or wait months and abandon it to someone else.
3-50% or so of women are against abortion in the United States, and men are divided roughly equally, so its remarkable that hating women is this diverse of a position, you would think that it would be more male-skewed than this.
4- Abortion is philosophically complex and a morally treacherous. A big part of my pro life bias is as a counter reaction to the obnoxious moral certainty of the progressive variant of abortion defenders, those who find it morally okay to "shout their abortion" and compare babies to cancer and parasites. I, quite frankly, want to punish those people. If I detect any kind of moral uncertainty or recognition of the fundamental evil you're flirting with when you argue for more permissive abortion, I'm usually inclined to show some moral uncertainty of my own.
Is your pro-life position such that you only allow an exception for the life/health of the pregnant person, even in the 1st trimester? That's pretty radical.
> You don't have the right to tell people how they should fight for their principles.
Society has the right to balance people's interests. People who can become pregnant have (I think obviously) a huge vested interest in bodily autonomy, as does every free person. The state has to balance that interest--indeed that right--against others' pro-life positions. My argument is that there are lots of compromise measures that actually work to reduce abortion bans without doing things like increasing the death rate of pregnant people [0]. 70% of people who have an abortion are within 2x of the poverty line. It seems like a simple thing we could do is to help these people out financially. It seems like a dumb thing we could do is force these people to give birth and try to raise a child in poverty.
> I'm not American, but I can be described to have moderately pro life views, in that I think abortion should be always banned, except for the 3 reasons I listed above, which (after proof) would bypass the ban at any moment in the pregnancy.
Just to be clear, your views are not moderate, they are extreme. The vast majority of people support unrestricted abortion in the 1st trimester. Further your position--again--leaves no room for problems that occur during pregnancy that require an abortion: fetal abnormalities, the pregnant person gets cancer, fetal death, etc.
> Pregnancy is the direct result of the women's actions
Again you are ignoring assault and problems that occur during pregnancy.
> ...irresponsible women...
Ah, here we are. This is misogyny. Birth control fails. People are assaulted. Some people are in abusive relationships where they're unable to use birth control yet forced to have sex. Please learn about this issue before you start impugning others.
> 3-50% or so of women are against abortion in the United States, and men are divided roughly equally...
This is wrong, or at least wildly unnuanced [1].
> A big part of my pro life bias is as a counter reaction to the obnoxious moral certainty of the progressive variant of abortion defenders, those who find it morally okay to "shout their abortion" and compare babies to cancer and parasites.
I get this. But I think you're taking out your frustration on the wrong people here. There were nearly a million abortions in the US in 2020. Practically none of those people are taking to Twitter and doing the kinds of things you're talking about. They're just people trying to do the right thing in incredibly difficult circumstances. People who seek abortion need our help and care, not our scorn.
>Is your pro-life position such that you only allow an exception for the life/health of the pregnant person, even in the 1st trimester?
Plus fetus defects and rape/incest/whatever. Those are the only 3 reasons someone may be allowed to kill the future human they brought in my book.
>That's pretty radical.
And that's okay, radicalism is a good thing when the mainstream is morally bankrupt. I also think people shouldn't kill insects unless harmed by them and that animal cruelty's (by adults) punishment is jail and\or death. Those are radical positions, but they are only so because the mainstream doesn't recognize the fundamental evil they are allowing, not because I'm deliberately being a troll or an extremist who go out of my way to become a radical. The simple principle "If something can feel pain, it deserves not to feel pain" can lead you to astonishing mismatches with people and their accepted morality.
>People who can become pregnant...
Women.
>... have a huge vested interest in bodily autonomy
Which they have, right until it affects another person. Nobody is legislating to force women to be pregnant, just that if they do become pregnant, then that's a life over there, and a life that they brought into existence as a result of their actions on top of that (Rape is an explicit exception, I don't have to say this one more time), they don't get to have "Autonomy" over a body that isn't theirs. "But that body is inside theirs" well my friend they put it there, they have to wait till it get out on its own, or until it threatens their own life. Nothing else is acceptable.
>increasing the death rate of pregnant people
Again, they are called women, and my position above (and the vast majority of others) would make sure that their life is never threatened. And the decision we're discussing never said anything about banning abortion in general.
>70% of [Women] who have an abortion are within 2x of the poverty line. It seems like a simple thing we could do is to help these people out financially
And most violent murders is done by poor people to poor people. What should we do first : criminalize murder or help people out of poverty? I would like if we can do both, and if it was up to me I would try the second as hard as I can for as long as I can before the first. But the first has to be done, and now is as good a time as ever.
>It seems like a dumb thing we could do is force these people to give birth and try to raise a child in poverty
As an anti-natalist, there is nothing I would like more than people to stop having children, especially children they will drag into poverty. But the solution is not to legalize killing proto babies, this argument will lead you to "We should bomb children in Afghanistan and Syria, since they have a vastly lower quality of life waiting for them", and who knows, maybe that's correct, but even I, moral radical as I'm, am not yet ready to accept that.
Acceptable solutions can be
- Widespread popular education and contraceptive availability
- Societal shame around having children when you're poor
- Adoption
>your position leaves no room for problems that occur during pregnancy that require an abortion: fetal abnormalities, the pregnant person gets cancer, fetal death, etc.
>you are ignoring assault and problems that occur during pregnancy.
I don't know why you keep saying that when I have repeatedly said that all those should be exceptions to any abortion ban. Every single one of those things is one of the 3 (and only 3) reasons I think abortion should be allowed, *at any time in the 9 months*.
>This is misogyny.
Very well then, so let it be. I'm a misogynist.
>Birth control fails
Not in 99.9% of the cases when you use it correctly, responsibly and redundantly, and the rest is an acceptable risk that you bear the consequences of when you accept it.
>People are assaulted.
>Some people are in abusive relationship
So rape? It's a good thing then that this is one of the very important exceptions, as I said about 3 or 4 times now.
>They're just people trying to do the right thing in incredibly difficult circumstances. People who seek abortion need our help and care, not our scorn.
And we help them by, among countless other things, making it illegal to do the wrong thing. Nobody decent benefits from convenience abortion.
>> I, quite frankly, want to punish those people.
>This is misogyny too.
Thank you, I will wear it proudly. It's my utmost pride and pleasure to hate people who don't respect life, life that they're the reason it exists in the first place. If hating the subset of women who are like that is misogyny, then misogyny is a moral duty.
I'm not saying it's a simple moral question. I'm not sayin abortion is something that has no trade-offs. While I agree with you, how a reasonable person can strongly object abortions, and they should not get abortions. But when their moral stance spills out to legislation, I am concerned.
You can say we "engage to stop infanticide", but millions of people endure child abuse and thousands die from it every year. And having no access to abortions will surely increase that number.
At which point a fetus is a person? We do kind of have an answer to this, when it's viable outside of the mother's body.
If we keep going down the rabbit hole of fetus rights, it gets real ugly. Is contraception murder? Is plan b murder? Does having a miscarriage warrant an investigation? Should we prosecute a fetus that absorbed it's twin in-utero? What about IVF and thousands of embryos that are thrown out? What about stem cells?
I think broad abortion rights is pragmatic policy for the reasons you suggest. I think it's better for societal reasons on net. I also think the compromise around this issue found in European law (Germany, Denmark, France) is pretty reasonable.
That said, I don't think a constitutional right exists and the Roe decision that found one was somewhat tortured (even RBG said as much early in her career iirc).
Given that this should be argued democratically and via policy. I'm in favor of federal protections that raise the minimum bar to what Europe has and prevents states from enacting all-out bans. I also can see reasonable disagreement about later stage abortion rights for the reasons I mentioned above.
It's a messy issue, it's not the job of SCOTUS to legislate these kinds of issues and I think having done so here has ultimately led to a more polarized situation where we're worse off. Fighting this out democratically is probably healthier for our democracy.
> "Abortion in Denmark was fully legalized on 1 October 1973,[1] allowing the procedure to be done on-demand if a woman's pregnancy has not exceeded its 12th week. Under Danish law, the patient must be over the age of 18 to decide on an abortion alone; parental consent is required for minors, except in special circumstances. An abortion can be performed after 12 weeks if the woman's life or health are in danger. A woman may also be granted an authorization to abort after 12 weeks if certain circumstances are proved to be present (such as poor socioeconomic condition of the woman, risk of birth defects in the baby, the pregnancy being the result of rape, or mental health risk to mother)."
That's a lot more restrictive than the US was prior to this recent decision.
On face value sure it may look more restrictive, but it’s not a simple comparison. The exceptions for their 12 week limit are some of the PRIMARY reasons to get an abortion. In that regard, the soft 12 week limit could be more permissive of 20+ week abortions than our statutes.
Second, Denmark citizens have universal healthcare making it easier to access procedures, pregnancy testing, etc.
Third, prior to the ruling some states only had 1 abortion center state-wide. As well as rules requiring day long waiting periods, anti-abortion counseling, etc.
Imagine how access looks different when you must save up for months, travel 3 hours to visit a clinic, rent a motel for the night for the waiting period, and all while trying to not miss any days at work.
Hope that helps convey that rather dry comparisons of the weeks of various international statutes is a far cry from determining whether one system is “a lot more restrictive” than another.
SCOTUS is tasked with determining if a right is constitutionally protected.
There is no right to abortion in the constitution, Roe argued a path to one but it was fairly weak (https://overcast.fm/+vpWZx2bsc).
It was overturned because it's not the court's job to legislate policy beyond that.
Part of the reason for that is it creates policy which cannot be reverted by democratic means (except by the kind of extremes we've seen recently) - that's why it's better on net if it's narrow in scope and tied to constitutional rights (imo).
IANAL so this is at the edge of my knowledge, but that's my understanding. There is a path to adding things to the constitution, but that power lies with congress.
I'm confused what you're arguing for. You seem to agree, in general abortion should be an option - which is what roe v wade did.
States could impose restrictions on how and when abortion is performed. I agree with you, that third trimester on-demand abortions are ludicrous btw.
I however do not have that rosy of a perspective that this was overturned due to technicality and that in fact women's rights are about to be stripped the fuck away.
> in fact women's rights are about to be stripped the fuck away
If this is your concern, shouldn't you be furious that Roe v Wade stood in the way of 50 years of progress in preventing that? The democratic process could have been improving women's rights for all that time. This is exactly what happened with LGBT rights in that time - much less than that time, in fact. Instead this judicial block was in place which was like clamping down the lid on the democratic pressure cooker, preventing any kind of progress by preventing dialogue.
Dialogue?! As in the debate if women should have rights?
Maybe I'm missing the point, but what "progress" do we need to be making? Women had access to reproductive care for the past 50 years, and now they won't. Doesn't sound like progress to me
When one side of the debate does nothing but spew nonsensical falsehoods, it's really easy to pick a side even when it seemed morally ambiguous before. Even easier when I'm agreeing with RBG.
Basically I'm drawing a distinction about what I personally think is good policy and what is actually a right granted by the constitution.
I think broad access to abortion for women is important, but I think Roe finding that this protection exists as a constitutional right just isn't correct. If we want there to be a constitutional protection there needs to be an amendment. Short of that we need to pass legislation federally.
Otherwise it's up to states and constituents within those states to fight it out democratically.
I was happy with the outcome from Roe because it protected a lot of vulnerable women who will now unfairly suffer consequences, but I still intellectually think it was wrongly decided. Now we're suffering the consequences of that.
Had Roe not been decided this way maybe there wouldn't have been as extreme a push to get Trump in office at all costs? It would reduce the political nature of SCOTUS and allow for relief valves - people can fight out the issues democratically. Obviously this can't happen in cases where constitutional rights are legitimately infringed, but again the finding of a constitutional right to abortion was tenuous at best.
We need to get into law the things we care about - that's how the system is supposed to work.
Ok, I will never not be amazed by how americans can reconcile two opposing views in their heads (I mean it as a compliment).
But I do think that leaving abortion rights up to states will work out terribly. It's kind of like letting states decide if women should be allowed to vote
Then you have to create an amendment for abortion. Women's right to vote is explicitly given by the 19th amendment to the constitution. This is the basic function for the supreme court, states cannot impose laws that are unconstitutional.
> We do kind of have an answer to this, when it's viable outside of the mother's body.
I never understood this argument. There is no baby that is "viable" (able to survive on their own) (well, to be honest, most adults aren't either), and parents are required to care for them (and criminally liable if they fail to do so).
> There is no baby that is "viable" (able to survive on their own) (well, to be honest, most adults aren't either), and parents are required to care for them (and criminally liable if they fail to do so).
Babies are viable when they can survive with help from any adult. Before some fetal age, they are completely dependent on the body of the mother - if they are removed from it, no matter how gently, they will die (perhaps there is some way to make a fetal transplant, but that wouldn't necessarily change the equation so much).
Once past some age (and especially after birth), they just need someone to take care of them, it doesn't have to be their mother.
> they just need someone to take care of them, it doesn't have to be their mother.
Wouldn't it then make more sense to require the mother to take care for the fetus/baby before the age of viability (as she's the only one who can), not after that (and/or after birth) when anyone can? Right now, it's the reverse.
There are safe heaven laws in all US states, which allow the parents to abandon their newly born child in designated places (typically hospitals) without facing any charges. Children can also be legally given up for adoption. So, in fact, the right to abandon a viable child is less controversial.
Now, the viability standard is important because it is very hard to consider a non-viable entity "a person" in any serious sense. If it can't even perform the basic functions of its organism, how can it be considered to have rights, and has never been able to do so, how can it be considered a person?
Key here is "outside of the mother's body". Plenty of babies are cared for by people other than their biological mother, I'm sure you've heard of that.
What I am sayin here is that if there was a process by which we could take an unwanted fetus and implant it into someone else / allow that child to exist outside of the physical body of a person that doesn't want it, then sure, that is possibly a better alternative to abortion. Short of that, people should not be forcing other people to give births against their will.
> Abortion is a case where there is genuine disagreement among the public and at its core exists a genuine moral question.
That is not true, at all. It is a small minority that want abortion to be illegal. And of course it's a moral question. What isn't? Quit legitimatizing these minority political groups, as if they have ever considered a moral position in their life or can even describe what morality is.
The U.S. is not a democracy by definition, and certainly not one in practice. The problem with people hiding behind this as a "democratic process decision" is that that they are ignoring the fact that the Republicans absolutely refuse to participate in democratic proceedings and work to pass a law in Congress giving people the rights they deserve. Republicans, with the support of a minority in this country, are holding the U.S. hostage. What's insane, is that the Republicans make life harder for this very minority and blame it on everyone else.
Abortion is actually not a complex issue. It is a tough issue but not a complex issue.
The U.S. is reaching Middle East versions of extremism.
I feel like you may be a bit out of touch with rural / conservative America. Pro life is not an extreme minority opinion.
You're free to argue it's an immoral or unjust opinion, or argue it's an opinion that is not internally consistent with their other political opinions....
But to downplay the size of the cohort to diminish the opinion is unproductive in reaching an amenable outcome.
I am not downplaying it. It is a minority opinion by any poll I have ever seen. It's just that it may not be a minority opinion in certain areas or groups which have unequal power due to gerrymandering and the electoral college. (Again, the U.S. is not a democracy.) So again, by any account I have ever seen on abortion, these folks are the minority by numbers. This minority has long been in use, abused, and stirred up by corporate America and the conservative right. If the U.S. was a true democracy, these people would likely not be getting their way hand over foot.
So, I don't think it's myself who is out of touch. I came from rural America. I went to high school with people and my extended family who all are still there. I would consider rural America out of touch with basically anyone else in the world. They want to drag down America with nostalgia for a dream that never existed while they vote for the very people who put and keep them in the predicaments they are in. They and the Republicans are as un-American as it gets. Nothing they stand for is inline with the constitution or America's principles.
In European democracies - typically not dominated by bible thumping Republicans - these things have been decided democratically, like any other law.
As a result abortion is a very minor political issue. Some people want more or less restrictions, and occasionally rules get adjusted.
If the Supreme Court hadn't suddenly decided to commandeer this issue in 1973, I think the US could also have been like that, and hopefully after a few dramatic years
we can get there.
Roe and Casey recognized and dealt with the competing interests involved in abortion. That's why it allowed some restrictions on abortion while declining to do so for similar issues like contraception, interracial marriage, and gay marriage. The status quo did not ignore the interests of the unborn child, while the new status quo completely ignores the interests of the woman.
Reproductive rights are fundamental to women's liberty and equality. They should be protected by the courts like many other fundamental rights, not subject to the whims of political majorities.
Fair enough. But then we get back to the core issue. Why should the unelected courts be the ones making this determination of what the appropriate balance is?
I know the argument gets overplayed, but there is something to be said about the fact that Roe was decided by nine white men.
But even then, up to 12 weeks, no questions asked, 12 - 18 weeks under very specific circumstances (incest, rape and such) and afterwards pretty much limited to if the mothers life is at risk (altough, preferably a C-section or something similar) seems like a good compromise.
The repeal of RvW allows states to implement no questions asked abortions for up to birth, along with allowing states to ban it altogether, rather than the previous state of the law.
Yeah - this is also the consensus a lot of law has landed on in Europe, I think it's also reasonable (especially as a baseline compromise to prevent total bans).
The vast majority (~80%) are within the first 12 weeks anyway, the later ones usually have extenuating circumstances and third trimester was already banned (without cause) in most cases anyway.
I'm pretty sure polling also shows most Americans have some nuanced view on this that sits somewhere in this range.
> I'm pretty sure polling also shows most Americans have some nuanced view on this that sits somewhere in this range.
People, in general, usually have pretty nuanced views. Altough, I personally have seen quite a few cases where people became more hardlined on certain issues after seeing the "oppositions" behaviour on it. (Anti gun people being more hardlined after seeing that pro gun ones go to the range with their kids, for example.)
It's simple, fetuses don't have rights. Roe was the right decision. The current SCOTUS went off the farm and are now just an extension of the RNC because of the 6-3 supermajority and recent ruling show they just do whatever the republican platform is wrapping it up in "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution.
Excellent post and well reasoned. I agree that the root of the issue here is one that will never have a definite answer.
Germany has roughly the same laws as Denmark, and now after this decision many states will continue to have the same abortion laws they have had for the last 50 years, many will have on par with Europe, and some will outright ban.
There is no making everyone happy, but 50 options that are easier to change seem like a compromise to a binary split that will always be under attack.
The other point that I think is salient is what justice Ginsburg noted back in the 70s I believe. She said that abortion rights were trending towards a more “liberal“ direction. And then Roe came and galvanized the pro life movement dramatically.
We can only guess and hypothesize. But one has to wonder if the pro-choice movement would’ve been better off without row, and with the passage of time.
That's correct. RBG said she would not likely have voted with Roe which was focused on the doctor and not the woman. That she would have liked to see progress carry on in the states then eventually move federally (like we'll see with weed at some point). She said it gave opposition a target. Instead of some percentage of 50, it was a nationally agreed upon "problem" by opponents.
I disagree with a lot of her positions, but this one seems well reasoned.
The 7 justices that decided Roe really did think they were ending conflict by siding as they did, that I believe did not, at all.
Except the goalposts have now been moved. We should anticipate that Republicans in the US Congress will attempt to codify a federal ban on abortion in all 50 states. Indeed, many are already advocating this. We should also anticipate that other freedoms once thought protected by the US Constitution and Supreme Court will come under threat. Justice Thomas writes in his concurring opinion in Dobbs that he would like to see Obergefell, Lawrence and Grisword overturned. These decisions protect same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships, and contraception.
The overturning of Roe comes just days after another ruling by the same Supreme Court in which they took away states' rights to regulate the possession of guns. States rights has always been a rhetorical tactic used by conservatives as a convenient ruse to achieve their aims. When the argument from states rights is helpful to their political aims, they rely on it. When it's harmful, they ignore it.
If the Republicans tried passing laws with a federal ban on abortion, a federal ban on same-sex marriage, and a federal ban on contraception, they would lose a very, very, large portion of their voting base. I highly doubt they will do it.
>The overruling of Roe comes just days after another ruling by the same Supreme Court in which they took away states' rights to regulate the possession of guns. States rights has always been a rhetorical tactic used by conservatives as a convenient ruse to achieve their aims. When the argument from states rights is helpful to their political aims, they rely on it. When it's harmful, they ignore it.
You do not at all seem to understand the NYRPA vs Bruen ruling or topic. It makes me question the rest of your reasoning.
Overturning Roe comes one day after a Supreme Court ruling that ends the process of New York's MAY ISSUE (if you are wealthy, make a donation, are connected) a concealed carry permit practice. It turns out the state doesn't get to require you to prove a need before you have your rights.
There is no right besides 2A that ever faces this level of scrutiny and abuse. It doesn't help that the NYPD has multiple times since that lawsuit initially started been found guilty of corruption by the state's own investigators, when they initially withhold completely appropriate requests but favored "others".
> It is good for unelected bodies like the Supreme Court to allow such dividing issues be figured out democratically.
Speaking as an outsider on American politics, it seems to me that it won't be figured out democratically. If it was done democratically, on a nationwide vote, abortion would easily stay legal.
What will actually happen is that the decision will be referred to states, where government is elected on small turnouts, in gerrymandered divisions, heavily influenced by untrue TV propaganda funded by billionaires, and in many cases elected based on supposed economic reasons, not any moral ones.
The effective result is that vulnerable young women will be forced to carry unwanted babies to term at the cost of great suffering to themselves and the resultant children.
Exactly. It sounds faux-romantic to wane about democracy and the power of voting, but when the systems that support this system have been perverted over the course of decades, it becomes a horror story. Democracy as it has been thought of is dead (in the U.S.).
This weakening of civil rights at the Federal level allows those Americans who are sexist to enact sexist laws where they have concentrated power within State boundaries.
People (at least currently, I don't have much hope after 2024) have the right to vote still, they could overturn this all in November if they wanted to instead of wailing and gnashing teeth, just simply go vote. The majority could easily toss out republic senators and representatives if they truly want to do something about this. I think people are too lazy though. It's a fkn shame.
I don’t believe that’s accurate. The Congress is already talking about passing nationwide legislation to protect the right to abortion. Such legislation would still be constitutional even after this decision.
Having said that, I think national legislation is probably not the most effective way forward for the pro-choice movement. All that will do is continue to galvanize the pro life side.
> The Congress is already talking about passing nationwide legislation to protect the right to abortion. Such legislation would still be constitutional even after this decision.
Please cite the Constitutional power authorizing this, restricting it to powers that will hold up under the present Court against a state asserting the absence of Constitutional federal authority and infringement of powers reserved under the 10th Amendment.
It can't be the power to enforce the 14th Amendment, because abortion as a right within that has been ruled out.
"On the question of abortion, the Constitution is therefore neither pro-life nor pro-choice. The Constitution is neutral and leaves the issue for the people and their elected representatives to resolve through the democratic process in the States or Congress — like the numerous other difficult questions of American social and economic policy that the Constitution does not address".
...
"After today’s decision, the nine Members of this Court will no longer decide the basic legality of pre-viability abortion for all 330 million Americans. That issue will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the States or Congress."
Even if it was in the main decision and not a concurrence, and even if a statement about the effect rather than legal rationale of a decision wouldn't be dicta rather than ruling even there, that statement does not erect any new Constitutional basis for Congressional action.
If you think there is a basis in the Constitution for Congressional authority to protect abortion against state prohibition that this Court would uphold against a State challenge, please present the specific Constitutional grant of authority.
Interstate commerce clause. Our federal gov’t is no longer one of limited powers, in practice. Congress can justify damn near anything under that enumerated power.
80 years ago in Wickard the Court said Congress could regulate a Guy growing an acre of wheat for his family because, if everyone did it, it would affect interstate commerce.
Abortion affects population, which affects interstate commerce.
> If the voting majority truly cares about access to abortion then we will hopefully see enough democratic traction to give them the mandate needed
The problem is we have an electoral system that forces us into a two party system. One of those parties is beholden to religious ideologies. If any republican votes for abortion protection they will get primaried. So we end up in a situation where a healthy majority of the country wants some level of abortion rights, but because we need 60 senate votes it's impossible to implement.
When Obama was running in 2008 he claimed to want to codify Roe as law his first day as office, and was elected with a super majority. Never once tried. This was not the only opportunity in the last 50 years.
It’s not JUST about means, motive, opportunity. There has to be the desire to spend the political capital. I think it’s interesting no one in 50 years with all the majority make ups have put the effort in.
I don’t speculate a reason other than it seems more expensive than the media might have me believe?
What do you mean he never tried? How do you know that? Obama never had the votes to overcome the filibuster for abortion rights, he was struggling to even get the ACA passed. Why publicly focus on legislation that's impossible to pass, especially when it's already the law of the land?
During the 111th Congress, from the appointment of Al Franken until the death of Ted Kennedy, as well as during the term of his appointed successor Paul G. Kirk, the Democratic party held 58 seats in the Senate and caucused together with 2 more senators.
There were conservative democrats such as Manchin and leiberman who beleived their constituents weren't in favor of abortion rights. A straight party line vote on abortion rights wasn't going to happen. There were also republicans in more urban states that knew the majority of their constituents favored abortion, but because they were worried about being primaried they wouldn't vote for abortion rights.
Sure but the possibility of getting dem senators from red states to vote for abortion was extremely, extremely unlikely. Republicans tend to stick together but Democrats do not on these slim "majorities". Check out Manchin and Senema, they are essentially moderate republicans despite their party affiliation. They are heavily sponsored by right wing corps and PACS.
Supreme court rulings are law in this country because of Marbury v. Madison. You can try to claim precedent and law are somehow different, I think you'd have an incredibly hard time convincing most people.
Marbury v Madison established judicial review, meaning that the courts can strike down unconstitutional law. It does not give the courts legislative ability.
Maybe you're using a fuzzier definition of "law", but there was never any federal legislation that guaranteed access to abortion. That is what we need.
You are apparently unfamiliar with the legal systems in the US (the federal system and 49 states), which are Common Law[0] systems (Louisiana uses a French style "Civil Law" system):
"In law, common law, also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law, is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions.[2][3][4] The defining characteristic of “common law” is that it arises as precedent. In cases where the parties disagree on what the law is, a common law court looks to past precedential decisions of relevant courts, and synthesizes the principles of those past cases as applicable to the current facts."
Huh that is surprising! "There is no federal general common law"
Though it does kind of make sense, after all it's the United States of America, not the United People's of America, or the United Local Jurisdictions of America.
The States can have rights that supersedes the people apparently.
>Huh that is surprising! "There is no federal general common law"
My reading of the particular passage[0] in the Wikipedia article is that while Federal courts are no longer independent sources of common law, they operate along with other systems that are, and often impact the common law of the several states with rulings that set the limits of Federal, State and individual power.
It wouldn't make sense the other way around, since whenever individual rights contradict that of the State's, the federal court(s) would effectively undo the basis of their sovereignty.
> It does not give the courts legislative ability.
But it does. Our common law system treats judicial rulings as law. There is nothing stopping the supreme court from ruling on literally anything they like. They could make cars illegal in the next session if they wanted.
Not when legislators refuse to overturn it. That's obviously an issue too, but it's not really related to the problem here, which is that the two party system causes many people to have their opinions unrepresented.
It's a lot like fiat currency, it has respect of "all". Parties know if they kill the filibuster, the next time that the pendulum swings back everything they did will get thrown on the trash heap.
There is an element of truth to this but we’ve seen the filibuster selectively weakened to accomplish a specific goal under Mitch McConnell as well as Harry Reid before him. Its been done by both just within the last 2 presidencies, and there’s no good reason to assume your opponent won’t be the one to do it first when it suits them.
> When Obama was running in 2008 he claimed to want to codify Roe as law his first day as office, and was elected with a super majority. Never once tried. This was not the only opportunity in the last 50 years.
The cynic in me thinks that neither party wants this issue to go away because it fills voting booths.
Democrats have had multiple chances to codify it and didn't even try. They could also get some buy-in from on-the-fence people and maybe even a few very centrist Republicans in bluish states with a compromise that codifies protection for abortions in the first trimester but nope.
If Republicans really were serious about adoption as an alternative they'd make reforming and funding adoption and foster care a huge priority. They'd also entertain medicare coverage for uninsured women giving birth even if it's to be given up for adoption so as to remove the financial incentive for abortion. But nope.
Why solve a problem or find a viable compromise when the controversy gets you elected? Culture war controversies also distract from incompetence and corruption.
> Democrats have had multiple chances to codify it and didn't even try
This is a big flaw in your thinking. The republicans typically vote as a cohesive group of lemmings. Their leadership signals how they should vote and they follow. The democrats act more an independent collective of votes that happen to align on many issues, but not all.
> Democrats have had multiple chances to codify it and didn't even try. They could also get some buy-in from on-the-fence people and maybe even a few very centrist Republicans in bluish states with a compromise that codifies protection for abortions in the first trimester but nope.
When were these chances? I don't think there have ever been 60 pro-abortion votes in the Senate.
Codifying Roe is double sided sword. If Congress has the power to legalize abortion (under some commerce clause interpretation), it likely has the power to ban abortion nationwide.
That's what I've been telling my friends about killing the filibuster. It may be the only thing stopping a blanket federal ban in 2024 when Republicans re-elect Trump (or Trump lite, Desantis)
No one put the effort it because it would be completely meaningless. The same Supreme Court that upheld the Mississippi law would obviously toss out any federal “codification”
No they wouldn't. They didn't say anything about this being only a states rights thing, otherwise they would say things like the civil rights laws that were passed in the 60s were unconstitutional, and they have said nothing of that nature (yet).
Ruling that the constitution does not grant the right to abortion is also saying that legislating abortion is not an enumerated power. That means that any federal law that bans/bans banning abortion would be unconstitutional unless you come up with a commerce clause reason. Hard to see that flying with this court, so it seems to be up to the states now.
That is three weeks longer than France, Denmark, and Germany among others in Europe. In Germany you have mandatory counseling the tries to talk you out of it first.
I encourage you to read the concurring opinions. One justice concurs to explicitly point out that this decision does not make abortion illegal, but merely returns it to the legislative process.
> So we end up in a situation where a healthy majority of the country wants some level of abortion rights
some level of abortion rights != Roe and the extent of Roe
I'd imagine an easy majority supports it in cases of threats to the mother's life, but does an easy majority support letting Roe stand without any sort of weakening? I doubt it
I've seen your comments in this thread questioning what the American public actually wants. You don't need to wonder - there have been countless polls over the past fifty years that will tell you in detail:
I mean, look no further than the law that was being decided for this case. It banned abortions after 15 weeks, unless there’s a severe deformity or life of the mother.
This seems like the type of abortion “rights” that would get broad-based support across the aisle.
I imagine there will be a few states that outright ban abortion. But I think it will be a very small number, less than 10. And I think they will quickly change that position over the next 10 years.
I know that doesn’t help the people who live there now who want an abortion. But this ruling is not going to end abortion in America. That’s a guarantee.
That doesn't stand up to examination, currently Republicans are seeking to ban all abortions including of those involving rape or incest, some even go as far as forcing women to give birth even if it could be deadly to the mother. I suspect soon they will go for declaring it as 1st degree murder. They really have no shame and feel completely empowered by their cultish adoption of MAGA principals.
You're the problem. Seriously. I mean no disrespect. But people like you are thought-experimenting our rights away. The women in my country are less free than they were yesterday. You're playing rhetorical games and sympathizing. One party tried to over turn a free and fair election. You probably say "both sides" to that, too. One party is trying to ban teaching any sort of realistic depiction of slavery in our history. One party presses their way of life on the nation. Roe was decided based on a right to privacy. That benefited us all. We're all less free. You go ahead and wait and see. This luke warm, middling, "devils advocate" nonsense is the problem. It's why we'll gradually lose everything.
when your position robs people of their bodily autonomy you're not necessarily a bad person, but you have a bad and morally indefensible position and that's "the problem" people.
Ah right, "morally indefensible". Except that people do defend it from a moral standpoint. Maybe not your moral standpoint, but a moral standpoint nonetheless. The fact that you are so blind as to be able to even see the other side of the issue just reaffirms my statement that you are the problem
> My personal opinion is that polarization has pushed both sides to be completely antagonistic towards each other. 'Own the libs, fuck the deplorables', no compromise. The jaded side of me says: vote in more moderates that are willing to strike compromises. Crazed jesus Republicans and hyperprogressive activists are terrible people to put into national office. They gain power by antagonizing and being unhelpful roadblocks for change, all while asking for the most stubbornly impossible outcomes.
This take is completely divorced from reality. "Moderates" are the roadblocks. "Moderates" already have the system they want and love re-litigating culture war issues like this, because it makes it easier to continue roadblocking. Give me one example of a "hyperprogressive activists" blocking something that needed to get done, and I will give you a laundry list of "moderates" actors blocking ensuring no progress gets made in this country. Progressives don't even say "deplorables" that came from "moderate" HRC. "Crazed jesus Republicans" I would say this classification bisects several groups with in the republicans, however they seems to be affective at driving change given the post we are commenting on.
The reason you didn't have slavery in the north (and thus a north to fight the south in the civil war) was because of states' rights. California changed the environmental law of the land - because of states' rights.
It goes both ways. There is nothing intrinsically good nor bad with it. It's part of how the system is designed to operate.
> The reason you didn’t have slavery in the north (and thus a north to fight the south in the civil war) was because of states’ rights.
No, it wasn’t. “States rights” is a later pro-slavery slogan. It is not and never has been the same thing as loose federalism.
And there were, in fact, slaves in the North until it was abolished nationally (in more states at the time of the Revolution than at the time of the Civil War, and even fewer at the end of the Civil War, but the last three states where slavery existed until terminated by the 13th Amendment were Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey.)
This is not true. States versus Federalism has been an argument since the first presidency with Hamilton, Adams, and Washington stacked up against Madison and Jefferson.
The reason that states existed at all in the north - despite states having laws forbidding it - was because of the supreme court.
This is not quite right. You are forgetting Kentucky: a slave state that explicitly decided not to leave the union and fought alongside the non-slave states against the Confederacy.
Even Abraham Lincoln had declared himself as a non-abolitionist until the Gettysburg Address. He campaigned, and started his governing as a status-quo politician. The main thing that southern politicians railed against him was that he wanted to keep the compromise and have the "new territories" (areas that were not yet states) be kept non-slave territories.
There is nuance here, but basically the Confederacy pissed him off so much that he changed his mind and decided that he would push for the abolition of slavery, starting by ending it by force in the Confederacy. He moderated after the war somewhat, and his death (at the hands of a Southern conspiracy to re-start the war and bring back slavery) almost got us to full equality, but wound up in a compromise that got us the Jim Crow laws.
> You are forgetting Kentucky: a slave state that explicitly decided not to leave the union and fought alongside the non-slave states against the Confederacy.
I had always believed that Kentucky was neutral in the Civil War. Both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis (President of the Confederate States) were born in Kentucky.
Reading the wikipedia article[0], it seems like it's really complicated but it still looks mostly correct to me that Kentucky was more neutral than not.
It was an argument all through the founding, and is why we have a "2 senators per state" senate guaranteeing even the lowest population states still have some power and say in government.
There was the Nullification crisis, wherein South Carolina attempted to secede as a consequence of Jackson's government applying heavy tariffs on Southern states.
> My personal opinion is that polarization has pushed both sides to be completely antagonistic towards each other.
This opinion is about as uninformed as it can be. Currently the US is run by "moderate" Democrats, and extremist Republicans; the Right cries wolf every time the moderates do anything, and the moderates capitulate. If we look at American politics through your lens it makes zero sense.
We no longer live in a democracy and haven't really since 1978 with Buckley v. Valeo; increased by the recent supreme court decision in favor of Senator Cruz. There's a strong disconnect between what voters want and what happens in the halls of power, and it is increasing. The reality is that if you can donate to a senator enough you get "democracy".
Not to be too hyperbolic, but for the average person we really do live in a plutocracy.
Both sides believe they are the moderates and the other are the radicals. Until you zoom out and stop playing tribal politics, you will realize both sides are batshit insane and nothing really matters except being civil to one another and trying to connect with others in ways other than politics.
Connecting with others in civil ways is great. The two sides are not equivalent, though. "Batshit" left opinion: people should be able to require others to address them with novel pronouns. "Batshit" right opinion: liberals should be rounded up and shot (or the South was the noble side of the Civil War or segregation should be legal or Old Testament should be the law of the land, etc.). These are not in the same neighborhood of crazy, and this is setting aside the prevalence of the respective opinions and the political power of those who espouse them. Trump endorses the overthrow of democracy. Biden doesn't.
Promoting the both-sides falsehood could help bring the sides together, but it amounts to letting the looters keep their loot to stop the rioting.
Batshit left opinion: pro-choice conservatives should be killed. Believe me, I've heard dozens of variations on both sides. The difference is the left is overwhelming supported by all of our cultural institutions so there is a bias against the right across the board.
EDIT: As expected, my centrist and realist take that advocates for both sides coming together gets a downvote. I wonder which side that came from :)
The Supreme Court Justice who wrote the court's opinion on this issue just publicly stated he believes the Supreme Court should reconsider all of its prior procedural decisions, including Gay Mairage, legalized gay relationships, contraception and privacy in sexual or relationship matters.
You don't get to claim you're potentially naive, you're outright ignoring what they've publicly declared they intend to do. This isn't a group of well reasoned individuals removing power from the court, they're just doing whatever they hell they want to make the laws reflect their own religious beliefs.
Fuck this country, the only thing we're the best at is pretending we're the best.
There are plenty of devils out there, they can advocate for themselves. This ruling can be as technically correct as anyone likes, but it is disastrous in every conceivable way. All this ultimately demonstrates is how feeble rights - real, natural rights - are under the American conception of federal constitutional rights.
Edit: there are a lot of people who are clearly very clever advocating for the devil. The devils have the best lawyers money can buy; all I can really suggest, as someone who is not American and not a woman, is that you advocate for human beings for a change.
> All this ultimately demonstrates is how feeble rights - real, natural rights - are under the American conception of federal constitutional rights.
Another devil's advocate here...the people advocating for outlawing abortion are also convinced it's a rights issue: the rights of the unborn child. This isn't an open and shut case.
Granted, I think Roe v Wade struck a fairly nuanced balance and I also think this is a disastrous decision. It's unfortunate RBG didn't quit when she had the chance and also unfortunate the dems ran Abuela in 2016. This could have been avoided, along with 4 years of complete buffoonery and international embarassment. It sucks our one-party-with-two-factions system has one faction that's consistently spineless and lacking foresight.
"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
Thanks, I like this. I also find it insanely hypocritical that "these people" want children born no matter the cost, but once they are born they are left to fend for themselves. The same people advocating for illegal abortion are often advocating for stripping services that would help single mothers. Most are not actually interested in the welfare of children, but in moral grandstanding and exercising control over the bodies of "sluts."
It has come to my attention recently that the abortion of unwanted fetuses is likely to become illegal in large parts of the United States.
Fortunately, there is another alternative, which I am sure members of the Republican Party will hearty approve of.
Have the unwanted baby. Shortly after birth, drive to the middle of nowhere. Place the baby on the ground, naked, look at it sternly, and say
"Listen here, you whining little brat! You think I'm just going to support you for 18 years because I'm some sort of bleeding heart liberal? You got another thing coming you stupid welfare queen! This ain't socialist Europe! There ain't no leftist safety net here! You're just going to have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps!"
Then just leave it there, crying itself to death.:)
Pretty much every state already has Safe Haven laws that allow women to legally abandon their babies at hospitals, fire stations etc. Where they will be looked after and likely adopted out.
And believe it or not, there are Christians -- and not a small number -- who want to advocate for prisoners, immigrants, the sick, the poor, widows, orphans, and the unborn. I've long felt that if progressives and Christians concerned for social justice could call a truce on the handful of issues that they disagree on, we could actually get a lot done.
> the people advocating for outlawing abortion are also convinced it's a rights issue: the rights of the unborn child.
This is a nice fiction but it doesn't hold up to any level of scrutiny most of the time. Largely the "pro-life" people also believe in things like self-defense laws and the castle doctrine, which require that you not believe anyone has a real right to life.
Unless you think they'd all be ok with a squatter coming into their house and demanding food and that they wouldn't use their guns on them. But they think a mother should be required to literally risk her life in order to support a being she may not have chosen to create.
You don't need to give the benefit of the doubt here. You don't need to believe disingenuous arguments just because people say they're what they mean. Dig a little deeper and understand what they really believe: women with unwanted pregnancies deserve to have it carried out against their will because they think they've sinned.
All of what you said is fine and makes sense and, regardless of the vast generalizations, I agree with most of it given what I know about anti-abortion people. It's shrouded in hypocracy.
That said what I said holds: this is not a clear-cut case of rights, because the rights of two entities are in question and they are in conflict. Is a handful of cells with human DNA a person? Of course not, it's less biologically developed than an ant. Is a fetus that's developed for 8 months a person? Yeah, at that point it could exit the mother and be a (somewhat) functioning being. Where do we draw the line? At what point is a fetus a person? And from there, we can determine where its rights to not die at the hand of another person begin. And yes, we have to factor in the health of the mother, the health of the fetus, etc into these decisions.
My mom marched with Operation Rescue during the summer that culminated in the bombing of an abortion clinic, and later the execution of the Dr that ran the clinic, in his own church, during service, while he was collecting offerings as an usher.
I know in painful depth every detail of how these people think.
It is not nuanced on their side. They outright reject empirical facts. They believe the earth is only 6000 years old, that the dinosaurs died in Noah's flood, and that evolution is a myth, not the central mechanism of all biology.
They do not care about the facts other than pattern matching them as rhetorical thought ending cliches.
They believe because they had an imaginary conversation in their head once, they are now born again, and have a private telepathic phone line to absolute truth. When they feel certain about something, it's the will of god revealed to them through the holy spirit. When other people express opposing certainty, it's because they have been tricked by the devil.
There is no good faith debate on the basis of facts or nuance with these people. You could spend years refuting every single thing they believe on a factual basis beyond any nuance or doubt, and they will blink, look at you, and then say something like "I know what's true in my heart of hearts."
Every single detail of how they talk about this and the actions they take make clear their actual grievance is regulating women's sexual behavior outside of their theocratic conception of marriage.
There is no need to defend these people as some sort of morally principled people confused by the underlying nuances. They are no where near that intellectually honest on the subject.
So you would support an abortion procedure on a fetus after 8 months and two weeks of pregnancy? If you believe this to not be a nuanced issue, then are you in opposition to the original Roe vs Wade ruling that determined personhood for a fetus once it reaches a viable age for survival, and you instead support the ability to abort a fetus all the way up to the moments before birth?
> There is no need to defend these people as some sort of morally principled people confused by the underlying nuances.
I'm confused which one of my comments leads you to believe I'm defending the anti-abortion crowd. I was responding to a comment saying that this is an issue of bodily autonomy rights only. It's not. There are the rights of the unborn child at play as well, hence the nuance.
Opreation Rescue was by far the highest profile activist group in that moment. They were not radicals shunned by more moderate pro life people. They had enormous support.
Wichita is stuck in Kansas, a conservative state yes, but the average person you'll meet there is very similar to who you'd meet in any of the major metro areas. They are captive to a conservative rural minority in a microcosm of the same effect at national scale. "Go to crazy places" is a completely inadequate deflection. You know it.
My family's church went into schism in response to the Tiller murder. The strongest condemnation on the anti murder side was basically "they shouldn't have done that in a church." I cannot recall a single person out of hundreds that condemned the murder (or bombing) itself directly. The closest is my father, who maintains a "abortion should be outlawed except if rape" perspective. Additional useful information here is he failed to know my older brother was sexually abusing me in his own house.
I know "what if" style contrarian takes are an addiction on this forum, but please, do not engage in hypotheticals on this issue if you are not actually familiar and plugged in. You are doing evil purely in the service of some forum warrior "what if I actually have the smart take here" nonsense. These people know they're hypocrites drowning in dissonance. It's central to their mindset. Not only do they not care, they will double down on it every time.
> Where do we draw the line? At what point is a fetus a person? And from there, we can determine where its rights to not die at the hand of another person begin. And yes, we have to factor in the health of the mother, the health of the fetus, etc into these decisions.
That is irrelevant. At most, where you draw the line could affect what type of abortive procedure doctors would be allowed to employ - if you believe that the fetus is a person, you could mandate that the doctors must remove it from the mother's body without harming it.
But just as you have no obligation to allow someone into your home (and are in fact perfectly within your rights to murder them if they refuse to leave), you have no obligation to grow another person inside your own body.
There is no nuance here. There are only fallacies employed by people who desperately want to uphold some perceived status quo from time immemorial.
It's also important to note that there isn't even any reason to believe ancient Christians considered abortion forbidden or immoral. This is a much more modern invention, one given steam by the desire to oppose sexual liberation.
> But just as you have no obligation to allow someone into your home (and are in fact perfectly within your rights to murder them if they refuse to leave), you have no obligation to grow another person inside your own body.
I find this an interesting argument, but I have to note the difference: the person in your home is willingly violating your space. The fetus is not willingly in your body, and is given no chance whatsoever to leave without being harmed.
So I don't find personhood irrelevant here, and I think the nuance still applies.
> There are only fallacies employed by people who desperately want to uphold some perceived status quo from time immemorial.
So for you, rights begin at birth? I'm not judging, I'm trying to assess your solid position.
> It's also important to note that there isn't even any reason to believe ancient Christians considered abortion forbidden or immoral. This is a much more modern invention, one given steam by the desire to oppose sexual liberation.
I believe this to be irrelevant to the discussion. I think we've already determined that modern anti-abortion Christians are, as a group, often hypocritical. But the discussion has diverged from them and is now about when rights are assigned.
> the person in your home is willingly violating your space. The fetus is not willingly in your body
This is an interesting point, but I believe the castle doctrine doesn't make this distinction: if you find someone on your property who you didn't give prior permission to enter, you may murder them, regardless of whether they were there willingly (or even knowingly). For example, if you wake up in the middle of the night to a loud bang and find someone jutting out from your broken front door and shoot before asking questions, you will not be accused of murder or even manslaughter if that person was actually thrown into your house by someone outside.
> So for you, rights begin at birth? I'm not judging, I'm trying to assess your solid position.
I think a compromise where rights begin at viability makes enough sense. I would also be OK with allowing women to request a fetus be removed from their body even after it becomes viable, but not through procedures that are intended to kill it - for example, I could see an argument where a woman should be allowed to have an elective C-section to remove an 8 month fetus/baby from her body, who she could then abandon in the care of the hospital. But, I don't think it would be OK to request a procedure where an 8 month fetus is killed in utero and removed.
For non-elective procedures (where the life of the mother is at stake) the discussion is more open-ended, I believe.
Essentially, the right of the mother to her own body is quite obviously separate from the fetus' right to life. People who seek to conflate them are typically doing so with ulterior motives.
As someone else was pointing out, taking the extreme view of fetal personhood, while still correctly recognizing a woman's right to her own body, one should seek to (a) prevent any procedure that outright kills the foetus, (b) demand the mother carry the pregnancy until it is viable, (c) allow only late term "abortions" where the fetus is removed from the mother's body and kept alive on life support.
> if you find someone on your property who you didn't give prior permission to enter, you may murder them
I think the difference here is that there's no "a wild fetus appeared" but rather something intentional happened (intercourse of some kind). There's some level of acceptance/invitation here. If you invite someone into your house and they accept, that doesn't give you license to immediately kill them.
Granted, there are things like rape which need to be part of the equation.
I've said it a number of times in the comments but I will say it again: I think the original Roe vs Wade ruling had a great stance on the issue: once a fetus is old enough to survive, it receives personhood. I still think this is the most acceptable of all outcomes.
> I think a compromise where rights begin at viability makes enough sense. I would also be OK with allowing women to request a fetus be removed from their body even after it becomes viable, but not through procedures that are intended to kill it - for example, I could see an argument where a woman should be allowed to have an elective C-section to remove an 8 month fetus/baby from her body, who she could then abandon in the care of the hospital. But, I don't think it would be OK to request a procedure where an 8 month fetus is killed in utero and removed.
I think we see eye to eye here.
> For non-elective procedures (where the life of the mother is at stake) the discussion is more open-ended, I believe.
Right: which life is more important? Difficult questions, and survivability factors have to come into play here.
> Essentially, the right of the mother to her own body is quite obviously separate from the fetus' right to life. People who seek to conflate them are typically doing so with ulterior motives.
Separate rights with intersection at a point of conflict (assuming the fetus wants to live, which of course cannot be reasonably determined). I don't know if you're considering acknowledging of this conflict a "conflation" but if so, then I have to disagree.
> As someone else was pointing out, taking the extreme view of fetal personhood, while still correctly recognizing a woman's right to her own body, one should seek to (a) prevent any procedure that outright kills the foetus, (b) demand the mother carry the pregnancy until it is viable, (c) allow only late term "abortions" where the fetus is removed from the mother's body and kept alive on life support.
This seems to tip the scales in favor of fetal personhood over female bodily autonomy. I'm not a woman, but I think I would find it horribly painful to carry the child of someone who raped me and I'd likely want to get it out of me as soon as possible.
Are you saying this is a hypothetical position that anti-abortion people should support, assuming they were being logically consistent? If so, then yeah, that would seem to make sense.
> Are you saying this is a hypothetical position that anti-abortion people should support, assuming they were being logically consistent? If so, then yeah, that would seem to make sense.
Yes, that would be at least logically consistent of them.
> Is a fetus that's developed for 8 months a person? Yeah, at that point it could exit the mother and be a (somewhat) functioning being.
I could argue that ability of an organism to survive on its own is not a requirement nor a sufficient criteria for neither personhood (a legal construct) or anything in lines of sentience, self-awareness and sapience (philosophical constructs commonly associated with a person, although it's not a clear cut - e.g. a person may become incapacitated and is still considered a person).
You're misunderstanding me here (and I think this is the crux of a lot of "liberal" misfire on this and other issues): I don't think they're hypocrites, I think they're operating on different axioms from me (and probably you) and their views are entirely self-consistent. Absolutely reprehensible axioms to me, but they're not idiots.
There is a minor hypocrisy in framing, but it's not really important and you never have to talk long before the real axioms come along. Just look at this subthread's dissenting views and find the cases where people subtly or overtly admit that "life" is relative, and the innocence of the child is key. Then consider: innocent compared to who?
They do not believe that people have a right to life. They believe innocent people have a right to life. Once you understand that, what they say makes more sense. The mother who has a child out of wedlock (rarely will they consider the possibility a married person might need or want an abortion) and the man in your house demanding food have a thing in common: they both broke a rule considered sacrosanct and they both "knew what they were doing had consequences" (never mind broken condoms, hormonal birth control not working for medical reasons, let alone more obvious things like rape).
It's not hypocrisy. Most people who fall on the side of "pro-life" arguments believe these things for reasons that make sense to them, and not always for religious reasons.
Thanks for explaining, I think I understand your viewpoint a bit better now. I still think it's somewhat hypocritical that they want the baby to be born at all costs but many of them do not want public services to help single mothers. And I've seen first-hand how single mothers are treated in churches, so pushing church as a solution is not a viable workaround.
Part of the conservative worldview is just so deeply tied into the idea of "deserving," both in a good and bad sense, that it interferes with the value of harm reduction.
If a single mother struggles it's because she deserves it. If her child suffers for that struggle it's her fault. So long as there's something or someone to blame, you can ignore the question of how you could have prevented the problem in the first place.
In fact, if you provide her support, you might be rewarding her infidelity. And then people will perceive that as a reasonable thing to do and more people will do it and then and then and then....
But the important thing is that she didn't "sin" by "killing the baby". If the baby dies after it's born, it's also her fault.
Like I said, there's no hypocrisy there. Being a hypocrite isn't the worst thing someone can be. It's entirely possible to have a perfectly (or as perfectly as humans are capable of) self-consistent worldview that is also incredibly cruel. I think a lot of people have lost sight of that.
At some point people started to believe that conservativism was about "preserving the past" but that's subtly wrong. It's about "preserving hierarchies". Recognizing that all people are worthy of life is contrary to the idea that some people deserve what's coming to them.
I have to say, you've shifted my view on the issue a bit. I find your analysis very interesting. I've not viewed it in terms of deserving, but what you said makes sense.
And you have arrived at about the compromise that the Supreme Court had before this latest ruling: a fetus can start to get protections (on a state by state basis) when it hits viability (might be able to live outside the womb).
Right, which is why I was (and still am) supportive of the nuance of the original Roe vs Wade ruling. I think it was the best possible outcome of all outcomes. I get the technical arguments against enforcing it in the supreme court, but I don't find them particularly comforting in the face of a bunch of religious nutjobs viewing women like faceless baby factories.
>> the people advocating for outlawing abortion are also convinced it's a rights issue: the rights of the unborn child.
> This is a nice fiction but it doesn't hold up to any level of scrutiny most of the time. Largely the "pro-life" people also believe in things like self-defense laws and the castle doctrine, which require that you not believe anyone has a real right to life.
Huh? I know people are really tempted to construct straw-men to make their opponents look like hypocrites, but this one is especially weak.
> You don't need to give the benefit of the doubt here.
Eh, no. You do, otherwise you end up with nonsense like what you wrote next.
> Dig a little deeper and understand what they really believe: women with unwanted pregnancies deserve to have it carried out against their will because they think they've sinned.
You may be able to find an example of that, but I really doubt that's the motivating idea for the vast majority of the pro-life movement. I would bet money what most of them "really believe" is that a fetus is a baby and that baby should be protected from harm.
> I would bet money what most of them "really believe" is that a fetus is a baby and that baby should be protected from harm.
This is a shallow read. Why do they believe the baby should be protected from harm and not the mother who wants to or needs to end the pregnancy? Or the person who broke into your home?
I've literally never had or seen a conversation about abortion with a pro-lifer that when it went down this rabbit hole didn't eventually get to the idea that the innocence of the child matters more than the life of the child (and thus the lack of innocence of the mother).
And we have a women in the picture who is much more of a human being and she should also be protected from harm caused by a technically parasite entity that leeches on her resources potentially causing life-altering changes and could even prove fatal.
Your friend had a personal choice over her body to get a child. And it is a beautiful thing to do so, and I’m very sorry it happened - hopefully she will recover both mentally and physically and will have a sought-after child she wants.
Why do you want other women who did not choose this way to go over the potentially even more terrible thing of birthing a child at significant health risks she half-loves (as hormones are powerful things), half-hates? That just kills 2 people mentally.
Parasites are organisms that reduce the host's fitness while giving nothing in return. Babies are the exact polar opposite of parasites. They are literally the entire reason you're alive as far as evolution is concerned.
I'm sure any reasonably intelligent and good faith person would parse "Evolution is concerned" as a metaphor, just like they parse "The computer looks up the ip address in the DNS server" or "The atom shares some of its outer electrons".
>not all pro-social behaviors are directly reproductive
if you assert from that metaphor that the computer's "entire reason for existing" is to look up ip addresses, you've gone beyond metaphor. People don't have an "evolutionary purpose," evolution is just a thing that happens when ecological pressures are present. People do this all the time and it's really annoying. We don't need a secular version of intelligent design.
And it's relevant because even if you assume that there's some magical driving force to persist a species, there are ways individuals contribute to it other than having offspring. Thus, it is not their sole purpose.
>the computer's "entire reason for existing" is to look up ip addresses,
This is trivially true, a computer's entire reason for existence is to be used by a user, and looking up DNS servers is a crucial part of what makes that happens.
Similarly, a living organism entire reason for existence is to manufacture copies of itself, and, for female mammals, that means carrying babies.
>People don't have an "evolutionary purpose,"
This is just semantic hair-splitting. Planets don't have a 'purpose' either, but every single one of them finds a star and goes around it, and the ones that don't just can't find a star close enough. It's fair to say that, in a very real sense, planets only exist to revolve around stars, their very being necessitates it. This doesn't mean they are "aware" of it.
People are similarly machines made and remade by evolution to do a single thing : spread copies of themselves. It doesn't matter that evolution "didn't mean" to make them that way, they are that way anyhow. And they will behave that way.
>there's some magical driving force to persist a species
It's not magical, it's all the hormones and electricity flowing inside every part of you. You can see it on a screen and measure its concentration.
>Thus, it is not their sole purpose.
Yes it is, Evolution doesn't care that you founded a startup or worked for SpaceX, unless those things increase your genetic copies somehow.
You can write something like "if we look at it from a lens other than biology" before your statement to make it more correct, but I was replying to a person who compared pregnancy to a parasitic relationship, therefore they were invoking biology. Biology, in no uncertain terms, makes it quite clear that this is bullshit. Every living organism, in biology's book, is a self replicating machine made for nothing but spreading copies of itself.
There are two meanings to reason. We are indeed here due to reproduction and evolution not selecting out us, but that is an explanation for the cause.
The other meaning you want to use necessarily require intelligent design - there is no higher level goal to a human’s life in itself, as that would require something designing it for such. Though sure it depends on religious interpretation as well, but then higher level goals are usually claimed - so decide whether you mean the biological cause for our existence which is simply a side effect of a population that grows and is fit to their environment, or some chosen Deity’s higher level goals for an individual. None of those makes us primitive replica generators.
I can't for the life of me figure out where exactly in my comments you're reading this "other meaning". I was just correcting your incorrect usage of 'parasite', that's literally all what my 1st comment is.
You said that babies are parasites, this is just factually false (aside from being dehumanizing and disgusting, but that's typical for most mainstream pro abortion arguments, so I will just ignore that aspect). A parasite isn't just "any organism that lives inside me and makes me feel pain", by that definition, your own immune cells would be parasites in some cases.
Outside of popular movies and video games, parasites are organisms that are
(1) typically of a different species than their host(s), and
(2) depend on 1 or more host for their entire life and reproduction cycle, and
(3) manipulate the host(s), usually maliciously, for their benefit while giving no benefit in return.
You can also add a (4)th point about the host(s) usually not "knowing" they are being manipulated, but maybe that will get too philosophical, I can't be sure if parasitised animals realize anything is wrong with them, but the safe thing to say is that
(4) the host(s) don't host the parasite willingly or deliberately, and usually fight a constant arms race of anti-parasite adaptations followed by counter adaptations from the parasite. It is said that sexual reproduction itself is an anti-parasite countermeasure: the 2-way genetic mixing serves as a "jammer" to make life hard for parasites.
Points (1) and (2) are trivially false for babies. Point (3) is also false, but more subtly : the baby isn't "manipulating" the mother's body, it is itself a piece of the mother's body that gained independence, and the mother's body is adapted to willingly give it whatever it needs to survive and thrive. Point (4) is trivially false as long as the mother's impregnation wasn't due to rape.
I don't understand where all the philosophical baggage about "Design" and "Purpose" came from, I'm just correcting your sloppy use of "Parasite". A female human’s body is a machine perfectly adapted to having babies. This isn't a normative statement about that body's 'higher' purpose or what it 'should' do, just an empirical observation that refutes any similarity between babies and parasites, because parasites are invading entities that exploit "bugs" and "vulnerabilities" in the bodies they inhabit and control, while babies are first-class entities that have dedicated machinery and full, intentional support from any healthy female body that hosts them.
It would be like opening a python interpreter and being shocked that you can do Arbitrary Code Execution at the prompt, *that's literally what an interpreter is*, that's what it does, why it's designed and implemented. You haven't discovered a vulnerability, you just discovered an interpreter. Hosting babies is why the female primate body is adapted the way it is, there is nothing parasitic (read as: 'incidental', 'invading', 'foreign') to it, parasitism is when you exploit a body against its own fitness, just like a security vulnerability is exploiting a program against its own purpose. A python interpreter executing arbitrary python code isn't a security vulnerability, and a female human hosting a human embryo isn't parasitism.
I don’t know where you get all these nonsense requirements for parasites, 1 is usual, but not needed; 2 is trivially not true, there are plenty of animals that are only parasitic for a specific time and will later live outside any host getting nutrients in a “normal” way; regarding 3 — I sure hope you don’t mean manipulation in a sci-fi brain controll way, because while there are very limited instances of such (toxoplasmosis and ant-fungi), this is a very big exception not a rule.
4 - how the hell knowledge even come into the picture?!
So I really have no idea where you got these ridiculous made-up requirements, but just to clear things up, Oxford’s dictionary only has this as a “requirement”: “an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense.”
And this is absolutely true of human babies, technically, no matter how disgusting the notion is. Technically true is still true.
And no, the female body is not made for bearing children. Women usually have the ability otherwise evolution would select against them, but babies are not “first-class” in any way, otherwise there would be no such thing as Rh disease (where the mother’s body literally attacks the fetus). There is no design in evolution, it is a spaghetti code where the vulnerability of a vulnerability happened to be a feature over time and everything seems to be working statistically good enough in extant species, just enough so that they can reproduce enough to not go extint.
>there are plenty of animals that are only parasitic for a specific time and will later live outside any host getting nutrients in a “normal” way
Off course there is plenty of any thing in biology, I was describing every single parasite I know of or read about.
You can remove that requirement from the list if you want.
>I sure hope you don’t mean manipulation in a sci-fi brain controll way,
That would be ridiculous. I meant 'manipulate' as in "cause something to happen for your own benefit" which is an extremely boring way of saying that the parasite has all the agency, the host body is not cooperating with it. Unlike a baby, which the host body is bending over backward to host and nurture, the parasite is 'making its own living'.
>how the hell knowledge even come into the picture
Did you just mis-quote me on that? Because I remember quite clearly that this isn't my actual 4th point, it was a philosophical remark that I said could be a 4th point, my actual 4th point was
>>the host(s) don't host the parasite willingly or deliberately, and usually fight a constant arms race of anti-parasite adaptations followed by counter adaptations from the parasite.
Do you have problems with that as a necessary requirement for parasitism?
>So I really have no idea where you got these ridiculous made-up requirements
3 out of 4 of them are true when you take the time to interpret them as I meant them, and the 4th isn't exactly wrong either. I'm curious as to your definition of "made up".
>Oxford’s dictionary
Dictionary definitions are frequently less accurate than domain specific definitions.
>an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species
>this is absolutely true of human babies
Uhm... human babies are another species?
>the female body is not made for bearing children.
The entirety of this statement truth value rests on a semantic game played on 'made'. You define 'made' as necessarily requiring an intelligent design, whereas I define it simply as whatever happens when a process produce behaviourally-consistent artifacts. The vast majority of planets revolve around stars, therefore planets can be said to be 'made' to orbit stars. The vast majority of female bodies are well-equipped to carry babies, therefore female bodies can be said to be 'made' to carry babies.
When I say 'made', I don't necessarily imply a 'purpose' or a 'designer', I'm simply pointing out the sheer consistency of a form to its function, the female body is as suitable to carrying children as a planet is suitable to orbiting stars.
>Rh disease (where the mother’s body literally attacks the fetus)
Well, every program has its bugs :). How common is Rh disease? How many healthy babies are born for every baby attacked by Rh? Your own immune system turns mad sometimes and start killing you from the inside, does that imply that your immune system is not a machine with killing threats as the main purpose?
>good enough
This is underselling it. It's not hit or miss with a 50-50 or 70-30 %, the things you describe are extraordinarily rare, rarer than computer bugs and manufacturing defects in human-made machines.
If you are trying to draw an equivalence from a mother having a duty of care to her unborn child to someone robbing her house, yours is the argument that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
>Unless you think they'd all be ok with a squatter coming into their house and demanding food and that they wouldn't use their guns on them
Your actions didn't cause the squatter to come into the house, while it's the pregnant woman's actions that caused the baby to form inside her. A better analogy would be you advertising free food and residence, then changing your mind after a squatter comes to take you on your word.
I personally believe you shouldn't kill a squatter as long as no credible threat to your life exists, you can always remove by force, non lethal weapons are a thing. I also believe you don't have the right to terminate a being's life when you're the one who started it in the first place, no matter how much you dress it up in colorful language and fanciful thought experiments.
It's a fundamentally treasonous thing to do, to invite someone into life then quash them like a fly at the earliest inconvenience.
I think the real problem is your two party system. You don't have a real democracy, you have two gangs of career politicians competing to ruin your country.
Agree! I consistently vote for people who advocate for voter reform (ranked choice elections/STV and all that). It's the only way to break out of this ridiculous mess. Unfortunately I seem to be one of the only people who cares about such things.
Granted, there are deeper problems to our democracy than selecting representatives. At this point, our federal government is a puppet to the financial and corporate worlds: a marriage of industry and state. Hmm, where else did that happen?
It also works more-or-less as intended. On issues where there is broad consensus (e.g. COVID relief) it can move incredibly quickly. On issues where there is broad disagreement (e.g. abortion) it moves very slowly or not at all (requiring compromise).
I wish more countries were like the US (or, alternatively, like Switzerland, which represents the other extreme with their direct democracy).
I’m strongly in favor of abandoning FPTP everywhere, etc., but I’d caution against tying hopes to a single cause. IRV/STV/RCV/PV are used around the world, and their effects are not that revolutionary. (My softly preferred approval voting sees least real world use, either way I’m not letting my fantasy run wild.) Politicians, parties and voters adapt to the new ruleset, and in the end some form of median voter theorem still rules (Two coalitions dominate, fighting around the center.) The US system legal and geographical pecularities mean, in broad strokes, that it’s a median voter in a median district in a median state. On the party side, the system shifts much of the coalition-building to significantly before the elections, in comparison to other countries, where it’s done close to or after votes are cast. But then, I too believe we can and should do better.
Seattle will become the third US city to use approval voting this November 2022. It will come to entire US states in the next few years. It will be dominant electoral reform in no time.
Both Democrats and Republicans are more similar than different on all but a few social issues (these issues can change over time-- for instance, many Republican politicians used to be pro family planning and contraceptives). Both parties use those few social issues to sow all the division they can.
E.g., Clinton finished what Reagan had started with NAFTA (Democrat and Republican parties both support neoliberal policies)[1]. Clinton, continuing Reagan's initiative, dismantled the federal welfare system[2]. Clinton signed into law an expansion of policing, lengthened sentences, and a three strikes-- life imprisonment provision[3]. Clinton also supported deregulation and signed Gramm-Leach-Bliley which effectively repealed Glass-Steagal[4]. Clinton could have been a Republican except for a few social issues such as, his justice picks supported Roe v. Wade[5].
Clinton wasn't an outlier. Obama proposed changes to the CPI calculation to reduce, already low, Social Security (public pension) benefits[6]. He continued with financial deregulation signing the Security Modernization Act into law[7]. He supported privatization of schools[8]. His landmark health insurance legislation, which maintained private insurers and health care providers, was originally proposed by a far right think tank, the Heritage Foundation[9].
> Presumably those people will be proposing a federal ban soon, right?
Sure, that'd be a logical next step. The people who argue for states' rights are often doing so as a ruse to eventually exercise federal control.
That said, I think it will end up like marijuana: illegal federally with a bunch of states who just don't give a fuck. In the end, it may only weaken the power the federal government holds, which at this point is a good thing because power has been concentrating more and more the past 100 years.
I feel I have to reiterate though: this is still a disastrous outcome for a lot of people. I'm not happy about it. The conservative morons who "want the government out of their lives" but also continuously try to legislate people's bodies and sexuality have scored a real win, and I'm scared and upset for all the women in red states who have to live under their reign of hypocritical terror.
"The people who argue for states' rights are often doing so as a ruse to eventually exercise federal control."
It's funny how symmetrical hypocrisy is.
Liberals are hypocrites because they favor states rights when it comes to firearm regulations but not for abortions; and conservatives are hypocrites for exactly the opposite positions.
(I'll point out that in this instance, on a purely logical basis, the conservatives have the upper hand because they can clearly point to the second amendment, whereas the liberals need to try to identify abortion as some kind of implicit natural right that's not written down anywhere. I say this as a pro-choice person.)
In either case, you are right, it is largely a ruse. If abortions and firearms were both illegal nationally, then liberals would fight for states' rights on abortion but not for firearms; and conservatives would again have the opposite positions. Political creatures fight on the battlefield where they can win (or, more often, keep the status quo and stay in office but look like they are fighting to keep the campaign cash rolling in).
This is one of those cases, where, people like the original commenter, if we assume they are arguing in good faith, will then be "surprised" when it turns out those they are electing actually aren't committed to it being a "states' rights" issue. Devolution of authority to the states is just the current tool the right have to further restrict access to abortion, if federal legislative power to ban abortion becomes available to them, they will drop the "states' rights" approach immediately.
It's really a tale as old as time (or at least as old as the United States). "States' rights," outside of theoretical discussions, has always simply been a tool, not a true guiding ideology.
Yup. Funny how Thomas, in his opinion, believes "access to contraceptives, "same sex relationships", "same sex marriage" are all "errors that need to be corrected in the context of "states' rights", but somehow "interracial marriage" isn't.
Good faith is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. If you're proposing something bad I'm going to oppose you regardless of whether you're proposing it in good faith.
My point about good faith was assuming people that claim to simply be in favor of devolution of authority to legislatures or states are being truthful; and not just also saying that because its a useful and expedient defense.
He that knows only his side of the case, doesn't even know that. -John Stewart Mill
If you can’t steelman any topic, you don’t understand the topic.
I don’t pick begrudge Republicans that actually believe and really feel the abortion has been terminating a human life unfairly.
I’m more begrudge Democrats that refuse to understand this is a nonfalsifiable issue. That we will never understand truly the point of which a thing becomes a human.
There will never be agreement. You need understand and accept that.
So given the choice between federally legal and federally illegal, where there will always be conflict, you could do worse than 50 state rules.
For all the rage that “some number of weeks abortion bans” in the certain state received, that is Germany’s every day. They have a 12 week ban with mandatory counseling. I have difficulty understanding how the same pitched here would get red eyed outrage from most Pro-Choice but Germans seem to be getting along.
I don’t think the issue is abortion, I think it’s just like everything else hyper-polarization.
I think it’s absolutely stupid that if I see you still wearing a mask in a store, that I can pretty much determine your views on abortion. We’re being played.
> If you can’t steelman any topic, you don’t understand the topic.
This fundamentally misunderstands the actual Republican position, and it does so in the way that they are intending to trick you into doing.
If they cared about lives, they would protect schoolchildren. If they cared about lives, they would protect the poor. If they cared about lives, they'd care about death from car accidents, from Covid, from lack of medical care. They don't.
I think it is you who fundamentally misunderstand their viewpoint. You are mistaking not agreeing with your proposed solutions with not caring about the problem. They largely believe that government welfare programs of the 1960s and 70s destroyed communities and caused a larger amount of suffering and death. They earnestly believe that a better economy will be more successful at reducing homelessness than (in their view) crack-filled government housing.
The right smears the left with similar accusations. Every time an illegal immigrants rapes/murders/etc. you'll see them accusing liberals of the same thing--not caring about children's lives, etc.
They don't trust government policy makers are telling the truth about the effectiveness of masks and vaccinations--the same reason many democratic block voters like African Americans have low mask and vaccination usage rates.
Part of that is caused by stupid conspiracy theories and scientific illiteracy, but partially because its pretty obvious the government does lie to use when they think its for our own good.
Though part of it is valuing individual liberty over a slight reduction in risk of death. They are more willing to value sending kids back to school even if it means some 80 years olds die a few years earlier.
Not the OP but as a fellow non-American who likes to dabble in American politics I try to always mention that detail when I’m commenting on a hot/intense socio-political subject (like this one), so that the other people involved in the same conversation (presumably most of them
Americans, both here and on Reddit) can judge for themselves how valid my opinion can be seeing that (most likely) I’m not directly involved or affected by the subject being discussed.
In my experience, people mentioning that they're not American (and in particular they they are European) seem to think that confers some infallible wisdom to their arguments
> the people advocating for outlawing abortion are also convinced it's a rights issue: the rights of the unborn child. This isn't an open and shut case.
Does the decision at all call out the rights of the unborn child? If so why would it be left up to the states and not outright banned? Why are contraception and gay marriage called out as comprable rights?
There is no "pro-abortion", there is "pro-choice", as in people are free to not abort for moral or any other reasons.
I don't disagree with you, it's a complicated moral issue, I do not advocate for using abortion as birth control, but forcing women to birth and raise children when they can't afford them or even do not want them creates a lot of problems for those children down the line.
Mindlessly breeding people into poverty is no more humane than aborting a clump of cells.
Is IVF murder of children? Is a twin that consumed a twin in-utero a killer? Should we launch a criminal investigation every time a woman has a miscarriage?
Is plan B murder of children? If yes, is contraception, including pulling out murder of children?
Let's be real here, there is no 100% effective contraception method and out of 100s of millions of people having sex, probably a few million will get accidentally pregnant.
"People should not have sex" - is not a viable argument, because it's not a thing people will stop doing.
You sound like someone who thinks that women who have sex should be punished for being whores. So how about no uterus, no opinion? And kindly, hope you do not reproduce
> Is IVF murder of children? Is a twin that consumed a twin in-utero a killer? Should we launch a criminal investigation every time a woman has a miscarriage?
(1) That's a silly question. In-virtro fertilization is a series of procedures to help conceive a child. (2) Intent is often the focal point of Criminal Law and is generally shown by circumstantial evidence such as the acts or knowledge of the defendant. And so is ability; an unborn child has no intent or knowledge or ability to resist, so I'd argue no that it's not murder for a twin to consume her sibling in utero. Got any more "hardballs" for me, or are those the best you got?
> Is plan B murder of children? If yes, is contraception, including pulling out murder of children?
If a child was conceived, yes. Take a child that is in utero and the mother is 1 day away from delivery and takes a pill that poisons the child. Yes, it absolutely is murder. You think these are hard questions but they are not. The morality on the pro-life side is pretty cut and dry; any attempt to kill an innocent, healthy, viable human child is wrong. Period. Full-stop. Even in cases where the mother is in danger and needs to end the pregnancy; the child could simply be delivered. There is no need to kill the child, that's an extra and unnecessary and evil step you'd have to go out of the way to do.
> Let's be real here, there is no 100% effective contraception method and out of 100s of millions of people having sex, probably a few million will get accidentally pregnant.
Yes, and? Are you trying to say that the killings unwanted children should be OK? Are you saying that the value the life of those children should be hinged on how much they are loved by their parents? What are you trying to argue, exactly? Serious question.
> You sound like someone who thinks that women who have sex should be punished for being whores.
Nice strawman, but I'm right here. I think that women who have sex and conceive children should be held responsible for raising those children. You must think that women in general are pretty infantile and cannot bear any responsibility whatsoever. Are you some kind of misogynist?
> So how about no uterus, no opinion? And kindly, hope you do not reproduce
Why are you assuming my gender? I have 2 children by the way. Let me ask you, do YOU have a uterus? If not, then kindly shut the hell up while the big girls talk.
> > Is IVF murder of children? Is a twin that consumed a twin in-utero a killer? Should we launch a criminal investigation every time a woman has a miscarriage?
> (1) That’s a silly question.
No, its not, and analysis of the trigger laws passed in anticipation of Roe falling has found that IVF is at risk under many of them (because they define a “pregnancy” as beginning at fertilization, not implantation) [0], and states with fetal homicide laws in place even before Roe have conducted investigations and even made charges in cases of miscarriages not due to procured abortion on various theories.
It is only a silly question to people not paying any attention.
> One of the legislative initiatives that has been undertaken by several states is a statute creating a trigger ban on abortion, wherein the Supreme Court striking down Roe would immediately result in an automatic complete abortion ban statewide.
Good. I think that laws that serve to protect defenseless children should be upheld. I do think that IVF should be reconsidered, but it appears that the intent of the law is to prevent children from dying, not to prevent couples who have trouble conceiving, from conceiving because of complications that may arise. I think those two are separate issues with different outcomes. I think a child that is failed to be conceived or dies during the process of being conceived is a fundamentally different issue to a procedure who's express and deliberate purpose is to end the life of the child.
You have some serious reading comprehension problems.
He asked if it was murder, not "if it was under legal threat". And I never said it was bad. It attempts to conceive children not kill children, that's why it's silly. Can you strawman any harder?
Oh god. the 1 day before birth argument. Cuz that happens.
> the child could simply be delivered
What do you think a 2nd or 3rd trimester abortion is?
> Are you saying that the value the life of those children should be hinged on how much they are loved by their parents
Matter of fact it is. Millions of children are abused by their parents, 1900 of them died in 2019 due to direct abuse. Do you think forcing childbirth upon women unfit or unwilling to be mothers will bring this number down?
> I think that women who have sex and conceive children should be held responsible for raising those children.
What about men? Because men get to leave.
And thank you for asking, I do have a uterus. Sorry about your kids though
>. The morality on the pro-life side is pretty cut and dry; any attempt to kill an innocent, healthy, viable human child is wrong.
While innocent is too subjective to argue, the argument is not cut and dry. 1 week old fetuses are not viable and many laws don’t make exceptions on health. In fact isn’t viability one if the leading pro-choice indicators of morality in abortion?
> In fact isn’t viability one if the leading pro-choice indicators of morality in abortion?
No. That's a tactical argument. The leading, fundamental argument from morality is the value of human life. That's probably why many laws don't make exceptions on health. And as a pro-choicer, I kind of agree. I think there's an argument to be made that viability shouldn't even be a factor.
It can also block implantation. From the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information...
I don't personally hold strong opinions on Plan B. I think it should be frowned on because it could kill a conceived child, but I don't think it's as egregious as abortion.
> Do you think women that have been raped and conceive children as a result should be responsible for raising those children?
I think it's a nuanced issue; it's less than 1% of all abortion cases, and any policies crafted on this should be the exception and not the rule. People often want to take this particular marginal case to craft a rule to apply to the non-rape and incest cases.
But to answer your question directly, yes. I think the value of human life is contingent on someone's humanity, not on the circumstances surrounding their birth. Let me explain further. I know someone who was born of a rape and incest. She is an adult now and works as a nurse. To say that her life is somehow less valuable than her co-worker's is, I think, completely antithetical to the idea that all men and women are created equal. I think that being raped is traumatic. I don't think that the solution to that trauma is more trauma by means of abortion. I asked her, and her mother is happy she had her in the end. Having her was the only thing to help her cope. I realize not every woman is like her mother, so I also think that it's understandable if a mother chooses to bring her baby conceived of rape or incest up for adoption.
You seem to be lacking some understanding of how IVF works.
10 to 20 eggs are extracted, and then an attempt is made to fertilize them with sperm. 70 to 80 percent of those are successfully fertilized. That's (low) 7 to (high) 16 fertilized eggs. Perhaps 2 to 4 are implanted.
When would you say a child is "conceived"? When the egg is fertilized? When the egg is fertilized but only inside a woman's uterus? After the fertilized egg implants, perhaps?
I don't see how you can say that IVF isn't "murder" of all the fertilized eggs that aren't implanted - unless you try to say that suspending the process by freezing them is okay? - but if it's not "when fertilized" that you claim that "a child is conceived" then we start talking about the actual issue: potential and actual.
An egg has the potential to become a human, if fertilized. It isn't one.
A fertilized egg has the potential to become a human, if it implants correctly. It still isn't one.
An implanted egg that's divided 100 times, and is now 200 cells, has the potential to become a human, if it's fed and nurtured. It isn't one.
"Viability outside the womb" was picked for a reason, but even that permits other people to play the game of "force a woman to provide her body to continue to be used to feed and develop the viable-outside-the-womb baby" or "cut the woman open to remove the viable-outside-the-womb baby" if she doesn't want to continue to feed and develop it.
There's certainly a difference between "legal" and "moral"; a woman who knows she doesn't want to have a child and fails to act to prevent that "potential" from turning into "viable" must still have a legal right to terminate that pregnancy/viable human, but her actions are morally indefensible. By the same token, removing an implanted grouping of 200 cells can't be seen as anything other than cutting off the potential, and doing so as soon as one is aware of the potential and knows that one lacks the desire to end up with a baby is laudable.
> I think that women who have sex and conceive children should be held responsible for raising those children.
The misery in situations where consensual decision-making isn’t the fact of the matter is IMHO tragically under-explored in this framing and in Alito’s opinion. Without respect to the legal and political status of Roe, I still think it was morally right where it limited government intrusion and authority.
Will you feel responsible for this kind of outcome when it occurs in America, as it has in the past and does in the world?
> The morality on the pro-life side is pretty cut and dry; any attempt to kill an innocent, healthy, viable human child is wrong.
For anyone who honestly feels this way, it would seem that the most obvious next step is to enact very strong laws that prevent that now-born perfectly viable human child from being murdered at school. I can respect such a consistent position.
I've yet to meet anyone who takes this "pro-life" position a single moment beyond birth though. Why is that?
> For anyone who honestly feels this way, it would seem that the most obvious next step is to enact very strong laws that prevent that now-born perfectly viable human child from being murdered at school. I can respect such a consistent position.
I'm pretty sure there are already pretty strong laws against violence in schools, let alone murder. I think what you're insinuating on are gun laws? Well, sure. I think that every teacher should be armed and trained in the event of a school shooter because they have the responsibility to protect those children.
>"No, not like that!"
Haha. We tried it your way. Turns out criminals don't respect laws. Most gun deaths occur in gun-free zones. But those cities that are most armed also tend to be most polite and least violent. Think carefully about why that is.
> I've yet to meet anyone who takes this "pro-life" position a single moment beyond birth though. Why is that?
Again, pretty strong laws on the books against murder. I think what you're insinuating here is why aren't there government programs to raise children? Well, it's quite simple. The murdering of children is a completely separate issue. One dwells on preventing murder, and the other hinges on who's responsibility it is to raise it. I think it should be illegal to kill the homeless. To have you then turn around on me and tell me I'm obligated to take care of that homeless man is disingenuous. These are two, completely separate issues. I think that in general children are obligated to be taken care of by their parents, and I'm pretty sure we have laws on the books for that too. So, what's your issue with conservatives, really?
> I'm pretty sure there are already pretty strong laws against violence in schools, let alone murder.
That's why I said laws that prevent, not just words on a book.
> they have the responsibility to protect those children
They most certainly don't. Teachers have responsibility to teach and mentor children and they're fairly overworked on those roles already. Pretending they'll moonlight in SWAT school is hardly realistic on any level.
The question was how come nobody who believes in the sanctity of a child's life before birth actually believes in any protection to that child's life post-birth?
>> it's a complicated moral issue
> I disagree. Murder of children is wrong; that's as cut and dry as it gets.
Consider a pregnant woman in prison. In a "pro-life" state it is easy for her to get an abortion. It a "pro-choice" state is harder for her to get an abortion.
> Moreover, women who cannot afford or want them should not be risking pregnancies to begin with. Sex makes babies. To make a baby and then try to absolve yourself > To argue that human life is "just a clump of cells" based on your convenience is literally what hitler to the jews.
Are you suggesting that tumors are people too, and that they have full rights?
Ridiculous. A fetus is not a person. A pig or a cow is more sentient. If we're going to call a fetus a person, first we gotta do intelligent livestock and outlaw killing animals for food.
The difference is that most Americans would be outraged if the government forbade them from eating meat, because that takes away their freedom and forces them to spend slightly more money on food that doesn't taste quite as good. It astounds me that these same people think the government should have the power to force someone to give birth to a child they don't want and can't afford. The amount of suffering that will cause is unimaginable.
Of course, most people who are against abortion won't hesitate to get one if they or their daughter needs it. It's always different when it's your life and dreams that are about to be destroyed.
> And yes, I do think that human life trumps over bodily autonomy.
So you'd be ok with government agents showing up at your door in the middle of the night and taking you involuntarily to the hospital to donate some of your organs to someone in the ER?
> The relationship and obligations that a mother has to her child are fundamentally different to the relationship and obligations I have to a random stranger in the ER
You define "child" based on a religious definition. That's /your/ religion, not mine. Feel free to follow it all you want, you don't need to involve the rest of us. We're not talking about children, we're talking about fetuses.
> Do you really want to be play that game? Because I'll have a field day with you.
Ah, an internet tough guy. Feel free to "have a field day." Your entire argument is premised on the idea that a fetus is a human life, which only has basis in religion.
> You define "child" based on a religious definition. That's /your/ religion, not mine. Feel free to follow it all you want, you don't need to involve the rest of us. We're not talking about children, we're talking about fetuses.
Fetuses are unborn children. I realize this definition is rather inconvenient to your fragile narrative, but it is THE definition, not just my definition. Please refer to the dictionary, #4: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/child
Idk man. How come human lives have more value than other primate lives? Sounds like a perspective that comes from privilege (as in lucky enough to to be born human.
That edit is a nice but ultimately impotent statement.
What matters is the mechanics of how we're in this situation. They're complicated and thankfully this decision doesn't mean an outright ban for all Americans. Providing access for the rest is what should be discussed, over shaking fists and platitudes.
If the voting majority truly cares about access to abortion then we will hopefully see enough democratic traction to give them the mandate needed.
They do [0]. We haven't.
'Own the libs, fuck the deplorables', no compromise.
I'm tired of this false equivalence.
Let's not forget that each of the recently appointed justices that voted down Roe V Wade lied to congress before they were approved for the supreme court, saying that they wouldn't. How can one truly compromise with people who aren't honest in the first place? What is even the compromise here? Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others? The vast majority of Dems are the moderates and have acted in good faith, as you're suggesting, for decades and have nothing to show for it. The Overton window has been moving right for what seems like my entire lifetime.
You actually believe that the right lies, but the left generally acts in good faith? That's...cute. Your lifetime must not be very long. Both parties are full of dishonest slimeballs. If you only see one side of it, you are being tricked
Conservatives are straight up reactionary, and are putting people's rights back decades, using any means necessary. For all of the mainstream Dems' failures in executing the will of their constituents, they aren't doing anything close to that.
If you see these things as equal, you should try to put the snark aside and engage the world in an honest way.
No offense, but I think you need to engage a history book and some other news sources to break out of your bubble. The only difference is that one party is more aligned and recently successful than the other.
The game theory of this situation is bleak. If one side chooses hardliners, then the hardliners can pull the center closer to the hardline. In the past this worked out as most hardliners were hardlined on different topics. Now, the right has unified into a solid voting block that increasingly picks up all or nothing stances on most issues.
If democrats elect moderates into such an environment, the center is hopelessly pulled to the right. If Republicans vote in a moderate, they still get pulled into voting with the majority. If you are a democrat, increasingly your only option is to vote in your own set of hardliners who will take all or nothing stances - as getting nothing done is better than the alternative.
The anger in this decision is partially a sign of what's to come. The Supreme court is now vastly out of sync with the national population center - or their own precedent for the last ~70 years. Barring court reform, I'd expect that we're on the way to a constitutional crises where a state decides to overrule the supreme court's decision.
How would a state overrule the supreme court's decision? What do you mean with that? If In understand correctly, abortion has been legalized by law in several states and forbidden in several others, neither of which conflicts with this decision.
It is a shame that the USA hasn't been able to enact federal legislation on abortion in the past 50 years.
Massachusetts just barred interstate extradition requests, and other interstate attempts to enforce abortion bans for patients who travel out of state for abortions. How long before that goes to the Supreme Court?
There is zero chance that any elected or appointed official in Massachusetts blocks an abortion in Mass for any person regardless of residency.
The court is now firmly playing in political topics which it is Ill-equipped to handle.
> If the voting majority truly cares about access to abortion then we will hopefully see enough democratic traction to give them the mandate needed.
I’m sorry but this feels entirely divorced from reality. The nature of the senate, the continued erosion of voting rights… we’re not going to see democratic traction in a system that actively opposes it.
So much of our constitution is designed to protect us from the abuse of the majority. The idea that the majority should be able to dictate everything is NOT what democracy means. Mob rule is scary, and the framers knew that a government that is solely dictated by the will of the majority is ripe for abuse of the minority. So we have all sorts of restrictions on what the majority is allowed to do.
I feel like people have this view today that whatever the majority says is how things should be. That is not justice.
Many of the judges on the bench were literally pushed through undemocratically through the deep state cabal known as the Federalist society. The idea that the US can fix things by just voting better is laughable.
Also why is everyone playing “devils advocate” on this thread? It’s clear what the majority sentiment is here, why bother pretending to take a middle of the road “nuanced” position?
How is the presidency and senate undemocratic? If they are, it would be through the lens of direct democracy and I'm not sure direct democracy would result in significantly different politics.
The issue the GP is referring to is how the way our electoral process is set up people with more land have more voice in government. In effect, if you are rural your vote is worth more. This is an extreme in the Senate where a single person's vote has 1.5% of the power of a person in a different state (California vs. Wyoming).
And why do we give more voice to the rural vote? Sure they would be a minority otherwise, but so are left handed people and we don't give them more vote. Are they better informed politically than people who live in more densely populated areas? It doesn't really make much sense and I've never heard a argument stronger than "but then the cities would have a lot of political power" without explaining why that is a bad thing.
"Very seldom" including every single Republican Presidential term for the past 30 years save one. Without the electoral college propping them up the modern Republican party would be in serious trouble.
The two times that a president has lost the popular vote and won the election in recent history were Bush Jr's first term in 2000 and Trump's term in 2016.
Only 3 justices were appointed during those terms, all by Trump in 2017 - 2020.
Bush Jr did appoint two justices but they were during his second term, when he won the popular vote.
The remaining four justices were appointed by Bush Sr, Clinton, and Obama (2).
So I have no idea where you are getting your figure of 7/9 from.
So what you are saying is 7/9 justices came from the six elections in this century? Sounds an awful lot like what I said but I guess redundancy is sometimes useful.
This was just limiting it to this century, though. The pattern is well established and well understood. It isn't even very complicated. Each state has 2 senators and at least one representative. The number of electoral votes of a state is the number of senators plus the number of representatives. So a state like mine, Vermont, has three electoral votes even though we have only about 500,000 citizens. If population size were uncorrelated with political leanings, this would just contribute noise to the electoral process, but it doesn't. Less densely populated regions are conservative. The more such regions there are in a state, the lower the population of the state. So in effect conservative voices are given extra weight in elections. If you believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence -- "all men are created equal" and whatnot --, this should offend you.
Remember, founding fathers had a very dim view on Democracy, this is why they chose to have a Republic and then restrict the republic through a constitution.
If Democrats were losing out to big numbers, they would pro-republic and Republicans would be pro-democracy.
But, one of the best explanations for why founding fathers built the system the way they did is this[1], by late Justice Scalia.
The fundamental idea is that the American system is created to represent the will of the republic across time and space:
- Every bill needs to be passed by all three House, Senate and the President
- House recycles very fast (every 2 years)
- President recycles at a moderate speed (every 4 years)
- Senate recycles at a slow pace (every 6 years, and partially every 2 years)
- House represents the population
- Senate represents all states equally (or represents land)
- Presidency is elected through a hybrid system (electoral college, which is
distributed in proportion to the population).
- The fundamental idea is that any bill must be agreed upon by:
a. The will of the people not just in short term (house), but in mid-term (presidency) and long term (senate) also. When UK wanted out of EU, the remainers believed that they should have a revote because they didn't believe that people voted with full information. Of course, years later a second proxy vote through general elections made the intent clear, but in the US we will not go for a bill to be passed unless its not just what we voted for in the past 2 years, but also what we voted for in past 4 and 6 years.
b. The will of fifty states, and territories and not just by a few populous states. In contrast, EU's policy making is all a decision of France and Germany. EU is more 'democratic' than US, but also far more fragile.
American Democratic Republic system is a part of experiment of 'Union of Unions'. It's a balance between the different sides. If you make the union too weak, it will fail to hold itself up. Like Articles of Confederation was a failure because it was too weak, pre-Civil War US also turned out to be a union not strong enough. League of Nations wasn't strong enough.
But if you make it too strong, then individual states will start walking out because they don't find their interests represented (like UK voting for Brexit from EU).
The phrase “founding fathers” is gross and embarrassing as an American. They weren’t deities and they didn’t happen to invent the ultimate possible government for all time. We’re using computers to talk about stuff they literally wrote on animal skins with bird feathers! They rode horses to go visit other states, we have global fiber optic networks. Even if they were good ideas then, it’s not remotely the same world we’re living in now.
> Even if they were good ideas then, it’s not remotely the same world we’re living in now.
Which is why the government system they created allows us to update the constitution. Which we have done. Many times.
At least give specific reasons for why you think we should abandon the political philosophy that has underpinned our government for almost 250 years rather than vague references to technological changes.
Sure. Why send a handful of representatives from each state to Washington? With horses somebody needed to physically go. Now we can all watch C-SPAN. If we can vote for American Idol we can vote on laws. Yeah, direct democracy, computers make it work. It never did before but now it does.
Of course I don’t want to have to study every law and decide how to vote, that would be a full time job. So I’ll pick a representative and add my vote to the weight of theirs. But I can change my representative any time, even on a vote by vote basis, and obviously they don’t have to be from my state.
There are all kinds of better way of doing things that are possible now that nobody has gotten around to trying.
I feel like you made zero effort to understand the point I tried to make. Founding fathers may have been from a different time, but they absolutely weren't wrong about democracy not being a solution.
They studied numerous constitutions written during the antiquities and correctly concluded that for a large geographical nation like the US, democracy cannot work. That part does not change just because we have super fast communication lines and computers today.
They absolutely did not consider the “large geographical nation” that the US has become, because it did not exist as such at that time.
They had 2.5M people, we now have 330M. We’ve scaled 100x. It shouldn’t be surprising that we need to rethink the initial architectural decisions.
Think about it this way. They got to study their antiquities and learn from those lessons right? It would have been really weird if they had said, “Look, wise men already studied this stuff and figured out the right way,” and they’re talking about ideas from the year 1500, as if there was nothing to learn from the preceding 250 years.
> They absolutely did not consider the “large geographical nation” that the US has become, because it did not exist as such at that time.
You are making the same mistake as in the earlier part. US was already pretty big at the time of US constitutional debates to make direct democracy not possible.
> They didn’t do that. Why should we?
You're more than welcome to do that, but understand something, all the past constitutions/republics/democracies is data, which cannot be easily replicated and controlled for. You're going to come up with a new political system which ignores literally every negative lesson of the history of past 3000 years then you will need to explain how are those concerns not necessary.
Founding fathers were, really really really worried about things devolving into a military dictatorship and violation of individual rights. There are plenty of reasons to criticize them for not caring enough about the individual rights, but none that their concerns were unwarranted.
Just to give you an idea of the concerns we need to care about:
- Build a system which is democratic in nature and works for a large country like ours.
- Make sure that it prevents the democracy from violating individual rights.
- Make sure that it does not become a dictatorship (like how Roman Republic ended and became a dictatorship when Julius Caesar declared himself the permanent dictator).
States already tried to walk out once, and it didn't go so well.
A fundamental problem of catering to minority opinions is that if a minority shrinks it tends to become more and more strident to the point where it can no longer compromise, but they still maintain power due to the way the system is set up. This leads to highly polarized and dysfunctional political systems.
Plus, if there is a danger that a minority might feel disenfranchised and want to leave, what happens when a majority feels the same way?
I totally agree with this view and the "problem" is people want their way _NOW_. They don't have the patience nor want to understand that the other side has the political majority at this time. And when the majority becomes a minority opinion, they also cannot handle that change very well.
Today's bare-knuckle politics sure does not help moderate the peaks.
On the other hand you shouldn't be surprised when people are angry at you when you tell them "hold on, we are going to fix this problem in the future" when they have been waiting for literally their entire lifetime and nobody seems to want to do anything about it.
"This problem will be inconvenient for me to solve, so please wait until I die of old age before you solve it, thank you for your patience."
> The fundamental idea is that the American system is created to represent the will of the republic across time and space:
> - Every bill needs to be passed by all three House, Senate and the President
> - House recycles very fast (every 2 years)
> - President recycles at a moderate speed (every 4 years)
> - Senate recycles at a slow pace (every 6 years, and partially every 2 years)
> - House represents the population
> - Senate represents all states equally (or represents land)
> - Presidency is elected through a hybrid system (electoral college, which is distributed in proportion to the population).
I feel like a lot of people fail to consider whether this is a good thing. Like social studies classes always present this as an unvarnished good - "checks and balances, the bedrock of our system". But a system really should be designed to build consensus to action - there should always be someone in the driver's seat, even if it's not someone I agree with. Letting the rudder flap in the breeze until 100% of people can agree on something is not an inherently desirable outcome, because that almost never happens!
And yes, some people would say that's a good thing too, that we should bias towards doing nothing instead of doing something, but... that's not really a viable model indefinitely. The world is now based around exponential growth in economic output, exponential growth in technology, and we are preferring political systems optimized for an O(1) constant-state world where there's 100 years between the cotton gin and the internal combustion engine.
Especially in times of crisis that bias towards doing nothing is a really bad thing... consider the case of the Polish Sejm and how the goal of "excessive consensus" basically crippled the country and allowed their enemies to manipulate the system to create disruption and then exploit the deadlock for political gain.
Everyone agrees 100% isn't the right number, but then, what is? is 75% the right number? 60%? Simple majority? How big a consensus has ever existed in the modern political sphere, short of 9/11-style world-changing events? A 60% popular vote is considered a landslide, but if the system requires a 75% popular vote to achieve a 60% senatorial/house majority, the number is effectively 75% and actually achieving consensus really isn't possible in that system.
The American system's focus on checks-and-balances really is excessive - it's not a good thing for a system to be unable to reach consensus. It worked for a while as long as the "gentleman's agreement" held but now we are seeing people exercising political maximalism, "hardball" so to speak, and with those participants the actual rules of the system no longer result in consensus
We can then optimize around the "what if we flop back and forth between parties" problem separately but - requiring 100% consensus between all dimensionalities of society to do anything is not really the solution for that.
This idea that "deadlock between branches is a positive design goal" is fundamentally not how the rest of the world approaches this. After all, in parliamentary systems the PM is the leader of the party/coalition that controls parliament. That's a good system, it builds a government that has a consensus towards action and goals! Producing deadlock between branches of government isn't a desirable outcome in itself. And that, if you phrase it as such, is an inherent rejection of the American ideal of "checks and balances" in the sense you outline it here ("to require massive consensus across all dimensionalities of society via multiple branches and political compartments each favoring a dimensionality"). Yes, absolutely they still have a constitution and judicial branch to protect people, but they don't design the system around deadlocks between arms of the government being a design goal. And it still doesn't lead to "laws completely flip every time power changes" or the other supposedly negative outcomes from consensus-oriented systems.
> And why do we give more voice to the rural vote? Sure they would be a minority otherwise, but so are left handed people and we don't give them more vote.
There are other minorities that we think a bit harder about than left handers. Consider, for example, that African Americans are approximately 12% of the US population.[1] They are not, however, evenly distributed around the United States. For example, they make up 33% of the population of Georgia and 22% in North Carolina,[2] states that crack the top 10 in US population.[3]
It took a bit of doing, but I weighted the electoral votes for all 50 states and DC (see [2]; you've got to issue your own queries to get them all) according to the percentage of African-American population (AAPC). For example, Alabama has nine electoral votes and an AAPC of 26.8%, which returns 2.412 adjusted votes.
In sum, African Americans account for 70.658 total electoral votes, about 13% of the total compared to their population representation of 12%. That step change is an 8% advantage relative to their total population (538*0.12 ~ 65 electoral votes; 1 - 65/71 ~ 8.45%).
This is not, I want to point out, an argument about racial inequality or the fitness of the electoral college to deliver solutions to those kinds of problems. Neither is it an exhaustive treatment (obviously) of every kind of demographic. There are obvious flaws in this approach (you can't split EC votes, EC votes are typically winner-take-all, not all of the population are voting age, etc., etc.). So it's also not intended to say, "Well, akshully..."
I do think, though, that there is some nuance that is missing here. Rural people aren't the only minority affected by the electoral college, and questions of geography and demography play important roles in how people vote. It's worth considering what happens when you are in the minority, because it is the rights of the minority that are most likely to be overrun by the majority.
I'm not sure what your point is here? You are trying to calculate black voting power without even considering the longstanding and effective black voter suppression efforts in states like Georgia, so it's all academic anyway.
Replacing tyranny of the majority with tyranny of the minority isn't a win.
> It doesn't matter if I like the minority or not, singling them out for more political power makes no sense.
It seems like as a society we have a complicated relationship with this idea.
Rights are in principle equal, but power is not equally distributed. Maintaining any balance is a really hard problem.
The electoral college could be a relic of a bygone era whose time is over and done, but I'm not sure that eliminating it is going to reset the balance of power in a way that protects rights more effectively.
Sure it would. The changed outcomes in 2 recent presidential elections alone would have resulted in a completely different supreme court, which would have changed all of this. If the senate had proportional representation everything Dipshit McConnell hamfisted through wouldn't have happened either, which would also create a very substantially different political landscape.
That presumes candidates would campaign the same way and voters would vote the same way.
Look at the way primaries are run. Candidates put extraordinary effort into small states because that's where the party has decided it wants to have its candidates slug it out. They could instead choose larger states but they don't. Or the candidates could campaign in larger states but it would sink their candidacy --they campaign in order to extract maximum value. It's similar with presidential campaigns.
Senators hold power completely dissproportionate from the population they represent - the senators from Vermont hold the same amount of power as the senators from Texas, while representing orders of magnitude fewer people.
The senate is, by design, an inherently anti-democratic institution (it represents the rights of the states instead of the rights of their populations).
The presidency I think is at least elected quite democratically, so I'm not sure what GP meant there.
True but that is why there is a bicameral Congress to try to balance populism vs more restraint. Large vs small. You don't want the largest state(s) trouncing the agendas for all other states and vice versa.
Sure, but that's an inherently undemocratic argument. It doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just against the principle of the people holding the ultimate power.
The presidency is elected by the electoral college which is made up of one voter from each state for each rep and senator they have. If the senate is undemocratic the electoral college must be too.
There is a difference: electoral votes are bound by law in most states to respect the people's wishes. It gets much messier, and there have been presidents which were elected undemocratically (i.e. without a majority of the US population voting for them), such as Trump. But most presidents have been elected democratically, even though the process doesn't guarantee that.
Your argument is an excellent argument against the Supreme Court having originally decided Roe v. Wade the way that they did. It is not an argument for overturning it now.
Our country is based on rule of law. And a lot of that body of law is established by a body of past precedent. These precedents extend back nearly 1000 years, and are part of a web of what is called Common Law. The Supreme Court's unique authority and main job is continuing to add to and clarify that precedent.
What the Supreme Court is doing now is overturning long-established precedent. Originalism can be used to overturn virtually any past precedent you don't like. It is hard to overstate how much. Let me quote one of the current supreme court justices on the topic (see https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi for the full context):
Adherence to originalism arguably requires, for example, the dismantling of the administrative state, the invalidation of paper money, and the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. Originalists have been pressed to either acknowledge that
their theory could generate major disruption or identify a principled
exception to their insistence that judges are bound to enforce the
Constitution’s original public meaning.
Her solution to this is:
No one is likely to ask the Supreme Court to rethink arguably nonoriginalist decisions like the constitutionality of the Social Security Administration, paper
money, or segregated public schools—and if anyone did ask, the Court would deny certiorari.
In other words, the limit on how much of the fabric of current law the current court can dismantle is to be found in the restraint of the justices in being willing to avoid hard questions, and not in the reasoning process that they apply to their decisions. But these things tend to be a slippery slope. The more of our rule of law that they undermine, the more that they will come to see it as reasonable to undermine more rule of law. And the more chaos that they create, the less willing everyone else will be to go along with what they said.
At face value, all sides are not to blame. A president who lost the popular vote got to appoint THREE justices to this court and literally got a list of candidates from the religious right. This is the minority imposing their will on the majority, plain and simple.
No, all sides are not to blame. The USA is a Constitutional Republic so your comment regarding the popular vote is irrelevant. The popular vote is not used to elect a president in the USA and never will be. Additionally, the seditious person you're advocating for is the source of the Russia collusion rumors that the left steam media ran with for 3 years.
> The same state rights that allow gun control and homosexuality to be locally legalized
This is the same court that, just a few days ago, also denied New York's right to decide their own gun laws. Devolution might be great in theory if done consistently. What we actually have is a supreme court that will step in when it suits one minority faction and step out likewise, in both cases ignoring sound (often their own earlier selves') legal reasoning. That's not healthy.
You also seem to be ignoring the fact that "leave it to the states" is a bit of a sham when states that want to ban abortion seek to punish those who travel out of state for it. (Much like the way that states with lax gun laws undermine the efforts of neighboring states that have voted and legislated otherwise.) The actual availability of abortion services to women in Texas, for example, is practically zero for many. Like it or not, the US is supposed to be one nation, but "full faith and credit" has - like supreme court decisions - become a one-way street favoring the minority. Wyoming ideology is affecting Colorado much more than vice versa, contrary to what the majority position is across the two, and that's starkly un-democratic.
> The jaded side of me says: vote in more moderates that are willing to strike compromises
How do you compromise on issues like same sex marriage? It's pretty binary: gay people have the same rights as straight people, or they don't. With Justice Thomas's suggestion to relitigate Obergefell, this is exactly where we stand.
The Supreme Court has allowed gerrymandering and dark money, both of which serve to make the American government completely unbeholden to their constituents. There is no recourse in the legislative branch as long as elections are decided by who writes the map and who pays for the ads.
And I’m not sure you don’t know that. I’m not sure that this ain’t a ploy. “States rights!” You say. “Solve it in the legislative!” You say. And when those efforts fail because the systems for choosing those representatives is rigged, what will you say? You will blame the voters. And all the whole more and more goes away and all the while you blame the voters.
You'll have to forgive me if I'm not feeling the "begrudging" nature of your statement.
> Ofc, my support for this change assumes that this Supreme Court will show restraint towards political activism (in either direction) in general. Call it naive, but I'll wait and see.
Your comment seems naive. It should be pretty obvious the us Supreme (Being) court is not going to show restraint towards political activism, they literally destroyed 50 years of American bodily freedom and struck up a massive victory for the gun lobby in a day.
> The sad part of democracy is that it aims to represent the views of the voting majority. If the voting majority truly cares about access to abortion then we will hopefully see enough democratic traction to give them the mandate needed.
American democracy doesn't represent the majority as gerrymandering has stolen the voice of our people, and guess what issue this court absolutely won't be addressing: voters rights. Because it should be absolutely clear right now that this court wants only one thing: to execute their political agenda without care or thought to the consequence of their actions. And the consequence will be dire indeed, American is already divided and this will be the final push to forever sever the left from the right, affecting creating two separate countries, not in law perhaps (yet) but certainly in spirit. In one stroke, the court has done more damage to our country than our enemies ever could.
If the voting majority truly cares about access to abortion then we will hopefully see enough democratic traction to give them the mandate needed.
The problem with this reasoning is that the democratic process has been successfully gerrymandered in many states to a point where "the voting majority " is longer in a position to truly decide.
I get the foundational point you're trying to make (about states' rights having value), at least as a concept. But if you're of the belief that "if the voting majority truly cares" then over time the situation will mostly right itself -- and millions of women of all income levels (not just the poor) will not have to suffer the direst of consequences, while you sit back and wait for your prediction to come true -- you are very tragically mistaken.
But, the Supreme Court should not be responsible for managing dysfunction in other branches of govt.
Simply put, you are imputing a motive to the 1973 Court that wasn't there. The 1973 decision was made on foundational grounds (having to do with a certain constitutional amendment which, something tells me, you also believe very strongly in the value of), and in view of competing interests.
You can question the wisdom of the decision all you like, but the idea that it was handed down to "manage the dysfunction of other branches of govt" is supported neither by the factual history of the case -- nor by the Court's own writings at the time the decision was made.
The Constitution is a negative rights document, meaning that it enumerates all the actions that the federal government cannot do to you. The Supreme Court should not be in the business of legislating, as you mention it should be the Congress that legislates. The Constitution is clear on what the judiciary is meant to do, review if an existing law or executive action is in violation of the Constitution. Anything else is a gross overreach of power.
> The Constitution is a negative rights document, meaning that it enumerates all the actions that the federal government cannot do to you.
No, the Constitution is an affirmative powers document first and foremost; it enumerates all the things the federal government can do. The amendments (and a very few provisions of the base Constitution) include some negative rights as well, some directly applicable against the federal government, some against the State governments (and some of the former have been found to be implicitly included in some of the latter, though that is fairly explicitly under attack right now.)
And the top comment goes to... a progressive pretending he can represent "the other side" while constantly taking side shots at them and stating that and why he doesn't agree with them... all with empty rhetorical gestures towards "moderates" and "compromise." Yep that sounds like hacker news to me: as little information and as much inoffensive pandering as possible.
Ultimately, I don't feel this is really about reproductive rights.
It's part of a long term disenfranchisement of groups of individuals in a way which secures GOP electoral college votes. As you say, the power of rural Republican votes is significant and depopulating those areas of democratic votes is a significant part of the GOP strategy.
I do hope that this will motivate us to get some amendments passed to codify some of the rights that we've gained from court rulings. I hope this turns into blowback against the Republicans but I think there's a long road. I guess people just don't believe things will get "that bad" and now we'll see.
With the current Supreme Court the literal text of the constitution doesn’t matter. For example, the text of the second amendment is pretty clear that the right to bear arms is in the pursuit of a well regulated militia. Our
militia has since been regulated into the national guard. The second amendment is nothing more than a constitutional right to enlist in the national guard, but it’s used to promote/codify extreme ideologies.
> The second amendment is nothing more than a constitutional right to enlist in the national guard, but it’s used to promote/codify extreme ideologies.
A well balanced breakfast, being necessary to a healthy diet, the right of the people to grow and eat food, shall not be infringed.
Who has the right to grow and eat food?
A) The people (with no other condition)
B) The people (after a waiting period and background check)
"A well-educated electorate, being necessary for the endurance of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed."
Clearly you couldn't expect the right to keep and read books to only apply to the well-educated electorate.
Yeah, this is more or less my understanding of it as well. I assume you're pointing at A. I can't speak to the intent because I'm not a history/law guy.
I say this as a lefty: the US defines the militia as essientially including every able bodied man. Since it was written before the 14th amendment, it probably would be interpreted now as every adult.
In fact the first weapon ban to hit SCOTUS, US v Miller, hinged on the fact that sawed off shotguns had no military application, which was legal basis allowing them to be banned. The court at the time considered bans of military weapons unconstitutional.
Well, that may be clear to you. I don't think either of us are constitutional scholars but I think if we really want some meaningful gun control we should replace the 2nd amendment with something clearer.
You are wrong about the Second Amendment. It clearly states the rights for both militias AND individuals, it's not hard to suss out if you know anything about the period in which it was written.
people are very disorganized and afraid and bombarded by social media and news media that distorts reality. no one thinks they can do anything and the only people who act in an organized way tend to be antisocial types who just want to take things and control others for their benefit.
Gerrymandering, the electoral college, and the senate ensures that it isn't a majority whose views are represented, but rather the distribution of voters in states/districts (disproportionate voting power) that influences who becomes our representatives. This is compounded with how flawed First past the post voting is.
> In the long run, history will have a dim view of this era of global polarization with all political sides to blame.
Actually, in the long run, history takes a dim view of the people in the center.
People on one "extreme" side are vindicated. And everybody else gets flagged as supporting the wrong position.
As I put it to one friend: "When the issue was Catholics marrying Lutherans, your church and everybody in the "middle" were on the wrong side of the decision. When the issue was racial intermarriage, your church and everybody in the "middle" were on the wrong side of the decision. Now that the issue is gay marriage, why do you believe your church and everybody in the middle are on the correct side of the decision this time?"
The truth lies in the middle is, in fact, generally wrong.
The jaded side of me says: vote in more moderates that are willing to strike compromises
Suppose I come along and assault you, you defend yourself, and then someone comes along and tells you that you are as much to blame as the person who assaulted you. Are they accurate, or just squeamish?
Moderates generally lack any firm convictions or anchoring principles beyond maintaining equanimity, and so contribute mightily to shifting of overton windows and ethical drift, where increasingly flawed outcomes are excused in the name of avoiding controversy. Consider the the atrocities perpetrated pursuant to the Iraq war, for which nobody but the very lowest ranks (and only a few of them) have ever been held accountable.
I respect my ideological enemies more than this panglossian excuse-making. At least those people stand for something.
I like to differentiate between "moderate" and "centrist". A moderate is, by my definition, someone who has firm convictions and anchoring principles and those just happen today to plant them in the center of the political spectrum. If the Overton window shifts, today's moderate will become tomorrow's conservative or liberal.
By contrast a centrist always takes the middling, compromising position at the middle of that Overton window. It's centrists that contribute to ethical drift.
> Moderates generally lack any firm convictions or anchoring principles beyond maintaining equanimity
That's one way to put it. Here's another to think about: moderates lack rigid principles and avoid ideological convictions.
People on the extremes of both sides have a tendency to "paint." They paint the opposing view as monsters, and they paint people with independent views as "lacking convictions."
By no means am I arguing that those at the extremes are always right. I'm saying that if you have no other principles than 'compromise' then you will simply let yourself be pulled around by the most powerful force in a go-along-to-get-along fashion.
Moderates are simply conflict averse and don't consider that there is anything worth fighting for, ever. Unscrupulous extremists rely on them as a strategic buffer, because they are easy to manipulate. Neville Chamberlain was a moderate.
"conflict averse" and "easy to manipulate" are personality traits. Pretty subjective and not useful for (adult) discourse. There's a way to think of political "moderates" as a political science category. An example of a moderate position would be, supporting a free market economy but a wide social security system. An example of the other (economic) extremes are laissez-faire and socialism.
You're successfully proving my point from the comment above: you're painting folks who don't share your views. This does you a disservice as you can't possibly understand the arguments. There are many, many ways in which a person can be a Moderate or a particular topic can have a moderate viewpoint.
The cure for this affliction (of imagining your opponents and creating personifications in your head) is to diversify your conversational and reading sources.
"conflict averse" and "easy to manipulate" are personality traits. Pretty subjective and not useful for (adult) discourse.
Nice attempt at well-poisoning. You'll excuse me if I don't engage with the sophistry that follows.
Perhaps it's you who should broaden your reading sources, as people's behavior is much more amenable to objective analysis than you seem to be aware of.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451
You don't have to go very far for some links that echo what I said above:
"Moderate is an ideological category which designates a rejection of radical or extreme views, especially in regard to politics and religion.[1][2] A moderate is considered someone occupying any mainstream position avoiding extreme views and major social change. In United States politics, a moderate is considered someone occupying a centre position on the left–right political spectrum."
The pinning of subjective elements and personality traits to your political opponents is as dangerous as it is unscientific (and people both on the right and the left do this).
In the United States, a political moderate typically acts according to principles that the extremes of the large political parties don’t prioritize. They are only in the middle because we use a one-dimensional political spectrum in our discourse.
Nonsense. If moderates believed that they would form their own party and stake out territory. Instead they say 'the two party system forces this on us', and do nothing about it. There is no 'two party system.' It's just a bistable equilibrium state that arises out of the winner-take-all voting system. Moderates find it profitable to ride that oscillation without worrying too much about where it takes them, and prefer stable mediocrity to chaotic uncertainty.
Moderates also tend to run as independent candidates. Ross Perot is probably best known in the US.
It is difficult to successfully invest resources contra the two party system in the US, though. I think it’s a legitimate pragmatic decision to try to influence from within one of the two parties.
There are multiple small parties, but the moderate bloc that likes to occupy the center of the US political system hasn't thrown in behind any of them because (it appears) swinging between the two large parties is more profitable. Like I said, if they really meant it they would stake out territory.
I think it’s a legitimate pragmatic decision to try to influence from within one of the two parties.
So, sit in the middle and say 'both parties are too extreme' while bargaining with both for concessions and refusing to organize outside that framework, even though moderates/swing voters consider themselves to be the largest political bloc. That seems like perpetuating the system you complain about for profit, which is exactly what I complained about in the first place - a lack of any identifiable principle. You mention 'principles that the extremes of the parties don't prioritize.' What are they? Where are your red lines?
Moderates also tend to run as independent candidates. Ross Perot is probably best known in the US.
Ross Perot ran 30 years ago, since when we have been through two major wars, a huge financial crisis (and multiple smaller recessions), a pandemic, and a constitutional crisis. No outside candidate has mounted a serious challenge since then. Plus he was only able to do that because he was independently very wealthy.
I have posted this article about polarization here many times since it was published and all I ever hear from moderates is how bad it is, so bad that nobody can do anything about it. Moderates' unwillingness to anchor themselves to anything is a major contributor to the problem of polarization.
https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-...
Thanks. Fair weather moderates swinging between whichever party is advantageous, or less scary to espouse principles from within, wasn’t what I was talking about, but I see that you were. I’m glad you clarified that and hopefully we both understand we were talking past each other for part of this.
I do see specific suggestions from moderates. A lot of them have to do with campaign finance reform. Others have to do with alternate voting systems, like ranked choice. Ranked choice can be advantageous to extreme parties, of course, but they also make 2-3 more self-aware middle parties possible because they can stay in power as the #2 or #3 choice without having to engage in tug-of-war.
I agree that personal wealth is an unfortunate limitation to anyone seeking to run as whatever is in vogue D or R. I only mentioned Ross Perot to remind you of a well-known independent candidate. The 90s were a long time ago, yes!
I really appreciate your thoughtful clarification.
Both of the proposals you mention are valuable and would do a lot to improve politics, narrow as they are. It would be great if there were an identifiable group clearly advocating for those approaches, whether within or outside existing party lines.
> Moderates generally lack any firm convictions or anchoring principles beyond maintaining equanimity
Idk about this. Maybe they just think things are currently pretty good, and that the other options would be worse. I think democrats are largely on the right track. Just enough regulation to ensure market failures are fixed, broad social policy to do what you like as long as it doesn't harm others, a safety net that helps those who are down while encouraging everyone to work hard for the better of society.
I have frequently participated in an extreme version of this discussion.
Think about a situation where your race was being genocided in a neighboring country. The fastest way to stop it would be to engage in war. Now if you lose, genocide goes on, you have no recourse and your country is vulnerable to exploitation.
Instead, you can use economic levers. Maybe wait for your armed forces to be strong enough to go to war. Wait for winter and destroy food reserves. Maybe strike a deal to have your race only be 'persecuted' instead of genocided. Maybe fund militia instead.
All of these are suboptimal moderate outcomes. All of these lead to some loss of life or huge losses of freedom.for the people you want to save. But it avoids the worst case outcome. Majority of your race stil lives.
Moderates aren't spineless. Rathe, they understand that their agency is limited and you pull levers that are within said agency. If you try to climb a mountain that's too tall, it will lead to your demise.
Idealists want to be olympic gymnasts at 30. Moderates make peace with being a Yoga teacher. That's not spinelessness, that's wisdom.
What you're describing isn't moderation, but strategy. What I'm talking about is people who have agency but choose not to exercise it because it's inconvenient.
> Moderates generally lack any firm convictions or anchoring principles beyond maintaining equanimity, and so contribute mightily to shifting of overton windows and ethical drift, where increasingly flawed outcomes are excused in the name of avoiding controversy.
the point of being a moderate is picking and choosing which policies from which party you support and which ones you don't. The insistence that everyone decide between one of two party lines is what's driving this country towards civil war
So form a third party with middle-of-the-road policies that large numbers of people could get behind, because your buffet politics approach is clearly not working.
Actually I’m not sure this is 100% true. One option is to, say, only appoint SCOTUS judges that have an extremely broad reading of the Constitution on things you like, and a very narrow, textual reading on things you don’t.
> The sad part of democracy is that it aims to represent the views of the voting majority.
No, not this "democracy." The supermajority of supreme court justices were mostly seated by presidents who lost the popular vote. This ruling is incredibly unpopular among citizens of the US, but the court is also pro-gerrymandering, so the unpopularity is unlikely to have any real impact on elections. The country is rapidly hurtling towards religious authoritarianism, and the checks and balances to prevent that have largely been dismantled.
> so the unpopularity is unlikely to have any real impact on elections
Or maybe it isn't as unpopular as you think?
> The country is rapidly hurtling towards religious authoritarianism, and the checks and balances to prevent that have largely been dismantled.
Yes of course, because religious authoritarianism == allowing democratically elected state officials to determine their own state laws
If anything is authoritarian, it's the insistence on the court creating federal "laws" where there is no majority in congress. If you want abortion protection, pass it through congress
The GOP now has in place in several red/swing states legislatures that are ready to overrule electoral college votes determined by the popular vote and handing it over to those determined by republican legislatures. Lots of states have promoted Big Lie proponents to the highest election positions in their states, they now have a 6-3 super majority SCOTUS who will back up these decisions in the next Presidential election. Once that happens authoritarian Trumpists will take power because they have control of the military via Presidential power. If you can't see that then you've been living under a rock. That's when the American experiment fails.
> But, the Supreme Court should not be responsible for managing dysfunction in other branches of govt.
This is the only statement in your take that I disagree with. In the checks and balances system, the supreme court is exactly supposed to protect the balance between federal, state, and individual rights.
One consistent court might have protected gun rights and abortion rights this week. Another might have permitted restrictions on both. Instead we got gun rights and body control. The apolitical ship has sailed.
In every other democracy, voting laws and systems that mean individual votes are unequal (and even more absurd, the popular vote keeps losing) are of course unconstitutional and dealt with by the Supreme Court. How else could it be; guaranteeing one person one vote is the basis of democracy.
That's before we get to other design flaws like "winner takes all", which of course neither possible winner out of a guaranteed 2 is ever going to change.
> States rights has always been a double edged sword. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The same state rights that allow gun control and homosexuality to be locally legalized before national concensus; also now lead to abortion legislation being a state issue.
Except when the same court in the same week strikes down a state law that makes it marginally more effort to carry a concealed weapon in public.
That is a egregious misrepresentation of the law struck down in NYSRPA v. Bruen. In New York City, it was effectively impossible to get a permit to carry a concealed firearm in public unless one had connections and influence in the police department. Whether or not that is desirable from a policy perspective, it was far more than "marginally more effort" to obtain the permit.
> In New York City, it was effectively impossible to get a permit to carry a concealed firearm in public unless one had connections and influence in the police department.
Did the law actually require connections, or was the law being applied unfairly? If the latter, the correct solution would be to force the law be applied fairly, not just throw out the entire law. Of course, the people who complain about "activist judges" are fine with judges legislating from the bench as long when it's in a way that furthers their agenda...
"If the latter, the correct solution would be to force the law be applied fairly..."
That's essentially what Bruen decided.
NYC required arbitrary permission from a person rather than just meeting the requirements and following a written process. It also required a special need, distinguishable from the general public; where "special" was left to interpretation.
In one county in California, it was even worse, where it was widely known that the way to get permits was to donate to the sheriff's campaign or furnish the sheriff's office with cool tech and perks.
After Bruen, there still can be a licensing process, but it must be written, and available to everyone who follows the process. Maybe it will be a two-hour safety seminar and some fingerprinting, or maybe it will be a 3 week tactical training course and a blood sample.
Frankly, the decision itself to strike the law was correct, regardless of your political affiliation. It's also fairly low impact... no mass shooter or gangster bothers with a permit anyway (certainly not the racist Buffalo shooter, who wasn't deterred by lack of a permit). Other problems like suicide are entirely unaffected.
The impact comes from the opinion, which sets precedent for how all other firearm laws will be evaluated. If you believe that government should really be in charge of guns, then you aren't going to like it.
FIRST: If SCOTUS should stay out of big, divisive cultural decisions, then they should do it point-forward and not by hopping right back in the fray.
SECOND: Abortion is seen as a fundamental right for womens' health, and there are many documented reasons for getting abortion that are not merely "convenience". There are things which should not be prohibited by the democratic process, since they are human rights.
THIRD: There is no scientific basis for restricting abortion; I would place a large bet that more than 95% of people who are against abortion rights base their opinion on faith-based teachings.
FOURTH: We need to abolish the two party system via *ballot reform* and move to Ranked-Choice or approval voting. This will weaken the two parties, allow citizens to vote /for/ someone rather than against, and will be a more accurate gauge of popular sentiment.
> FOURTH: We need to abolish the two party system via ballot reform and move to Ranked-Choice or approval voting. This will weaken the two parties, allow citizens to vote /for/ someone rather than against, and will be a more accurate gauge of popular sentiment.
Yes please. The current system is completely dysfunctional.
Requires either 50 states to change state law, or 3/4 of the states to ratify a federal constitutional amendment. And any of these requires the cooperation of the two parties to make it happen, or voting in their replacements. So it's a really tough nut to crack. It's hard to change the constitution. If 85% of the country had any damn idea how the current system works let alone a modern alternative, it would be straight forward but they don't. And any states that think they will lose their inflated advantage will refuse to cooperate.
Except of course for all the medically necessary abortions which are extremely scientifically justified.
This decision will almost certainly kill thousands of women annually.
It's a question of morals not science, that should be completely obvious. If you believe a fetus is a human life then its probably more justified morally to end the mothers life instead of the newborn. There are of course some exceptions where the fetus wouldn't be viable in any scenario, those rapidly change with technology.
To be clear I'm pro abortion when its medically needed, I just think people give the other side too bad of a wrap and act like this is settled science.
Also worth noting that overturning Roe v Wade would reduce the loss of life if you believe a fetus is a person. Most abortions are not medically needed, meaning we are killing millions of people
And we have representatives who are literally pro-death. Some have said no exception for ectopic pregnancies and some have clearly stated that there is no exception for the life of the mother.
But relatively few people believe this. Maybe 30% of the country, and even then it is unclear how earnestly they do because most people who are staunchly anti-abortion support or use other techniques which functionally destroy embryos and fetuses.
For example, IVF would create and then kill dozens of children for every successful birth. But IVF is extremely popular.
It is unclear to me why 30% of the country gets to impose their morals on 70% of the country. It is clearly a moral argument either way, there are compelling moral issues about removing bodily autonomy and consent from women even beyond the medically preventable fatalities which will occur. Then there are the moral issues with rape and incest victims, being required to give birth, etc.
Do the 30% have a far superior moral compass than the 70% who have examined the same complicated issue and come to a different conclusion?
Totally agree, I'm more arguing devils advocate than anything. I think a minority imposing laws on the majority is undemocratic.
I just also think it's worth trying to actual meet people where they are, most genuinely think we're killing babies and want to stop that, and to be fair we have no idea when a human life starts. I'm just really over the villainization of people who are just concerned.
It's not tenable to hang your fundamental rights as an individual on a political process. While it only takes one decision to remove a right, preserving the right becomes a constant, grueling battle. These legal protections are the sin-qua non of a functional democracy.
>But, the Supreme Court should not be responsible for managing dysfunction in other branches of govt.
In a better system it shouldn't be, in the system we have really should be but isn't.
I have little doubt Clarence is only a little less crazy than his wife. Republicans put these people into positions of immense power. They might not have known how much power at the time, but they put shitty people in power for shitty reasons and they can now totally own that failure.
>Crazed jesus Republicans and hyperprogressive activists are terrible people to put into national office.
Got some enlightened centrism at work here. I'm willing to entertain that the left is way too woke, but they aren't sending crazy people to congress my dude.
Democratically? I hope you’re kidding. This court doesn’t have the thinnest of veneers to hide behind. They have a pretty obvious agenda (e.g., Thomas’s concurring opinion) and show no deference to either precedent or the Constitution.
We’re in uncharted waters here. I can’t think of a parallel in our short history where SCOTUS has shown such complete disregard for anything but their own political and religious beliefs. I think what’s getting lost in this is that Roe doesn’t just apply to abortion but the broader right to privacy. Others have pointed out the logical implications of what the government can and will do with these powers.
Amen. I posted similar in a shorter form. The ineffectual legislative branch has ceded power to both the Executive and the Judicial over the last fifty to sixty years. Until the legislative branch stands up, this won't be resolved.
> my support for this change assumes that this Supreme Court will show restraint towards political activism (in either direction) in general. Call it naive, but I'll wait and see.
That is naive, given that we've already seen over the past several years that this has already been shown to be true. When the GOP is in power, new justices are appointed solely based on political appointment. Their qualifications as judges seem to be irrelevant, as long as they support the party platform. When the GOP controls the Senate, they invent "rules" around which president gets to earn confirmation, and then break their own "rules" when it suits them.
> The same state rights that allow gun control [...] to be locally legalized before national concensus
Look again: SCOTUS is getting more brazen in overturning state gun control laws. This is just a consequence of what I've said above: the politically-appointed justices loudly cry "states' rights!" when it suits their platform, and quietly ignore state sovereignty when it suits them. Consider also that the GOP has been even more loudly talking about legislation for a nationwide abortion ban. Same playbook: claim the removal of a federal law is a victory for states' rights, but then turn around and try to enact the opposite law at the federal level in order to block the states from making their own choice.
> Now, the rural republican votes counting for more in the senate is a huge issue and threat to democracy that the US needs to figure out if it ever wants to represent the views of the people.
This is the key issue. The US government will never reflect the will of the people as long as the Senate is composed as it is. Procedural garbage like the filibuster make the body even more ineffective and useless. My prediction here is that as soon as the GOP regains control of the Senate, once they get another taste of obstruction, they'll hypocritically kill the filibuster, despite all their current rhetoric around how it's essential to the Senate.
> The jaded side of me says: vote in more moderates that are willing to strike compromises.
The issue here is that what you are calling "hyperprogressive activists" are not really all that "hyper" anything when you consider the rest of the democratic world. A US "moderate" would be considered fairly conservative in many other Western democracies. When I talk to friends who are members of various minority groups about this, they dismiss more "center-left" candidates immediately: none of these candidates have the courage (or desire) to work on civil rights and equality.
I absolutely agree with you that political polarization is at an all-time high, and most far-left/right politicians seem to be more interested in stoking outrage and provoking their opponents than in actually creating positive outcomes.
I don't really know what the solution is. It's hard to just tell everyone, en masse, to just calm the fuck down and stop assuming anyone on the other side of the aisle is an evil demon who wants to destroy the others' way of life. I'm guilty of this sometimes myself, but I'm really trying to understand where some of these people are coming from. It's hard. It's really hard.
> In the long run, history will have a dim view of this era of global polarization with all political sides to blame.
I understand the sentiment here, and what drives it, but I think it's bad to ignore that there are differences between how the two sides act. They're both terrible, and have many terrible policy platforms, but I think it's worth considering that one party seems more interested in taking people's rights and equal treatment away (or denying "new" rights that should have been rights all along) than the other.
> the Supreme Court should not be responsible for managing dysfunction in other branches of govt.
Hard disagree here. The Supreme Court acting as a vehicle for rights the majority of the population thinks should be enshrined, but can’t due to Senate dysfunction, is what is preventing the USA from sliding into another civil war. The Constitution is an extremely buggy first draft and originalism is a sick joke. Abortion isn’t in the Constition? Of course not, it was written by men in the 1700s. Judicial review isn’t in the Constitution either.
This ruling will also let us democratically figure out whether sodomites should be jailed, whether interracial marriage should be banned, and whether contraception is legal. All of the prior court rulings on these topics stem from the principles that were overturned in this one.
And then, two years later, after we democratically figure those questions out, we can flip-flop on them, because we voted in a new legislature.
> And then, two years later, after we democratically figure those questions out, we can flip-flop on them, because we voted in a new legislature.
Don't worry, SCOTUS won't let that happen. There's a pretty good chance they'll intervene in the next presidential election (unless a republican house takes it out of their hands), but either way they'll simply overturn any new laws they don't like. They're not burdened by any need for internal consistency - they'll rule in favor of Texas's abortion-bounty laws and rule against California's anti gun bounty laws, for example. Doesn't matter the logic is the same either way, they're not bound to any internal consistency or past logic, it's all about the will-to-power.
This is actually a pretty noted characteristic of .... "alt-right" movements.
> “Never believe [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [They] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
You? You have to make logically consistent legal arguments and follow the process, because you believe in the system. They believe in power. And they have power.
Dangerous times indeed, but here we are overturning Roe v Wade. And criminalizing contraception, overturning gay marriage, and criminalizing homosexuality is up next - Thomas specifically calls out Griswold, Obergefell, and Lawrence as being on the chopping block.
>The same state rights that allow gun control and homosexuality to be locally legalized before national concensus; also now lead to abortion legislation being a state issue.
There is some irony to this statement as the Supreme Court just the other day released a ruling that denied a state this ability with regards to gun control laws.
> The sad part of democracy is that it aims to represent the views of the voting majority.
As you said, the Judiciary is the least democratic, the nominations came from Presidents whom were elected by a minority of voters and confirmed by the Senate, using a minority of the voting populace of the country (because, slavery essentially)
The court's view on the 2nd amendment is so wildly, outrageously out of line with the Founder's intentions, and the actual text of the law, that any hope of "restraint towards political activism" is beyond futile.
At the time of the founders private ownership of cannons was legal, which was the most powerful weapon at the time.
Framers likely would have claimed that private citizens should be able to own working tanks (gun and all). They believed in a monopoly of violence solely predicated on the ability to muster an army, not on bans of certain types of weapons.
But maybe we shouldn't give a fk about framers intent. That's where the real debate should be on...
Isn't that supposed to just be flavor text? In other words, we should take the constitution literally, except for that part of the second amendment, just ignore that.
It looks like either we will have a January 6th like raid on the SCOTUS or a total collapse of the United States at this point and end up with a civil war with a second republic.
Hopefully that won't possibly happen. But we'll see in 2024.
This sounds all diplomatic and intellectual, but when a 16 year old gets a pregnancy from incest or rape, she’s totally screwed. I don’t think going towards the dark ages deserves this kind of “both sides” talk
> My personal opinion is that polarization has pushed both sides to be completely antagonistic towards each other.
Nobody in power is trying to put an end to it. In fact, media and institutions are trying to push the anger and divide further. I think most people realize this and this is why there are so many conspiracies out there as to why things have gotten this bad.
In my opinion, it's too late. Corruption of society of this level CANNOT be fixed. In a perfect world, everyone would chill out and realize they are fighting over what is essentially first world problems. But people have become trained to the point of abandoning reasoning, common sense, and good faith to prop up their tribes. We now have an entire generation that thinks this is all normal. It won't end well and this is exactly what our enemies wanted.
Their decision may be right through the lens of the initial ruling some 50 years ago, and perhaps through the acknowledgement of this being a divisive issue. However, it is at best hypocrisy of the court itself, and at worst, a devastating blow to one of the worlds worst healthcare systems.
This ruling in particular has be viewed through a wider scope, and not just the narrow lens of "people are divisive".
Their recent ruling interfering with New York states own policy on concealed carries best represents the courts hypocrisy - if a state makes a ruling and has a certain level of autonomy and power to do so, why is the SC overruling them here when its nearly just as divisive as abortion?
Additionally - the ruling is made within a very narrow scope, against common scientific and healthcare advice. It's also likely the ruling was made with strong bias and in bad favor as many of the justices themselves are not duly qualified to sit on the bench which they sit, and the ruling subsequently falls in line with a serious of previously strongly conservative rulings that defy prior precedent and the SC's own interpretation of autonomy, law, and previous rulings.
There is really no way to justify their ruling.
Polarization is a bit of mysterious character because we see a very strong, radical right wing forcing changes down to the county level in terms of gerrymandering, up to the level of presidential cabinet where federal crimes were committed without any consequence.
We don't hear of Democrats who, after losing a race complain of fraud and refuse to accept the results. That's a very Republican thing to do.
So, polarization is mysterious because there is a fast growing anti-intellectual, religious radicalism spirit and a fairly unchanged "populist" left wing. I.e. the left is mostly unchanged from 20 years ago, whereas the right has gone through a sharp and dramatic change in the same period.
This corner of the internet combines very little empathy with enough technical acumen to believe their biases are grounded in logic. Social issues here are just abstract intellectual exercises that are extremely disconnected from the reality of how people’s lives are affected.
I’m not sure why I clicked this thread, these responses were predictably awful.
> But, the Supreme Court should not be responsible for managing dysfunction in other branches of govt.
And it's not. The underlying problem is most of voting public doesn't understand how the system works, and why.
Repeated the language has been "The SC is making abortion illegal." That simply is not true. But with that falsely dumbed down "fact" ppl judge, form opinions, make noise, etc.
It’s been known for decades that roe v wade was a weak basis for abortion rights. The constitution does not have any law on abortion, and it’s Congress’s job to create federal laws.
Rights do not stem from the Constitution - as the language of the constitution itself shows: they are natural rights, some of which are explicitly laid down in paper. The right to do what you will with your own body is a natural right, and can't be alienated by anything, not even the will of the majority.
Even if you swallow the argument that a fetus is a "person", you still have to temper the rights of the fetus who is a parasite on the mother, who is a living, breathing person with rights of her own, including "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
If a dead person can't be forced to give up organs without prior consent, a living woman should not be forced to provide life support (at a risk to her own life by the way) for a fetus. Just like I can't be forced to donate a kidney to another person, a woman should not be forced to donate blood, bone and full life support to a fetus.
IOTW, it's literally a matter of competing rights to life. Carrying a pregnancy to term is a mortal risk. Certain pregnancies will kill the mother if not ended, and the fetus will never be viable. Other times the fetus is already dead, but since the law doesn't actually consider the fetus a person, it can't be removed due to abortion bans, and the woman is forced to carry a dead parasite and risk fatal sepsis.
All of this should be left to the woman, her doctor, her circumstances and her conscience, not a bunch of old men in legislatures and courts.
On the issue that the mother's life is at risk, or the baby is a product of incest or rape. This shouldn't even be debatable. Are the majority of conservatives really against abortion in these cases?
> All of this should be left to the woman, her doctor, her circumstances and her conscience
I agree completely, however if we are contending with the counter argument that a fetus does become a "person" at some point late in the pregnancy, having an abortion after this point for no other reason than "I don't feel like it/ I changed my mind" would by definition have to be murder. The "competing rights to life" argument would not apply here.
Do you think the majority of democrats would support granting "personhood" to the fetus at some late stage in the pregnancy if conservatives would support legislating abortion into law (abortions before the fetus reaches personhood for any reason, after which only if the doctor believes the mother's life to be in danger.) Or this is too much of a compromise, women should be able to abort at any time for any reason?
I am responding to someone whom I presume to be pro-choice and am trying to see if a compromise is even possible. The most common counter argument to "the baby has the right to life" is that the mothers life takes priority. The situation where the mother's life is in danger (also including rape and incest) is in the minority of cases (citation needed), therefore the majority of abortions could be prevented if conservatives would concede those scenarios.
No, because a woman's right to her own body is not in conflict with a fetus' right to live, even if you believe the fetus does have that right.
People who claim they care about the fetus' rights, and that they oppose abortion from this point of view, are either hypocritical or haven't given it enough thought. If they did, they would at best insist upon the woman carrying the fetus until it becomes viable, then having the right to a C-section where it is removed and placed on life support, and given up for adoption. But no one holds this position.
In reality, people use the rhetoric of the fetus' rights to muddy the waters, and to avoid admitting that they don't believe women have a right to control their own bodies. They hold collectivist views that are typical of conservatives, who believe all people should be subservient to the social fabric (while espousing individualistic views when it comes time for the social fabric to help those same people in turn) - no free sex, no freedom to use drugs, etc
The elected representatives of the Democratic party is overwhelmingly moderate. There are a handful of conservative democrats and equally many progressive democrats. Progressive democrats have been loosing as many primaries as they win, but overwhelmingly they are not up for election, instead a moderate democrat is the default choice.
The same can not be said about the Republican Party. This is not a both sides issue. Polarization is happening on the right wing in the American Party system, and the right wing alone.
This fight is not going to be over until the legislature formally defines what is and is not a person. I doubt that's going to happen because nobody wants to have that discussion.
There's a much better argument to legalizing abortion, that holds even if one considers fetuses as persons. In that just as one may not be forced to donate organs or even just blood to save someone else's life, by the same logic, one cannot be forced to bear a child.
Of course this is an ethical, not legal argument, so I don't know how it would translate to US law.
"…[L]et me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.' Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. 'Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.' I imagine you would regard this as outrageous…"
The moral question in this case isn't "Should you be able to unplug the violinist?" but "Should the violinist unplug themselves?".
As an adult who is profiting from a crime committed against you, they are morally obligated to return you to your original state that existed before the crime was committed (even though it would return them to their original state, which was illness and near-term death).
For a child in the womb, though, they do not have a pre-existing state (under the philosophical premise that conception is the starting point of a unique human), and most conceptions are not the result of crimes (although I can understand someone drawing a bright moral line between different pregnancies based on that factor).
It also only applies to a fetus created as the result of rape. A fetus created by consensual sex is like if you walked into the hospital, sat down in the room, and plugged the needle into your arm yourself.
That is patently absurd. Consent to sexual intercourse is not consent to pregnancy, especially if contraceptives were used and failed.
At the risk of stretching the metaphor to its breaking point, this is you choosing to go out and get drunk while aware that members of an unethical music lovers' organization are skulking about looking for victims to graft sick violinists onto. Sure, they no longer need to actively drug you because you willingly did that yourself, but that doesn't imply your consent to what happens next.
Consent to sexual intercourse is not consent to pregnancy
It's as much consent to pregnancy as dropping a cinderblock on your foot is consent to a broken toe or eating ten cheeseburgers a day is consent to getting fat.
No, it's really, really not, and this line of reasoning is getting absurd.
People around the world routinely engage in frequent sexual intercourse without becoming pregnant. If you show me even a fraction of that same number of people who have demonstrated an ability to consume ten cheeseburgers a day for a prolonged period without gaining weight, maybe you'd have a point. Otherwise, this is just a blatant false equivalence.
People around the world routinely engage in frequent sexual intercourse without becoming pregnant
Yes, and people routinely take methamphetamine without having a heart attack and shoot themselves without dying. That doesn't obviate the fact that pregnancy is the direct result of coitus. Claiming you did not consent to the function for which a body part evolved when you used that body part is like saying you didn't consent to sweating when you went for a summer jog. Sure, you may certainly take measures to prevent an undesired outcome but the physical results of your choices can only be tragedy, not injustice.
Notwithstanding the other debate in this thread about consent to sex versus consent to pregnancy, does your answer to the scenario above change even if you willingly plugged the needle into the arm yourself?
From my perspective, even if we assume the person plugged the needle into the arm, it's absolutely not my place to mandate that you must now keep the needle attached until the violinist can live independently again.
You may feel horrible about disconnecting that needle. We may even agree that it's a pretty awful thing to do to the violinist. In fact, we may even agree that you should be responsible for at least attempting to find alternative options for the violinist. But I certainly would never imagine creating a society in which we would prevent you from doing it. It is your body, and you should absolutely retain the right to revoke consent for the violinist to live off of it.
What kind of a question is that? Obviously you have to agree to it! What right do you have to kill someone just because you are inconvenienced?
You aren't required to save their life, but you also can't kill them.
Is this seriously an abortion argument, or are you just trolling? Are you seriously telling me people are OK with killing someone just because it's not convenient?
I always thought that the abortion argument was because they did not consider their unborn child a person. If you do consider that child a person then obviously you can't kill it.
> What right do you have to kill someone just because you are inconvenienced?
Bodily autonomy and integrity is not merely an inconvenience. It's a major principle in human rights.
Otherwise you could demand I give you my healthy kidney to save your life, and if I don't I'd be "killing you".
> You aren't required to save their life, but you also can't kill them.
You're not killing the violinist, you merely withdraw life support you're not obligated to give it in any way, they die on their own.
Changing the scenario midway does not help anyone. Unless you are implying you agree with me, and wish to discuss a new scenario.
To me the lines are clear: You don't have to take action to save his life, but you also can not kill him by your actions. i.e. if everyone froze at this moment and did nothing - would he live, or die?
In that just as one may not be forced to donate organs or even just blood to save someone else's life, by the same logic, one cannot be forced to bear a child.
Speaking as a generally pro-abortion person, I don't think it's that black and white. When you agree to sustain someone's life, is taking away that sustainment murder? For example, if you reach out and stop someone from falling off a cliff but then choose to let go before they regain their balance, is that murder? I also don't see how to logically reconcile the idea that abortion isn't murder but letting a baby starve to death is. Either you have a responsibility towards human life you created or you don't.
You and maccolgan raise good points - the parent-child relationship is not the same as any other. But I'm not sure when parental responsibilities should start. E.g. you said "When you agree to sustain someone's life" - but when one chooses abortion, presumably one never "agreed".
but when one chooses abortion, presumably one never "agreed".
I suppose that depends on your definition of agrees. If you know that sex creates babies you are agreeing to the baby as much as you are agreeing to an explosion when you light a firecracker.
I suppose in this case, if the pregnancy is the result of rape, contraceptive failure, or simple lack of sex education, abortion would be legal, and otherwise it wouldn't be.
Maybe odd at first glance, but the more I think about it the more sense it makes. It helps to turn the logic on its head - should it be legal to deliberately or negligently create human fetuses, only to kill them?
Hence my grandparent comment. Our attitudes and laws about what a person is are wildly different depending on whether we're talking about abortion, or human experimentation, or human cloning. We're allowed to make and kill fetuses but only when it doesn't serve a useful purpose?
We are talking about a mother, courts frequently force parents to act in the best interests of their children even if it's against the interests of the parents. A mother's child is not an alien unrelated in any way to the mother.
I wouldn’t say nobody. Certain schools of Islam explicitly teach that “ensoulment” of the fetus occurs after 120 days, as per my limited understanding. This timeframe largely coincides with the beliefs of a significant majority of Americans (per recent surveys) that abortion should be legal until the first few weeks of the second trimester.
I like the "until it can sustain itself" argument but the issue is that's a moving bar. Every time technology improves that time gets a little bit shorter. A hundred years ago a five month fetus had little chance of surviving. Now that survival rate is 85%. If we had the ability to instantly and painlessly teleport a week-old fetus into an artificial womb, would that be cause to ban all abortion?
The only fully consistent argument I've heard is that a human mind is the definition of personhood and that parents should be able to terminate up until several months after birth, but that's pretty out there.
Citizens United does not say that corporations are people, it just says people are not restricted on their rights if they create a corporation to exercise them together.
Set up a website that lets you buy these people a round-trip plane ticket to CA. That gets around both issues. If the doctor says there's no baby, then no money.
in general I think state rights lowers division, as a federal system is winner-take-all while a State system can be live or let live. of course the issue is when States violate Constitutional rights and hide behind State rights. however, diminishing States rights in favor of Federal rights ultimately has the same risks, i.e. let the lesson of Trump scare the hell out of us.
Thomas Paine, an example of a radical leftists in his own time by the standards of his day, is extremely well regarded today despite dying in relative obscurity and relative poverty.
It's the radical right wing that history will take a dim view on. The left can be secure in their control of posterity.
Nothing that happened today has anything to do with democracy.
The Republicans have successfully infiltrated state legislatures, gerrymandered and some states now are effectively under one-party rule. Take Wisconsin [1] as an example:
> Back in 2018, Republicans lost the popular vote in the state Senate races by 52.3 percent to 46.9 percent, yet gained two seats for a 19-14 majority. In the state Assembly, they lost the popular vote 53.0 to 44.8, yet lost only one seat to retain a 63-36 supermajority
This gerymandering also affects Congressional maps. And the Senate [2]?
> ... the Senate will be split 50-50, but the Democratic half will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.
In the wake of 2020, red states have passed laws like Arizona [3] that will allow the legislature or appointed officgials to overturn election results.
And on top of all that one side conspired to "steal" the Supreme Court by sitting on Obama's nomination for almost a year and then later rushing their own replacement in the last month before an election.
And every Supreme Court justice appointed in the last 10 years has said on the record that Roe v. Wade was a super-precedent. And today they voted to overturn. They lied. They all lied.
This isn't a "both sides" issue. This is the rise of white Christian fascism vs the feckless controlled opposition party. "Bothsidesing" is both a logical fallacy and intellectually lazy (if not outright dishonest). It's like looking at Kristallnacht and saying "well both sides are at fault".
There is no "both sides" here. The myth of the "far left" just shows how normalized right-wing propaganda has become. There are lilke maybe 4 progressive members of Congress while on the other side Nazi propaganda is openly pushed [4] and QAnon conspiracies are rampant in the Republican party, which may go as far as including Clarence Thomas and his wife who may well have conspired to overthrow the government.
When people say "far left" or "hyperprogressive" they really means "trans rights". Not wanting to murder trans people doesn't make you a radical leftist.
Please open your eyes and stop this nonsense about bothsidesing and polarization.
I see the courts as more of a low pass filter for a democracy. If you elect right or left wing governments for a sufficient number of terms, you will end up with a left or right leaning court.
> Ofc, my support for this change assumes that this Supreme Court will show restraint towards political activism (in either direction) in general. Call it naive, but I'll wait and see.
> States rights has always been a double edged sword. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The same state rights that allow gun control and homosexuality to be locally legalized before national concensus; also now lead to abortion legislation being a state issue.
You're a day too late to hold this position, the supreme court struck down New York's attempt to regulate open carry yesterday.
Your understanding of what happened yesterday is extremely poor.
The Supreme Court did not strike down New York‘s ability to regulate open carry at all.
They struck down the states ability to withhold concealed carry permits to anyone who does not provide a sufficient reason for application.
Turns out you don’t actually need to provide a reason for civil rights.
The NYPD since being sued over this has been found guilty in corruption cases of withholding permits to people who weren’t donors, connected, celebrities, elite.
No one reasonable should think you need to prove to the NYPD why you need your rights.
“May Issue” is now dead. “Shall Issue” is still fine, and open carry laws have not changed at all.
It should be noted, that New York had at least three opportunities in court to not appeal decisions they lost, and prevent it from going to the Supreme Court. Back when this case started the state of New York had assumed that Hillary would win and going all the way up to supreme court would be fine. When they lost the second circuit, they had offered the NYRPA concessions, they were reject, and had to appeal the decision making it go to supreme court. This was ALL the state of New York’s arrogance. And now NJ, MD, HI and others are surely pissed.
As to “needs” and “rights”. Hawaii since 2016 has issued approximately four concealed carry permits to citizens. They must be renewed every year. and you cannot leave your home county with the gun. This has been an obvious violation of rights and is soon to change.
Thank you for spelling out the facts. I don't think a lot of people realized what was really going on with all this May Issue nonsense. It was pure corruption, and completely antithetical to the Constitution.
I personally believe that Constitutional/permitless carry is the only way it should be, but getting rid of May Issue is a great step in the right direction.
Since the supreme court recognizes a right of personal gun ownership in the 2nd amendment and the 14th amendment applies the rules of the constitution to the state governments as well, the states cannot violate a person's right to personal gun ownership.
The supreme court does not recognize a right to an abortion in the constitution so the issue is kicked back to the states per the 10th amendment.
States rights only apply when things are not recognized as constitutional rights.
Very well said. Democrats reminds me of Eddard Stark from Game of Thrones, always doing the honorable thing and getting outmaneuver by people who don't play fair.
> Today 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican
> The rise of ideological uniformity has been much more pronounced among those who are the most politically active. Today, almost four-in-ten (38%) politically engaged Democrats are consistent liberals, up from just 8% in 1994. The change among Republicans since then appears less dramatic – 33% express consistently conservative views, up from 23% in the midst of the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” But a decade ago, just 10% of politically engaged Republicans had across-the-board conservative attitudes.
Comparing median figures are useless, any statistician can see that immediately. It is completely symmetric to movement in the distribution in either group. It only tells us about relative movement between the distributions, not whether either side is moving relative to prior positions.
Did you read the rest of it about the substantial difference at the fringe? Republican extremism exceeds Democratic extremism by 25-100% depending on the metric you look at. This is the difference between consistently-party aligned groups on both sides:
* strongly negative view of the other party: R 15% greater than D (43% vs 38%)
* important to live in a place where people share my views: R 40% more than D (50% vs 35%)
* most close friends share my viewpoints: R 30% more than D (63% vs 49%)
* would be unhappy if an immediate family member married someone of the other party: R 25% more than D (30% vs 23%)
* opposing party policies jeopardize the nation's wellbeing: R 30% more than D (66% vs 50%)
Conservatives are far more likely to not want diversity of thought around them, either
"But far more liberals than conservatives think it is important that a community have racial and ethnic diversity (76% vs. 20%). At the same time, conservatives are more likely than liberals to attach importance to living in a place where many people share their religious faith (57% vs. 17% of liberals)."
I enjoyed GP is talking about hyperpolarization, and you come in saying that it’s all a conservative issue, using an “Atlantic” article as your source.
Yes. I couldn’t imagine if a party had all 3 branches in control. So leaving more rights to states and not forcing them on the entire nation is going to be better.
You can vote in your state for reps that support your cause. Don’t like it? Move elsewhere.
People are doing exactly the same. Florida being one of the top states with influx of people from other states, specifically California.
I think the Democrats have had that trifecta now and again. It's pretty great because they just mill around, argue a bunch, then collapse. I honestly don't get why Libertarians don't vote straight Democrat: it's a sure way to keep government out of peoples' lives due merely to their utter lack of discipline and cohesion.
The only presidency that ended with less regulation in recent times was Reagan's. In general republican administrations are the ones who get less done (and "undo" less of what the opposition party has done).
I’m changing my views on regulations and supply-side economics.
I think this nation needs to kick start innovation and tech progress that was displayed in 1950-1970.
That means, low taxes, control inflation, get budget in order and have a surplus even, stop spending and question the efficiency of the Gov (Do 2x from existing funding). Huge tax breaks for startups and small biz. No state income tax.
It’s wishful thinking but I want Taiwan x Singapore x HongKong economic policies in the USA. Special economic zones like Shenzhen.
>That means, low taxes, control inflation, get budget in order and have a surplus even, stop spending and question the efficiency of the Gov (Do 2x from existing funding). Huge tax breaks for startups and small biz. No state income tax.
IIRC, the top marginal Federal income tax rate in the 1950s-1960s was never below 70%[0].
I should have compared to progress in the Roman empire just so that I can say that I do not condone aristocracy, only making a point about progress itself.
I have no opinion about what you said that I'm willing to express here, except that you mis-stated the level of income taxes during the period you mentioned.
Thanks and correction accepted. Lot of it is still misleading though. We should also clarify that it was the marginal tax rate, not the "tax rate" as we know. Marginal = above a certain threshold. 90% marginal tax rate, but effective tax rate only bit higher than it is today.
no/low taxes has been done since the 80's and all we have for it is massive wealth disparity in this country. It's a failed policy that punishes the majority so a few can be obscenely wealthy.
The wealthy economic zones also require we be OK with little to no environmental regulation, Hong Kong was known for having medical waste simply be dumped into the ocean. It wasn't unheard of to find used syringes and such wash up on the beaches..
I'd argue that wealth disparity is good if we can lift the entire stratum upwards. We have been doing exactly that since the industrial age. Life of the poorest has gotten better.
Inequality is overplayed and oversold to people who conflate crony capitalism to capitalism. The kinds of Thomas Piketty has done a tremendous amount of disservice to the west which hailed capitalism for over 2 centuries, unfortunately, USA + EU are regressing into socialism.
Yeah, I'm not going to base the idea that "inequality is OK" by someone from the federalist society. That's like asking an arsonist if fire is good.
I'd argue that the lower class has lost upward mobility in this country in the last 40-60 years. Sure, cheap crap can be purchased from walmart - but that's just subsidized crap. China has been lifting their lower classes up - yes, but at our expense.
Didn’t we have high taxes from 1950 to 1970 and massive government science military and education programs to do moon shots, stop the commie dominoes, and improve STEM education after Sputnik? And we had labor unions so your average job was enough to buy a home and send your kids to school if they wanted and maybe save enough for a boat when you started getting your pension?
I mean there was segregation, anti black and LGTBQIA violence and lots of rape of women and children, but economically, it had taxes. And larger non-entitlement government spending.
I am not advocating 1950-1970 policies, only indicating the level of progress. Otherwise, we'd also need to advocate for a massive World War that lead to the political resolve/unity followed by Cold War where we are on the verge of nuking each other for 3 decades necessitating intense R&D and military spending. Furthermore, it also necessitates that we form new Gov agencies like they did in 1950's which were nimble, highly efficient and competent. The latter, I would be in favor of. Remove regulations and start new agencies, abolishing old ones. It is also interesting to study why USSR, Cambodia and North Korea failed spectacularly while others that adopted highly capitalistic policies propelled into pulling people out of poverty (China, SK, HK, Taiwan, Singapore, and more recently Indonesia, India post-1990's, Vietnam and Thailand).
Hard to argue voting democrat is keeping government out of lives when some of the largest government overreaches have come from democrats. IE: ACA.
I do agree that they fail to utilize their advantage more often than not but to say that Democrats in control is going to keep government out of peoples lives is... an interesting approach given history.
Seriously, ACA has been the largest government overreach in your life? The government plays a huge role in insurance (over 1/3 of those insured are insure through the government) with Medicare, Medicaid and VA benefits. A few wildly popular rule changes (preexisting conditions) and some state-level exchanges have not moved the needle from giant player to overreach.
I didn't say "largest". I said "democrats overreach". That's not saying "republicans don't".
Both do it... the idea that Democrats stay out of your lives is stupid. They want to control your lives every bit as much. They are trying to create a Ministry of Truth. They are sending the FBI after soccer moms. Biden made unconstitutional moves to use the FDA to enforce unproven vaccines. He's gotten slapped down by the courts repeatedly for various things.
In none of the previous paragraph did I say "republican are innocent". They both want expanded powers and will abuse them given the chance.
"have not moved the needle from player to overreach" one of the largest - if not the largest - expansion of government in recent history isn't "player" level. You can't say "1/3rd of people are covered by the government" and not admit that that is massive overreach for a federal government that has no right in that area to begin with. Lock stock and barrel: over reach.
The creation of a whole new federal branch - "homeland security" was created under BushII. Cushy federal jobs with pensions all funded off that sweet sweet defense budget.
So now airline travel is ruined all for security theater..and you think ACA is overreach?
>>Now, the rural republican votes counting for more in the senate is a huge issue and threat to democracy that the US needs to figure out if it ever wants to represent the views of the people
The United States is substantively an oligarchic republic that has the superficial form of a rather distorted democratic republic (and representative democracy) and which likes to rhetorically appeal to democratic ideology, particularly as the entire justification for the government having any legitimate authority at all.
So, it isn’t a democracy, but it is entirely fair to criticize its failure to be one and insist that it ought to fix that proble, since its entire claim to legitimacy rests on it being a democracy as well as a republic.
> The United States is substantively an oligarchic republic that has the superficial form of a rather distorted democratic republic
Yes, it is a _representative_ democracy, as are most democracies around the world. We could be talking about the means to achieve such representation, and the legitimacy of such means, but by definition, it is still a republic _and_ a democracy, flawed or not.
There are non religious, anti abortion arguments. I've read some version of these before. They have shifted public opinion I believe more than religious arguments. I've read some version of these before, but there are probably others I'm skipping.
To summarize:
- We need those babies to offset huge demographic changes in the US population.
Not enough babies are being born to offset the aging population.
- Women having abortions earlier in life, and having babies later, is negatively affecting the health of the next generation. Autism, Downs and other diseases are all linked to the age of the mother.
- Abortion advocates do themselves no favours by advocating for abortion almost up to the moment of brith. Its about public opinion, and the opinion on when a baby becomes viable has shift due to science. Babies can survive outside the womb much earlier.
-Abortion takes out about 600,000+ babies per year in the US. About 40% of all US abortions are from African American communities. Whether you think this is good or bad, depends if you view abortion to be a good or bad thing. A lot of racists eugenists are hating this decision. So they're not happy with this either. So abortion can be viewed as racist policy because its end effect is killing so many black babies.
Then why is no one doing anything to support babies if we want so many? Here's how to incentivise having children:
- Remove fear of healthcare costs. All children can use Medicare. Cover pregnancy too.
- Stop worries about schools. Bring all schools up to an acceptable level. Hire teachers at underperforming schools until the number of adults is high enough to handle extreme bad behavior and give every child a shot at a decent classroom experience.
- Paid leave. Make it feasible to have a kid in your 20s without tanking your career. Have it come from social security, so you don't have to plan your pregnancy around which company you want to work for.
- Fix housing costs. Make it easy to afford a nice house in your 20s, so having a kid doesn't feel like adding to an ongoing disaster.
The list of things you could do to encourage having kids goes on and on. Of course you could just force pregnancies on the unwilling instead, if that's the kind of person you want to be.
Not that I disagree with you, all of those things would be nice. But its kind of like the "let them eat cake" proposal.
- Who is going to pay for this, when the glut of your most productive workers (tax base) is about to retire. US demographics don't support a larger tax base, but a smaller into the near future.
- People don't have babies because they live in cities. And cities are expensive to live, and space is at a premium. US already has near the highest standard of living in the world. Yet it can't overcome cities being expensive places to live. This is kind of universal.
- We are facing a period where Globalization is coming under sever strain. This points to lower standards of living in the future not higher. Look at the price of energy in Europe for instance. All the things you propose would require more people to pay more taxes, at a time when inflation and cost of living is going up.
I do believe that the birth rate will go up, but that might be if the supply chains break apart due to conflicts around the world. Then more people will be forced to move out to country just to survive. And having more space would lead to more babies being born, since kids are useful on farms.
Yeah, my list was just a list of things that kids need. "How are we going to pay for this???" really is just a subtle "fuck you it's your problem now" to the parents.
The abortion maximalist position, as well as the pro-life maximalist positions, do no one any good here. Someone in Mississippi came up with the idea of grabbing what by all appearances is a pretty mainstream European law, and applying it - and waiting for the inevitable lawsuit and overreach.
And abortion has absolutely had significant impacts on racism - but that racism pre-dates abortion.
I almost lost my wife due to the Catholic Hospital's policy against D&C procedures. Had the OBGYN not put his career on the line, and over-riding the prohibition on the procedure, she would have died. Now that same hurdle can become risking prison.
A few years later, we were blessed with a child who is doing well. I would have neither if not for Roe v. Wade.
This isn't about abortion, it's about denying healthcare!
It is important to note the position was that of the Hospital and not a legal position. All laws in place or being contemplated allow for abortive procedures in medical emergencies such as when the mothers life is in danger.
For instance, the Mississippi law which was the impetus of the recent SCOTUS ruling has the following language:
“[e]xcept in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person shall not intentionally or knowingly perform . . . or induce an abortion"
There are issues with the ICD10 codes related to D&C procedures as they reference or include the word 'abortion'. This should be resolved by the AMA.
> All laws in place or being contemplated allow for abortive procedures in medical emergencies
SB 612[0] in Oklahoma made abortions a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. I'm not sure how many doctors will feel comfortable making that call.
...Especially considering HB 4327 then empowers citizens to stage witch hunts against those providers. Imagine developing a reputation for performing abortions in that situation.
[0] Which defined a "medical emergency" as "a condition which cannot be remedied by delivery of the child in which an abortion is necessary to preserve the life of a pregnant woman whose life is endangered" – a high bar to clear. https://legiscan.com/OK/text/SB612/id/2564710
To me that's the beauty of the United States and the republic that we live in. If Oklahoma has laws and rules that you think are outrageous then move to a different state. On top of even that, if things are just too outrageous here to stand, then move out of the country, like all the media and celebrities that claimed they would move to Canada if and when certain people were elected.
“Just move” seems to imply they made a choice to live there in the first place. Often that isn’t true. What is a 17 year born in Oklahoma to do? Telling them to “just move” when they probably have very little money of their own and probably no family support doesn’t seem very empathetic.
It's a rich mans solution to a problem. "Just move", is clearly something they are easily capable of doing, everyone else? not really. you throw 20 years on a mortgage and then the rug is pulled from under you as the state itself gets worse and worse. You could say the same about refugees, Country's gotten into a bad state? just move. Don't fight for anything, just hope that someone somewhere actually took a gander at the problem and arrived at a solution that is conducive to a prosperous society.
It’s always so odd to me how people like you suggest the answer to something like Oklahoma’s wildly punitive abortion laws is for folks to just uproot their lives and move to another state immediately. Why don’t the people who hate people having a choice relocate to a less liberal area and simply not have abortions? Nobody is stopping them either, right?
It’s like there’s no consideration for the fact that they have families and communities they are a part of, or that they may lack the means to easily relocate.
When someone foots the bill for these people I’ll stop calling the solution dishonest and hypocritical. Until then, I suggest people who repeat it stop acting like it’s such an obvious, easy solution.
This also ignores the fact that states like Missouri are attempting to criminalize going to other states for them, which means even if you have the means to travel to another state for one without wholesale moving you can’t even do that. Should my home state be able to prosecute me for smoking weed in Colorado?
The day the US feels like two distinct entities with opposing views. Then you’ll have war.
And most of the non-western world will rejoice at the idea of the greatest country on earth forfeiting its hegemony over its inability to control religion when it should have.
Religion is the scourge of the earth, eternally at war against civilisation, education and reason; promoting war and hatred against the « barbarians » wherever it holds some ground.
Do you mean a stringent bar? A bar that is hard to identify?
Full text of "emergency":
“Medical emergency” means a condition which cannot be
remedied by delivery of the child in which an abortion is necessary
to preserve the life of a pregnant woman whose life is endangered by
a physical disorder, physical illness or physical injury including a
life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the
pregnancy itself."
This is very clear a covers all possible situations where the pregnant woman's life would be in danger.
This is very straight forward. If however, you mean to say it restricts abortions too far, you are arguing a different point.
This is a lot of room for selective enforcement even in the Mississippi law. All it takes are criminal penalties for a doctor to hesitate or even refuse to perform potentially life saving operations. And that’s not even looking at laws like the one in Oklahoma which doesn’t have this carve out.
Edit: OK has a stricter form of this carve out for medical emergencies, I misspoke.
Their lawyers know the laws and they write hospital policies that stop them getting prosecuted and losing their license to operate, so will err on the side of the law, not patients.
The U.S. should pass a law rather than relying on a court decision. Roe v Wade was a poor decision from a legal standpoint. For example, why were abortions in the first trimester considered due process under the 14th amendment but in the last 2 trimesters they were not? The court should not be creating the law, the legislature should be doing that. Pass a law in the U.S. legislature and that will take precedence over state law (see the Supremacy Clause in the U.S. Constitution).
The way I see it the courts are there to ensure our civil rights are not violated by laws. A law that "allows" abortion doesn't really make sense in that light. Unless the law is a prohibition on passing laws restricting this right, I guess, although that would be silly.
The way you see it, unfortunately, does not make it so.
The constitution limits how the government can infringe on the rights of the people. If the courts say that a right to abortion is not in the constitution, then amend the constitution to add it.
Until that point, it is up to the representatives of the people (i.e. the legislature at the state or federal level) to make laws.
SCOTUS has now said both things actually at different points in time without any constitutional changes.
Shouldn’t decisions generally be considered durable unless there’s some kind of obvious injustice being perpetrated?
There’s a reason overturning this particular law is so bad. It’s a cultural flashpoint and SCOTUS has just lit the match and blown up any semblance of them being an apolitical body. Not just with this one decision but the gun control case too. Another commenter pointed it out. This particular bench is picking and choosing fairly inconsistently and extremely ideologically about how they want to rule and then trying to find some justification for it. Consider this. All the evidence to date suggests that abortions (generally) are extremely rare, extremely safe, and generally difficult choices. This is the government getting involved in YOUR healthcare which is very much a privacy issue so dismissing it as “it’s not constitutional” is tone deaf because the argument had been made that it is and been the law of the land for half a decade.
Another example was when they didn’t sustain the lawsuit against Texas’ abortion law. Wanna bet they’ll ban any similar legislation aimed at gun seller and manufacturers? Why does the 14th amendment warrant less protection than the 2nd? Not to mention that the 2nd at no point was about personal gun ownership. Well-regulated militia is about states being able to regulate their own armed forces outside of federal control, not implicitly deputizing every citizen of a state as part of a militia the state can’t regulate (one of the rare cases where textualism and living document should be in agreement and they’re not).
>There’s a reason overturning this particular law is so bad. It’s a cultural flashpoint and SCOTUS has just lit the match and blown up any semblance of them being an apolitical body. Not just with this one decision but the gun control case too.
SCOTUS does not concern itself with the angered mob (paraphrasing Dobbs and a few other cases). It exists to read and interpret the law. Do you want a Court that bends its rulings to the "match and blow up"? I certainly don't.
Forget angered mob. How would you feel if the left wing grabs control of SCOTUS and bans all personal ownership of guns (ie go back to text literalism for the 2nd amendment)?
This is literally the first time the court has taken away a right after it’s granted. It sets seriously damaging precedent to the fabric of US society. Heck, even if SCOTUS had moved slower but this is literally the first chance they took. Even Robertson didn’t think they should have overturned it that fast. Robertson is one of the most conservative SCOTUSes ever. He’s who they put up after the embarrassment of Bush’s personal lawyer embarrassment (or genius political maneuvering because he knew Dems would blow their wads on Hanrietta Meyers).
This is the justification for SCOTUS to be packed hyper partisan going forward. In the past when it got this unbalanced justices would bend back to the center to mediate the court. That mediation instinct is now totally gone. Watch for court expansion to be much more seriously discussed for the first time in more than 100 years. This is a serious crises for their legitimacy (something which didn’t happen once they actually passed Roe v Wade).
The conservatives are 100% right that the original reasoning was totally bullshit about when the right to an abortion ends. It was meant to strike a political balance to not cause too much social strife while expanding a basic right of women. The only data driven position on abortion is abortion without any government restriction (modulo making it a safe process, mediating access control so the offices could only be credible, etc). The reason is that late term abortions basically only happen when the only business the state has is to shield the privacy and dignity of the people involved. People don’t take them on a whim at all. Rich people can provide this for their families but poor people need the government’s protection here. Abortion equalized Women’s healthcare access in a way never before or since. The failure to come to a compromise of any kind this time around on a socially hot topic where all the science supports the opposite conclusion that the courts came to, yes this is quite shocking.
>How would you feel if the left wing grabs control of SCOTUS and bans all personal ownership of guns (ie go back to text literalism for the 2nd amendment)?
Well first of all, SCOTUS doesn't have the power to do that. So in your scenario some state would have had to pass a law that says "all personal ownership of guns is banned", and then the challenge would have to make it's way to SCOTUS. I'm going to ignore for a moment that your characterization of 2A is wrong, and that it's been understood to confer a right to individual ownership since forever. But, going forward with your hypothetical there's a couple problems. First is, again, your belief that SCOTUS has the power to unilaterally ban gun ownership. It does not, and never did, have that power. Second, you're also assuming there's a sufficient amount of people that want to ban private gun ownership. Is there? Certainly doesn't seem like there is outside of extreme left-wing enclaves, and even then revealed preferences suggests that even if they want to ban guns for the plebeians they'd still like to retain the right for themselves. Roberts (not Robertson) is an incrementalist and his opinions do insist on this, yes, so that would give you another problem. Unless you are talking about expanding the court, which would indeed be the political Rubicon where the crossing of which would render the Court permanently compromised.
>This is the justification for SCOTUS to be packed hyper partisan going forward. In the past when it got this unbalanced justices would bend back to the center to mediate the court.
Huh? This isn't an accurate description of the Court's history at all. Is there some body of Opinions you're relying on to make this claim? Because if you've read enough of these things it doesn't seem that the Justices pay attention to the political bent of the opinions they write just to make sure they stay "balanced" (whatever that means).
>The only data driven position on abortion is abortion without any government restriction (modulo making it a safe process, mediating access control so the offices could only be credible, etc)...
>Abortion equalized Women’s healthcare access in a way never before or since. The failure to come to a compromise of any kind this time around on a socially hot topic where all the science supports the opposite conclusion that the courts came to, yes this is quite shocking.
That you believe what you wrote in your final paragraph is indicative of how Americans' opinions on this subject have been severely warped by how this issue is actually covered in media. Most of Europe has more restrictive abortion laws than the law at issue in Dobbs. Is healthcare in Europe for women somehow unequal? And given that this is a socially hot topic, doesn't it make sense to return the legal making power to the people and their elected representatives? This is literally what they wrote in the case. It's a fraught topic, emotionally charged, but it should be law makers and voters that get into the nitty gritty of the regulation of a medical procedure where a fetus is destroyed - not the Court.
The elephant in the room here that I'm detecting is that the political forces in favor of abortion are actually pretty disinterested in a legislating the issue. It's either too gross and fraught so they don't want to do it, or it's just too lucrative for fundraising to actually codify a right to abortion in the law.
> Well first of all, SCOTUS doesn't have the power to do that
Straw man interpretation. Overturning Roe v Wade doesn’t “ban” abortion but effectively it actually does in half the country. Gun control is very similar afaik.
> Second, you're also assuming there's a sufficient amount of people that want to ban private gun ownership. Is there? Certainly doesn't seem like there is outside of extreme left-wing enclaves, and even then revealed preferences suggests that even if they want to ban guns for the plebeians they'd still like to retain the right for themselves
This argument applies verbatim to abortion. The only solution is to look at where the body of scientific knowledge suggests we should go. To my knowledge that’s the absolute right to abortion and a total ban on gun ownership. The more telling thing is that your counter argument to “how would you feel if the court was packed to reinterpret the 2nd amendment to not include personal ownership” was “that won’t happen” and “there’s no public support for that”. These are exactly the same arguments that left moderates would say to the more activist left about not pushing the issue too hard and here we are.
> Is healthcare in Europe for women somehow unequal?
Which countries? Europe has a lot of them. Let’s look at some:
France: Veil Law is unlimited abortion after the first trimester provided two doctor’s sign off that the health of the mother is at risk. There’s sufficient nuance and weasel language that I imagine this isn’t really a big obstacle.
Britain: kind of complicated but effectively abortion is legal on demand at any point (98% of them are done under the “maternal mental health” carve out, likely to avoid having any legal issues come up / simplifies paperwork).
Northern Ireland: similar to Britain
Germany: a bit stricter but afaict still an absolute right with mandated counseling prior to the abortion.
Iceland: legal until the end of 22 weeks
Netherlands: 24 weeks
Estonia: up to 11 weeks if no reason, up to 21 weeks for pretextual reasons.
Poland: the strictest with the only carve out being maternal health.
Ukraine: up to 28 weeks (effectively)
Dobbs banned it at 15 weeks so citation needed about the claim that Europe is more regressive than Dobbs.
I’m sure there might be some that are worse, but very few that are as regressive as what women are now facing in half of the US states with the overturning of Roe v Wade (some states have absolute bans).
> This isn't an accurate description of the Court's history at all. Is there some body of Opinions you're relying on to make this claim?
From Wikipedia cause I’m too lazy to cite the actual text:
> The Court also held that the right to abortion is not absolute and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and prenatal life.[5][6] The Court resolved these competing interests by announcing a pregnancy trimester timetable to govern all abortion regulations in the United States
You can’t simultaneously have the right to privacy and have government interest in a pregnancy. Does the government have the right to go after you if you drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes during a pregnancy? What about using illicit drugs during a pregnancy? Does that mean you can go after people with drug issues who get pregnant (and now can’t even get an abortion) for endangering the life of a potential child? What happens if the women naturally miscarries because of drinking/drugs? What if the mother didn’t take her prenatal vitamins? This kind of reasoning really is ridiculous and misogynistic but it’s acceptable because the right to privacy principle in Roe v Wade actually extends in a very meaningful and common sense way. Roe v Wade was 100% a compromise to try to recognize that the government doesn’t actually have any any interest in the pregnancy (the recognition of that was slowly expanding).
> Blackmun recognized that life begins at some point for the fetus, but he felt it was not for the judiciary “at this point in the development of man’s knowledge” to speculate on what that point was.
Overall Roe v Wade was an incremental improvement for women’s rights but it was incomplete. The right to abortion should indeed be almost entirely absolute (with medical counseling to make sure the mother is OK before and afterward). In fact, overturning Roe v Wade now brings questions of whether IVF bans are now legal. After all, there’s potential life being kept in a freezer and most of it is destroyed (expect to see this come up). Neither state nor federal government should be involved in healthcare decisions themselves, only in legislating the process of how those decisions get made (to protect the patient / and or regulate commerce).
> Unless you are talking about expanding the court, which would indeed be the political Rubicon where the crossing of which would render the Court permanently compromised.
Technically the size of SCOTUS has changed over time and nothing came of it. We got 9 in 1869 but it has varied as I’m sure you’re aware. I think you’re assessment is correct though just because the country is so politically divided. A not insubstantial number of people (myself included) would argue it’s already compromised (McConnell’s political shrewdness/shadiness to give Obama’s SCOTUS nomination to Trump and Trump packing the court intentionally with anti abortion ideologues), so then it’s just a matter of degrees. This almost happened before with Roosevelt. I imagine Row v Wade is a lot more unifying of Democrats than the New Deal was.
> And given that this is a socially hot topic, doesn't it make sense to return the legal making power to the people and their elected representatives? This is literally what they wrote in the case. It's a fraught topic, emotionally charged, but it should be law makers and voters that get into the nitty gritty of the regulation of a medical procedure where a fetus is destroyed - not the Court.
Fantastic. Gun control can be described in very similar terms. We should similarly regulate it back to the states based on that principle.
It would be difficult to pass a pro-choice (or pro-abortion) federal law which complied with the constitution, as the 'right' doesn't fall under any of the enumerated powers, and seems to be clearly within the power of the states. It seems like the only way to have a federal right to abortion is to have a constitutional right (like Roe v. Wade).
The courts back then couldn't find in the constitution a way to make a solid case. They were hoping that the legislative branch would be able to get this done in a few decades.
Separate abortion from Roe v. Wade. The big challenge has been that Roe v. Wade was horribly decided. Even RBG thought so. Roe v wade gave the Supreme Court the right to make law without reference to any text in the constitution. Casey tried to change the justification but it still was a disaster. Sadly it is far from the only time the Supreme Court has made things up out of whole cloth that has had massive societal implications - see separate but equal, Dredd Scott, etc, bush v gore. Citizens United.
Getting rid of roe v wade kicks the issues to legislatures.
I may be the only hopeful one - but removing this from unelected, lifetime judges who seem to forget that a democracy is no place for kings and queens may ultimately result in abortion returning to the path it was on before roe v wade - a non-controversial issue decided by elected officials.
Roe V. Wade has decades of precedent. Even if the ruling was "horribly decided," this is not a good look for the legitimacy of the court.
Especially at a time when the country is more polarized than ever. This is just horribly timed and will further split this country apart. This will be our century's dredd scott - the court "thought" this would settle the issue. But it won't:
"Although Taney and several other justices hoped the decision would permanently settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision's effect was the opposite."
Roe was also a basis for many other ruling and this opens for them to be overturned as well.
THOMAS, J., concurring
“For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”
If he was to apply a logical framework to his reasoning then overturning Obergefell would mean also overturning Loving and dissolving his own marriage.
But he isn't particularly interested in that, because he is a political hack.
Thankfully, he is at least wrong about Obergefell, which was decided on different, and much firmer, grounds than the right-to-privacy cases. But carrying out the logic from this decision to others does indeed threaten Griswold and Lawrence, and especially Griswold, which was basically the direct precedential precursor to Roe.
Also the Pierce case that prevented laws requiring kids to attend public school. I'd love to know how many federalist society members send their kids to private schools.
Griswold (which articulated the right to marital privacy, which prevented laws banning contraception for married couples) was precedent for Roe, not vice versa.
Obergefell and Lawrence rested more strongly on Griswold directly (or through other non-Roe cases) than on any innovation from Roe, as I recall.
(Note that Thomas’ explicit attack on “all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents” strikes much more deeply, though, than just the Griswold line of privacy-related cases; the incorporation of the Bill of Rights as applicable against the States is substantive due process, and even the application of even the rational basis test requiring some connection to some legitimate public purpose for any legal distinction, are all part of the substantive due process precedent of the Court. I guess, if this Court wasn’t nakedly partisan and selective in its logic, this could be a hopeful sign for Dems on state gun control, since if there were a serious reconsideration of that precedent the incorporation of the second Amendment – the only Amendment with a purpose clause explicitly stating that it is for the benefit of the states – against the States would be on the weakest ground of any of it.)
Thomas really is a conservative extremist and I agree that his concurrence is very concerning. But no one else joined his opinion and the majority explicitly stated that all those cases shouldn't be affected(because of how abortion affects "two lives").
>The Court today declines to disturb substantive due process jurisprudence generally or the doctrine’s application in other, specific contexts. Cases like Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965) (right of married persons to obtain contraceptives)*; Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts); and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015) (right to same-sex marriage), are not at issue. The Court’s abortion cases are unique, see ante, at 31–32, 66, 71–72, and no party has asked us to decide “whether our entire Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence must be preserved or revised,” McDonald, 561 U. S., at 813 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). Thus, I agree that “[n]othing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 66.
>For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 7), we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents, Gamble v. United States, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 9). After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
>To answer that question, we would need to decide important antecedent questions, including whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects any rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution and, if so, how to identify those rights. See id., at 854. That said, even if the Clause does protect unenumerated rights, the Court conclusively demonstrates that abortion is not one of them under any plausible interpretive approach. See ante, at 15, n. 22.
This is actually in important and interesting legal question, because the Court has largely side stepped determining a mechanism for how to identify those rights, and did so in Roe.
But if you’re making a decision based on what will make people happy, isn’t that just politics?
Your point is well made - this is going to be catastrophic for our country. No good can come if it. But it can’t be the position of the court to do what’s expedient over what is constitutionally correct. Or should it be? What does it profit a country to uphold the constitution and lose its democracy.
RBG had her criticisms of Roe, but a quick reading of her critiques would clearly show she would be with the dissent today, not the majority.
Reproductive rights are essential to women's liberty and equality, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The unborn child has a competing right to life that is also guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Roe/Casey balanced these competing interests well, and today's decision blows that up and eliminates any notion of reproductive rights for women.
Rights are not supposed to be subject to the whims of political majorities.
While I'm a strong supporter of abortion rights, I agree with this logic.
If anything, this will force conservatives to solidify and clarify their views on abortion which will allow voters to decide where they land on the spectrum of abortion rights. Whereas before, conservatives just deferred to "abortion bad. look at supreme court decision".
Also, is it not the case that most Americans support some abortion rights? Thus, this could force conservatives to move center on the abortion spectrum in order to appease their constituents.
As if any of the "abortion bad" people rail against it only because it was a supreme court decision. We'd see the same fervor if it was a law. I've never hear someone say "I'd be fine with abortion if it was a law instead of a supreme court decision". I'm sure you can find someone making that argument but the vast majority (90%+) don't care. In fact I bet you could say "The Roe v Wade law" and most people wouldn't bat an eyelash because they just consider it "established precedent" and law vs court decision is irrelevant for them.
> The seven to two judgment in Roe v. Wade declared “violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” a Texas criminal abortion statute that intolerably shackled a woman’s autonomy; the Texas law “except[ed] from criminality only a life-saving procedure on behalf of the [pregnant woman].” Suppose the Court had stopped there, rightly declaring unconstitutional the most extreme brand of law in the nation, and had not gone on, as the Court did in Roe, to fashion a regime blanketing the subject, a set of rules that displaced virtually every state law then in force. Would there have been the twenty-year controversy we have witnessed[?]
Or to solidify their dedication to minority tule, specifically minority rule of one particular anti-science religious sect over the majority in a formerly pluralistic, science and education and hard work based society.
Stop educating people on biology (and in the post genome sequencing world), stop women from having reproductive control, stop LGBTQ folks from participating without fear, stop the free thinking people, stop it all in the name of that olde time religion (which itself is mostly a modern nostalgic reconstruction).
Very harmful to our ability to focus and succeed on technological transformation.
> a formerly pluralistic, science and education and hard work based society.
While today is certainly a dark day for the US, that paints an inaccurately rosy picture of the past to make us look even worse than we are today.
Our literacy rate has never been higher, belief in evolution is at an all time high, more people have college degrees, and access to accurate information has never been easier. We are in a short-term downswing on many axes, but the long term trends are towards science and education.
You are absolutely correct that we are more polarized than we have been since the Civil War.
I often imagine what it must have been like to be born in the 1920s. By 1945, you would have lived through a Depression and the worst war the world had ever seen by a large margin. You would have entered a world where a few button presses could wipe out all life on Earth. You watched the rise of communism. The economy of your adulthood was worse than what you were born into. It must have seemed like the arrow of progress had permanently broken and humanity was doomed.
And yet, without knowing it, ahead of you was the Civil Rights Act, the women's liberation movement, the environmental movement and the Clean Air Act, increased support for interacial relationships, gay rights.
In the midst of that dark time, it would have been hard to believe any of those could be ahead of you. Who knows what could be ahead of us now?
And then we ended up calling those people (born in the 1920s) the greatest generation. Sure, maybe the greatest generation is always just the generation that's about to die. But maybe the combination of hardship and opportunity also had something to do with it. So maybe we've got another "greatest generation" in the making.
> So maybe we've got another "greatest generation" in the making.
I have elementary age kids and it is fascinating seeing how that generation is growing up. They are so much more community oriented and caring that my generation was. They seem to understand that there are hard problems to be solved and that they won't be solved alone.
I'm filled with sorrow at the world they are inheriting, but I have a lot of optimism that they will do a better job with it than we have.
There's nothing metaphysical about observing that we have imperfect knowledge of the future and some potentialities are positive.
> I've already discounted the idea.
That's a personal choice of attitude and perspective, not an objective property of the universe. You're welcome to it, of course, but it's probably not accomplishing much for you.
> Everything ends eventually.
All the more reason to make the most of it and find the joy we can while it lasts. If it's going to end either way, why obsess about it?
Bless you for that. Unironically. I keep telling my kids you have to judge things in the 100 years over hundred years metrics, but have been feeling rather bleak today, also with the midterms looking like the anti-democratic forces may well win.
Also, due to having to argue basic shit like the value of a pluralistic educated democracy when we have the physical problem of climate change bearing down and really wanting our attention. I marched for Roe v Wade in 1988 the first time, protested against stupid wars in 1986, helped build what I thought would tie humanity together in an enlighten network of discourse in the 90s as a programmer, had kids in the 2000#, and now back to Roe v Wade. Meanwhile the CO2 is 420 ppm and we haven’t got a damn Mars 100 picked out yet (Sci fi reference there). I want Red Mars with more realistic population distribution, not Parable of the Sower.
> is it not the case that most Americans support some abortion rights?
Most Americans support some form of universal access to health care as well - some variation of single payer, or public option, or similar. That is nowhere reflected in state-level policy in many many states.
And most Americans support additional restrictions on access to guns like background checks, red flag laws, and banning assault rifles. Unlike abortion, those rights are being taken away from the legislators due to a horrible interpretation of the second amendment
And pot. And legal protections for workers in the workplace. Still, the Dems seem like weirdly ineffective standards bearers for all this, plus the Senate and gerrymandering.
> Also, is it not the case that most Americans support some abortion rights? Thus, this could force conservatives to move center on the abortion spectrum in order to appease their constituents.
13 states have trigger laws going into effect with this. It’s not going to move the needle at all. The red states will ban it. Blue won’t. And it’ll still be a hot button topic in the reversed states. Red candidates in blue states will want to outlaw it. Blue candidates in red states will want to allow it.
> Also, is it not the case that most Americans support some abortion rights? Thus, this could force conservatives to move center on the abortion spectrum in order to appease their constituents.
One would hope, but they have only been veering further to the right on this issue. In the past year, multiple states have passed the most extreme abortion laws this country has seen over half a century. Texas will literally throw women in jail if they are caught leaving the state to get an abortion.
But those evil Democrats want to teach kids that there is nothing wrong with being gay, so I guess it equals out?
I do not know how any sane person can still support the GOP, especially after the Jan. 6 insurrection and this SC ruling.
Agreed, it will also make democracy more granular and for the lack of a better word: authentic. Citizens can vote their way for pro or anti Abortion issues and kick out electives that do not support their preferences.
Yes. In fact, this ruling might well lead to an end of Republican majorities in red States, and to multi-decadal Democrat rule. Certainly that is likely if: a) public opinion is strongly in favor of some legal abortion, and b) Republicans ignore that and move to ban all abortions.
In 1992 Republicans ran on abortion and lost badly. In 1994 they ran on everything-but-abortion and won big. So there is precedent for them to lose badly if they overplay their hand now.
I think the opposite, and this ruling is the precursor to a lifetime of Republican rule at the Federal level and in all but the most blue states.
Next up on the chopping block will be voting rights. SCOTUS will act to ensure that disenfranchisement is perfectly legal and that attempts to help disenfranchised people vote are illegal.
We are currently in a recession that will likely turn into a depression of epic proportions. Republicans are going to walk away with the midterms and next presidency. They will use the food/stability crisis we are as justification for further attacking blue states and attempting to bend them.
That's assuming they don't just impeach Biden then throw him and his staff in prison once they have control of the Senate and House.
In 1992 they had to win the majority of the vote in elections to win seats, but they have innovated around that restriction in the past 30 years, so no, there isn’t a good expectation that this will make them lose
I don't see this really having any impact on voting patterns. Voting demographics are largely over-determined.
Republicans lost in 92 because of the "economy stupid" and, after sixteen years of incumbency, the pendulum swung to "throw the bums out." They were trotting out "Family Values" when people had actual concerns about their material conditions as we were in a relatively minor recession.
Pence just asked for federal legislation banning all abortions. So I think you are wrong to say the Republicans are trying to return it to the states, thy are trying to ban it.
Note that a man is not required to donate blood to save an adult human, even if there is no risk to him. The equal protection clause extends that right to your own body to women, and that is fairly sound constitutional reasoning.
The constitution doesn’t mention a million specific things, but it protects our freedoms anyways.
A democracy is a place to gradually expand equal protection of the laws to all people. Each change seems radical to the people accustomed to undemocractic flaws, but the outcome has been very successful these last few hundred years.
> Note that a man is not required to donate blood to save an adult human, even if there is no risk to him. The equal protection clause extends that right to your own body to women, and that is fairly sound constitutional reasoning.
Why did Roe v Wade rely on an unwritten right to privacy rather than the equal protection clause then?
> Note that a man is not required to donate blood to save an adult human, even if there is no risk to him. The equal protection clause extends that right to your own body to women, and that is fairly sound constitutional reasoning.
Just one comment away from implying that this case is straightforward, and you're bringing up esoteric case law from 100 years ago. I don't point this out to denigrate you, but to highlight just how complicated law can be, particularly when it comes to landmark SCOTUS decisions. I thought I heard on the news that the majority opinion was 90 pages long, but I can't find a reference. However detailed it was, for the next month, literally millions of people will be on Twitter making 280-character-limited reductio ad absurdum comments about it.
This is has been brought up a few times, but is largely a non-sequitur. First, if WWIII broke out, I doubt women would be exempt from a draft (e.g. see Israel where service is mandatory for women). Second, this is comparing exceptional circumstances where there is, presumably, an existential threat to the state vs. a situation that can reasonably be expected to occur in a person's lifetime (pregnancy).
The draft is also a temporary measure. As with other wartime restrictions of civil liberties, like curfews or rationing, it would not be tolerated if continued outside the context of a war.
Why would you believe women wouldn’t be exempt from the draft?
Do you have a historical example of that in the roughly 300 year history of the US? Do you anticipate on recent Supreme Court rulings that they will expand the idea of equality and not reinforce traditional Christian gender roles?
I was arguing for expansion in opposition to restricting equal protection. It would be much better if the US protected equal protection for all people immediately in 1790 but it didn’t. I would like to argue that the Republicans are a threat to the progress made in the latter half of the twentieth century without defending the previous systems as being good, but merely good enough to enable improvements via the Civil Right movement, gay power, womens lib, labor unions, etc.
If you have a plan for full equality, sign me up. I have seen some calls for a general strike on Twitter today, but I am unpersuaded that will happen this week.
Here on ycombinator even getting people to understand that the value of their labor is being taken and their orgs are racist and sexist is not an easy sell.
I am neither Republican or Democrat. I am Brazilian and moderate. But I would not go as far as saying any party is a threat. In society, all changes that were made too fast resulted in unexpected consequences. We might be in times of extreme polarization, but in general, having opposing views in politics forcing changes to be slower than the Democrats would want and faster than what Republicas would, benefit us all in the end.
I would argue that the US is suffering from an inability to legislate due to the polarization. The two parties do not share the same idea of what problems we have, and they are not arguing over how to fix them. You have one side saying we should do something about global warming and the cost of education and gun deaths and the other side saying women should submit to their husbands and gays are causing social breakdown in the country and the Democrats are drinking the blood of children to live longer.
The Senate allows a minority to stop the majority from tweaking the laws in an iterative process, and holds the society back from doing things that require laws, like carbon tax or cap n trade, or even fixing clear bugs in ACA. We don’t have much internet relevant laws passed in the last twenty years, yet the internet and its conflicts have changed quite a lot since Napster. We can’t change the law to let people rebuild flood destroyed buildings on higher ground. All we do is tweak the budget numbers and appoint judges. It makes prospective solutions extremely tilted compared to even a good compromise of a law.
This is the problem with politics today in America. Republicans win by saying No to everything, while everyone collectively loses because of our inability to get anything done. And then Democrats get blamed for it anyway, whether it was their legislation or not.
We are just stalled as a society. Brazil is quite similar. All the legislators are having a lot of problem moving forward in either direction. This is not a problem with the system and it is not one party to take the blame alone.
Until people find the middle ground or convince the other side, being stalled is not the worst solution. Dictatorship, civil war, and most other alternatives are worst than stalling legislation.
Take carbon tax as an example. I myself believe human action is destroying the environment and I want to reverse it. But I do not think carbon tax is the way, and I know many moderates on the same position as I am. How about removing all incentives first before imposing punishment? How about triple the nuclear plants, that are safer than never with newer tech, and make it impossible financially to justify carbon based electricity generation? There are dozens of ways to take the first steps without punishing people and getting more money in the government hands. Carbon tax is just shifting money from one hand to the other, and other bad actors will do something bad with it. I prefer to fix this with less money and less power to governments. And there you go. Better stalled than move forward in the wrong direction.
It is more a wolf against wolf situations than wolf versus sheep situation. We are all humans and we can all reason and have conversations. In a democracy with two opposing parties we are way better off than in Russia. There you have a wolves versus sheep situation, with all the sheep with leadership mindset already eaten over generations.
> Pence just asked for federal legislation banning all abortions. So I think you are wrong to say the Republicans are trying to return it to the states, thy are trying to ban it.
It’s worth mentioning that the constitutionality of such a law seems highly questionable based on the current leanings of SCOTUS. States’ rights work both ways, and (not a lawyer) I would assume an incredibly broad interpretation of interstate commerce would be needed to hold up a federal ban on abortions.
Why would you assume any precedent for behavior matters from a court that’s issued a majority opinion overturning a case where multiple of the co-signing justices had declared it settled case law?
They just overruled the NYC gun ban. They will pick and choose whatever they want
The US Federal constitution contains a right to bear arms, which supersedes the NYC law which stated ordinary citizens could not "bear arms" in public without justifying an exceptional need.
There is no analogous constitutional right for abortion. Roe v. Wade inferred it from a "right to privacy", which also does not exist in the text.
The US Federal Constitution contains the 9th amendment which guarantees that the enumeration of specific rights in the Constitution cannot be construed to deny any other right not enumerated in there, but that doesn't matter for these courts.
They have become openly partisan and will pick and choose whatever suits their political leanings. Once they got a majority on the court they no longer need to play ball with the other side
In 2007 a conservative SCOTUS majority upheld a federal ban on partial-birth abortion [0]. Thomas wrote a concurring opinion where he explicitly glossed over whether congress actually had that authority under the commerce clause. Normally he jumps at any chance to say congress has exceeded their authority under that clause. I wouldn't find it hard to believe if this court upholds a more general federal abortion ban
I believe that’s my point. From what I understand, an incredibly broad interpretation of something like the interstate commerce clause or another enumerated power would seem necessary for such a federal ban to supersede state laws permitting abortions.
Not quite. The ruling is specifically setup to allow a federal ban against it's challenges. The wording allows several avenues, my bet is on expanding the existing federal murder charge that has plenty of case law supporting it to fetuses at the moment of conception.
> The equal protection clause extends that right to your own body to women
No it doesn't
Here's the clause:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Where is a guaranteed right to abortion in this? You said Roe "is fairly sound constitutional reasoning", but I don't see you reading a Roe from this without some serious mental gymnastics
Also:
> Note that a man is not required to donate blood to save an adult human, even if there is no risk to him. The equal protection clause extends that right to your own body to women, and that is fairly sound constitutional reasoning.
Donating blood != killing a fetus
If you consider equating the two "fairly sound constitutional reasoning" then that speaks for itself
I don't think that's the argument the earlier post is making. They are arguing that you cannot be compelled to do something to save some else's life even if it won't harm you, and doubly so without due process.
However, I think viewing someone's body as their own property is a better way to frame this. If you decide a fetus is trespassing in your body, where should the state intervene? The state couldn't force you to harbor someone in your home during a winter storm, even if you left your door unlocked and kicking them out would surely result in them freezing to death. If you believe that a fetus has adverse rights against the body it's growing inside of, then you need to make that case.
> I don't think that's the argument the earlier post is making. They are arguing that you cannot be compelled to do something to save some else's life even if it won't harm you, and doubly so without due process.
Choosing not to kill a fetus != saving someone else's life
Using the two interchangeably is like building a house on top of sand
Following the viewpoint of the parent commenter, you are not choosing to kill the fetus. You are choosing to stop letting the fetus have residence inside your body (your property) and choosing to stop providing it with free nourishment. It's the lack of the fetus's ability to fend for itself that causes it to perish.
This is in line with my argument, but I actually mean something more direct than that. I mean you have the right to kill someone living inside of you, because you have property rights over your body and rights to the security of your person. Before viability, the only means of evicting a fetus, or in other words securing your person, is to kill the fetus. I think that is a fundamental right.
Just as you have the right to defend your home with lethal force, you also have the right to evict by lethal force a fetus.
I don't think it does us any good to shy aways from the uncomfortable aspects of t he free exercise of these rights.
You aren’t compelled to allow someone to stay in your home just because you previously invited them in.
Ideally, people would successfully use other means of contraception and they VAST majority of the time they do. But there are myriad reasons someone may come to the decision that they cannot carry a child to term. I firmly believe that being compelled to do so violates security in one’s person. There’s a long tradition in English common law preceding the US constitution that holds basic the same concept to be true. Historically common law allowed abortion up to the “quickening”, which today we might call viability even though it differs a bit.
Fundamentally I don’t think the state should be able to tell you what to do with your own body. Many important rights flow naturally from this basic premise. I think this is a principled approach rather than working backwards from an outcome.
Obviously there are alternative options to safely get the starving child in your house help. You can easily call the police, CPS, etc to take care of it with no danger to your own body.
You cannot do the same with a fetus inside your body.
That's precisely why I think an argument from property rights and self-ownership is more morally, legally, and philosophically sound, as I said. Your body is the most intimate and important property you have, to be secure in your person is one of the most fundamental rights. Being forced to host another life within your body and an infliction of suffering by the state, and in my view a violation of the right to security in one's person. I think that is a right that supersedes the rights any fetus may have, as unfortunate as we may feel the outcome to be.
Moreover, there are a lot of places where we morally and legally permit people to kill, that doesn't mean that we like killing or condone it in general.
As an aside, I appreciate that you’re engaging in good faith. I’m sure you arrive at your position through conviction, even though I strongly disagree.
> If you decide a fetus is trespassing in your body,
I think I remember the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child stating that (1) children are not the property of their parents and (2) parents have a responsibility for its well-being.
1. The Convention document doesn't expressly address it, but instructs in several places that the rights enumerated exist for children 'from birth', implying they do not apply to a potential child before it's born.
2. The United States is a signatory, but did not ratify this, and is not subject to it.
I would add that rights don’t flow from documents but rather need to be built up from philosophical argument. Perhaps they’re natural, discovered, or achieved but in any case I think we have to reason towards expansive and philosophically sound rights.
I’m not arguing that children are property, but rather your own body is. When a born child leaves your body, then they can no longer infringe upon your right of self ownership. I don’t see a conflict here.
The argument is that a state is denying the woman's liberty and/or denying them the privileges due to citizens on behalf of a party that is neither person nor citizen.
(Obviously the conferring the status of personhood on the unborn is a subject of debate).
This is a good point. In some ways, Roe v Wade gives pro-life movement an easy layup. It’s poorly decided law with no solid foundation in the Constitution. Nine white men jumped into a raging battle, and killed any debate through the Democratic process. And they did this during a time when the democratic process was trending in favor of abortion rights. Don’t take my word for it. This was Justice Ginsburg’s take on it too.
The smart move for the pro-choice movement, would be to get some state constitutional amendments on the books.
> Getting rid of roe v wade kicks the issues to legislatures.
The problem with this sentiment is that the issue was kicked to the legislatures decades ago. Congress has had decades to take care of this, and they haven't. So now all of the sudden it's a whole "but the Supreme Court overstepped". Well yea, because Congress refused and still refuses to do their damn job. It's easy: pass a law that gives people their appropriate rights and move on.
From 2008-2010, the Democratic party had the chance to enshrine abortion into the law of the land. They even had a perfect vehicle, the ACA, in which to do it, since it already dealt with healthcare rules. They declined.
In short, this is not true. There was a brief window where they might have had 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, but it's unlikely for a divisive partisan issue like this one. And they didn't have a 60% majority in the House anyway.
To put it very bluntly, the lack of action we've seen from Democratic Party majorities in recent history is very likely because they knew they couldn't pass legislation over Republican opposition. Sure, you can frame it as 'they declined', but that's an uncharitable oversimplification.
> To put it very bluntly, the lack of action we've seen from Democratic Party majorities in recent history is very likely because they knew they couldn't pass legislation over Republican opposition.
No, it’s because they couldn't pass it over Democratic opposition (whether it's actually one or two Senators, or whether those two are pretextual is a matter of debate.)
Republican opposition isn't an excuse with a trifecta. (And, no, the filibuster doesn't change this, since it only takes a majority to change it.)
But removing the filibuster wasn’t even in the tables or discussed half-way seriously when those majorities had power.
It used to be the filibuster was rarely used and the Senate actually compromised to create legislation. There is effectively no chance the filibuster would have been removed to pass an abortion bill. It would have been political suicide.
Even if it had, a federal abortion ban would have been passed the next time the GOP held a trifecta. Not opening Pandora’s box was a smart move.
I agree that the filibuster should have been on the table for removal. I think on paper it's ridiculous, and question the effectiveness of a governing body that needs it to function.
Because I think this one probably does. With how divided we are today, and this issue in particular, I don't think you can rely on a 50%+1 majority to pass a law one way or the other. That is like a coin flip. It seems guaranteed to lead to chaos, as each new majority rushes to redress the 'mistakes' of the preceding Congress.
And to be pedantic, the Democratic party does not have a current majority in the Senate. It's 50/48/2 Republican; Sanders and King caucus with the Democrats but King in particular is very centrist, endorsed the Republican Collins for her reelection bid, and votes with the Republicans most of the time. Maybe you think that is just nitpicking, but I wonder what you think about a 50/50 Senate depending on the VP to break ties. To remove the filibuster. To pass a nationwide abortion law.
> And to be pedantic, the Democratic party does not have a current majority in the Senate. It's 50/48/2 Republican; Sanders and King caucus with the Democrats but King in particular is very centrist, endorsed the Republican Collins for her reelection bid, and votes with the Republicans most of the time. Maybe you think that is just nitpicking
No, I don't think it's nitpicking I think it is factually wrong (except that, yes, Sanders and King are Independents). Not only does King vote with the Dems on most important votes, he's not even the most centrist or least loyal to the caucus member of the Democratic Caucus; In the current session, on key issues, if the caucus fails to gather the majority it needs (which usually means there is no vote: Schumer is pretty consistent about that), it is usually Manchin (D-WV) and
/or Sinema (D-AZ) — more often the former — that is the problem. (And both of them are to King’s right by both current session and career voting history.)
Yes, Manchin and Sinema are more problematic. Still, I don't think you addressed my actual point, which is that removing the filibuster to pass federal abortion protection would be a big deal, and the best the Democrats could hope for today is a 50/50 vote with the VP breaking the tie. I'd personally be astonished if they even tried, not because they didn't feel like it but because it would very likely be a gun that blew up in their hand.
I believe this is the kind of issue where you'd have to overcome the filibuster, not remove it. This isn't something Democrats were realistically able to do in 2008-2010, and they definitely can't do it now.
They could have easily gotten a few moderate republicans if they moved to 15 or fewer weeks to move it inline with most of Europe. Plenty of Democrats wouldn’t have liked that but compromise is supposed to leave both sides unhappy, after all.
A grand total of 0 republicans voted for the ACA. That's after almost a full year of compromise. It's plainly clear that any republican who voted for an Obama policy would've been voted out in their primary.
I doubt it, because those Republicans would risk being voted out of office.
I think this issue is one where we can safely say one side is not interested in compromise. We had compromise with Roe, and they fought. We had compromise with Casey, and they still fought. We've now witnessed the culmination of a 30+ year campaign to place a particular style of justice on the supreme court, complete with abuse of process to manipulate nominations and nominees being misleading or (arguably) lying about this specific issue to get confirmed. None of this is indicative of a willingness to compromise, to me.
Do you think the ACA would have been more or less likely to pass if it had mentioned a federal right to abortion (which would have benefited zero people for the next decade)?
The ACA would probably have had equal chances. It was passed on a party line vote anyway. Besides, nothing stopped them from passing a right to an abortion otherwise.
~25% of House Dems crossed the aisle to vote on a Republican amendment to the ACA to ban federal funding of abortion[1]. While that specific amendment failed in the Senate, it still forced a handshake deal that Obama would issue an EO to that effect.
It seems very unlikely that the ACA could have been passed if it enshrined abortion rights.
Both parties benefited from abortion being a wedge issue that wasn't under legislative control. The dems knew that if they enshrined it in law, then the GOP could campaign on undoing that legislative imposition.
The GOP just plays politics better though, so now they're a dog who caught the car they were chasing. The dems have a chance to make that backfire on the GOP in the midterms, but they're awful at getting or wielding power, so I'm skeptical they will.
This is honestly the reason why the DNC chose to gamble on Roe rather than seizing one of the opportunities they had in the last 50 years to write a law.
It's a sleazy move, and I'm not sure why they think people don't see what they are doing.
The ACA was already getting a lot of challenges and multiple attempts to repeal it from day one. I imagine that throwing abortion protections into the mix was deemed to be a poor tactical choice at that moment because it would enflame many of the ACA’s political opponents further and perhaps bring new adversaries into the fold.
The Supreme Court neither banned abortion nor prohibited the legislature from protecting the right to abortion. It merely decided that it is not currently protected by constitution, which to me seems completely correct.
If most people agree that it should be a constitutional right, no one stops the legislature from adding the required amendment. And if most people can't agree on that, well, adding that wouldn't be democratic.
The problem with this legal OCD is that in the meantime, people suffer.
This isn't a codebase refactor, this is people's lives. Pulling this ruling before you have "what the people want" in place is like deleting a feature you plan on rebuilding later before you actually rebuild it.
Nobody in their right mind thinks that's a good idea in any other context, so why would it make sense here?
The point is if you believe this to not be up to the Supreme Court to decide, then you don't believe it's up to the Supreme Court to undo until the people have decided.
The Supreme Court didn't issue a law here, they changed their interpretation of a decision they had made 50 years prior, for no reason at all except that the composition of the court had changed.
That's like hiring a new guy and his first action is to remove an entire technology that was propping up your infrastructure, because it wasn't being stored in the "correct" VCS.
Say a supreme court 50 years ago interpreted the constitution that woman did not have a right to vote. Then today the court ruled, the constitution doesn't actually state anything of the sort and overturns that past judgment.
In that case would you want the court to instead state, well a decision 50 years ago was made. So we wont change it. The US Congress needs to pass a law explicitly granting woman the right to vote. Such-as with say Minor v. Happersett, "Court held that, while women are no less citizens than men are, citizenship does not confer a right to vote, and therefore state laws barring women from voting are constitutionally valid"
A good court in a Democratic government must be objective in interpretation of law . And the system is such that it is the US Congress's responsibility to pass law.
A vote to prohibit women from voting isn’t analogous because it’s restrictive, not permissive.
There is zero legitimate reason for this to be reversed now, compared to after it’s been codified in the legislature.
But all of this is a silly distraction. The real reason has nothing at all to do with what the court’s role should be, and everything to do with the religion of the people currently serving on the court.
To keep the tech analogies going, it’s like a new tech lead deleting the web app code because be doesn’t believe in monorepos, but saying it’s a security issue.
> The real reason has nothing at all to do with what the court’s role should be, and everything to do with the religion of the people currently serving on the court.
You’re inferring that the court made it’s decision on a religious reason, and you’re entitled to your inference.
So here’s my inference, as an atheist conservative. No the Supreme Court did not overturn the case for religious reasons. They overturned it exactly for the reasons they stated:
“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives”
> compared to after it’s been codified in the legislature
The legitimate reason it is reversed _now_ is that it is _now_ when the matter is before them in the court of law that conflicts with Roe in a way that is hard to reconcile against precedent.
If your complaint is that it hasn't been codified into law by the legislature since 1973 (and you're right -- it hasn't) that is not the fault of the judicial branch, rather the legislative.
To borrow from your analogy, it's more like a repository deprecating its code, watching everybody for years claim that "they're going to delete this any minute now" and nobody stepping to the plate to take over as maintainer.
> The legitimate reason it is reversed _now_ is that it is _now_ when the matter is before them in court.
And it's in the court now because this is the first time in 50 years that we've had a court regressive enough to vote it down.
It hadn't been codified in law because there wasn't a need because the court's had settled the issue.
To follow your analogy it's like finally removing that deprecated code after 50 years and seeing side-effects across the code base that are hugely disruptive to a tiny percent of users and anger inducing to a majority, while also making a minority of users feel smug about it finally being removed.
> And it's in the court now because this is the first time in 50 years that we've had a court regressive enough to vote it down.
This is silly. It's basically always in the courts. This particular case has been ongoing since 2018 IIRC. Before that it was June Medical. Before that it was Whole Women's Health v Hellerstedt.
> It hadn't been codified in law because there wasn't a need because the court's had settled the issue
Except it had not legislatively, and it needed to have been. At the same time as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was lamenting the flaws of Roe halting legislative process that she knew still needed to happen, Joe Biden was proposing amendments to overturn Roe v Wade so that abortion could be outlawed.
It is and always has been balanced on the head of a pin. Both sides have of course been using it more as a platform for fund-raising than doing anything legislatively, while warning that the other side was moments away from winning. Please donate $5, $10, or $50 to the cause.
It isn’t silly, the state legislatures deliberately crafted more extreme bills in the hopes of overturning Roe, then the GAs all they could to expedite them up to the Supreme Court.
The boundaries of Roe v Wade have been debated for a looong time, especially as new medical technology have come out but this case only existed because conservatives believed they had a good chance of overturning Roe.
It also by itself does not restrict anyone from the help that they need.
It is not the job of the Supreme Court to care for the reproductive health of the American people. Of the federal government, that would either be the job of the executive or the legislature, depending on your preferred view of the executive branch.
It is absolutely the job of the Supreme Court to care for the entire health of the American people, there is literally no other reason for the body to exist other than to maximally enable Americans' life, liberty, and their pursuit of happiness.
If the Supreme Court cannot do this, it should not exist.
At no time in the history of the United States has that been anywhere near the purpose of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court's one and only purpose is to exercise the judicial power of the United States in cases or controversies before it, with original jurisdiction as specifically enumerated in Article III, Marbury v. Madison, and with appellate jurisdiction with regard to all other cases.
It exists to referee the non-violent resolution of a subset of emotionally charged disputes through a functioning legal system. It does not exist to ensure that one side or the other wins.
Those things are only useful if they help people. The root purpose of any system of government to exist is to provide for the health and happiness of the governed.
If any system of government fails to do that, it is broken, and the fact that you've lost sight of the entire purpose of government is both sad and entirely predictable.
> That's like hiring a new guy and his first action is to remove an entire technology
That isn't a good analogy. A better analogy is the security team modifying ACLs that allow them push changes. It may be a destructive change, but it's outside of scope of the security team.
How about a new customer support director deleting your Postgres instance backing your main SaaS product because it's hosted on a server in their cage?
Shouldn't have been in the CS datacenter, so screw the customers and the business as a whole who relied on that system, right?
The analogy is flawed as the codebase is to laws. And the supreme court didn't change any law. Instead this would be like the new guy coming in and stating, "Wow that codebase actually mutates objects and the commentary of it being non-modifying to its parameters isn't valid."
> A large portion of America views abortion as murder.
That is not true, they are a very loud minority. Most polling puts people who really care about banning abortion (in the ways it is being done right now) at below 20%.
The reason it is not passing legislation is because the Senate (which is required) is not a democratic institution. A state like Wyoming has 65x more voting power than a state like California. Current the Senate sits at 50/50 yet one side represents 40M more citizens than the other.
There's been no ruling that Abortion is un-constitutional. The 80% has the full ability to elect representatives to pass a law on the matter at the state or federal level.
See, you're saying this, but with effective gerrymandering and friends, a collection of low-population states have successfully broken the democratic process by having a majority of power while being in the minority.
A relatively small portion (under 30%, IIRC), and most of those don’t actually oppose abortion qua abortion, they just don’t want Those People to have access to it. (Many vocal opponents to abortion rights have quietly sought abortions on their family’s or mistresses behalf.)
> You’re assuming the rest of the country shares your views. A large portion of America views abortion as murder.
Is this backed up by data or your personal view? Because every piece of data that I've seen is that only ~30% of americans support a ban of abortion, while the large majority are in favor for it being legal.
> You’re assuming the rest of the country shares your views. A large portion of America views abortion as murder.
Except the vast majority do support abortion. I really don't care what "a large portion" of America thinks, the majority thinks it should be a right but due to the way we cast votes for presidents we have the minority picking supreme court seats and thus giving us this decision.
> But we are a republic. And the Supreme Court doesn’t issue law, that’s Congress’s responsibility.
Within the bounds of what is permitted by the Constitution. If you believe that bodily autonomy is a fundamental right guaranteed in the Constitution, then laws are irrelevant, as this is outside the bounds of what law is permitted to be written.
The Democrats were fine with mandating experimental COVID vaccines, but when it comes to abortion "bodily autonomy is a fundamental right". What a joke.
The Republicans fought tooth and nail against even simple mask mandates but now want to legislate what happens in a woman's uterus in the name of "protecting life"? What a joke.
> The Republicans fought tooth and nail against even simple mask mandates
Yes, it was also hilarious to see Democrat politicians vacationing in Florida maskless while their constituents had to follow illogical mask rules back home. Heck, in some cases they don't even pretend to care about these rules themselves (see MET gala and the countless of "parties" these politicians went to maskless).
> now want to legislate what happens in a woman's uterus in the name of "protecting life"? What a joke.
The supreme court did not ban abortion, so your argument is moot here.
I'm personally OK with abortion in the early stages. But I'd argue that there's a line where a woman's "bodily autonomy" ends and a prenate's bodily autonomy begins where abortion becomes more than the equivalent of removing an appendix.
Body autonomy means I don't have to catch a disease because other people are too selfish to get a vaccine that is only experimental in the same way air and water is experimental.
I never said they were. But if you're going to make an argument about bodily autonomy then how you can you be OK with forcing people getting a medical treatment they do not want?
Vaccination protects you from the disease. Vaccinating a 3rd party does not, we've been over this already.
The COVID vaccine was in fact experimental and it only received an "Emergency Use Authorization" by the FDA. How about you check some basic facts before you respond?
This is not true. This change, in a single day, the lives of millions. So it caused a change in behavior of the legislative system.
It is not a let discuss this and change it so it reflects the views of the population.
Look at the planned Parenthood that had to stop working today in some states. that's not the result of just changing a comment in code.
> The problem with this legal OCD is that in the meantime, people suffer.
I am willing to empathize with the denial of service but thats it.
Congress was the more appropriate federal authority to be a legislature, and failed to do so. In the absence of a federal law passed by Congress, state ones are the only ones that matter.
The topic of how long the ruling lasted is a complete red herring, as this is not out of character for the court at all.
I don’t feel like the convenience of having the court being so hard to overrule is a good enough reason for it to act as a superlegislature when convenient.
I am the same way on this regarding all topics. On this specific topic, in the past I had tried to point out how odd Roe v Wade was with the court acting as a superlegislature but I quickly learned this was not a conversation people were willing to have as they couldnt separate the “camps” from the case(s) so I stopped bringing it up. I’m glad that this case forces the conversation.
So it's more important to you that common law not exist than it is for the Supreme Court to make rulings based on religious ideology?
Are you really going to pretend not to understand why this ruling came now, when the religious right just so happened to be in charge of the Supreme Court, and not at any other time in the past 50 years?
I don’t feel like the convenience of having the court being so hard to overrule is a good enough reason for it to act as a superlegislature when convenient.
I completely understand that only one party is willing to make that interpretation on this topic. I think it is noteworthy that “the religious right” did not act as a superlegislature itself, given the opportunity, and simply removed it back to Congress or the states when in the absence of a law from Congress.
I observe that there are or were other ways to reach the outcome that the other party wants, that party has bungled all of those ways, and will likely continue to do so.
You "understand" and "think it is noteworthy" and "observe", but what do you "feel" about the people who've lost freedom today, because of the observable fact that this primarily happened due to the religious beliefs of the new members of the Supreme Court?
Not caring about the people for whom the system is designed for is exactly what makes this such a monumental problem. If the system doesn't work for the people it's designed to work for, it the outcomes don't reflect their will, then it's a broken system.
If this is the "correct" way, then the system might need to be torn down and rebuilt, possibly violently. Consider that as you avoid empathizing with those affected.
And I'm sure that empathy is comforting to those who will now die because their miscarriage can't be handled in a medically sound way.
Possibly less so to their loved ones, some of whom may act violently in response to a system that killed a person they care about.
I doubt they're going to care meaningfully about which legal mechanism it was that would have been most appropriate to use to allow their loved one to live.
That is a consequence of Congress not doing its job on this topic for 50 consecutive years.
Contact your state and Congressional representations and find legislative candidates that are as passionate on this topic as you are, if there arent other causes you are more passionate about that different candidates care about of course.
Or it's a consequence of the Supreme Court changing its precedent after 50 years of leaving it alone, and its members explicitly misrepresenting their position.
As I also mentioned in my first reply to you, the topic of how long the ruling lasted is a complete red herring, as this is not out of character for the court at all.
It is accurate that several judges lied to Congress during their nomination process and we do not have remedies or sanctions for that. (That are deemed politically rational)
It's not a red herring, as it demonstrates that the protection via the Supreme Court was not in any jeopardy of failing to function, as it has successfully protected women's rights for over 50 years.
Which is something both Justice Alito “the religious right” and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg “super left savior” agreed on!
Paradoxically, the Roe decision created the division that has far extremes. A false dilemma of which there are many other possibilities. Also something those two justices agreed on.
Congress avoided the topic for 50 straight years, masquerading the ruling as good enough, now it continues to lack consensus for anything else, its up to the people to attempt something else. If consensus cannot be reached then consensus cannot be reached, which is something I empathize with, people need to optimize their use more effectively and conform it to the consensus mechanisms of this country. Generate proposals that are more inspired and would have broader consensus, of which I do have a few.
> Nobody in their right mind thinks that's a good idea in any other context, so why would it make sense here?
We should give some deference to precedent, but the rule of law is paramount. Consider what the opposite of the rule of law really entails, or how hard won that victory was.
> What is legal != what is just, ethical, or moral.
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. We can't organize society to run on what is just, ethical, or moral. We can only make laws based on our understanding of those things. Our understanding of morality changes over time. Where the law is unjust, we should change the law. Abandoning the rule law ends badly.
> if the Republicans control all three branches of government, that they would not create a federal law that bans abortions everywhere?
If the voting public of the US shifts to where it adopts a view you disagree with then of course the democratic institution would continue to reflect the public.
But we have good reason to believe this will never happen. Polling shows that most individuals support a woman's right to abortion. And even if the Republican party gained control of all 3 branches, they aren't a monolithic and unified block when it comes to policy. "States rights" is a HUGE motivation for most Republicans, and a federal policy banning abortion would be a big stumbling block for getting the votes to pass such legislation even with a Republican majority.
States rights is a huge talking point, it has never been a sincerely held belief. Take marijuana, the same people clamoring for "state's rights" don't let federal states decide the issue. They support federal law that makes it illegal nationwide. You can bet every dollar they will do the same for abortion.
The US democracy is a huge joke compared to most european states for example. The two party system, gerrymandering, etc etc make this system really awful at governing such a diverse country.
Clearly biggest problem is the whole first past the post and winner takes all. Fix those and move to proportional representation and it would be lot better.
Are you kidding? Republicans vote in lock step according to The Great Leader. They would send us back to the 1800s if they could. I have no doubt in my mind.
1. The us is a failed democracy. The senate and the POTUS are incredibly not representative, thus many extremist policies get pushed contrary to popular opinion
2. The modern GOP is decidedly against states rights; they want their preferred laws and nothing else. For examples, see Trump’s plan to take away CAs ability to have its own emissions laws, the SCOTUS scrapping any ability for a state to require any burden of need to carry a gun, and the early anti-abortion laws that I believe will attempt to charge women for murder even if they get an abortion out of jurisdiction.
It's just as feasible that Democrats control all three, and it's happened before. The Democratic party had complete control over both Houses and the presidency from 1933 to 1947, 1949–1953, and 1961–1969; 26 years of full control of the legislative and executive branches thanks to the New Deal Coalition. By 1939, FDR had formed a more liberal court through his appointments, and that lasted a while through this Democratic control of the branches into the 1950s.
As the pendulum swings, so does policy. It would be more difficult IMHO if there were more than two parties.
> I do, mostly because just a few years ago when they controlled the executive and legislative, they showed they had no interesting in "banning abortions everywhere".
Because that would’ve been an obvious and flagrant violation of Roe and a waste of time.
> This Handmaid's Tale scenario continues to be Leftist fan fiction to rally the troops.
I mean, overturning a long-held right is the first big step on that path. It wouldn’t have such staying power if there was no concrete evidence, such as this ruling, to back up those fears.
> The same cannot be said for some of the scenarios the Right warns about - as we're witnessing right now.
> It merely decided that it is not currently protected by constitution, which to me seems completely correct.
First off, It was a momentous decision. It did not "merely" decide anything.
Second, a right does not need to be explicitly spelled out in the constitution to be a constitutionally protected right. The right to an abortion is a clear and rational outgrowth of the constitutional protections of privacy and bodily autonomy (IE, the right to not have the government mess with our shit for no good reason).
I love how black and white these counterarguments are. If a vaccine had side effects anywhere near as severe as the symptoms you see in a "normal" pregnancy it would not be considered safe and I don't think you'd see it mandated anywhere for something like COVID.
It's a also comparing a response to an acute global crisis to laws dealing with a routine medical issue (pregnancy) that ~50% of the population will experience in their lifetime.
>think they're referring to the hypocrisy of compelling vaccination on someone if you support the idea of bodily autonomy.
One of those things is not like the others.
That's a fallacious argument. No one threatened me with jail for not getting vaccinated and no one threatened the medical folks who gave me my vaccines with jail either.
There are millions of people who may go to prison for providing a private, personal medical procedure. That's wrong.
I'd note that Mississippi and Missouri have both charged women who had miscarriages with capital murder.
I don't think you're seeing the theme of bodily autonomy here. If the underlying argument for abortion is "my body my choice", then that same argument should logically apply to vaccinations.
>I don't think you're seeing the theme of bodily autonomy here. If the underlying argument for abortion is "my body my choice", then that same argument should logically apply to vaccinations.
Like I said, no one threatened me (or anyone else, for that matter) with jail for getting (or not getting) vaccinated, did they?
Nor was anyone threatened with jail for refusing to vaccinate people.
Whereas, many state laws threaten prison (and even face the death penalty) for those who have or provide abortions.
Go to Prison != Folks don't want to be around you if you're more likely to get them sick with a potentially deadly disease.
So, no. It's not the same thing at all.
If you can't see the difference, nothing I say will mean anything to you.
Thats what I thought as well, but since neither myself nor the comment I was replying to mentioned it, I was / am confused how the hypocrisy in question was relevant.
I'm probably overthinking a throwaway internet comment.
Just an age? This seems to part of the human condition.
Making decisions intuitively can be useful. It is not necessarily wrong. It does have the benefit of being energy-efficient. :) See "Thinking Fast and Slow".
In any case, I hope we can move beyond rationalizing, particularly as a deceptive technique.
The "body-autonomy argument" is not the only principle in play. COVID is a communicable disease. Vaccinating one person reduces the risk to others. An abortion is not a communicable disease.
In polling I've seen, roughly 2/3 are pro-Roe, but roughly 2/3 also misunderstand what it would mean to overturn Roe. They believe that abortion would be illegal everywhere, not that the legality would devolve to the states. So while it's true that 2/3 of Americans say they want Roe kept in place, it's also true that many of them don't know what that actually means.
>They believe that abortion would be illegal everywhere.
While that will not be true, access to abortion will be very limited everywhere. With 26 states limiting it seriously and no constitutional protections on getting abortions in a different state, you could see a vast majority of population not have access to abortions.
Even if everyone starts traveling for abortions, a huge amount of the population won’t be able to travel. And the ones who travel will stress the medical facilities to the extent that people living in states that have legal abortion access, will still have it’s populations access to abortions severely limited.
It doesn’t matter if 2/3 Americans don’t know what it actually means. What matters is 2/3 Americans want access to abortions, and that access will be severely limited regardless of whether it’s legal in your state.
> access to abortion will be very limited everywhere
This is surely not true. Forty percent of the US population lives in states with laws protecting access to abortion. The AP is reporting that 20 states have heavy restrictions/bans, and the remainder are to-be-determined. [1]
I've seen the 26 state reference floating around on social media and wonder which states are included, beyond what news outlets are reporting. I'm open to the possibility that the AP has this wrong — the reason I'd like to know the source of the 26 figure is to compare it to the mostly-trusted sources that are giving lower numbers.
To be clear, I'm not weighing in on whether today's decision is good or bad. I just wanted to clear up some of the statistics that people hear a lot, since they are sometimes based on misunderstandings of the law (which are reasonable since the case was decided a long time ago, and until recently most people thought it would not be overturned anytime soon, if ever).
If this polling is true, we'll see it in the November elections. If it the elections don't show this, either people really don't care, or the polls were wrong.
>If this polling is true, we'll see it in the November elections. If it the elections don't show this, either people really don't care, or the polls were wrong.
Why? Is there any conceivable scenario where the Dems are going to leave the midterms with a 60 seat majority in the senate? No, so why does it matter?
most people do think that abortion should be law in some form, but since the US doesn't have a democratic basis in 5/6 of the federal government - "leaving jit to the legislature" is just as bad as letting SCOTUS decide the law. that doesn't even touch upon how constitutional amendments aren't even on the table with how hard they are to pass
and no matter what, you're dealing with laws regarding the bodily autonomy of 50% of the populace. if that can't be considered a fundamental right, what really can?
How is it completely correct? The 9th amendment acknowledges that rights not enumerated in the constitution exist. It's perfectly reasonable to say that bodily autonomy is in fact one of those rights, as the concept is required for other rights to even exist.
The court decision goes over the process it uses to determine if something is an unenumerated right:
"We have held that the “established method of substantive-due-process analysis” requires that an unenumerated right be “‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’” before it can be recognized as a component of the “liberty” protected in the Due Process Clause. Glucksberg, 521 U. S., at 721; cf. Timbs, 586 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7)."
There is a lengthy appendix to the ruling that goes through the list of prior state laws that criminalized abortion and shows that a right to abortion is not, in fact, "deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition".
The problem is of "deeply rooted in history and tradition" is a weasel phrase that means literally anything they want it to mean.
Their claims about history and tradition so far have been historically inaccurate, or limited to only arch-conservative Christian traditions.
None of this is to mention a deeper fundamental problem with only looking at history and tradition in such a literal way: for women or men who are not white straight Christians, they haven't actually had equal rights for all that long. Arguably, the right to marry is a pretty fundamental Natural Right and has only been recognized starting in 2004.
These are master orators who no longer care about perceived legitimacy or stare decisis. They will continue to do whatever they want because they can, and make up the justification as they go along.
So you want to force women to die and easily preventable death (e.g. ectopic pregnancy)? That's the only way "completely correct" works here - the trigger laws on the books that result in that outcome were in place before the court took this case. They chose to rule broadly rather than a ruling that still enshrined the right of someone to have a medical procedure that would preserve their life say in the case of a non-viable pregnancy that would end in the death of both the woman and the fetus.
edit: i was wrong about the trigger laws having exceptions for life endangering pregnancies - its the new laws the same people are passing that remove the exceptions. I still stand by my statement, because the "completely correct" ruling allows those exceptions to be removed.
> If most people agree that it should be a constitutional right, no one stops the legislature from adding the required amendment
The issue is that we're forced into a two party system. If someone thinks "I want abortion rights, but the culture wars are more important to me" they vote republican. A large block of the republican base is single issue religious voters, so even if a majority of the republican voters want abortion rights they will never pass because the religious voters will primary anyone who supports abortion.
It's true that most people agreed that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned. But a quick look at the polling will also show you that Roe v. Wade was more popular than abortion itself.
I think there is a simple way to interpret that: a lot of people thought that Roe v. Wade meant that they didn't have to think about abortion. And they liked that, even if they didn't think it was the ideal way to resolve the issue. They simply cared more about other issues, like the PPACA subsidy gaps, environmental sustainability, gun rights, taxes, drugs, et cetera, ad nauseam. Even during the Barrett and Kavanaugh nominations, there were plenty of people, including the nominally pro-choice (e.g. a certain Senator from Maine), who argued that Roe v. Wade was not in danger, which was most likely wishful thinking.
So your idea doesn't work, and in fact nothing works. The era when a voter or politician can (effectively) ignore abortion as a substantive political issue is over, and it isn't coming back.
> The Supreme Court neither banned abortion nor prohibited the legislature from protecting the right to abortion. It merely decided that it is not currently protected by constitution, which to me seems completely correct.
The Supreme Court includes multiple justices put there in no small part due to lobbying by conservative faith groups, and as part of their lobbying plan, several states have trigger laws on the books that immediately make abortion legal in many states. The Supreme Court’s decision is the immediate cause of these “trigger laws” going into effect. It’s a part of a larger concerted effort, so this is a distinction with little difference for anyone living in these states or who may find themselves sued in Texas for providing abortions to a Texan who crossed into their state.
What's perplexing is why they don't apply this to the rest of the federal powers. Overturn Wickard v Filburn and cut it at the root. The federal government has no legitimacy to regulate intrastate trade, most gun laws, most of the civil rights act, the controlled substance act, etc. The fact that they picked abortion but not the root of anti-constitutional federal expansionism is truly baffling.
I hope to god that regulation of interstate trade gets shot down, so California and New York can tax goods from red states into oblivion. That would be a poetic response to this egregious use of "state's rights."
This is the most strawman argument I've seen all day. Nothing from red states is irreplaceable, and when people replace red state goods with blue state goods to avoid paying more, it hurts the red state companies complicit in the fucked up politics of their region as intended.
You're painting everyone located in a red state with broad strokes.
What you're suggesting also affects anyone that votes blue in red states, including business owners and workers that are trying to change their state laws.
Changing the law is harder when you're calling to economically punish those businesses and they have to layoff workers or close. So instead of campaigning on the weekend and persuading people to vote to change the state law, workers will be looking a new job. This maintains the status quo rather than help garner support to change it.
What you're suggesting is regressive and hurts the pro-choice movement in red states.
What you're saying here is that sanctions don't work, which is clearly false. I think economically strangling red states into the stone age unless they adopt a few basic liberal policies that are only opposed due to religious extremism is an entirely reasonable approach.
That's not what Wickard v. Filburn was about. Wickard held that regulation of individual behavior could be legislated under the Interstate Commerce Clause insofar as that individual behavior had a "rational basis" effect on the interstate market for a commodity. This effectively allowed Congress to regulate most aspects of our lives under the auspices of the power to regulate interstate commerce.
Constitution aside: the gangs and cartels will be licking their lips at the smuggling opportunities the second the gavel hits. You will hand them one of the biggest gifts since the war on drugs.
They decide what's in front of them. If you've got a good challenge case for Wickard v Filburn, they might hear it. But this case wasn't a case that could overturn Wickard v Filburn.
I don't think all 40 million women have lost "all" legal access. Eg Florida and Virginia are banning abortion after 15 weeks - which is actually less restrictive than in most of western Europe.
Eg France bans abortion after 14 weeks; Norway bans it after 12 weeks.
For now. Desantis is already saying he will increase restrictions. Do you have any reason to believe this man, running for President in 2024, won’t race to claim he is the king of protecting fetuses? He’s not going to be able to stand on a stage next to anyone who claims they will restrict abortion in any and all cases, and he knows that. Pence was out yesterday calling for a blanket nationwide abortion ban. That’s were the GOP as a party will be in 2 years, and Florida will need to be there before then to shore up Desantis’ political position.
Florida will not be a state where abortions happen soon enough.
> The Supreme Court neither banned abortion nor prohibited the legislature from protecting the right to abortion.
Which means that New York, California, Massachusetts will retain abortion access. And Texas, Indiana, will remove abortion access.
This sounds like States rights is actually working.
But the media is distorting the overturning of Roe vs Wade with the sensational claim that “Abortion is banned in the US”.
No, it’s not banned. This just means Texas and New York have differing policies with regards to abortion access. Yes, 46 million women living in conservative states will lose access to abortion, but not all of those women are liberal quite frankly. Moreover, those states are exactly that: conservative. And the Conservative Majority of that state isn’t required to accommodate the views of the Liberal minority of that state.
Just like the Liberal Majority of California isn’t required to accommodate their Conservative Minorities.
That’s the nature of how US Democratic institutions were built.
Sounds fair to me and the Supreme Court made the correct decision by returning that authority back to the states.
The amendment is at best quasi-democratic, since amendments that would have broad public support are almost prohibitively difficult to carry out, and requires the cooperation of states that are themselves quasi-democratic.
It’s either so heavily interpreted that it means different things than what’s written (2nd Amendment), it’s needed complete adjustment to even pretend to meet its ideals (Slavery), the adjustment needed adjustments (Voting Rights Act), and every step of the way those adjustments get watered down, stripped, rendered meaningless…
It’s a document written by people from a different time. Why be beholden to the past, when it’s not even recognizable in its current form to when it was first drafted?
Cute take but I'm going to ask the question: why did something that was in place for 50 years needs to be revisited? Is it maybe needed for the nutjobs that do want to ban abortion to do their thing?
Also, you need to ask yourself: is this about abortion? Or is it really about literally keeping the people poor, stupid and uneducated?
Think about it: if you're not poor this is not an issue. If you have 5 kids instead of 1, good luck getting them the proper education. But it's cool...we can use all that almost free labor to drive our corporate empires forward.
I'm afraid your comments in this thread have been breaking the site guidelines. Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully? That means without fulminating and without calling names.
> why did something that was in place for 50 years needs to be revisited?
Because it was poorly reasoned judicial activism and always has been. The amount of time that a decision stands should have no bearing on how good of a decision it is.
One of the dissents in Casey v Planned Parenthood in 92 also wanted to overturn Roe, for the same reasons that the current court did.
Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that Roe v Wade was poorly reasoned.
But what is baffling is why they picked Roe V Wade to overturn rather than cut it at the root, such as Wickard v Filburn which would have undone a massive swath of the kind of unconstitutional expansion of the federal government.
They could have applied their logic uniformly but bizarrely singled out an abortion case.
Because it was roe v wade in question. Not the other case. I don’t believe the Supreme Court can issue judgment on any law they choose. It has to be relating to the court case in question
They get to pick which case they take cert on. There is absolutely gonna be _something_ out there that would allow them to work at the root of Wickard v Filburn. Framing it as "they have to work with this one case they got" is disingenuous.
They intentionally chose to go for the contradictory choice of singling out abortion while not attacking the root -- which suggests to me think this is more about judicial activism than upholding the constitution.
If you want the cynical lawyer’s answer, it is simple. Wickard, as a ruling, allows the government more power and the ability to better project that power via the courts and legislature. Roe is a side-show for the government. The ability for someone to have a pregnancy terminated does nothing systemic to enhance the government’s ability to project power in a way which enhances the government. Which is why the parties will fight over abortion rights, but would never dream of trying to squash the government’s ability to regulate what a person does with material goods a la Wickard.
The law in New York City was from 1905. The current court doesn’t seem to value stability so much as their own agenda for how things ought to be.
Personally I think the root cause is an alliance between people with hateful beliefs and people that want the government not to tax or regulate large companies and rich families. Fine, slut shame people because they had sex and got pregnant (no matter the circumstances) and let us keep sponsoring fake research that carbon burn is good. Be openly racist again and lower those taxes even at the cost of not educating the young.
It is a good guess. This is not about right or wrong. This is about the rest of us being force the religious views of a minority by people who figure out it's a great way to divide and control us this way.
The Civil War was needed to overturn slavery. Do you imagine people on the wrong side of history just going: "whoops i guess it's wrong. We're gonna stop doing it"?
The more I see, the more I believe a civil war is not off the table. In fact it's becoming more and more likely each day. We have 2 camps today and people are more and more divided. There used to be a time when you could... talk about the issue and use logic and arguments around facts. Not anymore. Abortion will not lead to a civil war - not on its own - but it does add extra pressure to a pressure cooker that's about to blow up.
Its only going to blow up because of the extreme emotional stress forced on people through the news and social media. Its a non-stop rage machine. Its not the policies that will set off a civil war, but the people who make money off causing people to become so emotionally involved in things that have no effect on them.
What makes you think that this has no effect on the millions of people capable of giving birth in the US? What makes you think that this will have no effect on their partner, or the overall well-being of the child, once birthed?
Yikes. One really need not look much farther than your only submission to this site for an effective gauge of your priorities and positions. I do hope you learn some open-mindedness and compassion. Start practicing today.
I strongly recommend reading Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s thoughts on Roe v Wade in 1992 - expressed about a year before she became a Supreme Court justice.
She describes Roe as a “breathtaking” decision and as interrupting a process already underway. Her discussion starts on page 1198 in this PDF which is a rewarding read if you have the time.
I’m not advocating either way - I merely hope to present Justice Ginsbergs eloquent views (in 1992) on the matter for further discussion here.
this may come across as emotional, and I suspect it is, so feel free to downvote me. but that person, dead or alive, is completely non-grata to me. she is a big part to blame for allowing the court to become so heavily conservative. if she had stood down in Obama's early years, when she was asked to, it would be a 5-4 split, and a good chance that they wouldn't have had the balls to follow through with this
I'll try my best to phrase this delicately, as I understand it's an emotional topic for Americans right now, but perhaps RBG chose not to step down because she knew that the action of stepping down was inherently political, and after years on the court, had decided to avoid setting a precedent of Blue/Red judges tactically stepping down when their respective party is in power.
Who knows what her real reasoning may have been, but that's my interpretation.
I am not American, so forgive my question, what is the context? Was she expected to step down due to age, so Obama could appoint a new judge? Rather than dying by age under a different president?
If she had stepped down before 2016, Obama would have been able to appoint another liberal judge to replace her, and the political balance of the court would have remained unchanged. Instead, she died in 2020 and Trump replaced her with a far more conservative judge, which is indirectly one of the reasons why Roe v Wade was just overturned.
Of course, it must be remembered that almost no-one actually expected Trump to win 2016. So perhaps she didn't feel like there was actually much risk of her being replaced by a conservative, so it was safe to stay on.
yeah, thanks for the link and i recall (from years ago) reading about her thoughts on the subject. roe v wade was a sweeping judgement that (depending on how you looked at it) guaranteed women's rights at the expense of state autonomy WRT laws.
because of the states' rights issue, plus moral "conservatism", roe V wade was an easy target and i'm not surprised it was reversed.
fwiw, i'm a lefty and think that this is a terrible decision w/consequences that won't take long to be felt around the country
It should have been codified into law decades ago, but EVERYONE with few exceptions loves to fundraise off of it.
Want to know how you know the US will backslide? I Said it a decade ago - when R's are willing to pull the trigger on Roe, it will be because they are going for everything.
> It should have been codified into law decades ago,
If its not a 14th Amendment right, what is the Constitutional basis for codification? An expansive view of the Commerce Clause? That’s…not going to fly with the same politico-judicial faction that would hold it isn’t protected by the 14th Amendment.
"On the question of abortion, the Constitution is therefore neither pro-life nor pro-choice. The Constitution is neutral and leaves the issue for the people and their elected representatives to resolve through the democratic process in the States or Congress — like the numerous other difficult questions of American social and economic policy that the Constitution does not address".
...
"After today’s decision, the nine Members of this Court will no longer decide the basic legality of pre-viability abortion for all 330 million Americans. That issue will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the States or Congress."
That's an overly dramatic take. My prediction is that Republicans will now begin losing seats in red State legislatures precisely because of this decision.
The republicans have already indicated they are done with democracy. Why would they care if the voters don’t like it? They’ll just change the electors to whoever picks what they want
They believe they can. They tried last election and they'll try again as they had zero fucking consequences. If you think they wont try you are either one of them or have your head in the sand.
Edit: It was also frequently stated that "no, they wont" when people were worried about the conservatives overturning roe v wade, but here we are!
>That's an overly dramatic take. My prediction is that Republicans will now begin losing seats in red State legislatures precisely because of this decision.
If it happens, and it's because of this decision, I don't think it'll be felt for a while. Certainly I don't expect any backlash this election cycle, and probably no real consequences from this in 2024. I suspect that, to the extent negative effects are felt from this, there will be years of blaming those effects on 'liberal policies' and demonizing democrats some more. I'm pessimistic, but think we'll have a generation before there's any real backlash against the Republican Party over this issue (and by then, the party largely won't look the same as it does today anyway).
I'm disappointed with the decision, but it's an obvious reaction to what conservatives view as "the extreme left/progressives" pushing too far/hard. "...when the pendulum swings too far in one direction it will go back" (RBG)
I'm an independent and I share many views with both R's and D's. However I can say that at the extremes of each party - they're fucking it all up for all of us.
saying "SCOTUS didn't ban abortion" is at best useless semantic formality and at worst plain incorrect
a number of state have laws that the automatically make abortion illegal as soon as Roe was overturned, those are now enacted. furthermore, the case behind this ruling was dealing with a state law the effectively outlawed abortions, despite previous precedent ruling against it. this rule is simply enabling such behavior indirectly. this allows gives the green light for abortion to be targeted at the federal level, something which Republicans will be happy to do ASAP
to ignore the context of the surrounding case, and political motivations / backgrounds of the ruling justices is just ignorant. something like half of all states have now effectively illegal abortion
The HN crowd never fails to surprise me. For all of the great discussions about software on here, threads like this one reek of ignorance of civics and history. The de facto outcome of this ruling is abortion banned in red states. It's clearly partisan hackery when we have:
1. A court full of Federalist Society members
2. A court full of Catholics (staunchly pro-life)
3. Who are using the old argument of "states rights"
Three has historically been how the conservative minority defends its regressive legislation. They use the filibuster to prevent Federal legislation, then impose their will on minority groups within their state which has no filibuster. Anyone who has read about the history of the US should know this.
It’s almost as if the liberals didn’t even read this part the current court’s opinion.
“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives”
> It’s almost as if the liberals didn’t even read this part the current court’s opinion.
See the section in my comment about "states rights". I read the decision in its entirety and it was full of flaws from my perspective (I am not a lawyer). It's clear however that this is an ideological ruling. Also, I'm skeptical of the intellectual consistency of anyone's arguments when they mention "the libs".
I agree that the original ruling was ideological, but in the real world the enemy of good is perfect. How many people will suffer in the meantime because of this? How many women in red states will undergo back alley procedures to terminate their pregnancy? Truth be told I really don't care about the intellectual consistency of upholding or overturning Roe, I care about the real world impact it will have on people. It's not abstract, these are real people's lives.
Also that's before even getting into the structure of our federal system and explaining how "states rights" have almost always been a tool for upholding regressive legislature that is unpopular at the national level, due to the fact that a filibuster-proof supermajority is required to reign in the states, meanwhile a dissenting minority within the states has no similar recourse. Why do you think most of the progress in civil rights post-1964 has been accomplished through the Supreme Court? It's because southern and rural states are impossible to reign in with congress. This is why the Federalist Society went through the Supreme Court, because it's technically legal and technically how our government is supposed to work. But the end result is them harming people just like you and me.
There is a reason the maxim exists "Hard cases make bad case law". Of course slavery is wrong, and in fact rebellion to end slavery is more appropriate that case law to end it. That said abortion isn't slavery and its unclear which is morally superior. It's a question of balancing of rights between one human and another, no easy answer here.
The Supreme Court returned the question to the legislative branch. That’s it.
I happen to think abortion should be legal.
I also think it’s pretty clear that, when one side believes abortion to be a totally unrestricted right despite never appearing in the constitution, while simultaneously arguing for severely restricting and even eliminating a specifically enumerated right to bear arms, that they’re operating in complete bad faith, and don’t really care about the constitution except when convenient.
Change needs to be secured by convincing others of its necessity, not by appealing to authority to force others to behave or believe what you think they should.
The courts have been abused as an end-run around democratic change for too long now. I’m glad to see a serious bit of legislation from the bench rolled back.
This will force people to talk to each other. To convince each other. To work together. That’s ultimately a healthier outcome, even if things are a little worse while we figure things out.
> …when one side believes abortion to be a totally unrestricted right despite never appearing in the constitution…
Bud there’s a whole amendment about how if it’s not mentioned in the constitution it’s assumed you have the right.
> This will force people to talk to each other. To convince each other. To work together. That’s ultimately a healthier outcome, even if things are a little worse while we figure things out.
What part of this ruling makes that outcome happen?
> Bud there’s a whole amendment about how if it’s not mentioned in the constitution it’s assumed you have the right.
That is not what the 9th amendment says. It just says that the Constitution and Bill of Rights specifically laying out some rights does not mean that you lack all rights not laid out explicitly.
So no, it is not assumed that you have a right if it is not mentioned in the Constitution. It is just explicitly stated that you may have that right.
The 10th amendment then kicks all of those rights to the states rather than the federal government.
>That is not what the 9th amendment says. It just says that the Constitution and Bill of Rights specifically laying out some rights does not mean that you lack all rights not laid out explicitly.
You are interpreting it in complete contradiction to the text. You are literally construing the fact that some rights are enumerated and abortion isn't as a reason why you don't have a right to an abortion
>The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
>The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This just means that the absence of an enumerated right doesn't imply that the right is totally absent. I.e. the fact that the Constitution doesn't outline a right to sell heroin doesn't mean that heroin is by default illegal; it's just left to the States (and the people) to decide what to do with it.
But importantly, just because the Constitution doesn't outline a right to sell heroin, one does not have a Constitutional right to sell heroin — that's absurd. It's still something that can be decided upon by the legislatures.
> The Supreme Court returned the question to the legislative branch. That’s it.
What new legislation is required beyond the 4th and 9th amendments? Along with decades of legal precedent, these ALREADY protect US citizen's medical rights sufficiently. Yet the court saw fit to ignore them, effectively saying that a) we are no longer secure in our persons from unreasonable search if the state says so and b) rights retained by the people (but not explicitly in the constitution) can be denied by any legislature. This is a radical departure from our current legal structure, a complete re-interpretation of the constitution undertaken by activist judges behind closed doors in direct opposition to precedent and their public oaths - "That's it" doesn't begin to cover it.
We don’t need a bunch of old people/old men having these pseudo intellectual conversations about the healthcare of 17 year old girls. There doesn’t need to be these long paragraphs. Church and state need to be separated. Pro life people literally are enacting laws based on religious beliefs.
The simple answer is if you don’t want an abortion, don’t get one. Leave the health and safety of the rest of the population up to themselves.
This comment could easily be adapted into a form letter to oppose the majority of Supreme-Court-decided expansions of civil rights of the past century.
>I also think it’s pretty clear that, when one side believes abortion to be a totally unrestricted right despite never appearing in the constitution
The Supreme Court ruling on the Constitutionality of laws isn’t in the Constitution.
You’re describing a judicial philosophy (textualism) as if it were law, or some sacred edict from above. It’s not.
You’re pretending the “democratic process” isn’t broken. It is.
Remember: the legislature could have banned abortion outright, at any time. We didn’t need the courts to do that. It would just take an amendment to the Constitution.
Remember: a majority of people in the US want abortion to be legal. The court overruled that based on its own fetish for textualism.
It’s great that you want people to talk to each other. In the mean time, women will die.
Biggest thing to me is the message this sends - that there is no settled law really - I think the notion that nothing is legally set in stone and change is only a relatively easy matter of installing supreme court justices siding with your beliefs - that's gotta have some chilling consequences down the line for the country as a whole.
Greater progress requires building upon smaller progress, a settled foundation. If the foundation is constantly under churn you can reasonably expect constant regression.
Plessy v. Ferguson was settled law. Until it wasn't. And it was rightly overturned after decades of injustice. I bet there were many in the 50s who cried about settled law. Basically, the stare decisis argument is very limited, and the best anyone can hope for is that stare decisis is time-limited. Plessy lasted 64 years, while Roe lasted 50. So stare decisis seems to mean "for a few decades", which I think is fair.
Stare decisis is neutral as to the content of court decisions. It can be used to sustain rightly and badly decided rulings for decades. And the court can ultimately overturn its past decisions rightly and wrongly. They can fail in the past, they can fail in the present, and they can fail in the future.
Which was overturned in Brown by a unanimous decision. Typically the standard for overturning a case is high: either it is recent and clearly wrong, or there is a high level of consensus on the case. This is neither.
Stare decisis is not a time limit. It just means there has to be a very good reason to overturn. There is no such reason to overturn Roe v Wade, which is obvious by the split in the ruling.
Fair point of course - but the devil really is in the details - of how far we stretch, how often, which way we change - towards correcting or regressing, and on what is open to debate vs what is not. This combined with the other things opened up for debate - same sex marriage, inter-racial marriage, contraception etc. makes one feel like everything including slavery being illegal/immoral can be soon up for discussion.
Well they can "return it to the states" to decide after a creative re-interpretation. Nothing is settled after all. And what I was really saying was that even if 13th and 14th aren't voided in our lifetime, there are other easier targets - same sex marriage and contraception namely that would further cement the idea that everything is hackable to your beliefs (without even needing unanimous SCOTUS decision to undo long established precedents) using this recipe - when what one would treat settled and what one wouldn't is never clear everything is unsettled and open to hacking away.
Sounds ridiculous but look at gun rights - Scalia said Second Amendment applies to individuals, but the decision would not affect other gun safety regulations. Now we have the SCOTUS expanding gun rights at the expense of states' rights and their safety regulations.
Could Congress maybe make a law stating precedents will not be overturned unless there is unanimous assent? That might make some things somewhat better for the foreseeable future.
They've already declared significant limitations to the Fourth Amendment that apply to nearly every major city in the US. What's stopping them from going after others?
Yes, I think that's true. The Justices should stop imvoking the constitution in long legal ramblings and just say: "Our predecessors thought one way. We're different people and we think another way. Also, if you don't like it you can fuck off."
The same could be said of RvW - inventing new laws was simply the case of installing new justices - the constitution has existed much longer than RvW, so removing it isn't as much a problem for "settled law" than creating it in the first place.
And I think the point here was that RvW was not on strong settled foundations.
When I was a child in the Catholic Church (70s and 80s) there was NEVER any political discussion that entered into the service (“..render unto caesar what is caesar’s..” or ‘separation of church and state’. Or, more probable, perhaps it was felt that it simply was not the forum for present-day politics. I don’t know). Since lapsed, A few years ago I was encouraged by a priest, as he enjoyed his fourth old fashioned, to attend a Mass. He noted that I might find it more ‘enlightening’ than I had in the past so I agreed (albeit reluctantly). What I witnessed was no less than a 45 minute diatribe on the dangers of abortion, casting various aspersions (ad hominem) on any political leader not on board with new political agenda of the Catholic Church. Frankly very little else. I hypocritically thought to myself ‘would Jesus be proud of this? Perhaps. But I certainly wasn’t. The addtional twisted irony was that the person I was with actually had an abortion. She sat quietly listening to this without seemingly the slightest bit of concern. She said that’s how all services are now.
It occurred to me that all of this must have been carefully planned at the highest levels of both the church and political/financial benefactors that support it. A long and patient process put in motion years ago.
I realize This is somewhat anecdotal but speaks to perhaps the planning that culminated in todays decision. This is about power and control operating under the auspices of religion. SCOTUS are just run-of-the-mill sycophants playing along.
The framing of this debate is often religious, but it doesn't have to be. The fact is that at some point between inception and time of delivery, the fetus becomes a person and has some rights. Most people agree that it's probably not inception and it's probably not the moment before birth. So the question is when does this happen?
In that way, the pro-life crowd has at least a closer framing of the issue. The pro-choice crowd is talking about religion, privacy, social safety nets, etc. But that's all beside the point. If the fetus is a life, none of this stuff matters. We should all try and at least agree upon the framing of the issue and argue from there or we'll never get anywhere.
>If the fetus is a life, none of this stuff matters.
This is irrelevant to my personal views on abortion because I believe that individuals have rights over their own body which supersede anyone else's rights to their body. We hold this as true in all other facets of bodily autonomy. I have no legal responsibility to risk my life to protect my fellow citizens. I have no obligation to regularly donate blood or bone marrow. I can't be compelled to donate a kidney. I can even arrange for all my healthy organs to be thrown in a fire or buried underground after my death rather than allow them to be used to save the lives of multiple people. This is all because my body is mine and I can control what happens to it. If I refuse to allow it to be used to support another life, that is my choice.
Your comment actually made me think of something I had never considered: perhaps the mother's right against the child is self-defense.
The child is literally feeding off the mother until birth, taking energy, nutrients, maybe even killing the mother. I don't necessarily want to frame it this way, because I want to view the relationship as mutualistic or commensalistic, rather than parasitic, but I could see how it might be biologically a parasitic relationship.
However, a quick search shows that people against abortions say that biologically it must be "an organism that attaches to a member of a different species and feeds off that organism in a manner that is physically injurious to the other organism."
While it may not fit the dictionary definition of a biologically parasitic relationship, I believe it still can "feed off that organism in a manner that is physically injurious to the other organism."
So I think there could be an argument for self-defense.
Our (now healthy, five year old) son was definitely killing his mother from the womb; her liver was about to shut down due to HELLP syndrome when we did an induction. 50 years earlier and she and my child would be dead. This does actually kill people today: https://www.propublica.org/article/die-in-childbirth-materna... is an account of a neonatal ICU nurse who died from HELLP five years before my wife's doctor caught it. Childbirth can be really scary and dangerous.
I feel grateful you shared that story to talk of the dangers of pregnancy and also really really grateful that the medical field is improving with dealing with that condition and that both your son and his mother survived.
Arguments like this don't win the hearts and minds of people (maybe not your intent). Calling fetuses/babies parasites may sound to you like a clever analogy but to most other people it just sounds crass.
Oh I don't like the argument at all. I felt disgusted even writing it. I also don't like the argument of using self-defense as a reason to shoot people or the death penalty or frankly the assumption that other people have evil intent. I think the vast majority of us are trying our best and accidentally hurt people (EDIT: and that people feel hurt after our actions, not necessarily caused by them but more likely correlated).
But I do believe that some people who are pregnant and would like abortions may perceive the child as being parasitic (not a parasite, as I also don't like to attach strict labels of badness to one's identity but to focus on behaviors).
So I agree it sounds crass and yet think if others want to use self-defense for other arguments defending their harm to others, I don't see why that same argument couldn't apply here.
You're right, but I hold hope for an enlightened electorate that makes careful decisions when prohibiting other peoples' rights. This analogy is useful in exploring that space.
100%. The court took this decision away from human beings. You no longer get to choose when you procreate. At some point, the court says no longer your choice.
> The court took this decision away from human beings.
No, the court remanded the lawmaking decision to the states, as it should be.
There's this section of the CA-NV border known as "state line", which has a litany of casinos just right on the NV side of that border. The notion that different states have different laws is a fact we've accepted since the founding of our country.
When AZ bans abortion, Arizona women will be mildly inconvenienced by a three hour drive to the CA border, as other matters of state law divergence have always been. Nobody has lost their rights.
Cynically, I'd suggest that abortion rights aren't even the issue at hand - lots of people seem very angry/afraid that after a century of DC slowly arrogating all available power and authority to itself, that this power might flow back the other way.
> No, the court remanded the lawmaking decision to the states, as it should be.
I'm ok with this argument, as I believe that legislatures, national and state, should write laws to address these issues, not rely on court precedent.
> Cynically, I'd suggest that abortion rights aren't even the issue at hand - lots of people seem very angry/afraid that after a century of DC slowly arrogating all available power and authority to itself, that this power might flow back the other way.
I disagree that this is the main reason, because SCOTUS just basically said the NY state law against guns in public was unconstitutional, and Congress is passing a national gun law as we speak.
So I find it hard to believe that it's just about state's rights, because it's giving states some rights in one week while also taking away other rights.
When you find yourself explaining an ordinary biological process, especially one that millions of people regard as wondrous and miraculous, in this manner, does it not inspire you to take any sort of pause and wonder if you're engaging in a kind of special pleading? Intellectually and emotionally, is this really how you want to characterize pregnancy? I think one should be careful not to arrive at monstrous conclusions in service of political ends.
I have a child, and will likely be having another. I love them dearly. But to pretend that the birth process was "wondrous and miraculous" is papering over reality. It was bloody and gruesome. My wife was given an epidural to help control the very significant amounts of pain. During the birth, there was blood everywhere. While the newborn was being attended to by nurses, my wife had her vagina stitched back together. And to this day she deals with prolapse, which is where her organs drop out of her vagina. Among my friend groups, this was one of the easier/more routine pregnancies.
I agree with you. I felt disgusted writing it. For me, pregnancy inspires feelings of wonder and magic and awe. Yet for others, pregnancy may cause them to feel fear, pain, and hopelessness.
I don't want to characterize pregnancy this way, I also don't want to characterize almost any human interaction this way. I prefer to believe that we all have good intentions and sometimes accidentally hurt people and that most of us are trying our absolute best to minimize pain and maximize joy, especially to those around us. So what can hurt me is how so many mothers may feel pain whether they keep the baby or abort, and we often demonize them for making one of the hardest and most gut-wrenching decisions in their lives. That's not to say I don't feel pain for the unborn child, I also feel the pain of the lost life. But I also feel the pain for the child who is born and kills the mother, or who is born and is resented by the mother or abandoned.
I feel pain all around the situation and it hurts me that we can be so quick to demonize the unborn child or the mother.
> Your comment actually made me think of something I had never considered: perhaps the mother's right against the child is self-defense.
I doubt that argument would get far in the case of most abortions, but it might work in cases where the mother's life is at much more risk than is normal for pregnancy, especially where the pregnancy has gone so wrong that there is almost no chance the baby is going to make it.
Yeah, I think it'd be more obvious in cases of extreme physical harm, but harder to argue in cases of lesser physical harm or even in terms of emotional harm, regardless of how extreme.
Woman's choice is removed in circumstances of rape and I agree that that very much changes things. Rape accounts for less than 0.5% of abortions though, so while very important to consider, it'd be incorrect to assume that all abortions are due to rape.
Banning abortion except in the cases of rape would, however, result in many fewer abortion providers and make it inaccessible for many victims of rape. There's also implementation difficulties: do you need some kind of certificate from the legal system saying you were raped (way too restrictive), or is it just a matter of self attestation (for pro-lifers, likely a big enough hole to make it meaningless)?
"What's best for the child" is often the argument used there - since the child did not commit the rape, the argument goes, it shouldn't be punished for it.
The case you linked does not support your argument.
There the alimony decision was based on the rape victim giving consent from the standpoint of the civil laws which also govern parental relationships. That did not matter for criminal law because the victim was underage.
Not that I agree with the court here, but it is completely different from what you described.
So states that ban abortion are also pushing for easy access to contraceptives, right? That would be logically and morally consistent, no? Unless, perhaps, the motive for such laws is unrelated to the welfare of the humans (child and mother, both) involved.
If you believe that abortion is murder, how the child came to be is irrelevant.
The only way that the mother's conscious choice to have sex factor's into the equation is if the intent of abortion laws is not to protect children, but rather to punish women who choose to have sex.
It's a weird self-defense argument when the reason the child exists at all is because the mother and some dude brought it into existence in the first place. That seems a key piece the metaphor should include.
Fair point. I don't like the self-defense argument in general, as we will often put ourselves into a dangerous situation and then claim we were acting in self-defense when someone attacks us, e.g. the Kyle Rittenhouse situation, being unaware of how our actions escalated the conflict.
But just strictly going from the legal sense, I imagine there's a lot of leeway in defining self-defense with regards to whether one chooses to enter into a situation where one is likely to be attacked.
Yeah, there's a lot of complication for sure, even in "real" cases of self-defense (e.g., if you talk a bunch of shit to someone, and they attack you, and then you shoot them, how self-defensy is that?) I would prefer not do weird metaphorical gymnastics in discussing abortion -- it's pretty straightforward what the relevant tradeoffs are. I wish the nation could just battle it out over those, facing the hard choices directly.
I agree I don't want to do metaphorical gymnastics, and yet law and the interpretation of it can be exactly that. I mean often SCOTUS is trying to extrapolate meaning from 1-2 sentences in a Constitution written over 200 years ago, using many metaphors to do so.
I also don't feel very clear on what are the relevant trade offs, but maybe it's more clear to you. What do you see as the relevant tradeoffs?
You could decompose the issues many ways, but it seems like some of the principal components are:
Component 1: human life is valuable, and ending a human life is a serious matter not just for the individual, but for society
Component 2: personal autonomy, esp wrt control of one's own body, is one of the most profound of freedoms, and one of particular importance to the American people
Most Americans would probably agree that these two components explain the majority of the 'moral variance' on the issue. So then it's a matter of making an uncomfortable choice between them: when do we value human life less than autonomy? Answering that question will almost certainly require some further difficult reckoning:
Sub-component 3: what really counts as a human life? A person born without a brain? A brain dead patient? A patient reduced to the level of an animal due to Lewy Body Dementia? A 8.9 month old unborn baby? A 4 week fetus? A fetus that isn't viable outside the mother's body?
Sub-sub-component 4: what do we count as viable? What amount of medical intervention is allowed for a fetus to be considered viable?
And then things like:
Intersection {1,2}: What about when a person wants to exercise autonomy to end his own life, but is unable / unwilling to do so by himself? Should it be legal to enlist someone to help?
Etc. Tradeoffs all the way down. Seems more productive to admit that they exist and that you're taking a position. I agree with you that when making a legal ruling metaphor may be required (e.g., saying that the right to commercially transact is a kind of free speech), but in the current context it seems totally gratuitous. Specifically, if we're talking about making exceptions when the mother's health is at risk, that's easy to discuss explicitly -- human life is important, but the fully realized adult life is more important than the nascent life of the fetus.
I really appreciate how you broke this down, including the components you chose, and agree I'd rather have discussions based on such a structure than on more abstract metaphors. Thank you.
>> If the fetus is a life, none of this stuff matters.
> This is irrelevant to my personal views on abortion because I believe that individuals have rights over their own body which supersede anyone else's rights to their body.
It absolutely is relevant, because you view collapses into nonsense unless you believe a fetus is a not an individual and that it has no rights. If the fetus is a person, then you're in a situation where their rights to their own body are getting superseded by another's right.
> We hold this as true in all other facets of bodily autonomy.
No, not all. You totally have the legal obligation to provide for your children, if you have them, and that almost always involves using your body in some way.
> You totally have the legal obligation to provide for your children, if you have them, and that almost always involves using your body in some way
You are not legally obligated to donate your organs to your children, fwiw.
I think the discussion of ethical and legal obligation cannot possible be given broad swath of "no one is obligated to anyone" nor "you are entirely obligated to someone in every way". This isn't how reality works. Parents are considered obligated to their children, unless they choose not to parent their children and withdraw their parental responsibilities under existent legal frameworks. At the same time, parents are not entirely obligated to their children, as parents are not fined or jailed for not donating their blood or organs.
I completely agree with the comment you are responding to, but it is an argument that actually changed my position relatively recently. I used to believe in the "well, if you believe it is a person, then abortion is murder" argument, but I believe the bodily autonomy argument is much stronger.
If you have a child, and you are the the only good potential donor match, and that child will die without, say, a bone-marrow transplant, you are not forced to donate your own bone marrow. Saying "You totally have the legal obligation to provide for your children, if you have them, and that almost always involves using your body in some way" is a poor analogy that really doesn't encompass what it is to have another being living inside you.
That's why I think the "viability" standard is the only one that makes sense, and also why that as technology has improved that I think the cutoff date for abortion should be lowered to the new age of viability. Any human should have the right to remove another from their own body. In the case of a child, if we have no technology to allow that child to survive outside the mother, so be it, but I think the much better analogy to forced birthing is actually slavery.
I think the pro life crowd sees a significant difference between a fetus/baby/whatever and a random person.
Probably something like, you are responsible for the creating of the fetus/baby/whatever so you have more of an obligation to it than you do to other people.
If that were really the argument, it would look entirely different, as things like actual sex education, easily obtainable birth control, etc, would all be uncontentious. However, those are also very much subject to debate by the “pro life” crowd.
The fact that "pro life" is the term for, "against abortion," but can also literally be interpreted to mean, "supports social programs for people who are alive" is childish word games. This isn't a real argument. It doesn't advance any point. It doesn't even logically make sense. It's just playing on the inherent ambiguity of natural language in service of a cheap non sequitur.
I am not sure how the logic I laid out would lead people to support sex education or easily obtainable birth control.
It is mostly a personal responsibility thing, as I understand it. You are responsible for creating the baby so you must give up some of your rights like bodily autonomy.
Birth control and sex education are not really related to that at all as far as I can tell.
>It is mostly a personal responsibility thing, as I understand it. You are responsible for creating the baby so you must give up some of your rights like bodily autonomy.
If that's what you believe, then don't terminate your pregnancy. As far as anyone else is concerned, it's none of your concern.
> If that's what you believe, then don't terminate your pregnancy. As far as anyone else is concerned, it's none of your concern.
I mean, I personally agree with you.
However, there are very few true libertarians in our society and almost everyone has views that they wish to impose on other people. The pro lifers are not different than anyone else in this regard.
This may be the case for some but the Catholic worldview is both pro-life and extremely sex-positive, in the appropriate context.
If you're talking about not just "women who have sex" but "~women~ people who have sex without regard for the children whom they may conceive", then yeah I'm against that kind of sex.
The Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms[1]. Even in areas of the world where AIDS is rampant. They are not sex-positive, they are procreation-positive.
Edit: I suppose the Catholic Church is sex-positive when it comes to their clergy and underage parishioners. Disclaimer: I went to Catholic school for 11 years.
> Catholic doctrine might, American Catholics, especially, do not
This is unfortunately true (but unsurprisingly so, especially these days). That doesn't mean that they're somehow right; they don't speak for the Church.
> The Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms[1]. Even in areas of the world where AIDS is rampant.
Correct.
> They are not sex-positive, they are procreation-positive.
They are both. "Sex-positive" doesn't mean "anything goes".
> I suppose the Catholic Church is sex-positive when it comes to their clergy and underage parishioners.
No, the Church is harshly critical of this kind of thing. The fact that individual offenders have been shuffled around for decades is to our shame and to the shame of their bishops, but nonetheless the Church is not "for" this kind of thing in any way.
> I went to Catholic school for 11 years.
At least in America, I'd say the majority of Catholic schools are only nominally Catholic.
> No, the Church is harshly critical of this kind of thing. The fact that individual offenders have been shuffled around for decades is to our shame and to the shame of their bishops, but nonetheless the Church is not "for" this kind of thing in any way.
I prefer to judge the church on its actions, not on its words. The bishops/cardinals in question got lofty appointments as their "punishment"[1].
> Cardinal Law was neither indicted nor arrested. Instead, Pope John Paul II transferred Law to run one of the Vatican’s most cherished properties, the Basilica of Saint Mary, essentially rewarding Law for his deft cover-up of the abuses in Boston.
The Church is not a democracy. The opposition to condoms at the top is has serious consequences the world over, regardless of what Americans feel. If their stated policy is causing needless deaths, what is the value of the policy, and what is the value of the institution promoting such a policy?
> If you're talking about not just "women who have sex" but "~women~ people who have sex without regard for the children whom they may conceive", then yeah I'm against that kind of sex.
The best way to ensure that children are treated with appropriate regard is to ensure that fewer unwanted children are born.
To be clear, I agree with you. These exceptions are not good enough and can create perverse incentives like you suggest. I was simply citing the lack of these exceptions being universal as evidence that a large percentage of the anti-abortion crowd do not see personal responsibility as important to whether someone should have access to an abortion.
From a legal standpoint? Yes, absolutely. Let me turn the question around on you: do you think that bars and restaurants should require a negative pregnancy test before they serve alcohol to customers?
What is "obviously pregnant"? How does a bar accurately distinguish someone who is pregnant vs obese? Do you really want to have that conversation with your 18 year old waiter?
"Acceptable" is a vague word. Do I approve of it? Obviously not. Do I think society should be okay with it? Obviously not. Do I think they should be prosecuted for it? No.
That strikes me as very much of a strawman argument, as late-term abortions are not just incredibly rare (this interview with a woman who had to have an abortion at 32-weeks for medical reasons gives insight into how awful the whole process is — and how expensive it was for something that was absolutely medically necessary in her case [1] as the fetus was incompatible with life and there were medical complications that would make a live birth a potential death sentence for the woman involved), but that there are very few doctors who will even perform them in cases when they are medically necessary. And very few states that even allow that to happen.
But if you’re asking directly if I think someone should be able to prioritize their own life in place of someone else’s, well yes, yes I do.
[1]: https://jezebel.com/interview-with-a-woman-who-recently-had-... anyone who wants to rail about late-term abortions without knowing the pain and suffering that is involved for the women that have to get them needs to read that interview. All of it. Then read it again. And then think about why the focus of this debate is on the extremely-rare scenarios that are not about people changing their minds and not wanting to bring a child into the world, but are terribly sad medical scenarios.
This already happens when the fetus is unviable or already dead, called a D&C. If a doctor and a patient is legally obstructed from D&C, we will have cases where someone has to birth a dead baby or, if their contractions process isn't working, become septic and die.
He’s not though because anyone who follows this knows that late-term abortions are almost entirely situations where the fetus is incompatible with life (an actual medical term), there are ridiculous risks to the mother’s life, or other very sad scenarios. I’ve never even heard of modern cases where perfectly healthy fetuses were aborted at late stages. I’m sure that they have happened, but the rarity of it happening — not just because so few doctors do that work for medically necessary reasons and even fewer would do it for someone who just changed their mind, but because it is a prohibitively expensive procedure ($25,000 or more).
This 2016 interview with a woman who had an abortion at 32 weeks after she found out her fetus would not survive outside the womb and who then had to suffer through 24 hours of labor and have her dead child ripped from her womb (and prior brain surgery meant she couldn’t push), really paints a picture of the terrible reality for anyone forced to be in a position to terminate a pregnancy at such a late stage: https://jezebel.com/interview-with-a-woman-who-recently-had-...
That's not how late-term abortion actually works. Practically all late-term abortions are wanted children who for one reason or another don't work out. They are cases of extensive tragedy. Banning very late pregnancy termination directly means that doctors will not be allowed to save lives because it will mean ending the pregnancy.
When crafting law it is vitally important to understand how this would realistically affect people.
Do you think you should have the right to have an abortion 1 day before the due date of a baby?
The reasonable thing would just be to deliver the baby and put it up for adoption, but don't you have the right to, say, disconnect the placenta (it's your placenta), and also not have your abdomen cut open to help out some other individual who just happens to be stuck in there?
Typically, Western culture recognizes individual rights to do what they want with their own body, such as drinking too much, going hiking when it's too hot, or getting ugly tattoos. These days, even the right to use drugs is returning. So although having an abortion one day before delivery is unwise, I hold that it should absolutely be legal.
It's hilarious to me that the same crowd that fights for gun rights under the banner of "individual liberty" is very quick to invite the government into the womb.
I think you and the person you're replying to are on the same page. They seem to be arguing that abortion should be legal in all cases due to the individual rights of the pregnant person, regardless of the scenario, because individual rights apply even (perhaps especially) when society as a whole disagrees with an individual's decision.
Lets bring up a hypothetical that has never and would never happen. You could never find a doctor willing to do this unless there was something medically wrong with the baby that likely would endanger the mother.
I do support this kind of abortion because the only situation I could imagine it happening is in a life saving one.
The irony of this ludicrous argument (who would abort a fetus one day before their due date, increasing the risk to their own life? Let alone choose to abort a fetus themselves and risk bleeding out rather than have a doctor do it safely) is that banning abortions increases the odds of this very scenario playing out because of the lack of accessibility to safe abortions.
The scenario you've described is approximately the same as a suicide. Consider that people still do that even though it's illegal. Heinous shit will happen, but if you're genuinely interested in minimizing human death and suffering, safe and legal abortion is a necessary component to that.
Yes, it is a ludicrous scenario, but OP's entire worldview is equally as ludicrous, because it allows for such scenarios("If I refuse to allow it to be used to support another life, that is my choice."). In any case, no special rules or consideration are generally needed for normal scenarios, so you are often looking at less common or ludicrous seeming scenarios when probing the limits of someone's viewpoint.
I'm not positive that allowing no questions asked abortions 1 day before the due date will minimize human death and suffering. Instead, I think it would provide an avenue to take for people who have, basically, cold feet about being a parent.
In fact, I have to wonder if OP thinks they have the right to abandon their already-birthed baby in the wilderness. After all, what right does that individual have to force another person to take care of it? I'm an individual after all. If I refuse to allow my body to be used to support another life, that is my choice.
This is a conflict between bodily autonomy and the right to life. Two rights, both important.
Wheresoever these rights meet, we have, as a society, chosen the right of bodily autonomy. No one may compel you to donate your blood or organs, even if they might die without them. Even if they are your children. Even if you will be dead when they are taken. We have made a strong cultural choice that the body is yielded only with specifically granted consent.
Abortion is a place where these two fundamental rights connect. The mother's right to control herself and the child's to exist. Under our culture's normal choice of bodily autonomy, it is an unfortunate consequence that the child will not live.
It might be entirely reasonable to frame laws encouraging that children deemed viable should rather be birthed so long as there is not risk to the mother. But this is not, of course, what they have done.
Instead we have re-opened a chapter once closed. Of horror stories with women being denied abortive procedures for ectopic pregnancies, or known failed pregnancies, forcing them instead to carry their dead child until it is naturally expelled. Horrors that would be easily taken care of by the woman simply having that natural choice over her own flesh.
Desperate women without resources to flee oppressive laws will resort to the same sorts of dangerous remedies they did in pre-Roe days. These frequently went wrong, and many that spoke in favor of Roe when it was passed cited such stories.
Women will die and families will suffer under the laws that have become active today, and those laws that will be soon certified into action or freshly written to take advantage of Roe's absence. The people insisting on these laws will take no measure of responsibility for the terrors they inflict, insisting instead it is the fault of the victims of these laws. Many seem to take some perverse glee in it.
That one of the justices has insisted in their concurrence that we review and vacate laws enshrining similarly protected rights for millions of Americans, it seems sure the current path will lead only to more misery, bigotry, violence and horror if those pushing this poisonous legislation have their way.
>Do you think you should have the right to have an abortion 1 day before the due date of a baby?
I think it is fair to force a point of no return in a pregnancy after which we prohibit abortion (edit: beyond situations that threaten the mother's life). The most important aspect to me is that the person has the time and freedom to make that decision that is right for them. If we are trying to be scientific about it, viability occurs around 24 weeks so that seems like a reasonable deadline for a decision.
Even if that's the case, do you understand that the vast majority of society would consider such thing absolutely psychopathic?
What I'm trying to get to is that "My body my choice" is a nice thing to chant at a protest, it's also a pretty damn bad argument, I can't believe we are still doing this AFTER covid. I'm 100% for abortion but I find it hard to argue outside a "the fetus is not a sentient being at that point" frame.
> What I'm trying to get to is that "My body my choice" is a nice thing to chant at a protest, it's also a pretty damn bad argument, I can't believe we are still doing this AFTER covid.
It's really not a bad argument if you consider acute vs routine circumstances. Otherwise how could we argue against blackout restrictions[1] in cities now that WWII has happened?
I don't say this lightly, but you're literally advocating for killing babies. Not in the sense that a first or even second trimester abortion is, but to kill a baby literally a day before it would be born, because you have the right to and not to literally save your own life, is just absolutely craven.
You can come up with any justification you want, give it any name you want, but what you advocate for is still, in the end, killing a baby which would do perfectly fine on its own in the outside world.
Which is why I would be charged with murder if I go punch a heavily pregnant woman in the gut and kill her child.
I have yet to see a single baby that “would do perfectly fine on its own in the outside world.” A baby needs years of intense care and love to become a healthy person.
There is definitely an autistically propertarian argument in favor of abortion, which I personally consider fairly compelling, but 99.9% of people are not nearly as propertarian as I am, and I'm not willing to give people a pass to use this kind of reasoning selectively. If you support abortion rights on these grounds and you're not also 100% on board with laws that let you e.g. shoot burglars, you're not being consistent. A lot of people using this argument were also pro-vaccine-mandate, which is similarly inconsistent. (Not calling out you personally, just using "you" to refer to the hypothetical flip-flop.)
If the vaccine has side effects similar to that of an average pregnancy it would not only not be mandatory, but would have failed FDA trials and would be illegal to administer.
There's a line somewhere between total bodily autonomy and being compelled by the state to experience: nausea, swelling, muscle and back pain, weight gain, incontinence, depression, and laceration to you genitals.
Thanks, I think? I'm not sure why it's necessary to consider one's body "property" to advocate for having some semblance of control over what happens to it. And it's pretty obvious this right is not absolute since parents are still allowed to circumcise their children and sign off on medical procedures done to them.
My original comment is not addressed at people like you; sorry if that was not clear. You don't appear to be claiming to have a property ethic, and are instead using various ad-hoc lines of reasoning (e.g. what strikes you as qualitatively more or less onerous).
> parents are still allowed to circumcise their children
Indeed, propertarianism where parents do not own their children would also proscribe surgically mutilating them, for example. However, parents would not necessarily be obligated to take care of their children; this is also the basis by which abortion would be permitted. Propertarianism where parents do own their children (which strikes me as unreasonable) would a fortiori also allow abortion, as well as other more universally reviled practices such as post-birth infanticide.
Ah, interesting, thank you. How does propertarianism deal with my example of parents making medical decisions on behalf of children? It seems like an interesting quandary because a 1 year old can't be expected to make an informed decision on vaccination (for example) and so some control over the child's body must rest with the parents.
I can imagine several strategies compatible with western and near-eastern jurisprudence, such as considering parents to be (temporary) trustees with certain fiduciary duties to their children. I'm by no means an expert in propertarian theory; I just think it's a nice framework for bodily autonomy in particular, since it's computationally efficient, fairly unambiguous, and generally provides agreeable results.
We don't have the legal right to bodily autonomy. If we did, prostitution and recreational drugs would be legal. I think we should but we just don't. But this still doesn't get to the heart of the matter on abortion.
A fetus isn't quite your body.
But your body is feeding it and keeping it alive, often at the expense of itself. That's the bodily autonomy part - a woman should not be compelled to keep a fetus alive at the risk to her own health and well-being.
> If I refuse to allow it to be used to support another life, that is my choice.
You're missing the point that your choice to have sex created the fetus/life in the first place. That changes the debate and invalidates all of your examples.
This is really the crux of the matter. Thank you for bringing it up. The issue for the pro-life is crowd is not about life, and it never has been. The real goal is socially repressive puritanism and a desire to punish women for choosing to have sex.
By your logic, if a person drives a car and has a crash, the doctor should refuse to treat their injuries, because after all, it was their choice to drive.
> By your logic, if a person drives a car and has a crash, the doctor should refuse to treat their injuries, because after all, it was their choice to drive.
I'm pro-choice but this does not follow from that logic, which is that choosing to take action that might result in another living thing temporarily being dependent on you to survive, does come with at least some level of obligation not to rip that support away such that they die. Your analogy doesn't address that at all.
First of all, as others have pointed out, laws that prohibit abortion even in cases of rape and incest overlook the "choosing to take action" part. In that case, a person is pregnant without ever having made a choice to engage in any action at all.
Moreover, "living thing" is the key word here. A fetus IS a living thing. So is a cow, a cockroach, an intestinal parasite. We kill those, and we support industries that kill them, without thinking. And while there are extremists who support protecting a broader segment of "life," that is not what the pro-life movement is about. If I breed cows for a living, I have a legal and ethical right to kill those cows. And if I have a baby attached to my uterus, I should have the legal right to do what I want.
If you were raped, and it wasn't your choice, then yes I agree there's an argument that you should have the legal right to decide for yourself what the moral/ethical thing to do is.
But if you instead put the baby in your uterus, of your own free will and choice, you are responsible for it.
Rape accounts for less than 0.5% of abortions. While it's important to consider, it doesn't remove the responsibility in the other 99.5%.
I acknowledge that a person is responsible for what happens in their own body. The key point is that getting an abortion IS taking responsibility, not its abdication. If you are pregnant and do not want to give birth, getting an abortion is the only responsible choice. It would be far more negligent to give birth, risking additional medical complications, and bringing an unwanted person into the world.
I am under no more ethical obligation to preserve the life of a fetus in me than I am to preserve the life of an intestinal parasite that I've ingested.
> First of all, as others have pointed out, laws that prohibit abortion even in cases of rape and incest overlook the "choosing to take action" part. In that case, a person is pregnant without ever having made a choice to engage in any action at all.
Yeah, obviously, but it barely matters for the overall argument. It's misdirection, not a substantive refutation. Is anyone on the pro-choice side happy with only allowing abortions in cases of rape and incest? I'm not. I'm pretty sure that falls under the pro-life umbrella, in fact. All this shows is that one part of the pro-life camp may have a better-reasoned position than another.
> Moreover, "living thing" is the key word here. A fetus IS a living thing. So is a cow, a cockroach, an intestinal parasite. We kill those, and we support industries that kill them, without thinking. And while there are extremists who support protecting a broader segment of "life," that is not what the pro-life movement is about. If I breed cows for a living, I have a legal and ethical right to kill those cows. And if I have a baby attached to my uterus, I should have the legal right to do what I want.
This still doesn't address the argument. In fact your keying in on "living thing" and trying to build on that as an argument is pure semantic mumbo-jumbo. Replace that phrase with "baby" (which I avoided so we wouldn't immediately have that other ridiculous, pointless discussion) and all that junk about cows is irrelevant, which it was anyway.
Again: I'm pro-choice, to be clear. I just find most arguments from "my side" totally fail to address the "other side"'s actual positions, which is frustrating if, like me, you hope for your position to gain support. Bad arguments just make us look like we're wrong.
1. There are certainly more and less extreme flavors of the pro-life movement. I reject your assertion that the more extreme side is negligible, as there are laws on the books, and now enforceable, that prohibit abortion in all cases, such as in Louisiana.
2. Fetuses are not babies. Babies are people, from a legal and ethical perspective; fetuses are not. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, as abortion would already be considered murder. So yes, fetuses are living, but that does not afford them any rights, any more than cows have rights by virtue of being alive, and it certainly doesn't afford them rights that supersede those of an actual person.
In other words: in our society, we give rights to people, not to mere "living things."
> 1. There are certainly more and less extreme flavors of the pro-life movement. I reject your assertion that the more extreme side is negligible, as there are laws on the books, and now enforceable, that prohibit abortion in all cases, such as in Louisiana.
It's not that that faction's negligible, it's that the argument isn't helpful for refuting "the mother does have some obligation to a life that was created and became dependent on her through her own actions" because someone who holds that position probably doesn't disagree with you that rape and incest are exceptions. It's a distraction not from the broader debate, but specifically from substantively addressing this particular position.
> 2. Fetuses are not babies. Babies are people, from a legal and ethical perspective; fetuses are not. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, as abortion would already be considered murder. So yes, fetuses are living, but that does not afford them any rights, any more than cows have rights by virtue of being alive, and it certainly doesn't afford them rights that supersede those of an actual person.
This is precisely the point of contention, and it is far from clear-cut even on the pro-choice side. That's why 3rd trimester abortion rights are far less popular than the rest—even to many pro-choicers, the is-/isn't-a-baby question is settled at some point before birth, but after the 1st trimester.
I think it's extremely relevant to discuss the extreme pro-life position opposing all forms of abortion, because it's the only form that's logically consistent. If one truly believes that abortion is murder, then it doesn't matter how the baby was conceived. On the other hand, what is pro-life's ethical justification for allowing abortion in cases of rape or incest? Are you saying that murder is okay in some cases? In my opinion, it's just another example of the right's crippling hypocrisy.
The argument that abortion is tolerable in cases where the women does not choose to have sex shows your hand: the pro-life movement was never about protecting life, it has always been about punishing women. You are okay killing fetuses as long as the woman didn't actually have the temerity to enjoy sex.
You have #2 backwards. The reason we're even debating this is because we can't agree on when the fetus becomes a person with rights. Pro-lifer's are very much arguing that it is murder. 43ish? states currently prohibit abortion after a certain point in pregnancy prior to birth [0][1]
I just want to jump in and say that even though we don't agree on the issue at hand, I nonetheless appreciate you trying to clear up bad arguments and present only the strongest arguments.
It's often exhausting trying to get people to think with their brains rather than with the tips of their tongues, and all the bad arguments muddy waters.
> The real goal is socially repressive puritanism and a desire to punish women for choosing to have sex.
Just because you believe this doesn't make it true. I struggle to believe that a single pro-lifer would say this is the reason behind their beliefs. As a pro-lifer, I can attest that it has nothing to do with my beliefs. Believing it may "demonize" prolifers, and help you feel good about fighting for your stance on abortion. But the reality is, blind beliefs like this are the cause of division and hate that seems to be ever increasing.
> I struggle to believe that a single pro-lifer would say this is the reason behind their beliefs.
Of course they wouldn't say it out loud: that would be giving the game away. Instead, judge them by their actions. The same crowd that wants to prevent abortions also wants to prohibit contraception, allow unrestricted gun ownership, and cut back on any social programs that support families.
These actions are consistent with a puritanical, anti-sex society; they are not consistent with a "commitment to life."
So... you get to decide what I believe and why I believe it? Then you convince yourself that you're beliefs about what I believe are more accurate than what I attest them to be?
Stop listening to what prochoicers say prolifers believe, and start actually listening to what the prolifers are saying. I (and most prolifers I know) don't have some secret agenda.
Yes, I get to judge your integrity based on your actions. Obviously. When your actions are evil, I don't care what you say.
When the cop beats you bloody while declaring that it's "For your own protection," you are justified in questioning his motives. When the right claims to care about "life," but their actions totally contradict the stated goal, I get to declare them at best hypocrites but more likely just fascists.
> The same crowd that wants to prevent abortions also wants to prohibit contraception, allow unrestricted gun ownership, and cut back on any social programs that support families.
I see this kind of thought process all the time: when some people don't get traction with their arguments on a particular issue, they ascribe other beliefs to their opponent and call those into question. This is both ad hominem and whataboutism, and it doesn't win over anybody's heart or mind, it just "others" the opponent, further entrenching tribalism.
The "crowd" is diverse and contains multitudes. If you want to change minds, engage with the arguments, not with the arguers.
The argument that the right wants to prohibit contraception is not some specious straw-man that I made up: it is stated plainly in Justice Thomas's opinion. And it's a position that I believe is supported by a large portion of the population in states where abortion is now illegal. We see more and more antagonism against gays and trans people. Moreover, because the Dobbs decision dismantled the right to privacy, it has cleared the way to destroy the legal foundation on which other important decisions are based, such a gay marriage.
If you don't want to be judged as a tribe, you need to take a stand. If you support contraception and gay marriage, then support them. Right now, though, the right is supporting more and more extreme ideologues.
> The real goal is socially repressive puritanism and a desire to punish women for choosing to have sex.
Is the intent behind child support laws "a desire to punish men for choosing to have sex"? If a man has a one-night-stand with a woman and a child is born, he could be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of 18 years.
> By your logic, if a person drives a car and has a crash, the doctor should refuse to treat their injuries, because after all, it was their choice to drive.
If a person refuses to take a COVID-19 vaccine, and does not have COVID, should doctors / hospitals be allowed to give that person lower quality-of-service and/or refuse elective treatments? After all, the person made a choice not to get a COVID vaccine which is proven safe and effective.
> Is the intent behind child support laws "a desire to punish men for choosing to have sex"?
Irrelevant comparison. There is no procedure to legally "undo" a child who has been born, in which case one should pursue the wellbeing of the child (which may or may not be well-served by child support laws). However, if a child has not yet been born, and the child is not wanted, abortion prevents health risks to the mother, while also preventing an unwanted child from a life of hardship. If there's a procedure that helps everyone involved, why not do it?
> If a person refuses to take a COVID-19 vaccine, and does not have COVID, should doctors
Bro this makes no sense at all. If the patient doesn't have COVID, then the decision to not take the vaccine has no bearing on their elective treatments. If a woman has sex, she has not surrendered the right to her body.
Depends on the law as some laws forbid abortion even in rape and incest, which I'd argue are strong examples of someone specifically not choosing to have sex.
I don't understand why it is almost always "rape and incest", both on the part of people considering exceptions when they ban abortion or people trying to get exceptions into someone else's abortion ban.
Incest can be nonconsensual, in which it was also rape and so would be covered under a rape exception.
Incest can also be consensual, in which case what is the logic to treating conception by incest any different than any other circumstances of conception?
I think there are a few problems. First, as with statutory rape, I think incest is often treated as de-facto coercive - e.g. could you say "no" to your dad if you depend on him for food/shelter/clothing? Second, rape often requires the victim to accuse the rapist of such - which is probably less likely when family is involved. Finally, incest carries increased risks of abnormalities in the child, which makes the case for aborting to prevent suffering of the child stronger.
Fair point, I meant more for the nonconsensual aspect, although I'm unsure if incest is illegal even if consensual, I guess it might depend on the jurisdiction, at which point eve if it were two people consenting, it may not legally be considered consensual, similar to how people under a certain age have no legal ability to consent.
This doesn't matter though. If you drive recklessly and get in an accident where the victim needs you to donate a kidney you aren't forced to give up your kidney. Fault has never overiden our right to bodily autonomy.
> I believe that individuals have rights over their own body
Did you have rights over your own body when you had sex and started the process of conception? Why do your choices only matter depending on the result of conception?
The argument is that at some point the fetus is no longer the same body. Arguing for "bodily autonomy" ignores the crux of the debate. A mother cannot kill their 1 year old, and parents have obligations to their young children, otherwise social services will intervene if those obligations aren't met. What obligations does a mother have to their unborn child? That is the debate that needs having.
I'll quote someone else's response as I think it explains things well.
"""
> I also don't really agree with this definition either. This train of logic leads to the justification of euthanizing less intelligent humans.
How so? less intelligent humans have cognitive ability so they have rights.
> It also doesn't adequately address why a human with microcephaly or no frontal lobe has rights, but a dolphin or octopus or killer whale does not.
The question is not why the law is the way it is but the way that it should be. As it is now, It has rights because it is a human, we make our laws for ourselves and sometimes for other species, and I would definitely say that animals should have protections/rights (and they do). A law is also a custom or an enforced custom and certainly animals have customs. At least in america, many families take the toll of taking care of their family members with many deformities. the state should not enforce termination of these, but it should be optional for those that do take this unfortunate toll in their hands. (criminalization != decriminalization)
> It also allows for the justification of cruelty against animals who can feel pain but aren't intelligent enough to pass some arbitrary test of intelligence.
On the contrary, as a cognitive animal capable of pain. it indicates that you should not do so, I would say the capability of pain is the most important aspect to life. given that it is usually an indicator of the will to live.
> To be clear, I don't know the answer, I am hesitant to label anything as "innately valuable". I think that there is however a sliding scale of what is "ethical".
Neither do I. Abortion is euthanasia, and it certainly has merit. both economically speaking and in the sense of well being for humans. Given that human childbirth is probably one of the worst around on the animal kingdom.
It would be nice if we just relegated pregnancies to artificial wombs, but until the technology is there. I guess we'll be having this abortion "debate" forever.
"""
I know someone that just had a baby two weeks earlier. Other than a c-section, the baby required no incubation or anything special, or anything different than what a full term baby would require. It was fully formed and is totally able to survive outside the womb. Maybe a little a lower weight.
Just seems wrong that you think that the mother could kill it up to the last moment of birth, for even the most absurd reasons.
There's a reason access to 3rd trimester abortions enjoys far less support from the public than abortion rights in the abstract—and, in fact, IIRC, Roe and subsequent decisions do not guarantee any kind of right to 3rd-trimester abortions, which is why states have been able to restrict abortion access for late-term pregnancies, despite Roe.
I think you’re trying to ask a poignant question, but it misses the point.
The fetus’ body is not the mother’s body, and bodily autonomy dictates one isn’t obligated to give their body for another’s survival.
Removing the fetus from the womb results in termination of the fetus if done prior to viability, but at no point does any violation of the fetus’ body need to occur for this outcome to happen.
My views on this are definitely coloured by having three kids, but watching the process of creating new humans starting off with a discussion about "shall we try and start a family", the next bit <cough>, a result on a test kit, the highs and lows of pregnancy, feeling your unborn first child kicking along to music in my wife's almost comically round tummy while we sat in a concert hall a few weeks before the big day ..
.. through to revising algebra and geometry at the breakfast table with my eldest this morning prior to an end of term maths test.
> The fetus’ body is not the mother’s body
Indeed, although the fetus survives due to the cord that connects them.
I've personally been in the room for all our three kids' births, cut the cord for two of them. #1 needed the doctors in a hurry after his birth, I just sat out of the way, watching in awed and stunned silence.
Life is wonderful, and complicated, and at times messy and confusing. Sometimes just downright awful. Pregnancy is some or indeed all of those.
Like everything we do there are edge cases and I don't think we should design our societies to leave anyone feeling they are left with no choices. "Look after those who can't look after themselves" is something that goes beyond the technical discussion of when is a fetus viable, I've spent enough time feeding and changing babies to know that just because they can breathe unaided it doesn't mean they can survive unaided.
TL;DR: I would be just as uncomfortable with a complete ban on abortion as I would be with unlimited easy access to it without any time limits.
I admire that you have such a loving connection to your children.
And I get what you mean with survival, it’s a commonly discussed point in these debates. I think for the pro-choice side, if the technology existed to incubate outside the womb or to transplant from one person to another who wanted to give birth, we’d be for it. We are not pro-termination. But when it comes to the pregnant person’s autonomy, that takes precedence.
After viability and birth, others besides the mother and father can care for the child. And society owes its children that.
I believe the vast majority of pro-choice supports a limit at viability except when the mother’s life is in danger. Only 1% of abortions happen in the third trimester and nearly all of those are due to a threat to the mother’s life.
On the other side, I believe the majority of pro-life supporters want a complete ban.
If your beliefs are between the extremes, I think only one side represents that.
If your bodily rights supersede anyone else's rights to their body, then someone with lung cancer can go ahead and murder someone to obtain a new pair of lungs.
There was a pretty nifty short story called "Dibs" by Brian Plante in the April 2004 issues of Analog that was sort of along those lines.
Whenever someone would die soon if they did not get an organ transplant the government would check the records to identify all people who would be good donors. Those donors would all receive a notification that someone has dibs on that organ. If one of those donors died while the person with dibs was still alive their organ would be used to save the life of the person with dibs.
When that happened, or when the person with dibs dies before getting a transplant, all the people who had been potential donors were notified that no one had dibs on their organ any more.
Most of the time for most people they would occasionally get notified someone had dibs on some organ of theirs and then in a week or two they'd get a notice that it was resolved and their organ was no longer under dibs.
Rarely, someone who had an organ under dibs would get a notification that a second organ was under dibs.
Most of the time that would end like the single dibs case. Two or three weeks later they would be back to normal with no organs under dibs.
Very rarely someone with two organs under dibs would get a notification that a third organ was under dibs. In that case they were required to give up their three organs to save the lives of the three people under dibs.
The ONLY KNOWN METHOD OF HAVING A CAR CRASH IS ::drumroll:: driving a car. If you don't want to be forced to save someone as a result of crashing into them, whether on accident or on purpose, you shouldn't have gotten in your car.
How far does this extend? To riff off the classic example, what happens if there were a hypothetical medical condition where a violinist needed to be attached to your bloodstream for nine months and would die if removed beforehand, and you sign a contract agreeing to it before deciding at month seven that you've had enough and cut her off, killing her? Have you committed a moral crime there? And if so, should you face legal punishment for it (a separate question)?
This is a contrived example, but a pretty obvious answer given PC's stance. You can enter into the contact and would need be prepared for civil liability upon breach, or criminal if you entered into the contract under false pretenses. Intent would be a major part of deciding the criminal action. If you could be shown to have the intent of someone's death, then that would be murder, otherwise no.
Seems pretty heavily modified from the source, but even the source isn't super relevant because it is trying to use though experiments to determine the morality of the act, however Roe and this subsequent decision (tenuously) are based on legal justification.
Thought experiments are useful as intuition pumps, and very widely used in philosophy. And the particular argument I was responding to was about a moral argument for complete bodily autonomy.
Going along with your scenario - you'd have a discussion with your medical professional (who you've been seeing since the start of this process) and explore the possible outcomes with their guidance. In this specific scenario, you'd line up another volunteer host and transfer the contracted host-duties over to them.
This is not a religious argument. The 14th amendment prohibits the states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The first question is when does a fetus become a person. I don’t know the answer to that for absolute certainty and pretty sure everyone else commenting on this does not either. If we can agree that no single person can identify when a fetus becomes a person, keeping in mind lots of people think they know everything about all things. The ultimate question that needs be answered is what number of people need to agree when life begins? Only one person decides when life begin i.e. the mother, nine i.e. the Supreme Court, or thousands i.e. we the people vote on it. I would argue we in U.S. tend lean more towards the more significant the issue the more people are required for consensus.
It's been the religious right stated strategy for decades, I don't know how I could take any of your argument as credible without acknowledging that fact.
My friend, two things can be true at the same time. The religious right can have a strategy to end abortion for their own reasons and the 14th amendment can be an essential right that must be protected.
I don't understand your point. If you want to convince someone that believes that the fetus becomes a life sometime in the gestation period, screaming about religion and privacy won't get you anywhere.
There was no attempt in my comment do to that, simply straight forward truth: the religious right have decided life begins at conception and will kill to enforce their rules.
This is something I wonder about... do they really want the whole country or do they want to make things so unpalatable that the country balkanizes and disintegrates? It's frankly really hard to get a read on what these extremists want, because if you play it out far enough, it looks pretty ridiculous, IE: be careful what you wish for as a lot of those right-wing states are going to be even poorer and more backward than they are now.
I think it's hard to draw that line on extremism. Conversation and finding consensus are much easier if people build their world view and values on as small base assumptions as possible. If we cannot agree on base assumptions and values it's much harder to have a fruitful conversation especially if these assumptions cannot be violated because they were hand down from god. Religion generally makes numerous and very large assumptions.
There are many people that aren’t religious extremists who think that abortion is, at best, extremely morally problematic. It’s fundamentally a question about the definition of life, not the adherence to certain religious beliefs.
Poll data suggests that the plurality of the population do not support third-trimester abortions, but neither do they support a prohibition on first-trimester.
The reality is that what we consider a "life" is graduated, and the fetus progresses along that continuum during gestation. Most people know this intuitively, which is why popular opinion generally falls where it does. (See, for example, the Pew polls on the subject of abortion and trimesters.)
We struggle to draw a bright-line to say, "this is where life begins," because there is not really a point where life "begins," merely a long series of points where it shifts by degree from "no life" to "life."
As a society though we still are tasked with drawing this line and it is an arbitrary line. But it is illogical for it to begin at the very start of the continuum, or at the very end. The beginning because it is silly and unscientific to pretend as though some tiny clump of cells has any more life than a wart, and it comes at great cost to women's autonomy; the end because it is illogical to believe that a baby the moment prior to birth is a fundamentally different being than at the moment after. To believe that the moment is at either end is thoughtless dogmatism.
Where should the line be? Pick a point. Give the woman enough time to be able to know that she is pregnant, to plan and provide for her bodily autonomy to make her own life choices, and to deal with lead times at clinics. And then draw a line where the choice has been made. Most people believe that line is somewhere around the end of the first trimester or early part of the second.
> the end because it is illogical to believe that a baby the moment prior to birth is a fundamentally different being than at the moment after. To believe that the moment is at either end is thoughtless dogmatism.
> Where should the line be? Pick a point
But in your own words, isn't it similarly illogical to believe that a baby the moment prior to that point is a fundamentally different being than at the moment after.
Actually, the way you are framing it is a significant cause of the problem. In many cases, we are talking about a strictly amoral health care concern, IE: a clump of cells that are going to kill a woman if she doesn't get the necessary health care. It has absolutely nothing to do with a baby or life and everything to do with her bleeding out. THAT is the thing the right-wing ignores and wants you to ignore too. So they show you pictures of babies, they talk about babies, they come up with fictitious terms like "third-trimester abortion" because it's the only way they can frame the issue to rile up their base.
The rhetoric each side adopts precludes/ignores the other side's arguments, and thus there is no communication.
Moreover, whatever your opinion of abortion rights, Roe vs Wade was not based on solid legal reasoning and it was foolish for liberals to depend on it over the last half century instead of explicitly codifying it into law or the Constitution.
> The rhetoric each side adopts precludes/ignores the other side's arguments, and thus there is no communication.
This is the general case on most topics. Accepting the other side's framing is tantamount to "losing the argument" to most people. Often that framing defines the other side as essentially evil and thus not worth listening to or reasoning with. There are precious few places where actual debates where primary arguments are understood and rebutted by mutually respecting parties.
I have to disagree. I more or less understand the pro-life point of view, which is that a fetus is a precious life. Since I'm not religious, it's clear to me that the fetus is alive, but I don't see it's life as important until it is capable of thought, emotion, and sentience, in general. I would say this is the essential difference between most pro-life and pro-choice philosophy.
After that, I switch to a much more consistent version of "pro-life" which includes a moral imperitive not to cause undue (frivolous, even) suffering or harm to any living thing.
I disagree that there is a "point" at which a fetus becomes a person, no more than there is a point where a slowly accumulating pile of sand becomes a hill. Both hill-ness and personhood are artificial concepts that we give meaning to, and we can define them as precisely or as nebulously as we wish. Another example is adulthood. We have chosen to define it at 18 in the US, even though we all know 25 year olds who are less mature than some 16 year olds. In some cases (heinous crimes, emancipated minors) we will legally confer some aspects of adulthood to people under 18. In other cases (smoking, drinking), we will delay the privileges of adulthood. We do this because we know that a single "point" can't account for the full complexity of the transition to adulthood. And there's nothing stopping us from treating the onset of personhood as a similarly complex issue. Which is what the Roe v Wade regime did, for the most part.
"If the fetus is a life," you say, but of course it's alive, it's made of living cells. That's not even the issue really. Something being alive doesn't necessarily say anything about how we should treat it. We don't treat bacteria with respect, or mushrooms, or even most animals. So given that a fetus is alive, does that entitle it to any rights? And if so should those rights have primacy over the rights of the person who is carrying the fetus?
> So given that a fetus is alive, does that entitle it to any rights?
I didn't mean to say whether the fetus is alive is the relevant question, so apologies for the confusion. It's whether the fetus is a person, in which case, yes being a person does entitle it to rights, none greater than your right to life. That takes primacy over other rights of the mother to terminate the person (assuming it is a person).
It's true that there's no clear answer, but I suggest that this is the question to answer, regardless of where you fall on the debate. Some people think its "heart beat" however you define that, other think its viability outside of the womb, and I'm sure other people have different criteria. But we should look to answer this question and get to a sensible policy.
Even if we accept that a fetus is a person at stage X in its development (whether that is conception or later), that doesn't necessarily mean we will give it all the panoply of rights that we give to those residing outside the womb. In the US, citizens have certain rights (and sometimes, responsibilities) that non-citizens do not have. Are fetuses citizens? That's an easy one to answer: No, at least not by the standards of the 14th amendment, where it decrees: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
> no more than there is a point where a slowly accumulating pile of sand becomes a hill.
This is basically the argumentation why many treat conception as the start of life. If you can't know the exact point, then disallow people from guessing and potentially getting it wrong.
You could call that the "hidden variable" theory of life. There's a spark of life that begins somewhere, but we don't know it exactly so let's err on the side of caution. That could very well be true, but it's slightly different from my argument. I contend that there is no objective spark of life. We can call whatever we like "alive." It's just a word, one that only has meaning to the extent that we find it useful. Hence if we pick an arbitrary moment such as the start of the 3rd trimester as the beginning of life, it's not a priori correct or incorrect. It's only right or wrong to the extent that it supports or conflicts with principles that we hold more important. (E.g. I personally would hold the bodily autonomy of the pregnant person to be more important than assigning the right to life to a fetus pre brain-activity.)
There is one side that is fighting very hard to not only make it at conception, but potentially even before conception (there are reasons to believe that the supreme court might come for birth control next - and there are large portions of the same religious community that put them in power that want that).
For many people on the other side the fetus doesn't get rights until it is born. And up until that point, it is a bundle of cells wholly dependent on the mother, and therefor part of her body (and thus, her bodily autonomy). Indeed, there's a reading of the bible that supports this interpretation - it mentions multiple times a baby becoming alive "at its first breath".
For many people, the answer lies somewhere in the middle, but it's not clear at all that those people represent a majority.
The issue touches on strongly held moral beliefs on both sides - rights to life, right to bodily autonomy, and questions about when life starts.
There is no simple universal framing that we can all agree upon.
----
And even aside from framing, even if we could agree on a framing, the issue gets really complex, really fast. Lets say we do agree that the question is about when a life becomes a life.
Pregnancy is dangerous, as I well know. My wife and I lost three pregnancies. One of them was at 20 weeks. My son was already dead by the time we got to the hospital, but they had to remove his body from my wife's body or it risked a deadly infection. The medication they used to do that, in this case to trigger labor, was an abortion medication. The procedure they would have performed had that failed, was a DNC - an abortion. Both are already being banned by trigger laws in many states. In a room down the hall, a dear friend of ours who'd been struggling with infertility and loss was having a DNC the same day we lost our son, due to yet another failed pregnancy. Again, without that procedure, she would have died.
So you very quickly get into other complexities even when you do boil it down into a question of when life starts. And even then, the argument for banning it the way many states are (completely, with no exceptions) becomes hard to make about anything but control.
You can say it's about saving the life of the child - but we don't force dead people to donate their organs even when it would save a life. These laws will force women to die, even when there is no living child left to save.
>there are reasons to believe that the supreme court might come for birth control next
Reasons like Justice Thomas explicitly and clearly saying they should reconsider the ruling that prevents states from banning them.
From the NYT:
>Then, [Justice Thomas] took aim at three other landmark cases that relied on that same legal reasoning: Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that declared married couples had a right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same-sex sexual activity legal across the country; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry.
>Justice Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” all three decisions, saying it had a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents. Then, he said, after “overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions” protected the rights they established.
It's not nearly as vague as "there are reasons to believe" that the Court "might come for birth control next". Justice Thomas said it very very clearly in his opinion today:
"For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [contraception], Lawrence [sodomy], and Obergefell [same sex marriage]. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents."
Here's the thing. It's easy to believe that one side truly believes in the right to life, at least for innocents. Being against killing, at least for non criminals/enemies, is pretty common.
The right to bodily autonomy is not believable because there weren't a whole lot of people campaigning against vaccine mandates because they were pro-bodily-autonomy.
As for your examples, surely even pro-life people don't care about "abortions" of babies that are already dead? If laws are interpretable in that way it seems like an easy wording fix. Not many people would care about that even if religious.
There have been explicit cases of republicans holding public office saying that abortion bans should explicitly not make exceptions for ectopic pregnancies or even cases where the mother’s life depends on it in general
The people who passed the laws know damned well what they are banning. They are intentionally and explicitly banning the procedures by name. Medical professionals and the people these would affect pointed out to them the impact of banning the procedures. They don't care, they passed the laws anyway.
As for bodily-autonomy, most people I know who are pro-choice are also in favor of the vaccine because - same as abortion - they view it as a life saving medical procedure. Those who weren't did protest about bodily autonomy in relation to the vaccine mandate.
Doesn't matter if it's life saving, right? If you argue based on bodily autonomy, and then support vaccine mandates, you're not consistent regardless of what you think the vaccine does.
One doesn't have to take extreme positions to be consistent. In order to believe that someone should have bodily autonomy over continuing a pregnancy (something potentially life threatening, and definitely life altering) I don't have to believe that bodily autonomy is absolute.
Vaccines are something that touch on community health. When one person chooses not to get vaccinated they are putting everyone around them at risk. At the most extreme extent, abortion affects the potential parents, the potential life, and their families. It's a different risk calculation. A woman pursuing an abortion is making life and death decisions for (at most - because not everyone believes the fetus is a life with rights) two people. Someone not getting a vaccine in a deadly pandemic is making decisions that impact life and death for their whole community.
COVID vaccines never affected other people because they don't reduce transmission, and even if they did, the point of a vaccine is individual protection. If you think it works then it didn't matter what other people choose. And this holds true for many vaccines.
Yet, again, odd silence from the pro-choice crowd. Clearly they don't believe in choice nor bodily autonomy.
Abortion on the other hand does always affect other people, if you believe the fetus is a person.
But most importantly, yes you do have to be consistent. If you can't be consistent because you feel it requires adopting extreme positions then you need to rethink your moral code, because clearly, you may find that your position isn't as morally clear as you thought.
Ok, but that means that you are the fetus's enemy, and society has an obligation to choose a side in that fight to the death you are proposing, to make sure that the correct side ultimately wins.
I never understood the privacy aspect. If an alien were to come down and have human biology explained and was asked about their thoughts on abortion, I doubt they would invoke privacy. Maybe bodily autonomy, but not privacy. Perhaps I'm missing something.
In regards to bodily autonomy, again if the fetus is a life, you have to be a good steward of the life. I don't think you have a (moral) right to harm your body to the detriment of the life, much like you don't have a right to drive off a cliff with someone inside your car with you. And if someone assaults you and results in you losing your baby, I don't think that's the same as a regular assault.
How is the government going to know which people have fetuses in them, and how long they've been there, without some loss of privacy? (Do you think menstrual cycles are private information, for example?)
And how does the government know what people do (or plan to do) to their own bodies without some loss of privacy?
> In regards to bodily autonomy, again if the fetus is a life
Well yes, you can argue against bodily autonomy as a compelling argument for legalizing abortion. My initial point was that you were just ignoring it.
That said...
> you have to be a good steward of the life
Says who? Compelling someone to use their body as a host (not "steward") of another life is a violation of their bodily autonomy.
If you're going to use car analogies, we also don't say that anyone involved in a car crash must donate blood or organs to save other victims.
> The privacy aspect is simple. You have no right to know anything about my discussions with my doctor nor to dictate courses of action.
This is a pretty weak argument which could be used to justify any number of things. Can you rape or murder behind closed doors, and invoke the right to privacy when the authorities try to stop you?
Just because X happens in private doesn't make it legal and protected by privacy rights.
There are plenty of illegal medical procedures. You can't have a doctor remove a kidney and help you sell it, for example.
There are different levels of privacy. The government coming into your home is a much different violation of privacy than the government coming into your body.
The privacy argument is tenuous at best. We regulate how and what medical procedures can be performed all the time.
> The same people who (falsely) screamed about vaccine mandates being a HIPAA violation sure don't give a fuck about that now.
If you're going to make the argument that privacy requirements protect abortion procedures, then that would also mean that vaccine mandates are not allowed for the same reason. You can't have it both ways.
True, but of the three topics you mention, one clearly dominates the others: when does human life begin. Bodily autonomy and privacy will always be secondary matters that cannot decide the legality of abortion.
It's curious that the definition of human life is different in every state. The circumstances around brain death, euthanasia, and suicide are decided locally, not federally. In fact, I think before ROe v Wade, the Supremes never before tried to define what is "human" and what is not. Even the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th amendment (which decided the citizenship and equal protection under law of black people) was not decided by the Supremes but by the states.
Probably, now, it would be better if the states wrote legislation that clearly defines human life, thereby taking such an important issue out of the hands of unelected politicians like the Supremes.
Even if we agreed that life begins at conception, it's not at all clear to me that the bodily autonomy and privacy issues would go away.
> it would be better if the states wrote legislation that clearly defines human life
Except there's no objective answer in reality, because "human life" is a fuzzy made-up concept. I doubt some arbitrary legislation would settle things down. People would still disagree just as vehemently.
No, the framing should be around the women's right to bodily autonomy. In Florida, they have a "stand your ground" law. If someone threatens your life, or even great bodily harm, you are allowed to use lethal force.
Giving birth is a life threatening process. Even under fairly routine births, women endure significant bodily harm, often irreversible. Look up prolapse. Your organs literally push out of you vagina. This impacts 20-35% of women and for many of them this condition is permanent.
If you are allowed to shoot someone in Florida because they threatened your bodily autonomy, why shouldn't a women be allowed to terminate a pregnancy for the same reason?
In the middle ages it was considered to become a person at the 'quickening', when it started to move. The reasoning being that the soul had entered the body at that point.
Even when the fetus becomes a baby, it still matters. You are forcing another person to help that baby, in a much stronger (albeit temporary) way than any other.
Think about it; you are not required to help somebody if they're in an accident or a fire; you're not required to donate blood, but you would require a woman to donate blood and nutrients, spent several months of hardship and have a small but non-zero risk of serious health problems.
At some point it changes; in my mind, around viability. If the baby is delivered, you cannot kill it (you may be required to take care of it, although many states allow you to give up your kids).
Somewhere around 6 months, we might require a woman to give birth... Maybe
I agree; I also think it's important to allow the people to decide these kinds of hot, controversial issues.
7 people shouldn't have the power to command millions of people.
It's better to persuade, discuss, debate, change hearts and minds, than to dictate top-down.
I personally believe only women should be allowed to vote on this issue. It's their bodies, and they bear the overwhelming brunt of childcare and labor associated with raising children. They take the risks. They ought to be in the driver seat.
>I personally believe only women should be allowed to vote on this issue. It's their bodies, and they bear the overwhelming brunt of childcare and labor associated with raising children. They take the risks. They ought to be in the driver seat.
I fail to see how that conclusion follows the reasoning. If anything them having a dog in the race would make their opinion biased, and thus void. The discussion is not whether if women should have control over their bodies or not, it's about the morality of exercising that control over a living human being that might or not be considered conscious to some degree.
Any group when facing the option of giving itself more rights will be biased towards the positive and surely impartiality ought to be important in this kind of matter?
Note that this isn't something I desire, as I see it the whole of society has a say on how things are run, and so we all discuss things such as education even if we aren't going to undergo any more education, it's just if you want to make this a special case and make a differentiation, anyone capable of pregnancy should be the first group out the door.
I appreciate the primacy of the mother's opinion over the father's or the courts' (since pregnancy affects only her body among those three parties), but I hate to dismiss the father as if he were just a bystander.
But surely there's another participant that deserves a voice. If it's a person (or even partly a person), then its most precious possession, it's life, is to be taken. Surely its voice cannot be dismissed outright. That's why I believe this issue is not as simple as letting only the mother (or the courts) decide. Historically, abortion has done a lot of harm, irrespective of Roe v Wade.
Personally, I think we need to try harder to minimize the injuries inherent in abortion. Let's not make a complex issue binary, as merely right or wrong. Technology and creativity are our friends. I believe it's possible to find 'cures' that do far less harm than is done now and to work toward even better ways until the rights of everyone involved are served.
> The fact is that at some point between inception and time of delivery
I don’t think this is that complicated of an issue. The moment when the parent decides they want to keep the baby, is the moment when the fetus becomes a person. That precise time is when the fetus has someone that loves and cares for it, holds attachment towards it, etc.
However if the parent carrying the child is not allowed to make that decision form them self, then this becomes unnecessarily complicated.
I don’t agree with your framing. In my opinion, at some point between a baby being born and going to preschool, the child will become intelligent enough to warrant being called a real person. It’s quite probable that treating a just-born baby as a full human has its advantages, but that is certainly not biologically true. A baby is less aware than cows, and people eat cows all around.
That's not a "fact" at all, actually. I can tell that you tried hard to frame the issue in such a way that you could present this "fact", but it's still just an opinion. In fact, for many centuries, a lot of people have felt and thought and believed that personhood is not conferred until birth.
No, they aren't irrelevant. The fetus is an obligate parasite. It could be a person and still not have the right to force the mother to carry it to term.
This is such horse shit. No one in this issue is for taking a life so to presuppose that that is where the issue lies is plainly insulting. The pro-choice movement doesn't believe its a life. Understanding the greater social impacts of limiting abortion doesn't muddy that.
There was a time when the democrat party stood for abortions being "legal safe and rare". None other than Bill Clinton said this. Perhaps this decision will now allow state legislatures to pick a reasonable time limit. This does not have to be a wedge issue.
Hahahahaha no. I live in Louisiana, which had a law passed a while ago that said the moment RvW was struck down, all abortions are illegal. No exceptions for rape or incest or risk to the mother; someone put a baby in that womb, and you, as womb-bearer, will carry it to term no matter what.
It was a wedge issue when the GOP picked it up and made an unholy alliance with the raving fire-and-brimstone preachers of the South that got Reagan in office. It has continued to be a wedge issue that the GOP has relied on to get their asses in office for pretty much my entire life.
It cuts both ways. What you're saying about the GOP is 100% true. It also became the Democrats' fundraising angle for 30+ years, despite their total inaction on passing an actual law recognizing the right to abortion. Democrats like Joe Biden supported bans on federal funding for abortion via medicare, which led to the present condition when people have to rely on clinics/non-profits for abortion care.
The only winner in the partisan fight are the elites in both parties. We need a working class party to resist both of the parties of American capitalism.
God yes, I sure would have preferred to vote for Bernie over both Joe and Hillary. I was super delighted to get to vote for an actual socialist candidate over a Democrat when I was living in Seattle, and the amount of rich Seattleites who were constantly butthurt over her policies was a regular source of delight.
It's also not 1970 anymore. There's a prophalactic pill, there's morning after pill, and there's freedom of movement between states. Women are capable of exerting self-responsibility over their reproduction, and they are not helpless victims.
If you have money, or a network of help, and a safe home situation...
It's easy to say "everyone in a regressive state should move". It's easy to say "everyone in a regressive country should move". Not everyone has that option as readily available as you might imagine.
There are inconviences behind everything you go to do. Simply saying "not everybody can afford something" is not an argument. It's a convenient escape hatch. If people spent half the effort to actually help any women in such a situation than they do at protesting, most such extreme situations could be solved.
Except access to contraception is based on the same reading of the constitution that Roe v Wade depended on and has now been gutted. There are now legitimate pushes to outlaw contraception for unmarried people.
So now I must travel hours to receive a procedure that may save MY life?
If I have an ectopic pregnancy you are going to make me cross multiple states potentially to have a life saving procedure that can currently be performed at any small hospital in the country if not for legal restrictions? That's certainly part asinine.
Most of the legislation either includes or is eventually amended to provide for those exceptions. 12 to 15 weeks is generally should be more than enough time.
There's also a hell of a lot of people in this state who can't afford to take multiple days off from their four jobs that barely pay the bills between them to travel halfway across the country for an abortion if they find out after it's too late for any pills. Most of the Bible Belt has similar trigger laws; the closest states that still have legal abortion are Minnesota, Kansas, and Illinois.
The GOP is working their hardest to send everyone back to 1970. Or further. 1850 looks pretty good to them.
> What I witnessed was no less than a 45 minute diatribe on the dangers of abortion, casting various aspersions (ad hominem) on any political leader not on board with new political agenda of the Catholic Church.
A typical Catholic Mass lasts less than one hour. Most of the Mass follows a fixed, prescribed set of prayers and readings, that have nothing to do with politics. In the middle there's a sermon, that usually lasts about 15 minutes, that might include references to news or to politics.
Either you ended up at a very atypical mass, and by very atypical I'd say borderline heretic, or you don't remember well.
> with new political agenda of the Catholic Church.
New? Like it or not, the position of the Catholic Church on abortion has been extraordinarily consistent through the centuries.
Yeah, I'm not Catholic, but I go to services in all three major branches (Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic) and I am a Christian. Granted, I've only been to one service in the USA in recent years, but even still, Canada is not so different and I've not even heard abortion mentioned once nor long diatribes on any specific political issue other than vague warnings against government manipulated media.
But this isn't what gets mentioned in Hacker News comments. And it certainly isn't what is upvoted. The internet boosts grievances and fourth sigma event reporting.
> New? Like it or not, the position of the Catholic Church on abortion has been extraordinarily consistent through the centuries.
That's not even remotely true!
For the vast majority of the history of the Catholic Church early term abortion was acceptable. It was only the 1588 that it was outlawed, and that didn't last long, only a few years. Another ban was instituted in 1869.
At the timescale of the Catholic Church, the current extremist position on abortions is extremely recent. Far less established as precedent than say Roe was.
150 years out of 2000 is not consistent. If you value consistency, then ignore the current ruling as its relatively fresh and just carry on with abortion.
Not sure why you’re downvoted, my wife is catholic and you’re right on every point. I would even go further and say deviating from the standard ritual of catholic mass is probably a big no-no in the church and could land a priest in hot water.
I'm not as old as you (born in the late 80's) but my family left the church (protestant) for this exact reason. There was more discussion of social/political issues than of scripture. To be fair, I think it's OK to some extent, but the elders had made it a priority to denigrate liberal ideas and beliefs.
Look up the Koch brothers. They're largely responsible for much of the chaos we see in our country today.
Like most things, follow the money. How do you get people to care about the same sermon on the same verse year after year? Want to get people involved with their time and money? You just have to convince them of whatever evils they already believe. Be their echo chamber, talk about all the people who are trying to do such terrible things. Be a fear-monger. The same thing that works for Fox News and CNN also works in a church. Get them addicted to the rhetoric and watch the money flow in. Look at people like Joel Osteen who only care about money.
I grew up going to church multiple times per week. Today's church is a cult and it is a cult about hate. I learned in Sunday School that God is love and that we should help each other. Today the message is righteous indignation. They don't believe in the Bible or follow Jesus' teachings but they are very very adamant that the "sinners" must be converted to their way of thinking. It is nothing but hypocrisy and if pointed out, Christians have decided that they and they alone have the right to decide what parts of the Bible matter and what doesn't.
IMHO this is profoundly tragic, and bad, and Jesus would not be proud of that. The church should be helping people to be caring for one another, and looking after the downtrodden and vulnerable. Protecting the rights of unborn children should not involve being nasty to other people, it should involve making clear arguments and being willing to provide decent support for people with unplanned pregnancies. It feels to me like the church, particulary in USA, got hijacked by a bunch of people who don't have any real faith but just use it for their political agenda. Pope Francis wouldn't agree with their stance I'm sure, but then he believes in devolving power away from Rome which, while that is for good reason, allows things like this to go unchecked. Whole lot of complex issues.....
Except that the court relinquished its power to decide on these matters. It may not seem like it now to you, but it actually gains credibility by the courts, because they are not put in the middle of such a consequential decision. It allows the legislature to act. This isn't a power grab, but a relinquishing of power.
The supreme court can at least hide behind some abstract legal argument (spurious or otherwise).
Much more concerning to me is the states who have enacted the actual bans with whatever passes for a democratic mandate. And it's that system which presumably will be the only tool that people have to protect themselves.
What powergrab has ever relinquished power? It's literally the opposite of a powergrab. What power do Christian conservatives now suddenly have?
This was a democrat party talking point to show supporters and fundraisers how indebted they should be for being "given" a right. No one owes any politician anything.
What may I ask is your specific grievance with the Democratic Party, which you have twice in this thread incorrectly called the "democrat" party? You've clearly got some beef, so state it plainly.
My beef is with politicians in general. No one is indebted to a party, republican or democrat. But at least republicans aren't claiming credit for giving you your "rights".
Sorry, for not capitolizing Democrat, since you seem to see such great offense in it.
>But at least republicans aren't claiming credit for giving you your "rights".
Can you point to somewhere that Democrats have claimed to "give" rights? Democrats aim to "protect" rights, but the Constitution is where rights are enumerated and/or it is recognized that there are rights that may exist beyond what is enumerated. Further, if you were to read the party platform of the Democratic Party, you would see that protecting and enhancing rights is a fundamental core value.
>Sorry, for not capitolizing Democrat, since you seem to see such great offense in it.
It's "capitalizing" not "capitolizing" and it's not its state as a proper noun I was noting. The party is not "The democrats" or "democrat" it is the "Democratic" party. Sure, it's just words, but if you are going to repeatedly call out a party in a thread for some grievances, it's useful to call them by their actual name.
You've lost the thread of the discussion. I said the reason the Democrat party is so protective of Roe v Wade is because its a cornerstone of their powerbase and how they give their supporters and fundraisers the impression they are giving them their rights. Not from the constitution, but from them, because nothing about abortion is in the constitution. If you read Roe v wade decision, you'll note they had to introduce the idea of a right to privacy, which also does not exist. From a purely jurisprudence perspective, its all built on smoke and mirrors. These issues were supposed to be settled in state legislatures, which is what the decision today asserts. Now, state legislatures are in a position to circumscribe abortion around cases where it is acceptable. It may be extreme to call it a life at conception, but it's also extreme to call it not a life right before birth. There's middle ground here.
One major change that spurred specifically the Catholic church into politics was the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) which permitted priests and bishops to participate in politics.
I never experienced long political diatribes when I attended Catholic mass a few years ago. There wasn't much time for speaking as the mass itself is quite involved.
> It occurred to me that all of this must have been carefully planned at the highest levels of both the church and political/financial benefactors that support it.
I'm curious if we'll see leaks confirming this. Otherwise this might be an anecdote stretched a little too far. It's far more likely you've experienced some bad pastors.
"There shouldn't be intermediaries between God and human beings"--is a Protestant doctrine. This doctrine has gone secular: separation of church and state. In other words, protestant Christian ideas have become the foundation of many modern political theories.
For a Catholic, the Catholic Church is the intermediary between him/her and God.
this was masterminded in large part by Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society. he's Catholic, and the upper echelons of the organization are virtually all Catholic, and has enjoyed tremendous influence - even providing Bush and Trump with shortlists of Justices to pick from.
unsurprisingly, the majority of Justices are now Catholic - Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor (liberal, not a FedSoc pick), Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett.
Why is it a surprise that the Catholic Church is against abortion? This list of religions that are ok with abolition is short. It would be quite a big thing for a catholic to turn a blind eye to and not consider when voting.
> Why is it a surprise that the Catholic Church is against abortion?
What's surprising is the American Catholic priesthood tends to go after pro-choice politicians, but not pro-death-penalty ones, despite the church seeing both as similarly objectionable. The political bent is fairly new.
Catholic dogma is also very pro immigration. The birth of Jesus during migration, and that he was cared for by accommodating strangers (and even other migrating nomads) is a big deal in Christianity. The current pope’s rhetoric underscores this.
Why they focus so much on abortion is suspect indeed.
> What’s surprising is the American Catholic priesthood tends to go after pro-choice politicians, but not pro-death-penalty ones, despite the church seeing both as similarly objectionable.
[EDIT: This first paragraph is incorrect as is pointed out in a response; it is left unchanged for context of the discussion.]
They are not viewed as “similarly objectionable”. The death penalty is viewed as being within the legitimate power of government doctrinally, but the present leadership of the Church views prudentially that the conditions which allow it do not occur in the modern world. Direct abortion is viewed as doctrinally prohibited. This is an important theological distinction because the Church heirarchy is viewed (borrowing some language from law) as having binding authority on doctrine, but only (very strongly) persuasive authority on prudential application of doctrine to particular material contexts.
That being said, you are correct that the political actions of the American Catholic heirarchy (more the bishops than the priesthood, and not all of them) are rather unbalanced (and not just on this pair of issues) in a way which is not easily explained by any coherent appeal to the actual social teaching of the Catholic Church.
> They are not viewed as “similarly objectionable”. The death penalty is viewed as being within the legitimate power of government doctrinally
Respectfully, no. The catechism reads, "the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person"[0]. This is a recent revision, and what you say reflects what was officially taught until 2017.
I stand corrected. I was aware Francis had solidified the move to “never” from “almost never” that had been palpably occurring for some time, but somehow missed that he had articulated it as a categorical violation of morals rather as a progression of prudential judgement in changing circumstances as other recent Popes had.
"[..] it has been infallibly taught by the ordinary magisterium of the Church that the death penalty is not intrinsically wrong. Not even a pope can reverse this teaching." [0]
A claim by a lay philosopher that something has been infallibly taught is not the same as an actual infallible teaching, and if you even casually follow Catholic debates, you will find a lot of conflicting claims about what has an has not been infallibly taught.
Arguably, the most these writings about what has been implicitly infallibly taught and therefore cannot be changed by a Pope despite the absence of an explicit dogma tell you is what the author is very concerned that there is an insufficient commitment to among the heirarchy and probably a risk of imminent change by a Pope, which the author is lobbying against.
(Or, as in this case, what has recently been actually changed by a Pope that the author wishes everyone to pretend has not.)
People can argue whatever they want in an editorial, but I will take the word of the pope and the catechism when it comes to the question of, "what is the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church on X?"
Well I certainly can't blame you for that. However, it's far from clear whether the change to the catechism can even be reconciled with prior teachings at all. I only linked to one article among many, but there is considerable confusion about this change throughout the church and Pope Francis has not really offered any clarification.
> Well I certainly can’t blame you for that. However, it’s far from clear whether the change to the catechism can even be reconciled with prior teachings at all.
If one views the argument that the prior teachings were infallibly proclaimed as incorrect, than there is no need to reconcile them; the prior teachings were simply in error.
Unsurprisingly, Francis has not only identified the previous approach as in error, he has both explained where the error is and provided an (unnecessary) explanation of what led people to make the error.
> there is considerable confusion about this change throughout the church and Pope Francis has not really offered any clarification
No one is confused or has any need of clarification. “It is per se contrary to the Gospel” isn’t the kind of statement that leaves a whole lot of room for different readings.
> This list of religions that are ok with abolition is short.
You are incorrect, but this is also a specious argument. The list of religious that were anti-slavery was short at the outset of the 19th century and a mile long by the outset of the 20th. Church doctrine is not immune to influence by popular sentiment.
It's common to say "political" when a topic in question is challenged. But everything can be. Zeitgeist, and context changes, so the very same sermon becomes "political". For what I know Catholic position on abortion didn't change from OP's childhood. His perception probably did.
I'm pro-choice but I still believe that this is the right move.
> “My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
You believe it is right on a technicality, but don't care to factor in the women who are guaranteed an early, unnecessary death because of this ruling?
People are guaranteed early, unnecessary deaths when they cannot afford expensive medical treatments for their rare conditions. Or insulin for their diabetes. Or housing for their family.
Where in our constitution and laws are these things codified as rights? They are not.
In the same way, abortion is not a right. But I believe it should be. This is an issue that our elected officials must decide, not the courts.
"Where in our constitution and laws are these things codified as rights?"
Um, how about Roe v Wade and the TEN times the Supreme Court upheld RvW since it was decided, including as recently as 2016? The court just blew up precedent with a ten ton nuke and you're arguing hey, it was just good jurisprudence!
Do you understand the difference between the constitution and the courts? The court does not invent rights, nor should it. It is the federal government’s responsibility to codify rights, and it is the courts responsibility to affirm them.
Separate but equal was precedent for a long time as well, would you be arguing the same for that?
You're ignoring what I said, which is that a right established by the highest court, and ten times affirmed by the highest court, including as recently as 6 years ago, just obliterated that entire history in a ruling that is guaranteed to carry a toll in human health and human lives.
"The court does not invent rights, nor should it."
It has established many specific rights that are not articulated in the Constitution or codified in laws. Most still stand.
"Separate but equal was precedent for a long time as well, would you be arguing the same for that?"
I'm confused, how many vulnerable women died as a result of that?
> You're ignoring what I said, which is that a right established by the highest court, and ten times affirmed by the highest court, including as recently as 6 years ago, just obliterated that entire history in a ruling that is guaranteed to carry a toll in human health and human lives.
All of this posturing is irrelevant to the fact that the right which was granted did not follow from the arguments being made. Our courts should follow sound reasoning when establishing unenumerated rights. They also should not care about what the impact would be downstream of their decisions; their reasoning should stand on its own.
> It has established many specific rights that are not articulated in the Constitution or codified in laws. Most still stand.
And some no longer do.
> I'm confused, how many vulnerable women died as a result of that?
Impossible to say, but it had to be a non-negligible amount. Either way, that has no bearing on which way the court should rule.
The laws represent the will of the people via their elected representatives. The court adjudicates these laws and their validity as it relates to our constitution.
"They also should not care about what the impact would be downstream of their decisions; their reasoning should stand on its own."
Do we live in the same reality? As the dissenting justices stated, "The majority's refusal even to consider the life-altering consequences of reversing Roe and Casey is a stunning indictment of its decision."
Judges are not law-interpreting robots and no one ever pretended they are supposed to be (until you I guess). Their decisions impact the health and welfare of hundreds of millions of human beings and to not incorporate that reality into their work would be monstrously inhumane. There is a long history of rulings directly referencing the impact of decisions, to argue otherwise is a lie or disingenuous.
None of your analogies are applicable. Somebody dying because their personal circumstances made receiving medical care difficult or impossible, is patently different than dying because someone else was allowed to deny them medical care by imposing their personal religious beliefs.
How is pregnancy not a personal circumstance? Anyway, you are right that they are not directly comparable because pregnancy and abortion are such unique things. I suppose the most similar analogy I could think of is a doctor refusing to perform a surgery which has a high chance of outright killing a patient and a smaller chance of treating the issue.
Either way, there is no constitutional right to an abortion, and that is the fundamental issue. Call your representatives and demand them to take action on codifying the right to abortion.
Pregnancy does not, in and of itself, prevent access to medical care. So while it is a personal circumstance, it is entirely inapplicable within the context of care being intentionally prevented.
> I suppose the most similar analogy I could think of is a doctor refusing to perform a surgery which has a high chance of outright killing a patient and a smaller chance of treating the issue.
Not analogous, at all. That's a medical professional making a single medical decision based on medical information. That surgeon is not preventing the patient from finding another surgeon who will perform the procedure. Whereas what you're suggesting, is that freedom of religion should give politicians the right to make a singular blanket medical decision on behalf of everyone in their state, present and future, without any situational knowledge or medical reasoning.
It's not a constitutional right to abortion. It's a constitutional right to not have personal liberties stripped by the states which are enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and right to privacy are all enumerably applicable to preserving this liberty. The ability for anyone to impose their personal religious beliefs on a population violates all of those rights.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up religion, I have not mentioned it at all. Perhaps you are conflating the reason for some states passing of anti-abortion laws with the law itself.
Either way, the federal government does not grant this right, therefore it is up to states to decide.
> It's a constitutional right (9th amendment) to not have personal liberties stripped by the states which are not enumerated in the Constitution. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and right to privacy are all enumerably applicable to preserving this liberty.
None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.
> I don’t know why you keep bringing up religion, I have not mentioned it at all.
The only objection anyone has to abortion is based on religious beliefs. So, you didn't need to mention it. It's the foundation of the entire issue -- that religious beliefs can be imposed on a population as law. Saying that it's irrelevant to the discussion betrays an ignorance of the subject at hand.
> None of these rights apply to abortion. If anything, there should be an enumerated right to bodily autonomy.
The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable. For a different example, the 4th amendment doesn't contain any verbiage about police officers opening a trunk during a traffic stop, but the declaration that they must have probable cause still applies. In the exact same way, to assert religious beliefs that affect someone else's medical care violates all of the rights I listed.
> The only objection anyone has to abortion is based on religious beliefs
Uh…what? I am not religious (agnostic/atheist) but I object to abortion after a certain amount of time except in the cases of grave bodily harm or being the product of forced reproduction (idk what the site rules are on certain language, but I trust you understand what I mean). I believe that the unborn baby is a viable human life at some point and that abortion without a justifiable reason after that point would be equivalent to murder. I also believe many people also feel the same way I do.
> The enumeration does not need to specifically reference the word to be applicable
Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case.
> I believe that the unborn baby is a viable human life at some point and that abortion without a justifiable reason after that point would be equivalent to murder.
That's the entire point! You're not objecting to abortion. You're objecting at some point in time and only when it's medically unjustifiable. But those moral thresholds are different for every individual and there are medically justifiable situations, which is exactly why no individual should be able to impose their personal beliefs as a law which declares those medical situations as unjustifiable.
You're welcome to have moral objections and believe they are the most correct or reasonable, but they have no bearing on the concerted efforts of religious groups and individuals to outright ban access to medical care. And that's the discussion at hand, which you keep conveniently ignoring. Many people have total opposition to all abortions in all situations and specifically for religious reasons, which is what actual, real-life politicians are implementing as we speak.
Someone else having an abortion (whether you believe it's murder or not) doesn't infringe on your rights. But you imposing your beliefs in a way that affects someone else's medical care is absolutely infringing on their rights. These are fundamental concepts of our democracy.
Just because everyone may not be be able to agree on exactly when that viability threshold is or what reasons are justifiable does not mean we should not attempt to do so. Almost all states (and other countries) where abortion is legalized still have reasonable limits on when they may be performed (e.g., not after second trimester). I think we would both agree that an abortion of an otherwise viable and healthy baby one day before expected delivery would be unethical.
The religious arguments for banning all abortion for any reasons are not sound and I would not expect such laws to pass scrutiny when challenged in court (but who knows nowadays).
Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.
All this being said, I support the right of a woman to receive an abortion, within reason. It is up to our elected officials to codify this right. It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.
> Almost all states (and other countries) where abortion is legalized still have reasonable limits on when they may be performed (e.g., not after second trimester). I think we would both agree that an abortion of an otherwise viable and healthy baby one day before expected delivery would be unethical.
Your moral compass isn't accounting for the logistics of pregnancy. At any point during a pregnancy or childbirth, complications can arise which risk the mother's life, and a medical decision is most often made to save her instead of a potentially healthy child. By both medical and legal definition, this is still an abortion. To declare that it's not ethical to abort in these situations is a declaration that it is ethical to kill the mother. So, we very much do not agree that the ethics of abortion are obvious or even quantifiable.
> Many things people do don’t infringe on my rights. Someone murdering another person doesn’t infringe MY rights, but it is still wrong. A parent beating their child doesn’t infringe my rights but is still abuse.
I think you missed the point here, or I wasn't clear enough. Given that the spectrum of ethics doesn't allow for a standard threshold of "murder" and we've already established that abortions are a medical necessity, the only case against the right to abortion boils down to being personally offended by someone else's actions. If medical care can be decided by personal offense and codified into a law that is guaranteed to be harmful, then we don't actually have the freedoms described in the Constitution.
> Yes, but we are in disagreement on which rights are applicable in this case. [...] It is not, nor should it ever be, the responsibility of the court to attempt to enshrine a right that does not exist through case law.
Freedom of speech protects the moral threshold discussed earlier. Right to privacy protects medical information. Freedom of religion is based on separation of church and state, which means religious beliefs shouldn't hold any bearing at the federal level, particularly because they may directly contradict the beliefs of another religion. These are all fundamental concepts of our democracy, and it is absolutely the court's job to uphold them when challenged.
And the case law does exist (it's the one which just got overturned), so even if you were correct about the court's responsibility, then they just did the opposite of what you're purporting that responsibility to be.
So you believe that doing the wrong thing for the right reason is better than doing the right thing for the wrong reason? That intent matters more than outcome? And that laws being structured in a way you specifically find compelling matters more than the morality of a law?
I think we can have some nuance here. As individuals I believe we have the leeway to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. But once we get to the level of government and acting in accordance with laws, I believe that acting for the right reasons (i.e. following the laws) is the only option that can lead to long term outcomes.
For the government to selectively follow laws, saying that in this case they don't apply since they don't give us the right result, makes a mockery of the very idea of having laws.
If we're speaking about what one should use as guiding principles, then it seems that if one acts for the "right" reasons, then that usually result in doing the right thing and only unusually results in doing the wrong thing.
Whereas if one acts for the "wrong" reasons, then that will only rarely result in doing the "right" thing.
One can look back at the original Roe v Wade and say "The right thing was done here, the outcome was good", but having that sort of consequentialist outlook tends to blind people to the downside of having the right things done for the wrong reasons- which is as we see here, those wrong reasons can in the future easily lead to the undoing of the right thing.
The original Roe v Wade decision meant that Congress never had to pass a law that explicitly nationally legalized abortion. If they had, the current situation wouldn't exist.
The Roe vs. Wade decision was the wrong way to solve the problem because it specifically set the stage for decades where the legislature didn't enshrine abortion as a right, and thus left it up for grabs to be taken back away only decades later. Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues that if Roe vs. Wade had been less sweeping, that the existing cultural movement in favor of women's rights would have naturally led to the protection of this right on a more fundamental and long lasting level.
Could you explain this a bit more please? (I'm not from the US so I'm possibly missing something but your comment is surprising at a broad strokes level)
Edit: I see you've edited your post already with a quote which is helpful.
The original Roe v Wade ruling, regardless of opinion on the outcome, was widely viewed as being based on a weak and poorly reasoned judicial argument. The risk of leaving defective judicial reasoning as precedent is that it enables a whole class of undesirable legal outcomes in the future unrelated to abortion. For this reason, it was expected that the Supreme Court would eventually fix this mistake. This ruling doesn't outlaw abortion, it merely moves it outside that court's jurisdiction and leaves it to other parts of government to decide.
I support this ruling for this reason even though I am against outlawing abortion.
It wasn't. This ruling is not about the constitution it's about power. Roe vs Wade was fine. This ruling is based on the fact that Republicans after decades got 6 extreme social conservatives on the court who decided they don't like Abortion
I basically see people holding states more accountable now. State politicians who are pro-life are on notice. They can no longer cry about it and blame the federal government. The issue is now on their plate- and it's a thorny one. People need to vote.
But the Supreme Court just banned the rights of states to decide how they apply gun laws. Specifically, New York was prevented [days ago](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-gun-law-new-york-...) from deciding how concealed carry should be implemented.
Surely you can see the hypocrisy in only being in favour of state rights when it suits you.
You should read the actual opinion, and not the "summary" that this journalist put together. They didn't "ban the rights of states to decide how they apply gun laws". Simply that certain types of "may issue" permitting are at odds with 2A, because they deny Americans the exercise of an enumerated right for arbitrary reasons.
Permit Requester: I want to carry a pistol outside the home for self defense reasons.
Issuer: I don't believe your self defense claims are legitimate.
Requester: Why?
Issuer: I don't have to tell you.
SCOTUS enters the chat: This is no longer allowed.
There's a big difference in how you framed it, how that journalist framed it, and what actually happened. There is no hypocrisy here.
As much as it pains me to point this out, you cannot draw much of an analog between abortion and gun laws when it comes to states rights, because guns are protected by the Constitution very explicitly, abortion is not.
I think that it's more complicated than that. My take away was that NY gun laws allowed people to concealed carry with approval but were basically denying lawful approvals which ran afoul of the second amendment.
It ran around of the 14th amendment. Only people who donated money to the right politicians got approved for CCL. NY is still free to regulate handgun carry requirements, they just can't deny permits arbitrarily.
I'm not sure the political currents present in America today indicate that states won't eagerly trample the right's of their citizens. Especially considering the voting restrictions and minoritarian rule pet projects of the right.
America is also rife with examples of the federal government intervening to protect citizens from their states — Brown v Board, or most extremely the Civil War.
"People need to vote" is insufficient for regressions on issues that affect people's livelihoods. For example, Texas has a larger democrat-voting population than many blue states, "just voting" won't do anything to improve their livelyhood in the foreseeable future.
Are you at all concerned that now that this becomes a State level issue we move the wedge from a single federal level to 50 different wedges clogging up legislatures? We've been arguing about Roe for half a century, will this lead to resolution or is it a metastasization? Just an initial thought I had, even though I agree on all your points.
That sounds good in theory, but we know about the states where the republicans seemingly cannot be voted out of office - not helped by all their changes to the election system to prevent that. But indeed it would be ironic, if the public reaction to this were that strong so that a lot of red states turn blue. But I don't have too high hopes. Too many people in the whole spectrum don't see a ban of abortion affecting them while it is too easy to be "pro life".
Here is a thought: I'm a pro-choice New Englander. If those states like Kentucky are so strongly pro-life, then who am I to push my New England center/lib culture onto them?
It's liberating in a way- I don't need the whole country to subscribe to living like me or holding the same beliefs and that's okay.
To what extent are you willing to let other states restrict rights of US citizens because their cultural majority is different from yours? Is there a line? Perhaps 330 million people is too many to have in a single culture.
I am starting to come around to that view myself. The mythology of America has been dying for some time, and accelerating dramatically in the last few decades. Without that mythology to bind us together, it may be that we are more different than we thought. Arguably the majority of people in the southeast, for example, do not share the same values as people in the northwest. Maybe they should not try.
Our mythology has always been life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech and religion. Democracy. Rule of law. They aren't as radical and in vogue today but this was and still is our "mythology", IMO.
I think that's an idealized interpretation of a young country that spent it's first 100 years believing humanity is attached to skin color, fought a brutal civil war over that before spending its next 100 years preventing most of them from entering commerce, and its last ~50 years incarcerating as many of them as possible. And things like shadow wars in Cambodia do not look good on a country proclaiming "rule of law". So perhaps that's how you perceive it's shared methodology, but certainly not "how it has always been".
My theory is not that mythology kept you together, but that there was enough cultural and physical space to peacefully ignore each other if anyone so wished, simply by moving a bit further away. Communications were slow enough that they could be digested or ignored more or less at will.
The problem is that, between natural population growth and the rise of the internet, both the cultural plane and the physical one have largely run out of space. Figurative "midwest zealots" just cannot live their lives ignoring "coastern heathens" even if they'd like to, and viceversa. And so the fights have broken out and will likely continue for a long time.
This is not a state issue or a cultural issue, it is an individual issue.
It does not matter what people in Kentucky think. They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions. Even if every person in Kentucky, or every person on the planet believed abortion is wrong, that would not impact an individual person's right to an abortion. Abortion is outside the scope of what governments can legitimately legislate, because individuals have sovereign control over their bodies.
> They do not have the right to an opinion on another person's life decisions.
The other side says that the fetus is a person with rights that are being trampled. And around and around we go forever. I am personally pro choice but I do understand that this is 100% my own subjective opinion.
Ahmen to that. We wouldn't be in this situation if liberals took voting as seriously as conservatives.
I've seen 100's of comments over the last year about how "I'm done voting because the student loans were not forgiven" ... I don't think the next period in America is going to go very well.
The problem is that even if abortion rights are re-established on stronger footing in the future, a whole lot of people are going to get hurt in the meantime.
I'm pro-choice as well and think this was the right decision. Roe created a Constitutional right that didn't exist. All this does today is correct that mistake.
As a big believer in states' rights, I"m glad to see more rights returned to their voters and legislatures. As was frequently told to me, "If you don't like it, you can move to another state." And I did.
Furthermore, this decision gets rid of the viability precedent so more extreme liberals states are now free to pass all the 3rd tri-mester up-until-the-moment-of-birth abortion laws they want, free of any potential legal challenges.
This gives states and their voters, the citizens, the people the right to choose. And I'm all for that.
do you think the supreme court did this because they share the same opinion as rbg? I think this Case was maybe a wonky solution for the Problem but it was the only one you Americans Had.
RBG thought that Roe v Wade won for the wrong reasons, but didn't want to repeal it because of the damage she knew it would cause – she wanted to roll-forward rather than roll-back.
This court, or at least the conservative majority, are very much in favour of rolling-back, and I suspect are only vaguely in favour of letting the legislature pass laws because they know that there will be challenges to those laws that they can then get involved in, meanwhile they have shifted the overton window of women's rights.
It's important to note that the idea that Roe was decided incorrectly, is a myth perpetuated by fedsoc and other reactionaries. And the liberal legal academics did nothing to counter it.
Do you really think they wouldn't still overturn if it was decided based on equal protection? We should not fall into the trap of deifying the court. They are not above politics and they never have been.
And they didn't rule against it because of the privacy angle. They ruled against it because they are trying to destroy the jurisprudence of substantive due process and unenumerated rights, because it serves their reactionary politics.
Only if you buy in to the reactionary attack on substantive due process in general. And it's a mistake to think if Roe were decided any other way, that it still wouldn't have been overturned. Reactionaries do a great job of smuggling their politics as socially acceptable, fictional legal frameworks like textualism, even though they clearly abandon that whenever it is in conflict with their politics.
The fact that the same institution (SCOTUS), reading the same text (US Constitution) could conclude that abortion is a right, then isn't, tells us much of what we need to know about said institution, text... and certainly "historicism" as well.
It's all arbitrary; clever and well-read people spending a lot of time justifying and rationalizing their predjudice.
Which is why I think that making this decision should be done via a legislative branch instead, rather then unelected partisan, unaccountable, lifetime appointed judges.
Well said. This reversal really exposes the court as a political entity imo.
The Supreme Court just ruled that abortion is a question for the states, but concealed weapons laws aren’t. What’s more likely, that this all fits into some complex theory of states rights, or that it’s republican majority siding with the republican party?
This will debilitate and kill and a lot of women in conservative states, and it opens the door to potentially eradicating the self-autonomy of tens of millions of non-desirable people (women, racial and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities).
Just another day of religious extremists and fascists crawling out of the woodwork, pretending to have a moral high ground. A lot of people here don't even know or care about how pregnancy works, what an embryo or a fetus is, or how extremely risky pregnancy is for humans because it evolved to be a crazy biological war.
I'm tired of having the minority religious and bigoted views dominate politics and starve us of progress. Regardless of what the "right" ruling is on the law, or the roles of the different branches of government, the practical impact of this ruling is millions of Americans denied the right to healthcare while simultaneously being denied free access to any democratic process to secure it.
>> I'm tired of having the minority religious and bigoted views dominate politics and starve us of progress.
Is it minority views? Surely, when it comes down to states legislating this, people can make their opinion heard at the ballet box. And if a majority of people in a state vote conservative and abortion is restricted then we are legislating based on the wants of the majority. It will be interesting to see if this is an important enough issue for some conservative voters to swing them (and states) to the democrats.
Yes, unquestionably, the vast majority of Americans support the right to abortion. That said you can do a lot with gerrymandering, suppressing voters, and our archaic electoral college that gives people more/less voting power based on the state they live in.
Define "pro-life" as "no abortions ever" and it's a minority opinion. Define "pro-choice" as "abortions at any stage of pregnancy for any reason" and it's a minority opinion. Saying your side is the clear majority on this issue proves nothing other than you are in an echo chamber.
Am I misreading this? Your link seems to verify the claim of the person you are responding to. Only 19% support legal abortion in all cases without exceptions.
Pro-choice is the clear majority. There's no argument of "it depends on how you cut it". It's natural for people to disagree within a movement but 69% of Americans oppose Roe V. Wade being overturned.
Ok but the original comment from andrewclunn was clearly correct and your response incorrect. His point was that when nuance is added, the majority belief is less clear. This seems pretty important when there is no definitive understanding of exactly what "pro-choice" means.
You've now retreated to an argument that no one was making.
His argument was negating a true claim by playing a game of definitions. Regardless of how you cut it, pro-life is a minority view. Attempting to use shades of pro-choice to diminish that is not arguing in good faith. It's the argument equivalent of going "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!" while holding your finger in front of someone's face.
Ultimately though, what matters is how many approve of Roe being overturned, which is a binary, and those who oppose Roe V. Wade are in a very clear cut minority.
There's no possible reading of the original comment where it is "objectively incorrect." Clarifying what is meant by extremely vague labels like "Pro-choice" and "Pro-life" is far from a definition game.
> what matters is how many approve of Roe being overturned
Exceptionally few people understand exactly what the implications of Roe are so this framing is useless.
Only 27% think Roe should be overturned. Roe only protected first 3 months (first trimester) except in extreme cases. Your statistics do not support Roe being overturned.
It's hugely minority. 60-73% support abortion access the question is where the limits/timelines should be and that number is only growing especially now that there is a spotlight on the issue. You will now see some 18 mostly small population red states pass extreme laws restricting abortion access while a majority of voters even in those states are against such laws.
> Is it minority views? Surely, when it comes down to states legislating this, people can make their opinion heard at the ballet box
How about instead of deferring this to states rights, we defer directly to individual rights and let individual people decide what to do? You know.. like in some sort of 'free' country.
The child is not a child nor a person. Not even the Catholic church considers a fetus a person, nor the government (as you can't get a tax deduction for your fetus). I used to be fairly religious and godfathered a couple of kids. Neither of them were baptized in the womb though. Or maybe I had the 'wrong' religion?
If you think the fetus is a person, then don't get an abortion. It's super easy. And if your fetus is killing you, then feel free to die for your beliefs.
There is a filibuster at the Federal level that prevents a majority of elected officials from passing laws. The electoral college can prevent the candidate with the most votes from being elected. These are both tools that allow a minority to block what a majority of voters want. Three of the SC justices were appointed during a president's term who did not win the popular vote.
At the state level there is no filibuster meaning that a dissenting minority has no way to protect themselves. Re-districting (gerrymandering) also neuters the voting power of minority groups.
There is a bias for majority rule at the state level, and minority rule at the federal level. So yes, it's minority views. This is why issues like Slavery and segregation were argued as "states rights". The way conservatives prefer our government to be set up is with a weak federal government and strong state governments so that a localized majority can enforce moral legislation on a disenfranchised minority without Federal intervention. It has always been about power and any arguments about "returning the decision to the people" is no different that someone in 1964 saying it should be up to the states whether or not minorities can use the same bathroom as white people.
The thing about abortion that most people seem not to understand is that the debate is fundamentally about answering "when does human life start?". One side believes it starts at conception, which equates any abortion with murder. The other side believes it starts at some point after that, which makes abortion up to that point a women's health / rights issue. Irreconcilable, but also toxic when the two sides never talk about what they actually disagree on, but instead call each other murderers or anti-women's rights or whatever.
There is no answer of "when life begins". It's a game of semantics. Like Diogenes bringing a chicken to Plato, any set of traits you can give me to define life, I can find an exception that destroys your definition.
Therefore the question should be "when is it ethical to terminate a fetus". Pro-choice voters have different answers for this question. The problem is pro-life hardliners who refuse to play ball whatsoever. They believe life begins at conception with no basis other than religion.
No. Most people agree that abortion is acceptable early on (e.g. < 12 weeks). It's hardliners on both sides who are doing the most fighting because they either think that it's okay to abort up to the point of birth or that terminating a bunch of cells is murder.
> They believe life begins at conception with no basis other than religion.
It's not religion, it's science. A new human life (complete how it looks, what gender it's assigned, etc) begins at conception. It's not a full human, but it's slowly becoming one. The question is when it's too human to terminate.
> It's hardliners on both sides who are doing the most fighting because they either think that it's okay to abort up to the point of birth or that terminating a bunch of cells is murder.
The pro-life hardliners are the ones currently overturning super-precedents and creating trigger laws in red states. This isn't hypothetical, it's going to cause real harm to poor women and poor children.
Again, all these decisions are being made by pro-life hardliners aren't even willing to have a discussion AT ALL, many even believe that contraceptives are "killing babies". There's no basis behind their beliefs other than the bible. Most couldn't even tell you the stages of fetal development.
Can the state compel you to get an ultrasound to prove you are pregnant? No, that would be an invasion of privacy. That was the underlying logic of the Roe V. Wade ruling.
Also, I could show you an ultrasound of a mouse or a dolphin at 6 weeks and tell you it's a human fetus and you'd believe it. "Well the human fetus has human DNA" ok, does that have any meaning at that stage of development when their features are all the same? At that point the distinctive trait that allows for abortion of a Dolphin but not a Human is the DNA, or that it's inside of a human mother. It's all arbitrary distinctions. You can have a real discussion about it but pro-lifers start and end at the Bible.
Tell that to a right-leaning Christian pastor, or their congregation. Most of modern Christianity specifically teaches that, in some places, things are most definitely black and white and some basic questions do indeed have easy answers. "Murdering babies", as a family member of mine likes to phrase it, is to them one of the most straightforward and simple of them all.
What you are describing is science. The scientists can determine when life begins, but when life begins is ultimately irrelevant. The state already has no issue killing violent criminals, so even if scientists agree and say "a fetus is equivalent to a fully-developed human at 12 weeks", the question will still be "is it ethical to allow the mother to terminate that human beings life?". At which point you start comparing the value of an unborn human life to the cost that raising a child imposes on society. Again, pro-lifers wont engage with any of this discourse. The blame lies with them.
Again, religious pro-lifers refuse to have any ethical or philosophical discussion whatsoever. They are absolutists who are unwilling to entertain a utilitarian viewpoint or any other justifications for abortion. There is no "middle ground" with them.
And why have you chosen to portray the most radical and unreasonable of all your numerous opponents? It's not exactly "straw-men" because these people exist, but looks pretty similar to it.
Because they are the base that the republican party answers to. They are the Supreme Court justices who are members of the Federalist Society who have been playing the long game to overturn Roe and other decisions. I'm portraying those who have actually been doing the mechanisms of overturning Roe. This isn't some hypothetical debate, these are organized groups mobilizing to enact change.
Also even if there weren't tons of holes to poke in the philosophical argument of "what is a human life? / what makes human life valuable?", life isn't sacred. We kill prisoners, send soldiers overseas, or let people die as a result of preventable diseases (COVID).
The question for a utilitarian is when is it ethical to terminate a fetus? Weighing the costs of an unwanted child on society, the cost of life if the mother dies, the cost of preventing back-alley abortions, the cost of her future as a mother if she suffers reproductive damage and cant have kids in the future even if she wants to, etc.
I think weighing human lives on the basis of "cost to society" will lead to undesirable or rather deteriorated ends. I hardly need to come up with examples.
I agree but this is what our government currently does and I'm trying to explain this in the framework of how we currently make decisions in the US. A spherical cow model of Government I guess.
Life is also the wrong indicator, tardigrades and ants are alive. But what defines a human is its cognitive abilities. This is why its OK to terminate a coma patient. Fetuses and coma patients are exactly the same, without the host/machine to keep them alive, they will die on their own.
I also don't really agree with this definition either. This train of logic leads to the justification of euthanizing less intelligent humans. It also doesn't adequately address why a human with microcephaly or no frontal lobe has rights, but a dolphin or octopus or killer whale does not. It also allows for the justification of cruelty against animals who can feel pain but aren't intelligent enough to pass some arbitrary test of intelligence. To be clear, I don't know the answer, I am hesitant to label anything as "innately valuable". I think that there is however a sliding scale of what is "ethical".
> I also don't really agree with this definition either. This train of logic leads to the justification of euthanizing less intelligent humans.
How so? less intelligent humans have cognitive ability so they have rights.
> It also doesn't adequately address why a human with microcephaly or no frontal lobe has rights, but a dolphin or octopus or killer whale does not.
The question is not why the law is the way it is but the way that it should be. As it is now, It has rights because it is a human, we make our laws for ourselves and sometimes for other species, and I would definitely say that animals should have protections/rights (and they do). A law is also a custom or an enforced custom and certainly animals have customs. At least in america, many families take the toll of taking care of their family members with many deformities. the state should not enforce termination of these, but it should be optional for those that do take this unfortunate toll in their hands. (criminalization != decriminalization)
> It also allows for the justification of cruelty against animals who can feel pain but aren't intelligent enough to pass some arbitrary test of intelligence.
On the contrary, as a cognitive animal capable of pain. it indicates that you should not do so, I would say the capability of pain is the most important aspect to life. given that it is usually an indicator of the will to live.
> To be clear, I don't know the answer, I am hesitant to label anything as "innately valuable". I think that there is however a sliding scale of what is "ethical".
Neither do I. Abortion is euthanasia, and it certainly has merit. both economically speaking and in the sense of well being for humans. Given that human childbirth is probably one of the worst around on the animal kingdom.
It would be nice if we just relegated pregnancies to artificial wombs, but until the technology is there. I guess we'll be having this abortion "debate" forever.
This is a very intelligent and thoughtful response, I don't have the energy right now to respond to every point, but I think that these types of arguments about intelligence are typically used to deprive "lesser beings" of rights. When I think that the opposite conclusion should be reached, that being intelligent should ensure some baseline of humane treatment. I understand with and agree with your sentiment, but typically in pop-philosophy hierarchies of intelligence are used to justify the mistreatment of others.
Thank you, I have found some flaws in my own argument but I will leave that to you. Its a scary and realistic slippery slope, funny considering how difficult to accurately measure intelligence is, even worse with an improper education.
I know this is a hypothesis, but I'm sure simplifications like blyss symbolics or toki pona or https://www.plainlanguage.gov/ would "augment" intelligence as well. I've also heard dyslexia is non-existant in other languages. Which indicates that the complexity helps no one and at this rate, in due time, humans will be mentally incapable of handling the complexities of the world itself.
I don't think this is the right question. The better question is one of bodily autonomy: whether someone should be compelled to keep another human being alive at the cost of their own health and safety. This avoids the whole "when does life start" debate, which has been a moving goalpost for the history of abortion related law.
And please remember that even a “normal” pregnancy can exact a heavy toll on the mother, physical and financial.
My back hurts constantly, but even worse when I pick up my much-desired child. He’s over 25 lbs now, and I dread what the next years until he’s able to climb up into an acceptable car seat on his own are going to be like.
I work part-time, and thank heavens Germany made my pre-pregnancy employer give me that option. One of the major factors in MLM prevalence in the US are the absolutely abysmal job prospects for anyone who can’t work full time - that is, many mothers of young children. My friends with preschool age kids who work full time only manage it because they have expensive daycare open from 7am - 6pm, pay nannies, and/or have spouses with less-intense (or no) jobs. This, of course, is only realistic for women with well-paid jobs.
And if one of you wants to respond, “adoption,” please remember the aforementioned physical wreckage, plus work-related difficulties. Germany encouraged my employer to let me stay home the six weeks before my due date and insisted I do so the right weeks after the birth, all at just about my previous net pay.
I don’t think that “slavery” is too strong a word for forcing someone to go through with an unwanted pregnancy, but others can call it “indentured servitude” if that makes them feel better.
> I don’t think that “slavery” is too strong a word for forcing someone to go through with an unwanted pregnancy,
Whereas enslaved men were often forced to work fields in America, enslaved women were forced to give birth to their rapists’ babies. Forced birth and slavery go hand in hand.
Fitting now that the New Confederate States of America (read: Gilead) can be distinguished by how eager legislatures are to force women to give birth to their rapists’ babies.
And like the Old Confederacy, the New Confederacy also sees nothing wrong with forcing women to give birth only to take the baby away. Oh, sure, giving the baby up for adoption is “voluntary,” but how voluntary can it be in a country that doesn’t pay maternity leave and doesn’t effectively subsidize daycare? I, a married and well-paid IT worker, got 1800 EUR/mo for a year away from work and pay a bit over 400 EUR/mo for daycare from 7am-4pm (not quite enough to really work full time, but that’s another discussion).
Until the US is at least there, adoption is not really a free, uncompelled choice in forced-birth states like Texas.
I have a dear childhood friend whose birth mother was a college student who went through with the results of a foolish accident. I’m glad she did, because I love my friend, but I’m also glad that it was her choice to make; in late 70s Austin, she could have easily gotten an abortion. She was able to choose the adoptive parents, and got what she wanted for her baby: a well-off but childless Catholic family just far enough away to be unlikely to accidentally meet.
Seems like a side issue to me. If I forcibly put someone under my control, it should be my responsibility not to kill them. Airplane pilots have the same responsibility. Imagine if pilots forced us to fly with them, and then decided they didn’t want to carry our weight anymore! There’s good reason that is illegal.
> Seems like a side issue to me. If I forcibly put someone under my control, it should be my responsibility not to kill them.
That's the trouble though - unwanted pregnancies are either accidental, forced on the mother (in cases of rape), or too dangerous to continue due to unforeseen complications. That's more like waking up and finding you're medically tethered to a person that now depends on your body for survival and less like the pilot example.
What's really damning of the "pro-life" movement here is their general opposition to contraceptives - sometimes including condoms. It's pretty clear that the main goal is to control sex, not preserve life.
Apart from rape, pregnancy is never forced on anyone.
In the case of the trolly problem, the law has always favored self preservation. It’s a non issue.
For accidental pregnancy, It’s widely accepted that the other party (males) can only reliably choose whether or not to have sex. They have no choice in the matter post-pregnancy.
I see no reason women can’t be held to that same standard.
I say this all as someone that is pro-choice. But I always prefer to be principaled in my reasoning.
The problem with this is that now the burden to prove rape is on the mother. Before she could just get the abortion, no matter the reason. What a women considers rape and what the government considers provable rape is vastly different, to the point where proving rape in court is neigh impossible (I’ve seen the process up close) unless there is damning evidence like video and a confession.
So relying on rape as some sort of exception really means that women who were raped will never be able to prove to the government’s satisfaction to that fact, and will be forced to carry their rapists baby to term. He said she said doesn’t rise to a preponderance of the evidence, let alone “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
I guess we should thank the GOP for just sidestepping that issue and going straight for the most extreme position possible of banning abortion even in the cases of rape and incest. Makes these questions a little more straightforward.
A person that firmly believes that personhood starts at conception, would not want a rape exception for abortion. Carrying an unwanted child to term is the far lesser evil of murder. There’s no ambiguity there.
That said, my position is more nuanced. Personhood starts handful of months after conception as far as I’m concerned.
Carrying an unwanted child to term sounds a lot like slavery, which sounds like the opposite of personhood. But I guess you’ve built a straw man you don’t believe in so it doesn’t make sense for me to push too much against that.
I guess what I would say in general is that we’re talking a lot about when personhood begins, but I don’t think we’re talking enough about when personhood ends. To me, personhood ends when the government forces you to do something with your body that you don’t want to do. In that moment you are not a person but in fact owned by the government.
IMO: There's a discussion to be had about rape, you didn't consent to pregnancy by having sex then and the child is effectively an intruder. Whether or not you're justified in killing the child is complicated there and I don't have the answer.
So if we had artificial womb technology, should a woman have the choice to terminate the fetus if the fetus could be safely moved to an artificial womb? If so, doesn't that go beyond the scope of your post of abortion being purely about bodily autonomy? If not, whose responsibly is it to raise the child?
I think this is an interesting hypothetical, and in such a universe I suspect many women would choose the artificial womb even for children they want to keep themselves.
But let me counter with another hypothetical: if we had a contraceptive device that could safely and reliably turn a woman's reproductive system on/off at the flip of a switch would "pro-life" advocates support it or oppose it?
I think that's the right lens. Suppose you had a rare blood type that can prevent the death of somebody else; could the state compel you to donate blood? Or suppose we are at war and badly in need of blood donors of all types; same question.
Furthermore what about organs? There is lot of people with two functional kidneys and they don't necessarily need both... Should we start forcibly removing them and transplanting to people in need? Also other such operations like bone marrow...
Exactly. Who cares about the fetus? It's not like any one of us is doing anything about the shitty stuff that people (conscious ones!) are going through right now in third world countries. So the whole "you're killing a human" angle is complete nonsense, life is not sacred and it is silly to act like it is.
The only thing that matters here is what the mother wants.
The difference is, there is no universal answer, everyone has their own beliefs and answers. Making the right to an abortion an individual decision allows everyone to decide for themselves.
Banning that ability is the government deciding for you.
This is a loss of individuality for everyone regardless if you can or ever have an abortion.
An interesting aside is that when sperm were discovered, it was hypothesized that each sperm carried a complete, miniature person, a "homunculus." The person became a fully formed human life when God attached a pre-existing Soul. The Soul contained those things which separated us from the animals, such as moral and reasoning capacity if male. It was God's intervention that marked the start of life.
Nope. You completely misunderstand the pro-choice argument. You can believe life begins at conception and still believe it's wrong to force a woman to carry a fetus to term.
thats the thing, we dont even know what sentient life means. we arbitrarily define it as human and nothing else (hence we are okay with killing billions of animals for food yearly, not debating that just making a point). so if we are not sure when the life begins indeed we should be more considerate of other factors/right that we may be impacting like womens right to bodily autonomy or even just safety.
None of that matters to these zealots. taking a step back, if you look at it with your real world glasses (i.e.. not lawyer ones) you'll realize this is just a bunch of religious crowd trying to backdoor their religion into law. I mean realistically how much of self doubt and introspection Trump crowd you think has had about this issue? How many of them do you think would even be participating in these debates except to 'trigger the libs'?
It's depressing to watch the USA continually fail to keep up with the progress of other first world countries. Often times even taking steps backwards like this.
There are so many actual issues deserving of this attention. In what universe is removing rights a priority?
> Only seven of the 59 countries allow elective abortions after 20 weeks, the group found: Canada, China, Netherlands, North Korea, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.
For those who say this is the logically correct decision, how exactly did you conclude that?
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USA Constitution
14th Amendment
Section 1
...no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws...
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The constitution clearly says that states cannot enforce laws that deprive citizens of their lives and liberties.
Now, states have renewed authority to deprive at-risk women their right to life-saving medical procedures. Please explain to me how this doesn't violate 14A.
I'm not taking a stance for or against your argument. I'm simply point out a logical gap that doesn't make this as simple as your suggesting.
The root of the issue is not the rights provided by the 14th amendment, but when, exactly, those rights apply during the process of conception, gestation, and birth. This is further complicated by the fact that scientific advances enable situations that our founders could have never predicted.
I see two facts that are very clear:
* A person cannot exist without conception.
* At some point during pregnancy, a baby can survive as an independent living human. The youngest living baby was born on day 132 of pregnancy.
Unfortunately, that leaves a massive grey area and your opinion on those is likely highly personal - including religion and living situation.
The rights provided by the 14th amendment are exactly the issue. Today's ruling does not strike a balance between the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn child. It eliminates the rights of the mother.
There is a massive gray area, and Roe/Casey dealt with it just fine. Prohibiting restrictions early on in pregnancy and allowing restrictions later in pregnancy seems like a good solution to the competing interests at play.
> Today's ruling does not strike a balance between the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn child.
Striking a balance between the rights of a mother and child is not the job of the Judicial branch. That’s a job for the Legislative branch.
The court’s job was to determine if the Constitution prohibits the State from making their own state-wide decisions about regulating or permitting abortion.
Those aren't mutually exclusive jobs. If you determine that the Constitution does prohibit states from eliminating access to abortion, then you as the court must step in and adjudicate the competing interests between the mother and the unborn child. Balancing competing rights is a huge part of what the courts have always done.
Fundamental rights like life and liberty should not be subject to the whims of political majorities in legislative bodies. This is a fundamental pillar of our system of government. It's a big reason why we have a Constitution in the first place.
That second "fact" is not a fact. Baby is the term we use to describe children soon after they are born. Did you mean fetus?
Fertilized eggs have the potential to become fetuses, and fetuses have the potential to become babies, but fertilized eggs are not fetuses, and fetuses are not babies.
I think the spirit of your argument is that we cannot decide when to call a fetus a human. Like I mentioned in another comment, this grey area does not preclude undisputed humans from their constitutional rights.
279 days into a pregnancy, the baby can survive fine outside the mother's womb. If it's born the next day, nothing physically changes about the baby whether it's inside the womb or outside. It's literally a baby. Yet in roughly half of the liberal states, it's perfectly legal to kill that baby for any reason while it's inside, but the next minute when it's outside you'd get life in prison for killing it. How is that logically consistent?
What methods are there of killing an unborn baby a day before it would otherwise be born that wouldn't cause massive harm to the mother? What examples of this actually occurring do you know of?
Personally I agree that ethically, intentionally killing the foetus/baby just before birth is not significantly different to doing so just after birth. But it doesn't mean the same legal protections make sense, given the very practical differences between either act. Perhaps the only scenario where they're not so different is where the mother is already dead. That we might need laws against anyone actively killing an unborn baby in such a case (given they'd obviously require active intervention to survive more than a few minutes) seems a little farfetched.
First, you can't call a fetus a baby just because it can become a baby. (Just as you can't call a child an adult just because it has the potential to become an adult.)
Second, pregnancy varies from person to person. You can't reasonably assume that all fetuses that are 279 days old will survive and become healthy babies.
Third, there are substantial physical differences between fetuses and babies. I'm sure you're aware that fetuses receive most of their nutrients through the umbilical cord, whereas babies do not.
Maybe I'm wrong and you're right, maybe "nothing physically changes about the baby whether it's inside the womb or outside." Let's test this hypothesis. Go feed a baby through its belly button and see how that works out.
I suppose you can dispute anything then, but the upthread comment is right, and the same amendment of the Constitution is pretty clear about it:
> All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
Citizens is one part, people is the other. Whether a foetus is a person, whether it has constitutional personhood, was argued by Texas in the original Roe v Wade case. You may also note that the difference between person and citizen has been debated many times before in constitutional law. From [1]:
> Thirty years ago, Bickel made a statement about the relationship between citizenship and personhood in American constitutional law that is well known among scholars of immigration and citizenship. He said: “It has always been easier, it always will be easier, to think of someone as a noncitizen than to decide that he is a nonperson.”
> What is expressed here is both a descriptive and normative claim about the significance of the category of citizenship in our constitutional system. Bickel argued that, as a historical matter, the Constitution has never set much stock by the category of citizenship; that one of the most disastrous aspects of Dred Scott was that it treated the denial of rights to slaves and free blacks as turning on their lack of citizenship; that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment came close to entrenching this mistake, constitutionally, via passage of the privileges or immunities clause of section 1, which might have appeared to make rights contingent upon citizenship; but that, in the end (by way of Slaughterhouse,7 which eviscerated the clause), “innocence was restored.” And Bickel concludes by expressing satisfaction with this state of affairs: “I find it gratifying … that we live under a Constitution to which the concept of citizenship matters very little.”
In important ways, Bickel is descriptively right. True, citizenship status is still quite significant in a variety of settings, and conflicts between citizenship- and personhood-based groundings of rights persist in various contexts. Still, for a great many purposes, the “right to have rights” is not contingent on the possession of citizenship status. In the international arena, it is largely persons who are the subjects of human rights
> You've only taken half of the statement, it was:
Because I was only responding to that half of the statement. The argument for banning abortion must stand without it. Your insistence on it was why I chimed in.
What you're now alluding to is a different claim than the one I responded to: that a. a fetus is a person (as you both seem to agree, disputable) and that even if we concede that question, the rights of the fetus outweigh those of the woman; taking some of the bills and laws that have passed in the various states, at the extreme, that it's fine to deny to a woman bodily autonomy, even where it will put her through great trauma, up to and including death.
> What you're now alluding to is a different claim than the one I responded to
Yes, because you were only responding to half of the sentence. My advice would be to respond to full sentences even when inconvenient.
I'll add, I'm not making a claim about personhood nor citizenship, I'm pointing to where the grey area is. How that becomes an insistence is something you'll only know.
Finally, I do not agree that accepting the personhood of a foetus would necessarily outweigh the woman's rights, as again, it would come up against bodily autonomy - another grey area that I hope would be ruled on to be as absolute as possible.
Yes, I read your comment, thanks. You didn't appear to making reference to the same grey area that was referred to in the comment you responded to. It's not often that I see absolutism and the acknowledgement of a grey area within the same breath so do forgive my mistake, if it is one.
You do not have a right to life saving medical procedures. You do not have a right to an abortion. There is no law or constitutional amendment that grants this. This is the flaw in your reasoning.
That being said, I believe women SHOULD have a right to get an abortion enshrined in law. It is up to our re-elected representatives to achieve this, not for the courts to invent rights thereof.
You might not have a right to them, but those procedures exist, and citizens would like to avail themselves of those procedures. They could even do so, except for the state's intervention: and that intervention thus deprives the citizen of "life, liberty".
You left out the “without due process” part. The due process is the state enacting laws to restrict access.
Of course, congress could pass a law enshrining the rights to an abortion tomorrow. This would grant and preserve this right for all Americans, regardless of state, due to the supremacy clause. Hopefully, this does happen.
I left it out, as I didn't find it relevant to respond to that particular comment.
A simple drafting of a law is not the whole of "due process"; the very Roe v. Wade encapsulates that. (Of course, now overturned.)
But also, take the cases of forcing a women to have a child she did not have a say in (rape) or which will kill her (e.g., ectopic pregnancy). These seem pretty close to bill-of-attainder type situations, but also, due process.
I'd also argue you need to overcome the equal protection clause; bodily autonomy seems to me like a right that we generally honor — we do not force organ or blood donations upon people — yet, here, we strip that right from one sex in particular?
Agreed on bodily autonomy. It is my guess that the court would strike down laws that restrict abortion wholesale (when challenged), but who knows.
Of course, this is only applicable if the Congress fails to act; were they to pass a law that enshrines the right to bodily autonomy, there would be no issue.
Did you read the amendment? There doesn't need to be explicit protection for medical procedures or abortion. 14A protects people from being deprived of life and liberty by state action or legislation. Eliminating access to abortion can deprive someone of their life and / or liberty, so eliminating access to abortion contradicts 14A.
> nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law
There is no federal law granting the right to abortion. Therefore, states may have enact their own laws to either affirm or restrict access to abortion. This process is due process.
> Any state law that deprives someone of life and / or liberty is unconstitutional.
It's not. It's literally not. Stealing food is illegal, even if you were going to die of starvation without it. Breaking into someone's home is illegal, even if you were going to freeze to death outside. And now, in some states, abortion is illegal, even if you were going to die from giving birth.
States or congress should pass a law allowing abortions if that's the will of the people. The court should not invent a law out of nothing; this ruling is legally correct.
If you believe that life begins at conception you could say that abortion deprives that "unborn person" of their right to life, as long as carrying the fetus to term would not put the life of the mother at risk.
How would you differentiate this argument for abortion versus for slavery? Should it be legalized, and the government just tell people not to do it if it violates their conscience?
In the eyes of roughly half the country, it's plainly injust to allow anybody to murder what they believe to clearly be a human being just because the other half believes they're subhuman.
It's the government's job to punish injustice, even if the actors don't believe they're being unjust. Very few people in prison will say they did anything wrong. In their eyes, their crime was justified. Everybody thinks they're doing the right thing. Like it or not, it's the government's job to determine if that's true or not in many cases.
> How would you differentiate this argument for abortion versus for slavery?
Slavery unambiguously violates the autonomy of another human being.
If it could be demonstrated scientifically what life is and when it begins and that happens to be at conecption, then yes, abortion should be outlawed. But we don't know this. In a free and open society, in the absence of knowledge, we should default to people making their own choices; we should default to freedom and not restriction.
To deprive someone of life is a crime, hence, someone who believes life begins at conception is advocating against unlawful killing, and crimes are certainly the purview of the state and society.
Are you willfully misrepresenting other arguments? There's a curious pattern in these threads of you ducking out of conversations when nuance is attempted.
The remainder of the reasonable discussion around this topic is centered around the blurry point between inception and when viable birth is possible. The vast majority of people would classify a fetus, minutes before birth, being aborted as murder.
As well, in most countries restrictions occur at some point in the pregnancy (recognition of the trade-off between bodily autonomy and the rights of the unborn). In my country that happens to be nine weeks unless there's an emergency.
This ruling does not prohibit anything. Regardless, in a democracy other people's beliefs are entirely a sufficient condition in what the government will do. Maybe not sufficient reasoning for you, but again, it's a democracy, not your fiefdom.
Missouri just banned abortion as a result of this being overturned, so yes, it does.
> other people's beliefs are entirely a sufficient condition in what the government will do
False. Other people's beliefs are a necessary condition. If I convince 51% of the populace geminis are evil and should be imprisoned, this is not a sufficient condition for the government to implement this policy. We would need to scientifically demonstrate that astrology is in fact true. This is the sufficient condition. The necessary condition is a majority believing it. Likewise, having an objective, unambiguous, scientific definition of what life is and when it begins is the sufficient condition for outlawing abortion and a majority believing that is the necessary condition. A characteristic of a free society is not one where the government creates laws based on the whims of particular religious groups.
> Missouri just banned abortion as a result of this being overturned, so yes, it does.
No, it doesn't, Missouri's laws have prohibited abortion.
> If I convince 51% of the populace geminis are evil and should be imprisoned, this is not a sufficient condition for the government to implement this policy. We would need to scientifically demonstrate that astrology is in fact true.
Government is not bound by what is scientifically demonstrated, thus making this statement and the rest of what you wrote, incorrect.
> A characteristic of a free society is not one where the government creates laws based on the whims of particular religious groups.
Hundreds, if not thousands of years of fairly consistent belief that life is sacred is hardly a whim, neither is the opposition to Roe v Wade from certain religious groups. It's also not characteristic of free society, governments put in place plenty of silly laws "on a whim" in free societies.
> Government is not bound by what is scientifically demonstrated
You're implying:
something is scientifically demonstrated -> government is bound by it
What I said was:
government has bounded something -> it can be scientifically or logically demonstrated
> Hundreds, if not thousands of years of fairly consistent belief that life is sacred is hardly a whim
You're appealing to the populace. How long or who believes something has no bearing on whether or not it is true or whether anyone should care about it. People thought the earth was the center of the universe for a long time too. Also, something cannot be "sacred" universally, only conditionally.
> > Government is not bound by what is scientifically demonstrated
> You're implying:
> something is scientifically demonstrated -> government is bound by it
How have you managed to change round such a simple sentence and state it means the opposite? I'm astounded.
1. Government is not bound by what is scientifically demonstrated.
2. Something is scientifically demonstrated.
3. Hence, government is *not* bound by it.
> What I said was:
> government has bounded something -> it can be scientifically or logically demonstrated
You wrote no such thing as the words "bound" and "can" are not to be found in your statement in any form. What you actually wrote was:
> If I convince 51% of the populace geminis are evil and should be imprisoned, this is not a sufficient condition for the government to implement this policy. We would need to scientifically demonstrate that astrology is in fact true.
Aside from your clearly not understanding what a necessary nor a sufficient condition is, this statement is not true. I shall do some reordering of my own to shine light on this:
We would need to scientifically demonstrate that astrology is in fact true… for the government to implement this policy.
That's your implication and it's not based in reality.
I could go round in circles like this forever, much like the constellation of Gemini around the Earth but it would be as much use as reading my horoscope.
> > Hundreds, if not thousands of years of fairly consistent belief that life is sacred is hardly a whim
> You're appealing to the populace. How long or who believes something has no bearing on whether or not it is true or whether anyone should care about it.
I didn't claim that the length of time it has been around has any relation to its truth, I corrected your use of the word "whims" to mischaracterise those you clearly oppose.
> whim | wɪm |
> noun
> 1 a sudden desire or change of mind, especially one that is unusual or unexplained:
There's nothing sudden about Christian opposition to abortion.
> People thought the earth was the center of the universe for a long time too.
It's Earth. I feel like making that pedantic point because I hope that making you more careful with your writing might lead you to read more carefully too.
> Also, something cannot be "sacred" universally, only conditionally.
The government doesn't believe that life starts at conception. Otherwise you'd be able to get tax deductions for an unborn fetus. This has nothing to do with when life begins. This has everything to do with population control and with religious fundamentalism.
What is the difference between a baby in the womb on day 280 versus the same baby an hour later outside the womb? One is called subhuman and often perfectly legal to kill for any reason, and a person would get life in prison for killing the other.
"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or ... in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether to terminate her pregnancy."
Now, which is more important life or liberty and property of owner of the host body in pregnancy. And if life is is more important should we force organ transplants? After all at least there is lot of spare kidneys around... Maybe half a lung is also workable.
As expected, the 5 justices on the leaked Alito opinion constitute the majority, Chief Justice Roberts filed a concurring opinion (in which he argues that the principle of judicial restraint requires merely upholding the law in question, not overturning Roe), and the 3 liberal justices dissented.
In total, the opinions are 217 pages long.
Anyone able to quickly run a diff on the leaked majority opinion and the official one?
I work for a company, headquartered in the Mid West, that has been very public in their support of LGBTQ rights, among other things. Do you think corporations should take a public stance in support of abortion rights? Will tech companies continue to flock to Texas, in what will become a very difficult environment for abortion?
> Will tech companies continue to flock to Texas, in what will become a very difficult environment for abortion?
Recruiting for tech in Texas has already taken a hit due fear around abortion (getting employees to move down there can be quite difficult).
More broadly, I think this is likely to put a big damper on high-end knowledge work in conservative states. Educated people are overwhelmingly liberal. While you could certainly find a subset of knowledge workers who don't have an issue working in a state banning abortion, the difficulties with hiring and transfers probably won't pass a cost benefit analysis (again, we already see this in Texas).
I always find it a bit funny that HN/tech crowd is generally considered liberal, when I as a Norwegian feel opinions here are sooo conservative. Guess it depends on frame of reference. Democrats would probably be far to the right in Norway?
I'm definitely using the American frame of reference here. I'd totally agree most of my colleagues who self-describe as liberal would be conservatives through much of Europe.
No, it really depends on the issue - economics, speech, voting rights, gender rights, abortion rights. Of the later, Democrats are far to the left of Europeans.
Also, I’ll point out that HN (and SV) has a little “l” libertarian streak (entrepreneurship) which favors smaller government and personal accountability/agency.
"Knowledge" worker in Texas here (native; didn't move here). I don't feel this affects me for a few reasons, but I will say that I'm also aware that 1. I can travel out of state, and 2. drugs are available online and there are drugs that can provide medical abortions - perhaps those can be put together.
That said, in talking with a colleague this morning, we agreed that if the state does go completely crazy and manages to secede, we just want enough notice to sell our property so we can leave.
I'd assume the GOP leadership in TX will act in bad faith or for their protection first. If you have a single female friend or associate this ruling will impact you. It will have far reaching consequences beyond just abortion access including the possibility of IVR becoming illegal as well. We're about to see a huge slate of medical procedures and practices caught up in this ruling.
The Texas law makes it so any citizen can file a civil suit against anyone who has an abortion, including ones performed out of state. There are already pro-life organizations that will help people fund these civil suits.
While I am pro-legalised abortion I think this is a separate kind of issue to LGBT rights, racial equality etc. LGBT rights/racial equality is about treating everybody equally. Almost no 'good' people are opposed to those things. There are plenty of good people who literally believe abortion is the murder of a baby. I disagree but I don't agree that it's an unreasonable opinion. Given that, I think companies taking a stance on it would cause a lot more division than when they take a stance on more clear cut social issues.
> Almost no 'good' people are opposed to those things.
That is an interesting perspective. You just called something like 100M or more Americans not good people. I am not being hyperbolic. Talk to them. On the surface they are friendly, easygoing, etc, but switch the topic to LGBT rights and listen. The very fact that they believe there is such a thing as "gay rights" tells you a lot. Good luck trying to educate them on how "cannot discriminate based on sexual preference" is not the same thing as giving gay people special rights.
>> You just called something like 100M or more Americans not good people
Fair enough. So long as they believe they deserve more rights than another group of people, they're not good people. Hopefully they'll change their opinion. I've known plenty of people to change their opinion on this issue over the years and hopefully it'll continue on that trajectory. My point was more than on those issues it's simply one group that thinks another group does not deserve to be treated equally. With abortion it's more two sets of competing 'rights' - the woman and the foetus.
After reading a bit about Austin this morning (but before this news) I was browsing zillow + google maps, trying to get a feel for the city. Basically I'm tired of winter. It's a total non-starter now though.
Texas has no income tax. But the property tax functions as a backdoor income tax because there is rich school district to poor school district redistribution. Therefore property taxes are high in Texas, though not higher than, say, in New Jersey (which also has an income tax).
> Do you think corporations should take a public stance in support of abortion rights?
Some companies have even gone so far as paying for abortions. That's disgusting. It reveals that The Man doesn't want women's productivity to go down and would rather work them to the bone instead. Out of the kitchen and into the office? That might be a bad deal.
> Some companies have even gone so far as paying for abortions. That's disgusting. It reveals that The Man doesn't want women's productivity to go down and would rather work them to the bone instead. Out of the kitchen and into the office? Might be a bad deal.
Or it could reveal that abortions, even in the best circumstances, cost money -- time off of work and travel expenses for example. Perhaps these companies support women having access to it regardless of their economic status.
It'll blow your mind, but some companies even allow employees time off to vote in elections, partially for the same reasons.
While I think that these kind of things shouldn't require a company to take any action in, this isn't "going so far as" in a country where medical care is basically tied to your job. If your company guarantees medical care, why is paying for an abortion anyhow different?
But indeed I prefer a system of public health insurances which keep these matters independent of your employer.
All those red states that courted tech employees the last two years are about to get a challenging political period from that new donor base.
Alabama has Huntsville, Texas has Austin, TN has chatt and Nashville, NC has Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, Florida has Miami/Tampa, AZ has Phoenix, CO has Denver (CO isn’t super red but it’s somewhere). This will get more interested and remote workers go deeper into small towns.
A large part of why the right has disproportionate political power is because left-leaning folks tend to cluster together geographically and dilute their votes. Now that they're beginning to spread out, this may change a bit.
What I find interesting is how for many many years people thought Roe would be safe because it was mostly useful as a political tool. A wedge to drive into voting blocks to make sure they stay Republican despite everything else they are doing. It was in nobody's interest to actually repeal it. What nobody expected was for decades of indoctrination to produce true believers that would actually be elected to the Supreme Court.
So now we are in a situation where the dog has caught the car and it's not sure what happens now.
Arguably Roe distorted national politics. This ruling might now distort local politics. It's going to be interesting. We might well see a multi-decade swing to the Democrats!
I wouldn't count on a major Democratic victory out of this. The propaganda machine that has been feeding this issue for the past few decades is still alive and well, they will pivot to some other issue (CRT, Wokeism, Black Lives Burning Down Entire Cities, etc...) if they have to. Abortion was just something that polled really well with the base and so they went with it, but it's not the only game in town.
> The propaganda machine that has been feeding this issue for the past few decades is still alive and well, they will pivot to some other issue (CRT, Wokeism, Black Lives Burning Down Entire Cities, etc...) if they have to.
It already has. See all the hysterics about how any discussion of same sex relationships or trans identity around children is "grooming".
My great grandmother Julianna died in 1935 aborting herself with a coat hanger in Southern Idaho. She was born in 1915 and died in 1935. Twenty years old. I’m a fifth-generation Idahoan, my family moved to Idaho during the great Mormon exodus of Illinois.
They were extremely impoverished. It was the Great Depression and in one of her letters, she writes about not even having the luxury of bone broth They were barely able to take care of their two children and she writes that it was better to save two children than let three starve. In her letters, she describes her guilt and the emotional pain she endured watching her two children be hungry. One of those children was my grandmother. She describes her concerns of being malnourished, she had been opting not to eat as much to let her two children eat, and how that would affect her unborn child.
She wrote that her pregnancy was early enough that she could reconcile her faith in allowing her two other children to survive and that not giving birth to a malnourished child would also be the right thing to do for that child as well. In college ethics classes, I became enamored with her situation and had a dozen or more conversations with my grandmother, I read my great-grandmother's letters and heard the story as passed through the generations. I will always cherish those conversations with my grandmother.
This of course ultimately developed my personal beliefs. I am thinking of her and my grandmother today.
I’m in a same-sex marriage and my stomach dropped reading Clarence Thomas’s opinion and his reference to Obergefell. It wasn’t that long ago I wasn’t able to see my now-husband in the hospital — the emergency room - here in conservative Idaho. I do understand his opinion and context but even if legally sound, it affects me.
We the people of the United States of America know how to edit our living constitution and make the rights that we want a constitutional guarantee. It seems impossible at the moment with the divisiveness, polarization and in-fighting but we know that religion is on the decline and you will see that represented in elections in the coming decades. It is possible, we just don’t know the path today. It can be done, but it won’t be easy.
I’m sorry, this isn’t all that related to Hacker News. To relate it back, I guess I am saying that we’re hackers, we can hack society, we can hack belief systems, we can take unrelated ideas and bring them together to create something new just like we do inventing new categories of products. We can disrupt things through big ideas and through execution. If we want change, it will be a lot of hacking and hard work. After all, I think it was social / political hacking by the creators of this movement that got us here to today.
Thank you for writing this. I am a married gay man in Texas feeling all sorts of things similar to you are right now. The story about your great grandmother and your note about Thomas's opinion and your husband's visit to the ER hit hard.
Please keep telling people about your story and how these decisions affect you.
Just telling you the personal responsibility/slut shaming argument for banning abortion makes your side look weak as hell. At least those who claim fetus are alive have a somewhat respectable looking moral framework but when you reveal it's really about blaming women for having sex and forcing them to suffer for it it no matter how bad it is for woman and offspring , shows how nasty many "pro life" views are
If you want to come across as genuine, you might want to take a stab at not taking someone's ancedote and bastardizing to fit the scope in which you want to limit the topic you want to discuss.
It makes you appear out of touch with reality and self serving, rather than trying to make any attempt to understand.
Taking somebody’s real story to fall back to a hypothetical moralistic scenario? I’m confused if you think this helps you actually understand someone else’s beliefs.
Ultimately questions of right and wrong are entirely values based (barring belief in an absolute power, and I’m not aware of a way to pick absolute right and wrong without starting with some sort of unprovable assumption, one could charitably call “faith”)
We're going to wind up breaking up The Union one way or another in the coming years.
Time to start planning on how violently we do that or not -- to consider this unthinkable is going to be the path of more violence and not less.
To all the centrists who are trying to spin all this as nothing to get worried about -- either you're secretly perfectly happy with everything going on and you're not much of a centrist in reality, or else you're still in denial that you've lost. Political polarization is here to stay and will only get worse, and centrists equating what the right is doing now with the "far left lunacy" of universal health care share a massive chunk of the blame even though they'll never accept it.
I found this discussion of unenumerated rights [0] to be helpful in explaining how a right to privacy was derived from the US constitution, and how difficult it is to establish a "test" for unenumerated rights.
[The Griswold case] says the penumbras around the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendment create a right to privacy. So what they're getting at — a penumbra is just a shadow, right? — is that these textual provisions cast these shadows. And those shadows, which all contain this notion of privacy overlap with each other such that they coalesce into a right in its own right, so that the right to privacy under which the right to contraception is protected is derived from the shadows of actual textual provisions.
Very disconcerting that the rights to contraception, same sex marriage, and consensual adult sexual relationships are up for debate because they are not explicitly enumerated in the constitution.
It hurts me to say this, but American democracy is broken. Checks and balances have been twisted to subvert true democratic rule. We should stop worshipping the Founders and their intent, and aim for a Second American Republic, built around the tested and true practices of mature European republics (that have done a lot more revisions than our 1.0.33 release...):
- Parliamentary democracy, two chambered if need be, with slowly changing electoral maps (drawn from the Census and controlled by judges, not politicians)
- Ban on non-government funding of political parties. Money raised comes from the government or small donations.
- Parliament/senate majority is enough. Enough of that 19th century filibuster nonsense.
- Faster constitutional amendment cycles that don't require supermajorities
- No assinine lifetime appointments to anything. A 10- or 12-year term and a healthy pension are controls enough
Law is code: it needs to be easy to change when it's not working and it needs good change processes when it does change. But we cant be running a modern economy and society on 250 year old COBOL...
For anyone struggling with how to meaningfully help, I decided to make a donation to the Yellowhammer fund. I have no association with them (see my comment history and profile, I am a robotics engineer in California) but I searched for abortion funds that serve the South where people will be hit hardest by this, and found them.
In their words:
"The Yellowhammer Fund is a 501(c)3 abortion fund and reproductive justice organization serving Alabama, Mississippi, and the Deep South. We envision a society in which reproductive decisions are made free from coercion, shame, or state interference, a society in which individuals and communities have autonomy in making healthy choices regarding their bodies and their futures. We commit ourselves to community education and empowerment, policy advocacy, and the development of systems of mutual aid to ensure that our friends, families, and neighbors never go without the things they need."
For anyone interested, the book Freakonomics had a chapter devoted to studying this as a factor that lead crime to drop from its peak in the early 90s US, approximately 20 years after Roe v Wade.
Kind of a provocative study and you could make a similar case for leaded gasoline and other factors but nevertheless interesting.
The study you’re speaking of (abortion lowering crime rates by preventing unwanted children from terrorizing the streets) remains unproven at best, despite oft being cited as settled research[0]
Thank you. We'll figure it out in 20 years time if no federal law will be instated. The data from pro/contra abortion states can then be correlated with the crime differential in those states. Through that I guess it can then either be shown plausible or implausible. We'll see.
I believe there have been social studies showing the positive impact to crime by increasing access to abortion. I don’t have citations or the time to look them up now, but I am pretty sure it is referenced in Freakonomics and possibly one of Gladwell’s books.
There's no way to tell for sure, because it's such a broad statistic. Other people have opined that the removal of lead gasoline was also a reason of the drop in crime rates. No one really knows what is causing it.
Bad generalization and prejudice right there. While whether someone is brought up in an environment that encourages care absolutely influences the choices people make down the road, whether the person in question was "wanted" does not matter. I can't exactly back that up with some solid data but i think that many people know someone who is far from being an "unwanted" person but still made some bad choices in life.
Your comment is quite mild given that from the outside the last years it really looks like the US is sliding slowly towards autocracy. The tendencies are there. I've asked myself if it's not the case that the largest threat to peace and progress & good quality of life for the western world long term does not lie in the balance of how it goes in the US and what I can do about this - just to ensure the best for my life and those I care for.
> There's this belief that society always moves in a "forward/upward" directory
That's the central fallacy of Whig historiography [1]. It is in part facilitated by the fact that recent history is often written by the victors.
MLK repeated the same fallacy: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Is that the same arc that included two world wars?
Just for some context, I once heard commentary about MLK that suggested that that specific statement was made in more of a spiritual tradition than a practical or historical tradition.
It is interesting to note that while American's attitudes on many social issues like gay marriage or racial injustice have moved in a progressive direction, American's attitudes on abortion haven't budged since the 1970s.
This assumes there is a universally agreed upon definition of "upward" and "forward". Religious people would argue things like abortion rights and pride celebrations are the opposite of upward and forward progress since they enable and encourage what they believe to be sin.
These are the same people who think the world is 6000 years old, the first man was made out of mud and the first woman was made from the rib of the first man. They're clearly insane so their view of forward should be thrown in the garbage.
Ya that's a really good point and I think about it often.
Look at Iraq, the cradle of civilization, the seat of Babylon. And Egypt. And even Greece to an extent. Former glories of the world but they aren't the most glorious places in the world now.
Appreciate it, but it was a glib way of saying evidence needed not citation. I know that thing was said - but I din’t believe it to be backed up by historical evidence
It’s a surface level protection. Forcing someone to bring an unwanted child into this world is not enlightened. There’s a reason why women and couples opt for abortion. They’re often not ready for that responsibility, and it’s the kid who suffers most.
Life for the sake of life feels like virtue signaling, especially since those who espouse it have no interest in providing social programs to help these mothers and couples raise the kid they were forced to have. That’s pretty barbaric.
Congratulations. You saved a life you almost immediately stop giving a shit about.
One could argue that every living human — all of us — are a product of generations of rape and unwanted children whose lives no one cared about, who survived to have their own. Civilized humans who enjoyed enforced women’s rights are a laughably short segment of all human history.
If anything, reflecting on the stress and violence of our collective ancestors should only further strengthen the desire to do better by supporting things like "enforced women’s rights". Was that your point?
We're also the product of generations of people dying prematurely of diseases like polio; our lives would be quite a bit different if infant/child mortality had been 0% for the last 100k years.
Should we not wipe out polio because our ancestors couldn't?
> Forcing someone to bring an unwanted child into this world is not enlightened.
> They’re often not ready for that responsibility
So they could have used condoms, the man could have avoided ejaculating where it could cause pregnancy, or they could also just not have sex or the woman could take pills or an IUD. Unless it was rape, nobody forced them to have a child.
I do agree that there should be programs that help the parents more.
Clarence Thomas said we should reconsider contraception as a right, which according to your logic essentially means we should reconsider sex except for having a child as a right. You can't advocate for personal responsibility and then take away all mechanisms to conduct it.
I don't even know who Clarence Thomas is. It sounds like he is religious to me which as far as I know allows sex for procreation only, not for pleasure. Maybe I am wrong tho. Whoever he is, I can agree with some of his views while disagreeing with others.
How do you feel about rape victims who are unable to prove they were raped in court and are forced to co-parent the rest of their life with their rapist?
Or what about rape cases which take longer than 9 months to reach a conviction?
Rape is hard to prove and it doesn't necessarily mean co-parenting with the rapist, I think it's even more likely that he avoids responsibility and escapes than become a parent.
And the second issue seems to be an issue of bureaucracy and it's slowness.
Those cases are both valid where I think most people would argue it's not as clear cut but I think they are mostly the exception, not the rule.
I'll sign you up to take care of those kids, then. Just feel free to email me your full legal name and address (see my profile), and I'll hire a lawyer to figure out how to make that happen. I might even offer to pay for the costs for the child you adopt doing this for the first year if you act fast!
Unless it's young life that's already living and happens to be impregnated via rape? Then fuck her, right? Force her to give birth?
And exactly how does banning an abortion when the pregnancy is not viable for any number of reasons (molar pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, anencephaly) help anyone? Why are we forcing women to carry dead fetus's around in their bodies?
Because that's what a total ban on abortion does. It also makes IVF illegal if "life begins at conception".
The notion that the only abortions happening are happy couples who find out they're pregnant, tell their friends and family, plan parties, and then in some sinister plot months later wake up and casually decide "you know what, let's just kill it" is absurd.
Not all life is equal, and not all human life is equal. If you were driving down the street and two buildings were on fire, a IVF clinic with viable implanted eggs, and a preschool full of living children, you would 100% of the time try and rescue the preschoolers if you only had time for one. The idea that all human life down to a recently implanted egg has the same value as an 11 year old girl who's been raped and wants an abortion is an untenable position.
As a non-American, non-Christian, I find the entire fiasco quite weird. Like a lot of cases in the US, why don't they address the core issue? If rape is so common, how about punish the rapists like other advanced countries do? Yes, including the death penalty for serial rapists or repeat offenders.
Because that's a reactive punishment that does absolutely nothing to help out the woman who might be carrying a fetus post rape, not to mention the fact that rape is already illegal and a rapist isn't exactly going to be deterred by the fact that there's illegality involved. The issue of abortion also touches upon things like ectopic pregnancies where the woman can/will die if an abortion is not performed.
> rapist isn't exactly going to be deterred by the fact that there's illegality involved
Controversial opinion, prisons aren't a deterrent, corporal punishment would leave a more lasting impression and instill fear into would be offenders. It would also be more cost effective and efficient.
You're straw manning. Not all crimes should have the death penalty. But severe abhorrent ones like killing, spreading of chaos (i.e. "terrorism"), or some other abhorrent obvious ones. We see that in countries that do apply the death penalty for such crimes, they have much lower of those crimes compared to those that don't. And they've done it for over 1000 years.
It's very uncommon where I am. Rape is severely punished. There are many countries like this, we're not "liberal" countries so they don't align with the Western media agenda.
I can understand this argument, however in this specific case we are forcing children onto parents who are in bad positions to raise them (or most wouldn't consider abortion), and our state does a terrible job at providing support to kids throughout their lives (healthcare, education, welfare programs are all notorious in the US) in the case where parents aren't reliable.
As a pro-choice person, I could be convinced against abortion _if_ there was a guarantee that every child would have the full resources of the government to help them achieve a successful life. We all know that isn't going to happen.
So without the appropriate follow-through, this is actually less enlightened and hurting both parents and children more.
> I could be convinced against abortion _if_ there was a guarantee that every child would have the full resources of the government to help them achieve a successful life. We all know that isn't going to happen.
Kids brought up with bad parents will be somewhat similarly disadvantaged. Why should potentially bad parents (eg. heavy drug addicts) not be banned from having kids? Both of them would be "forcing children onto parents who are in bad positions to raise them".
CPS can take kids from parents who are bad parents (drug addicts) just as they can take kids from parents who don't want the kids (and presumably would have aborted the kid if they could have).
I would have no problem with this line of argument if it was honest and genuine, but it's not - it's a pretence.
If prolife movement actually cared about protecting life, they would not support policies that leave children to die of terrible diseases if their family can't afford healthcare.
The legal question here is whether the federal government of the United States, absent legislation, is able to compel the states to allow abortions up to a certain time window of pregnancy.
The ruling today says that the federal government does not have that power, absent legislation. But by the same token, it also could not BAN abortion absent federal legislation.
Others have commented on the weakness of the original "penumbral reasoning" of Roe v. Wade decision establishing the government's ability to do this, and that this criticism is recognized by judges commonly perceived to be on either side of the political spectrum.
A lens with which to view this decision through is the correction of technical debt, and it's really not that remarkable from a legal perspective.
It's very remarkable from a social perspective, considering many of us have grown up in a Roe v. Wade world.
But this returns the burden to states. In my state, today's ruling changes nothing, as abortion is protected by our state constitution. In other states, there's some political work to do assuming the citizenry in those states agrees that things should be different.
If there's actually a consensus opinion on abortion in the US across enough states, federal legislation could be created some day. By design, federal legislation is a slow process - it's designed to be inefficient. One of the biggest liberal criticisms of Roe v. Wade is that it stopped the process cold, and we've lost decades of time to have that conversation about legislation in trade for a decision on very weak legal footing, which many have argued was long overdue for correction.
From my vantage point, the questions you raise are immaterial to the legal issue decided in the SCOTUS. This decision was one about the structural relationship between the states and the federal government. The questions you raise are relevant to the state politics that need to take place going forward, for sure. But it comes back to this question - if the majority of people in a state believe that abortion past some point in time (1w, 14w, 24w, pick one) constitutes murder, should they not be allowed to have their state law reflect that? We believe other nations have that power for diverse views on the matter - France, I believe, doesn't allow abortions after 14w (it was merely 10 up until 2000). When evaluating law in the US, a key premise is the idea that the US is a collection of states that outsources certain functions to a central government, not a singular government with separate census areas.
Except that states banning abortions after X weeks was already a thing under Roe.
And this decision was not about any "state rights" bullshit. The court previously found an unenumerated right to an abortion, and now they completely reversed themselves. Women do not have complete body autonomy and must support another life no matter the impact on their own.
I think there is huge question of right of mother as well. Lets take hypothetical situation where someone forcibly mates two humans together in such a way that removing other would kill that other. Per anti-abortion people they would have to live together forever. Which seems bit sick...
Come on. Nobody that supported this ruling except the deluded give a damn about life or whatever they were preaching. The Republicans only care about getting the votes they need to maintain their stranglehold over red states, cut taxes and environmental protections for the benefit of their patrons. The fundamental Christians only care about seeing the rights of women being repelled, there are zero concerns about the life of children, otherwise they would be pushing for free childcare, support for mothers, parental leave, ....
It's all a matter of punishing women for their own desire to be emancipated, it's a punishment for those women who have sinned by thinking they could act like a man and have sex whenever they wanted. If they truly cared about the unborn, they would
1. care about the already born, first, and
2. push for the widespread availability of contraception.
Given that contraception is bad for them, too, it's clear this is not an ethical question, but a moral one: sex outside of marriage, or for pleasure really, should not be allowed, and it must always carry consequences, no matter if it vastly more impacts women than it does men. You know, a man can always run from their responsibilities, while a woman cannot run away from her womb.
> The Republicans only care about getting the votes they need to maintain their stranglehold over red states, cut taxes and environmental protections for the benefit of their patrons.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, we don't vote for Supreme Court justices. There's no leverage to impose electoral or party pressure on a justice who has already been appointed, unless it is by impeachment. Your assessment of their motivations doesn't hold up.
Are you naive or what? Republicans have lists of candidates for justices that they have deemed so anti roe-vs-wade that they deemed safe to propose for justices. Someone like Thomas is not going to change his mind once he is appointed...
Why not, if he's now free to act as he pleases? The assertion is that he doesn't believe he's acting rightly, but does so under electoral pressure. If I'm naive, please explain: what's to stop him doing as he thinks is right, now that he's appointed?
Your naïveté lies in the fact that you don’t realize that Supreme Court justices are elected by proxy of voting for the president that nominated them and the senators that confirm them.
It stands to reason that on average, if you elect conservative presidents and senators, you will get conservative justices, and vice-versa.
You seem to assert that there are wolves hiding in sheeps’ clothing, waiting until they are confirmed to show their true colors to save the country. I counter that reality is more boring than that, and that these people can be taken at face value by virtue of what they’ve said and done for decades.
Furthermore, I think yours is an apologist/denialist stance people use so they can get someone in the courts they truly approve of, while hiding behind the “hope” that they won’t be as bad as everyone else knows they will.
The only part of what you wrote that addresses my point is this:
> You seem to assert that there are wolves hiding in sheeps’ clothing, waiting until they are confirmed to show their true colors to save the country
Against this characterization I would oppose John Roberts, who was appointed by a Republican president, but has been reluctant to create any non-trivial precedent on topics that figure in the Republican platform. There's a lot of anger among Republican voters over that, but what can they do? They can't vote him out, he is not beholden to the Republican party, and he's done nothing impeachable.
I understand how this can be difficult to perceive from outside, especially if you happen to be in a bubble that perceives Republicans as uniformly deplorable. But I assure you that Roberts is viewed that way. (I view them from another direction entirely.)
As far as my stance being apologist or denialist, you have no idea what I think or want.
you: “we don't vote for Supreme Court justices… There's no…electoral…pressure on a justice[‘s] motivations…”
zzleeper: “Are you naive…? Republicans have lists of candidates for justices…they have deemed…anti roe-vs-wade”
you: “If I'm naive, please explain”
This is where you lost the point, and where I explained your naïveté, an explanation you ignored in your response to me.
Your last two paragraphs consist of speculative ad hominem (judging by your profile, we have similar life circumstances, and I have many conservatives in my “bubble” ie family members) followed by a hypocritical self defense. We don’t know anything about each other outside of what we’ve said here. I’m simply calling it like I see it:
you: “Why [wouldn’t Thomas change his mind once he is appointed], if he's now free to act as he pleases?…what's to stop him doing as he thinks is right…?”
The obvious answer is that he was appointed precisely because it was expected he would act the way he has, because what he believes is right is fully aligned with who appointed him, as are the three most recent appointees. You want to point out exceptions like Roberts, but those merely prove the rule from my original explanation.
The parent isn't wrong. Republicans don't do shit to support "the born" who are ill or live in crushing poverty, they don't give a shit about people, they give a shit about power and this is a lever they've been yanking on to get it for years.
On one hand, you are correct in that the right is more reluctant to use governmental power to improve society. That's in part because they put more emphasis on personal responsibility, and in part because they are skeptical of the government's competence.
On the hand, I think the right has done more than they usually get credit for. Median real wages rose significantly under Trump. [1] Nixon created the EPA. [2] At an individual level, conservatives donate significantly more to charities, and give blood more often. [3]
It seems like if they want to emphasize personal responsibility, they could stop trying to influence laws that prevent people from getting abortions or using contraception.
While I won't try to argue with you because abortion is the thing we won't see eye to eye on, what bout the 'or' on contraception, or do you think that responsible people only think that sex is for making babies?
On another thought, you think the best thing to do is give people you judge as irresponsible a child? Also, doesn’t original sin mean the fetus not innocent? Is innocence really the important measure? Because lots of things are innocent we don’t care about.
I don't have any particular problems with contraception. Some right-wingers do, they should speak for themselves. (I'm also not against early-stage abortions)
> On another thought, you think the best thing to do is give people you judge as irresponsible a child?
It's not ideal, it's just better than normalizing taking innocent lives. Also, if someone really thinks they can't be a good parent, putting up the baby for adoption is always an option.
> Also, doesn’t original sin mean the fetus not innocent?(which of course doesn't really apply since it's not a person)
I'm not religious, so I don't really think about the issue in terms of sins in the religious sense.
That is kind of a weird argument and I assume you don't understand the antiabortion position. People who are opposed to abortion think it is murder. If somebody supports personal responsibility that doesn't mean they think we shouldn't have murder laws.
You may disagree with the idea it is murder, but if it is in fact murder than it is completely consistent to support laws against it.
Biologically life begins at conception [1] [2]. A human fetus has been conceived. Therefore a human fetus is a human life. Unjustly and deliberately killing a human is murder.
You may disagree with some of the premises but they follow one another and have decent reasons to believe them. That is hardly irrational.
Something to keep in mind. If you want to actually convince somebody in the future, saying their views are as irrational as believing the Earth is flat isn't the best way.
This argument is based on a logical fallacy equating "human" with "person". It's yet another example of an attempt to derail the discussion.
>You may disagree with some of the premises but they follow one another
You can say the exact same thing about antivaxers.
>If you want to actually convince somebody in the future, saying their views are as irrational as believing the Earth is flat isn't the best way.
Honestly, I don't think I can convince a flat-earther or pro-lifer. This kind of brainwashing appears to be unfixable. What can be done is limiting the spread.
How do you even define "life" biologically? Two "living" things combine to form a fetus, and just a few months down the line none of the physical matter of those living things still comprises the growing fetus. The thing that is being terminated isn't a human, it's the potential of a human, which is also the thing that is flushed down the toilet when a used condom is disposed of.
Forced birthers are crazy, full stop. A fertilized egg is not a human any more than a sperm is a human.
Yesterday you've decided that hydatidiform mole is a human.
And here you're making the same mistake again: you're assuming that if someone disagrees with your ideas about biology it means they don't understand it. In reality the reverse is true - pro-life myths might make sense to a high schooler, but not to someone who actually understands the topic.
Yet you missed the obvious fact that science doesn't even have a good definition for life, in fact it's a hard problem in the philosophy of science. You could say that the replicating mass of cells will in the future become a human being and that is not true of a sperm (unless it later goes on to fertilize an egg), but a sperm is just as "alive" as a fertilized egg.
If you have some sperm cells laying around they won't grow into a human. If you have a fertilized egg it will (assuming the process completes normally).
Again, this doesn't matter to the discussion. Even if they were fully grown humans this wouldn't "override" pregnant person's right to decide about their own body.
(Also, you're conflating 'being homo sapiens' with 'being a person'; you've already tried this method of derailing the discussion two days before.)
>Does it mean a parent can be forced to donate an organ for transplant for their child?
I am not who you were responding to, but since we were talking previously I will remind you what I said before. You are not obligated to provide what people need above the basic necessities. Organ donations go beyond that.
Christians do give a lot to charity, but a lot of those are christian charities that give aid on the condition that you eat a heaping mouthful of bullshit. It's really just a feel good way for them to try and proselytize.
> give aid on the condition that you eat a heaping mouthful of bullshit
I don't have any stats on that, but it's contrary to my personal experience. When I was a student, there was this Pentecostal group which used to give free food to everyone every Thursday. It was quite unconditional, not even means tested.
If evidence on their position was completely missing or neutral then I would agree with you. Sadly, this is far from a straw man because there is evidence that they do not care.
These are the same people who actively work against giving children school lunches, who protect racist gerrymandering, who want to defund planned parenthood, and so on.
If, in the same breath, we were talking about significantly revolutionizing support for children/families in poverty, then this would be a different discussion. Sadly, look at the polls, this is majority boomers who no longer have functioning ovaries & men whose egos demand control over women.
I suspect people exist who are both pro-life and also pro-social safety net. You're falling into the trap created by the two political party system: binary thinking.
People exist who satisfy any imaginable criteria - one guy cut out his own appendix with a kitchen knife and lived. What does that prove, we should be our own surgeons?
The key questions is, how many of such peope exist.
I am fine with this contrarian argument, but why does it stop at birth? There’s no support (universal healthcare for children, paid maternity/paternity leave, etc etc). Conservatives apply these arguments inconsistently.
Actively supporting/helping vs not killing/preventing others from killing are pretty significantly different moral arguments. This always comes across as "If you're against abortion then why don't you support insert political position that involves drastically raising taxes and giving way more power to the state?"
You’re just describing a trolly problem. If you believe a foetus has more right to autonomy than the person carrying it, but you don’t believe in making sure that all children have what they need to survive, you’re avoiding “killing” by direct action in favor of killing by neglecting to act.
As for paying for it… no taxes need to be raised. Just divert 1/1000th of the money going to the military.
Except the child's death isn't guaranteed if we fail to implement universal healthcare/free school lunches/insert welfare program here, so it's not really a normal trolley problem. And that's before you get into potential adverse second order effects of such programs.
>Just divert 1/1000th of the money going to the military.
GP mentioned universal healthcare as one of the ways in which to support children after birth, I don't think $800 million is going to be enough to cover it.
I'm not sure how one can call a woman carrying a child something other than "actively supporting/helping" that child. So this amounts to a hypocrisy where it's OK for the state to have power to force a person to keep another person[1] alive for ~9 months, but somehow wrong for the state to contribute resources to this effort.
I'm also not sure how giving the power to pry into people's reproductive decisions is somehow less state power than administrative power to distribute resources.
[1] That's accepting the argument that a fetus is technically a person, which can also be debated.
I know that's what the post says. But that's not the actual equivalent. If we had free healthcare just for pregnant women, then it would be fair to say we should give free healthcare to children too, but we don't.
The fact that there is no free healthcare for pregnant women demonstrates that noone actually cares about the child's life.
It demonstates that you are willing to force a woman to carry the child of a rapist against her will (so it's not her choice) and then have her give birth without medical assitance if she can't afford hospital stay, potentially resulting in the death of the child and the mother.
it shows what the game is really about - control over women
Pregnancy has nontrivial effects on women. There is risk of death, emotional and physical changes to the body, and you need to adapt your life around these things. In the case of rape there is also trauma. It seems incredibly unjust to rob the mom of the choice to decide what to do in that situation. Having a position that ignores the mom in favor of the baby is terrifying.
Regardless of my opinion on whether states should be able to restrict abortions, I really didn't like Roe vs. Wade. This should be a law that congress votes for/against and be held responsible for by their voters.
I wonder how such a legal framework would work if the court could go to their respective law makers and say that the law is unclear in this case and require them to vote on it. Then, rather than Roe vs. Wade being passed in the first place, the supreme court would order congress to vote for/against a new law forbidding states from being able to restrict abortions.
Unfortunately it would require a constitutional amendment and so is unlikely to happen. But the benefits are obvious:
No mucking around trying to interpret legislative intent, just get new legislative intent!
If the executive steps into grey areas of the law, force Congress to clarify things.
I do worry it would solidify the judiciary as a proto
-legislature arguing the law back and forth with Congress. I’d also worry about other unforeseen consequences which would somehow cause worse problems then are existing system.
Kinda feels like a bit of a “bail out” signal to me. Even if the Democrats somehow get their act together enough to legalize abortion it’s going to take a long time.
On this tech focused forum people have portable skills in high demand. As WFH continues to be normalized there’s probably more opportunities than ever to work for US companies from elsewhere. You can move to Canada and you’ll be in the top 5% of earners easily.
You can still vote in us elections and donate to help turn things around, but in the meantime set yourself and your ancestors up for better success elsewhere in case things don’t.
There’s no real downside aside from forgoing the absurdly high wages of Silicon Valley, but you’d still be highly paid.
Looking at this ruling and the one a few days ago on arms - could someone explain to me why they're wrong legally? FYI I'm not American and personally am in favour of legalised abortion + severe gun restrictions.
My understanding is these rulings are both based on the constitution. The one on guns seems really straightforward:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I know this can be interpreted differently but to me it reads that nobody should be restricted from arming themselves.
Regarding abortion, what aspect of the constitution would cover it?
I'm asking in good faith here btw.
Edit: separately, it is insane to me that these big decisions can be completely split along political lines. A 'supreme court' should be apolitical. There are so many issues with the way the US Supreme Court works. It needs total reform. You should be able to trust a court to make a decision based on the law, not their personal preferences.
> Regarding abortion, what aspect of the constitution would cover it?
The Roe case hinged on abortion being a right under privacy right. It was a very weak argument and even Ruth Bader Ginsberg (a very left leaning justice who died recently) didnt like that reasoning and thought it was weak: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/06/ruth-bader...
They decided abortion was a right and worked backward until they found a round hole in which to fit the square peg. Frankly I think it fits much better into the 13th amendment, but then that would also lead to the uncomfortable conclusion that parents may be compelled to involuntarily serve both unborn and born offspring, and I'm guessing they didn't like the implications that would have on child neglect laws.
This is exactly the point for me. Roe V Wade embraced a court that decided that judges could/should legislate (that is, make new laws) rather then enforce the text of existing laws. This is not new from the court - separate but equal, Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, Dredd Scott - all basically where examples of the court taking matters into their own hands.
This simply says "Abortion is a legislative matter - the constitution does not say that abortion must be legal until the moment of delivery".
Weird because the courts striking down laws as unconstitutional is literally their job description.
Equal protection under the law would be my first pick for constitutional protection of abortion. There are very few life threatening things that the law compels men to do. Yet the law can compel a women to carry a fetus to term against her will?
Men are still lawfully required to register for the draft for military service (even though active conscription is currently on hold since 1973). It could be argued that being sent into war is life threatening.
I can go to jail for refusing to be drafted sure but my life would not be at risk the same way someone with a rough pregnancy might. Anecdotal but my sister in law would not be alive today if she had not had the option to end unsafe pregnancies prior to having 2 healthy children.
Unlike saying no to being drafted, abortion is a medical procedure. Women can't simply choose to abort, they must have medical assistance. Even with that it's never a simple choice.
Not to mention that when a war threatens the country you being drafted is taking the lion's share of the risk, because someone not doing it is also risky and to everyone.
Here women have to risk their lives and jail because a bunch of religious extremists and fascists have nothing better to do. There is no logical, philosophical, moral or even religious reason for it. It's tyranny for tyranny's sake. It's a demonstration of the power these people have over society.
> Weird because the courts striking down laws as unconstitutional is literally their job description.
Funnily enough, it's literally not in their original job description. Judicial review, like so many things about the Supreme Court, is just based on precedent [1].
>> Equal protection under the law would be my first pick for constitutional protection of abortion[..] Yet the law can compel a women to carry a fetus to term against her will?
But wouldn't that introduce the issue of whether or not the foetus should be entitled to equal protection (which most anti-abortion voters would suggest is a child and should be protected/have rights)? Seems odd to make it a man/woman equality issue.
For example, i have two lungs. You are in a car accident and both your lungs have failed. I could donate a lung and save your life.
Your right to live comes up against my right to control my own body. My right overrules your right. Even if I was the one who caused the accident that damaged your lungs. I can be found to have broken laws causing the accident, but I can’t be forced to donate an organ.
My view has always been that it does not even matter if the fetus has full rights.
People do not have the right to physically attach themselves to another person, and leach blood, oxygen, nurturant etc off the other person. Period. Fetuses would not be an exception.
I feel that a person who wakes up with another person surgically attached to them by some sort of mad-scientist doctor could have surgery to have the second person removed, even if this means certain death for the second person. I don't view abortion as any different.
I could support a ban on abortion methods that directly kill the fetus, but as long as the method is primarily about severing the connection to the mother and removing it from the body, I see nothing wrong with that, even if removal means certain death for the fetus.
If people feel fetuses have human rights, I could also support laws or medical ethics requiring doctors to attempt to save the fetus after it is expelled (if the condition was such that saving them might be possible) just like they would try to save any other person.
>> This is exactly the point for me. Roe V Wade embraced a court that decided that judges could/should legislate (that is, make new laws) rather then enforce the text of existing laws.
> Weird because the courts striking down laws as unconstitutional is literally their job description.
Not really, because the question is actually "what makes something unconstitutional." Should the standard be "we nine unelecteds don't like it, and can read whatever we want into text that is actually silent on the issue"?
> Equal protection under the law would be my first pick for constitutional protection of abortion. There are very few life threatening things that the law compels men to do. Yet the law can compel a women to carry a fetus to term against her will?
That frankly doesn't make any sense. The law doesn't say that men are permitted to get abortions but women aren't, and the law clearly must be able to regulate things that one sex is incapable of doing (e.g. penetrative rape, and please don't waste time trying to argue the illustration instead of the point). Also, I believe most, if not all, anti-abortion laws apply to people other than the woman getting the abortion.
> Should the standard be "we nine unelecteds don't like it, and can read whatever we want into text that is actually silent on the issue"?
I mean that’s what every ruling is. The court exists because the text isn’t clear. No text is clear enough to handle reality. There are always exceptions, shifting definitions, changing technology. No document can be the full representative of its meaning - a system of rules based on documents will always have a layer of interpretation built on top of it
>> Should the standard be "we nine unelecteds don't like it, and can read whatever we want into text that is actually silent on the issue"?
> I mean that’s what every ruling is.
No, it clearly isn't. If it was, you might as well abolish the other branches of government, because the government is really an oligarchy of judges.
> The court exists because the text isn’t clear. No text is clear enough to handle reality. There are always exceptions, shifting definitions, changing technology. No document can be the full representative of its meaning - a system of rules based on documents will always have a layer of interpretation built on top of it
That's true, but only to a point. Take it too far, and you are just using an oligarchy of judges to bypass the legislative process.
Actually, the power to strike down laws as unconstitutional was arbitrarily claimed by the court in 1803. It is not written down anywhere, except maybe the original federalist papers.
Well, lately, men can get pregnant. I haven't really thought this through, but I think that if you take the liberal position and regard trans men as men, then you can't claim equal protection as an argument against abortion restrictions.
The constitutionality of the draft is debatable. Congress can raise armies, per the constitution - that doesn’t mean they can compel any individual to fight.
> Equal protection under the law would be my first pick for constitutional protection of abortion. There are very few life threatening things that the law compels men to do. Yet the law can compel a women to carry a fetus to term against her will?
I don't think it's the court's job to equal the playing field on biology.
But since you put it like that, wouldn't that mean the father also has the right to decide for or against the abortion of his child?
It literally is not. The ability of the court to strike down laws is something the court came up with for itself. It's not literally in the Constitution, it's an inferred authority.
> Weird because the courts striking down laws as unconstitutional is literally their job description.
"Unconstitutional" is never as straightforwardly defined as one would like. For example, protesting against the draft was ruled by the Holmes court as unprotected speech. Today, you can burn a flag with impunity.
> Equal protection under the law would be my first pick for constitutional protection of abortion.
While I'm supportive of the, for lack of a better term, "spirit" of Roe vs Wade, it was never premised on equal protection under the law. After all, men don't have an acknowledged right to avoid parenthood. The opinion itself only justifies abortion on a limited right to privacy and explicitly rejects the "my body, my choice" justification that it is mythologized to have:
"The Court's decisions recognizing a right of privacy also acknowledge that some state regulation in areas protected by that right is appropriate. As noted above, a State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life. At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision. The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 25 S.Ct. 358, 49 L.Ed. 643 (1905) (vaccination); Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 47 S.Ct. 584, 71 L.Ed. 1000 (1927) (sterilization)."
> There are very few life threatening things that the law compels men to do.
Selective service and compelled paternity.
> Yet the law can compel a women to carry a fetus to term against her will?
The law can compel a man to support a child even if he man is not the biological father. It can compel one be vaccinated against his/her will. It can also compel sterilization if it determines that one is mentally defective.
Compelled paternity isn’t a matter of bodily autonomy
Child support isn’t a matter of bodily autonomy.
Both of those apply to both men and women.
The law can theoretically compel everyone to be vaccinated, not just men.
That’s equal protection under the law. It’s also only available in public health crises - not routine.
Again sterilization has been applied to men and women.
Selective service is maybe the only analog to forced birth, and even that has carve outs for religious and moral beliefs.
>Compelled paternity isn’t a matter of bodily autonomy
>Child support isn't a matter of bodily autonomy
A man can be ordered by a court to obtain a job to pay for the child or risk being thrown in prison for refusing to comply. Even terminating parental rights does not remove him from the obligation of paying child support. There has never been a case of compelled maternity (compulsion to mother a child) as every state, even the ones that will now be able to criminalize abortions, allow a mother to surrender her child within a period of at least 72 hours.
> The law can theoretically compel everyone to be vaccinated, not just men. That’s equal protection under the law. It’s also only available in public health crises - not routine.
Equal violation is not equal protection. Otherwise slavery would be OK as long as you could find a persuasive or compelling enough interest for it and found that it could be equally applied to men and women. That's not how rights work. They're inalienable. You either have them or you don't.
> Again sterilization has been applied to men and women.
Same as above.
> Selective service is maybe the only analog to forced birth, and even that has carve outs for religious and moral beliefs.
Carveouts and concessions only make the violation of a right palatable, not reasonable or justifiable. Several states that oppose abortions have carveouts for incest, rape, and/or threats to the health of the mother. In spite of these carveouts, I reject that states or even the federal government should have a say on what one does with one's body in the first place with "special" cases being negotiated after the fact.
Well then we mostly agree. I’ve just been trying to draw consistent lines through an inconsistent system. I believe the system should be consistent, and I believe that there is no consistent system that men could live with that would also include banned abortion.
Then you share my own interest. I would certainly enjoy a constitution that was consistently interpreted to acknowledge and protect negative rights from first principles. But anyone who's read case law will find the actual practice of law to be more disappointing.
Judicial Review is something the court granted itself, it’s not in the constitution. This idea that that court can basically invent or remove the laws of the land by interpretation of a 200 year old document, then decide oh, that’s wrong and now it’s this way… is basically insane. It does not work like this basically anywhere else in the world.
And in their justification, the assenting justices are now coming for gay marriage. It’s funny that justice Thomas is not also gunning for interracial marriage, given that they were both legalized using the same interpretation of the law. SCOTUS is a joke, and it’s decisions should hold no bearing going forward.
Some argue the Supreme court has too much power. Whether you agree with the result or not, the Left absolutely abused the power of the Supreme Court in order to make fast progress. There was no reason to involve the Supreme Court in many of these cases in the first place other than because the laws themselves disagreed with what people wanted. But the people have the power to change the laws. We just havent.
which is also why 2nd amendment is relevant. if the people responsible for the creation of laws is sufficiently corrupted, then the public have the right to form a militia and replace them. Which you cannot do if those same corrupted people are the ones deciding who is allowed to have guns or not.
I don’t think the Court was intentionally abused though. The Left doesn’t have an equivalent to the Federalist Society that carefully evaluated every candidate to see if they held pro-LGBTQ positions for decades in order to eventually legalize gay marriage.
The Supreme Court has taken on relevance because Congress is worthless. When no laws can be passed, courts act as clever compilers to keep society working despite the source code being ancient. The programmers of the law have not updated it to match the reality on the ground nor the features users want. This is a far better outcome than an uprising against the government, but it will only work for so long. Ultimately Congress needs to become functional again, which will require compromise and pork barrel trading.
>The Supreme Court has taken on relevance because Congress is worthless
>Ultimately Congress needs to become functional again
Yes exactly. I keep seeing rhetoric that we "lost 50 years of progress". we didnt. We band-aided our government and had 50 years to make the proper correction and havent been able to yet. More importantly, though, I dont think we have really tried to
the group that was keeping that band-aid on is now out of power and we want to blame the other side for simply upholding separation of powers. I mean, it is tone deaf to do it now at best, but Mississippi pushed the issue. the court is obligated to uphold the law, not dictate it. Abortion as a privacy right has always been a weak stance.
Anecdotally, I have felt a growing disinterest in local politics growing for the past decade. I can name so many people who "didnt want to talk politics" 2 weeks ago who are now non-stop politically charged over roe v wade. I could roll my eyes about it all, but honestly I just hope it serves as enough of a wake up call for people to stay involved.
> Regarding abortion, what aspect of the constitution would cover it?
The 9th amendment of the United States reads:
> The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
This was added as an Amendment, because many founders were deeply concerned that the introduction of a bill of rights would create the impression that if they enumerated some rights, people would consider that list to be complete.
That is, they recognized that there were many rights not explicitly enumerated by the constitution that were still important rights. Nearly everyone agreed that the enumeration of rights was not intended to capture every right.
So, relying on "what rights are explicitly mentioned in the constitution" is antithetical to the entire concept of the bill of rights. It's an incorrect place to start reading the constitution.
George Mason, coauthor of the second amendment, was asked "Who is the militia?" He's been asked this several times and at one point said it was everyone except our politicians. He typically responds: "I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for few public officials." (George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 425-426) - https://www.madisonbrigade.com/g_mason.htm
The scope of the second amendment is the same scope as all other amendments which is to say it's an unlimited, and natural right. Anything else is just playing stupid games with lawyers.
Article the twelfth (AKA the 10th amendment) of the Bill of Rights from the US Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
So the current argument might be that since the constitution does not give the federal government the power to regular abortions (or to prevent states from regulating them), then that power to regulate them or not is reserved for the states to do as they please.
The prior argument (from Roe vs Wade) is that the US Constitution provides a right to privacy and that prohibiting or otherwise restricting abortions violates that right to privacy.
While there's no explicit right to privacy in the constitution, it could be implied by the 14th amendment: "... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ..."
From the original Roe vs Wade opinion:
"A person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Viability means the ability to live outside the womb, which usually happens between 24 and 28 weeks after conception."
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/
The current record of a baby surviving is around 20-21 weeks.
The viability condition is one of the legal arguments people tend to attack. Justice Blackmun even wrote in a memo when drafting the verdict for Roe vs Wade: "You will observe that I have concluded that the end of the first trimester is critical. This is arbitrary, but perhaps any other selected point, such as quickening or viability, is equally arbitrary."
They did end upon a viability criteria. The exact week has also changed since medical science has advanced in the last 50 years.
And these justifications from previous decisions (Obergefell, Loving etc… ) can be overturned with the current SCOTUS’s interpretation. In-fact, in the leaked draft, these were also on the docket to be targeted by the court. In todays assent, only Obergefell is being targeted. I wonder why that is? (Cough, Clarence Thomas)
> Regarding abortion, what aspect of the constitution would cover it?
The US Constitution does not contain the word abortion, and so decisions by the Court on abortion either way are only indirectly guided by applying other parts of the Constitution.
Except this is not the way the consitution is actually written:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
To the people == legislative branch. to the states means the states legislative branch.
> [The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Which is the go-to argument for federal control over things. If you pay for it, and buy it from another state, then the feds can regulate it.
It seems perfectly legal to make a federal law that states don't have the power to block access to medications produced in elsewhere. Nor do they have the power to prosecute people for buying such medications, regardless of the effects, from businesses which have locations in multiple states.
I think you would have better luck arguing the equal protection clause. The commerce clause can be used to strike down a state trying to prevent it's citizens getting abortions in other states, but cannot be used to restrict the laws of a single state.
In an ideal world, SCOTUS would point to the Ninth Amendment, say, "this seems like an un-enumerated constitutional right" and allow it.
But since we don't yet live in that world, we need every argument we can find, no matter how flimsy or contrived. Because, despite having a solid foundation sitting right there, we are forced to build on top of a patchwork of whatever else we see laying around.
Or we can just pass a law, instead of allowing judges to do so.
Remember that the supreme court has a somewhat checkered history. IT is the least of the democratic branches, but has unarguably limitless rights.
What is the supreme court decided that I had a in-numerated constitutional right to have slaves? Or a un-enumerated right to not have Japanese or Chinese in my state. These are not hypothetical.
The Constitution also doesn’t say I am allowed to bear an Ak47, but apparently it’s a constitutionally protected right. You have a right to bear arms, but if you are going by the strictest interpretation, those arms should be a firearm built using 1776 technology. Fuck originality interpretation. We all know exactly what SCOTUS is going to overturn next and it is going to backslide America into a further shithole
Actually, it does: "arms" is a general term that describes weapons including the Ak47.
The problem with saying technological change invalidates the 2nd amendment, is that you have to also explain or accept that the 1st amendment only applies to letters written with a feather and a pool of ink.
"Arms" includes nuclear weapons too, strictly speaking. After-all, the term for the period in which the USA was building ever more powerful nuclear weapons was called the "nuclear arms race."
Ah the classic nukes "gotcha." If you want to argue nukes ought to be included as bearable arms, I'm all for that too. The federal government has shown itself very willing to infringe on the right to bear arms.
A constitutional amendment could easily ban nukes. It's not like there isn't a process to get them out of private hands the legitimate way. It probably wouldn't even be difficult amendment to pass. Similarly an amendment should be required if you want to exclude certain technology from the 1st amendment.
> ""A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I think was this was meant to mean was: Any citizen has the right to join their local/state militia, and keep their service rifle and uniform with them at home.
The militia is defined in both statutory and common law as essentially every able-bodied male, and always has been in the US. The statutory law explicitly recognizes that the militia is not something you "join" but is something you are.
Obviously this should probably be expanded to include women generally, but their 2nd Amendment rights are not predicated on their membership in the militia.
> I think was this was meant to mean was: Any citizen has the right to join their local/state militia, and keep their service rifle and uniform with them at home.
Seems sensible. But the court is saying that if you look at what laws were passed / in force at the time, and what courts said about them around that time, you'll see that to contemporaries of ratification the second amendment meant a right to carry arms, not just to be in a militia, or whatever. That too seems sensible. Now what?
So if a group of people form a militia, do they then as militia have right to produce let's say nuclear weapons? As those are "arms" and thus shall not be infringed. Can federal government or state control what type of weapons these militias manufacture, import and hold?
The constitution the "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms". So who owns the right? Is it the Feds? No. Is it the States? No. It's the peoples'.
While the first part of the sentence says why should care, the explicit right is owned by the people.
What people don't often consider is that one can infer that rights might be infringed. The second amendment just says, "We can't fringe this right".
DC v. Heller was wrong. Go read the context around all of the places where a militia is mentioned in the constitution. It’s a pretty clear difference from the world that DC v. Heller created.
Yea, there's a lot of history around types of militias, too (especially formal v. informal militias). The historical arguments were what got me on this: the 'prefatory' clause is pretty clearly there to point out that formal militias are allowed, and make no mention of informal militias.
The Constitution is a little ambiguous as to whether or not a citizen must join a militia in order to keep a gun at home.
...however in the absence of militias in the US today, it makes sense that even if that requirement was initially envisioned (which is very debatable), it's no longer reasonable.
It's historically interesting to note that different versions of the amendment were ratified, both including and not including that last comma.
The US has a common law system, which means supreme court precedent is binding. Once a case is decided courts aren't supposed to decide the same case in the other direction. The supreme court has decided many cases showing that Americans have the right to abortion until viability. Undoing that precedent is a largely unprecedented move.
The New York carry case seems like it was probably decided correctly, what's interesting to me is that the courts gun law doctrine relies on deciding whether the law is "consistent with the nations historical tradition of firearm control." The court decided this law was not, even though it is over a century old and 7 states have had similar laws for decades. At what point does it become part of our historical tradition?
Brown vs. Board of Education undid a ~60 year precedent. This case undoes a 50 year precedent.
The court has to be allowed to undo precedents once in a while. Otherwise we'd have to fight a civil war over every Dred Scott case.
I'm NOT saying this case, or yesterday's, was rightly decided. I'm only pointing out that the court has changed its mind a number of times in the past, and will again in the future.
I heavily recommend that you read the gun ruling for yourself. It's a very fun run through history. How often do you get to read about the 1328 Statute of Northampton, launcegays, and the Black Death in modern legal analysis?
There is a legal principle that once the court bedsides something and it becomes established law, you don't overturn the previous decision lightly.
Roe & Wade is based on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Roe vs Wade did not happen in vacuum, it's part of a larger understanding of the Constitution that recognizes a right to privacy and recognizes that there are unwritten rights.
This decision overturns this whole 50-year old framework. Decisions based on 14th Amendment’s Due Process clause are now open for banning contraception, banning interracial relationships, family relationships, right to intimacy (sodomy laws), the right to personal control of medical treatment. It will even have data collection limit consequences.
Re: guns, if the militia is well regulated then the militia needs to explain guns getting into the hands of people that kill kids as well as insanely high per capita murder rates (primarily in red states, it should be mentioned). Maybe time to disband a militia that can't regulate itself?
This is aside from the founders not being presented with a firearm that can put 6" holes into a kindergartner's body at the rate of 45 rounds per minute.
We're never going to fix the gun issue in this country but the reading of 2a has always been absolutely absurd.
RE: SCOTUS the powerful will always protect the powerful. Sotomayor just went on the record the other day to call Clarence Thomas 'a man who cares deeply about the court as an institution.' Clarence Thomas, whose wife was supporting and funding the January 6th insurrection and effort to overturn a legal election.
Every now and then I ctrl-f the constitution to find the words "supreme court" and somehow come up blank every time.
>This is aside from the founders not being presented with a firearm that can put 6" holes into a kindergartner's body at the rate of 45 rounds per minute.
Citation required... the only way you're going to get a 6" hole in a human body is with something like a .50 BMG (which is an anti-material rifle) or maybe a .45-70.
Nothing in this opinion bars the Congress from crafting a compromise. One might hope it prompts just such deliberation, though within the confines of present politics I find that unlikely.
Regarding guns, the dissent argues that “well-regulated” and “militia” are key components of the text. The applicants for concealed carry were not part of a militia, and the current court doesn’t seem to acknowledge the “well-regulated” piece exists at all.
With regard to abortion, the constitution guarantees us a right to privacy, which is closely linked to bodily autonomy. The argument being that there is constitutionally no legal way for the government to involve itself in your personal health decisions. There is an interesting ideological reversal here with regard to the recent vaccine debate with liberals arguing the government should be able to compel vaccination, and the conservatives against.
Except there isn't a explicit right to privacy either in the constitution or the bill of rights. Which is why RBG always argued that Roe v. Wade was poorly decided.
Should there be? I think this is an evolving question that would settle a number of ambiguities in the law.
If one were to die tomorrow without being an organ donor, the state still cannot compel one to give up their organs, even if it would save lives. Why should a woman’s body have less autonomy than a corpse?
On the other hand, I don’t think many people would support 39-week abortions either, absent some explicit medical necessity. At some point, which is inherently a gradient, our legal system has to afford protection to what is a viable person.
Americans have a tendency to go for the most extreme positions on everything and I think the court reversing Roe is an incredibly shortsighted decision that will cost it decades of legitimacy. The institution is more damaged now than possibly ever. Even the Chief Justice had wanted to uphold Mississippi’s law but preserve Roe, which would’ve been a much better solution than where we are today.
I've seen it claimed that "well-regulated" in 1789 meant "well-equipped". Think of what a "regular" and "irregular" meant then (and kinda still means now). A "regular" was a soldier in an army. An "irregular" was a civilian joining the fight. I don't know if it is true that "well-regulated" meant "well-equipped", but it makes sense that it might have.
> There is an interesting ideological reversal here with regard to the recent vaccine debate with liberals arguing the government should be able to compel vaccination, and the conservatives against.
My interpretation of that ideology is that liberals want the government to protect public health by restricting personal freedom of participation in certain aspects of the public sphere by those who choose not to be vaccinated, and conservatives want to put their own personal choices above the public health by allowing them to do without restriction all the things they did before the pandemic regardless of their vaccination status. There was never serious debate about blanket compelling of vaccination.
Yes I agree the legal system should be apolitical, they should be elected instead of appointed, and there should be an age limit, plus it's just odd those judges never retires, congress is 4-years, senate is 6, what about a 8-year-term for supreme court just like everybody else(longer term for 'stability', life long term is ridiculous to me).
Them being elected would only guarantee they are political. If judge appointment was not decided by politicians and instead an independent body there would be a better chance of them actually being apolitical.
From outside perspective so many parts of judicial system being elected individuals seem sort of part of the problem. Them being elected means that there is very perverse incentive to work with. Ofc, there need to be way to recall those misusing the power or not following the laws. But maybe campaigning isn't the best way to do.
(1) Stare Decisis and Reliance: two legal standards that had restrained even right-wing courts for years. It's legal, but "bad", for the Court to overturn a long-standing law that people organize their lives around (as they did post sexual-revolution). So the standard isn't "is it wrong," it's "is it egregiously wrong." And the court has found multiple times that Roe is fine.
(2) The decision doesn't take aim at _just_ abortion. It takes aim at the right to privacy. This right is pretty strong, overall: the 9th Amendment says "just bc a right is not explicit, that doesn't mean it isn't real"; the 3rd, 4th and others say "the gov't can't just meddle in your affairs without real justification;" the 14th says "this right is universal." Implying this right is weak is iffy at best, and DEFINITELY doesn't meet the "egregiously wrong" standard.
(3) The new tests are, uh, speculative.
(3a)They rely on historical analysis that is contextually-driven at best. Are we talking abortion, reproductive healthcare, or women's rights? That's a matter of framing, not law, and will lead to dif conclusions, which makes it a bad test. [Note: more on this when Obergefell is inevitably challenged...]
(3b) The tests lead to dif conclusions than Alito reached. Abortion has been legal in the US for longer than it's been illegal; it wasn't banned nationwide until the 20th century, because it was explicitly legal under british common law. Even 19th century regulations were effectively just regulations of methods (poison control), not abortion itself. I'd argue "a cultural practice referenced in Shakespeare, explicitly addressed in 400 years of british common law, and that we kept for 100+ years in the US, including when the Constitution was written" is pretty deep. Besides, it's applied differently in different cases (how far back is "deeply rooted," anyway?). TLDR: arbitrary = bad test.
All this to say: I'm pissed bc it's bad policy, but I'm ALSO annoyed at the bad legal analysis. Like - there are better arguments! It feels like an F U.
(1) Stare decisis should not be followed blindly. "Wrong" and "egregiously wrong" are subjective gradations. Recall that Dred Scott or Plessy weren't considered wrong or even "egregiously" wrong for decades after their decision until they were. Also, Casey vs Planned Parenthood did partially overturn Roe vs Wade. So to say that courts found Roe "fine" is misleading.
(2) Roe vs Wade is not premised on the 9th amendment (as much as I would have liked that) or cases involving substantive due process (Lochner vs New York), but on Griswold vs Connecticut, which relied an unsubstantiated argument of "penumbras" and "emanations", as though rights can be "found" in the same way that one summons Captain Planet. Roe vs Wade does not make a protestation to the defense of bodily autonomy as a fundamental right. In fact, Roe explicitly rejects such arguments.
A mistake on my part: Griswold was partially predicated on the 14th amendment as one of the "emanations" but, unlike Lochner, not given a first-principles argument for substantive due process under the 14th amendment.
It isn’t wrong legally and if anything, had the constitution been followed correctly, this decision is how it should have played out in the first place. It is only controversial because some people think their personal opinions on controversial issues should override democratic mechanisms.
Which was wrong, and will ideally be overturned. "Racists supported gun control in the past, therefore we should keep gun control now" is perhaps not the strongest argument one can make.
It should be up to the Congress (or state legislatures) to make abortion legal and write the laws that protect the right such as they did for example in France.
The Constitution is or was a band-aid and it's reached its EOL.
The Congress has abrogated their duty here and we're seeing the consequence of this.
You answered your own question. It's the interpretation that matters. The Supreme Court is a joke.
Political debates have not been done in good faith in the US for decades. It's no longer about the people - it's about fooling the people into getting amped up about things and voting one way or the other. It's like a wrestling match. Does it really matter who wins if it's all fake? Actually I take this back: being a wrestler actually needs some sort of prep and physical conditioning. Wrestling is better than politics.
People hate to admit it but the court is just another political entity and always has been. The basis for Roe was weak (bodily autonomy, privacy). So is the basis for literally all gun control:
>> "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
So anyone, including children, the insane, felons etc has a right to bear "arms". And there is no clear limit to say that a gun is "arms" but a kilo of C4 or a ground-air missile launcher or a fully armed attack helicopter is not. In fact, in 2022 any militia that could be even slightly useful will need at least some air support. Yet SCOTUS has routinely banned these items from personal procession.
I say this not because I am some crazy gun nut or I think that those an actual right to bear arms would be a good idea.
I say it to point out that the courts job was always to rule what people wanted and what was practical was also legal. Just like a politicians job is.
Actually arguing actual constitutionality is a red herring. A lawyer's job is to find a loophole and all judges start as lawyers...
As a point of fact, Americans can legally buy a "fully armed attack helicopter". They typically don't as a matter of practicality and cost, not theoretical ability. The paperwork is pretty nominal.
Most Americans don't realize that, at least until recently, you could buy a kilo of C4 with cash, no questions asked. It is outside the experience of most Americans to buy high explosives retail, but that's actually a thing depending on where you live.
Yes, the courts generally lag public opinion, but eventually side with it. Whether regarding interracial marriage, birth control, gun control, and many other things. If anything, Roe was an outlier because in 1972 the public was probably mostly unconcerned about abortion and, if pressed, probably not broadly for it to be legal.
If, indeed, more than half the States were to legalize civilian possession of heavy weapons, then the courts might rule that to be covered by the second amendment. And since none do, the court will feel safe ending the second amendment's shade at small-caliber firearms.
One might wish for the courts to act very differently than this, but then we'd probably see large majorities in favor of reforming them to be as they are.
It's a problem, though, that we have such disparities in public opinion between various States.
By the way, this decision may well cause the end of Republican rule in many Republican States if their legislatures get too excited about banning more abortion options than the people of those States want them to. It might well usher a multi-decadal Democrat majority in the State legislatures and in the Federal government. It could very well be a Pyrrhic victory for pro-life activists.
I`m not american, but lets be honest. Is not a constitution right because is not in the constitution. States can now do their onw diligence about the subject. So it`s not the end of the word for pro-choise people.
It's actually written in the Constitution that we as Americans enjoy many rights that aren't explicitly written in the text. It's in the 9th amendment and 14th amendment due process clause.
The 14th, to me, encompasses everything that it means to be American: self-autonomy. The right to marry outside our race, the right to choose our sexual partner, the right to birth control are established in the due process clause.
The issue there is the reactionaries who claim to be 'textualists' and 'originalists' have all but decided the ninth amendment is meaningless.
Scalia said, "the Constitution's refusal to 'deny or disparage' other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people".
Of course, anyone with a brain can see that Scalia was the first to abandon textualism or the reactionary idea that judges should not engage in 'judicial activism' whenever they came in conflict with conservative policy.
> The right to marry outside our race, the right to choose our sexual partner, the right to birth control are established in the due process clause.
The rights to choose your sexual partner and marry outside your race are also established in the Equal Protection clause, which gives them a stronger basis in the constitution than birth control and abortion which solely rely on substantive due process.
If the constitution is so vague that different judges will interpret it completely differently (and it "encompasses everything that it means to be American"), you need to fix the constitution. Having judges interpret vague things the way the people of the day want is a recipe for...exactly what's happening now.
> It's meant to protect liberties that were traditionally respected at the time of its ratification, but were not all necessarily written down. Abortion was not one of those -- in fact it was flatly illegal (almost?) every single state at the time, and continued so into the 20th century.
The text I emphasized above is false.
After independence, the US adopted English common law, which "hazily" prohibited abortion after "quickening" (fetal movements usually first felt around 15-20 weeks' gestation), but lacked an actual written statute banning this. The first anti-abortion laws were introduced in Connecticut in 1821 (precipitated by a womanizing preacher who got one of his many young female fans pregnant, insisted she abort the fetus before marrying him because it'd damage his reputation, tried and failed medicine and then "mechanical" means, caused stillbirth, all without technically breaking any law): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#...
Abortion wasn't made illegal in most states until the mid 1800s. Benjamin Franklin even published information on what can be used to perform an abortion in one of this books.
Wrong, this is refuted at length in the Dobbs ruling.
>That the common law did not condone even pre-quickening abortions is confirmed by what one might call a proto-felony-murder rule. Hale and Blackstone explained a way in which a pre-quickening abortion could rise to the level of a homicide. Hale wrote that if a physician gave a woman “with child” a “potion” to cause an abortion, and the woman died, it was “murder” because the potion was given
“unlawfully to destroy her child within her.” 1 Hale 429–430 (emphasis added). As Blackstone explained, to be “murder” a killing had to be done with “malice aforethought, . . . either express or implied.” 4 Blackstone 198 (emphasis deleted). In the case of an abortionist, Blackstone wrote, “the law will imply [malice]” for the same reason that it would imply malice if a person who intended to kill one person accidentally killed a different person:
>“[I]f one shoots at A and misses him, but kills B, this is murder; because of the previous felonious intent, which the law transfers from one to the other. The same is the case, where one lays poison for A; and B, against whom the prisoner had no malicious intent, takes it, and it kills him; this is likewise murder. So also, if one gives a woman with child a medicine to procure abortion, and it operates so violently as to kill the woman, this is murder in the person who gave it.” Id., at 200–201 (emphasis added; footnote omitted).29
>Notably, Blackstone, like Hale, did not state that this proto-felony-murder rule required that the woman be “with quick child”—only that she be “with child.” Id., at 201. And it is revealing that Hale and Blackstone treated abortionists differently from other physicians or surgeons who caused the death of a patient “without any intent of doing [the patient] any bodily hurt.” Hale 429; see 4 Blackstone 197. These other physicians—even if “unlicensed”—would not be “guilty of murder or manslaughter.” Hale 429. But a physician performing an abortion would, precisely because his aim was an “unlawful” one.
>In sum, although common-law authorities differed on the severity of punishment for abortions committed at different points in pregnancy, none endorsed the practice. Moreover, we are aware of no common-law case or authority, and the parties have not pointed to any, that remotely suggests a positive right to procure an abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
>In this country, the historical record is similar. The “most important early American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries,” District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. 570, 594 (2008), reported Blackstone’s statement that abortion of a quick child was at least “a heinous misdemeanor,” 2 St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries 129–130 (1803), and that edition also included Blackstone’s discussion of the proto-felony-murder rule, 5 id., at 200–201. Manuals for justices of the peace printed in the Colonies in the 18th century typically restated the common-law rule on abortion, and some manuals repeated Hale’s and Blackstone’s statements that anyone who prescribed medication “unlawfully to destroy the child” would be guilty of murder if the woman died. See, e.g., J. Parker, Conductor Generalis 220 (1788); 2 R. Burn, Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer 221–222 (7th ed. 1762) (English manual stating the same).30
>The few cases available from the early colonial period corroborate that abortion was a crime. See generally Dellapenna 215–228 (collecting cases). In Maryland in 1652, for example, an indictment charged that a man “Murtherously endeavoured to destroy or Murther the Child by him begotten in the Womb.” Proprietary v. Mitchell, 10 Md. Archives 80, 183 (1652) (W. Browne ed. 1891). And by the
19th century, courts frequently explained that the common law made abortion of a quick child a crime. See, e.g., Smith v. Gaffard, 31 Ala. 45, 51 (1857); Smith v. State, 33 Me. 48, 55 (1851); State v. Cooper, 22 N. J. L. 52, 52–55 (1849); Commonwealth v. Parker, 50 Mass. 263, 264–268 (1845).
Ben Franklin could publish what he liked; that didn't make it legal, or a right.
>Is not a constitution right because is not in the constitution.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." - 9th Amendment, in its entirety.
In other words: there is an entire Amendment specifically dedicated to refuting this argument. People have rights, even if they're not specifically written in the Constitution.
> But abortion couldn't be one of those rights because abortion was banned in some states.
Abortion was not, in fact, banned when that amendment was written. The first full ban was in New York in 1829. [1]
Besides, the legal issue is not whether abortion is one of those rights per se, but rather whether privacy is an implicit right (almost certainly), and whether family planning (abortion, yes, but also contraception & choice of sex partner) is a sufficiently private decision that the government is restrained from regulating it.
The preceding amendments are examples of the types of freedoms given the people, and the types of limitations imposed on the governments. Then it goes on to say, this is not an exhaustive list of rights for people, but is an exhaustive list of rights to the federal government.
The right to potentially life saving treatment sounds an awful lot like those enumerated in the first amendment, and the right to not have the government force you to go through an potentially deadly and avoidable situation sounds in the spirit of the eighth amendment.
The problem is that it just exacerbates an already major problem in America: access to healthcare is based on where you live and how wealthy your parents are.
Wealthy republicans can just fly their teenage daughters to a blue state, while poor people will inevitably end up getting back-alley abortions.
This is an accurate viewpoint. The overwhelming majority of states permit abortion and are not going to backtrack. The federal government has not banned abortion, and their legal ability to do so would be Constitutionally sketchy at best. There is a clear democratic path to settling the abortion issue in the states.
The news here isn’t a Supreme Court overriding voters, but devolving the decision of abortion rights to voters in the states and their elected representatives.
Are you able to make a substantive argument here? Can you quote anything from Thomas's decision to suggest he does not want to revisit anti-sodomy laws, gay marriage, and trans rights? Otherwise your post looks like a low-effort way to refute OP's argument with absolutely no evidence.
Thomas cites himself (he absolutely loves to cite himself, he does it 19 times in 7 pages(!)), 'As I have previously explained, “substantive due process” is an oxymoron that “lacks any basis in the Constitution.”'
He then goes on to say outright that Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell should be reconsidered. I take that to mean the majority reactionary court, who also do not believe in substantive due process, will overturn those. And it also implies a call to action for reactionaries to start building cases.
Those cases created rights out of thin air and said rights are supported by huge majorities of the country. It would be trivial to pass a law actually codifying them. Not so with universal abortion, because it's not popular at all: https://twitter.com/Peoples_Pundit/status/152150922486134374...
Until it actually happens I don't care. Almost anything can happen. There is not enough time in the day to get worked up over everything that can happen.
Exactly how is it wild speculation when they are outright admitting that they want to do it, and they have enough far-right reactionaries on the court to do it?
There is a reason this decision is so backward-looking and out of touch with the general trend in favor of the rights of women globally. This is the fulfillment of a religious fundamentalist, dominionist agenda. That's invisible to most people in the tech industry because tech is mostly irreligious. The nation as a whole is increasingly irreligious.
Don't argue the case. Marginalize the dominionists. Neutralize their effectiveness. Exclude them from institutions and communities. Dominionism is a movement closely related to white supremacism and the American flavor of fascism. It is as fundamentally dangerous as those related movements. Debating dominionists is just as useless as debating neonazis, and for the same reasons.
There are 13 Circuit Courts in the United States. With that in mind they should have one judge from each serve on the Supreme Court. The current Supreme Court is full of partisans with questionable qualifications and backgrounds.
Tip for savvy EU-based employers: you can save yourselves a lot of work when hiring US nationals that don't quite meet the European Work Visa requirements, by requesting a humanitarian visa for candidates that live in Florida and such instead. Abortion restrictions and associated death penalty pretty much make that a no-brainer.
I've tended to respect the USSC most of my life. No longer. This sickening retrograde decision bodes much ill for Freedom. Coming at a time when we're already reeling from the after-effects of multiple blows, shows how little empathy the court can feel and how little it cares for majority opinion. What grievous suffering will it inflict next? What is the aim, if not the tragic end of a once-great story?
Supreme Court has shoot itself in the foot. It they can overturn their own decisions based on political schemes, then we can overturn EVERYTHING they do, including this decision itself.
A lot of people are missing a very important core issue
What Alito and others did by over turning a previous supreme court ruling is open the bad box in that any time a majority changes on the supreme court there will be an attempt to over turn past rulings not based upon law but based on feelings of the court.
the only sliver lining is that there is growing evidence that at least 3 supreme court justice might be impeached by year-end.
This is a good occasion to remember that most people in the US thinks that abortion should be legal [0], thus this decision purely appeals the white evangelical minority.
Do you have stats on views of abortion by trimester? Here's [0] one from last year, which finds that 54% of people think third trimester abortions should be illegal in all cases - (EDIT: presumably) including health of the mother - and 65% think most or all abortions should be illegal in the second trimester.
> ... which finds that 54% of people think third trimester abortions should be illegal in all cases - including health of the mother - and 65% think most or all abortions should be illegal in the second trimester.
I believe the poll from your source fails to make that distinction. From the article:
> But Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco, who supports abortion rights, cited research showing that Americans viewed second-trimester abortions more empathetically when told about some of the reasons why women seek them.
So if asked if abortions should be legal in the third trimester, most people would jump to say "no", without considering the context.
And now we're playing the game of polls, where depending on what additional information you provide, people respond differently. The general point of "people will respond differently if you ask about abortion in general vs third (or second) trimester abortions in particular" remains.
I'm sure your overall polls would change if you said it meant that a nearly-due baby could be aborted at will, too.
> The general point of "people will respond differently if you ask about abortion in general vs third (or second) trimester abortions in particular" remains.
I don't think I understand. Are you looking for a blanket statement on all abortions?
The former poll is not nuanced because it aims at providing demographic data. The latter does not - it de-aggregates sentiment based on trimesters, thus adding the circumstances should be considered.
I'm saying that polls can be twisted however you want, if you're willing to put in the effort. [0] How the question is framed is a large part of the effort, and what the quoted doctor was complaining about. (Specifically, he was complaining that things were not sufficiently twisted in the direction they found favorable)
Disaggregating the question based on trimesters is one form of twisting. Asking only a single blanket "are you for or against the right of a woman to choose" is also twisting.
I still fail to see your point, as it seems that your proposition is just that polls aren't useful at all.
Fact is though, most US citizens aren't against the _idea_ of abortion. We could be nitpicking in there all day long, but there is a majority who is not against it.
On the one hand: Mifepristone + Misoprostol, you can get them mailed to you anywhere in the country, even if abortion is illegal in your state. https://twitter.com/AidAccessUSA
On the other hand: I support impeaching these five justices for their deception claiming it was settled law before they were confirmed, rescinding a constitutional right purely for religious reasons, and thus violation of trust. This is the proper civil mechanism for accountability. And making Roe a federal statute.
I remember all the times I was called a poor sport for bringing up Brendan Eich's support of Prop 8 right here on HN, any time Brave came up.
"You won! Take the W and move on."
There is no win when the same people who supported Prop 8 were working hard to prevent marriage equality, and end it once it happened, and working hard to fight the very underpinnings for it and other rulings like Roe vs. Wade. This is why I refused to move on for so long, but eventually the downvotes and flags and screaming won over, and I gave up. And we lost.
What if an American person wishing to have an abortion just travels to another country where it's legal to get it done? Can they be arrested upon return?
If so, does that mean that all Europeans that had an abortion could be liable to prosecution in the US if they choose to visit?
Not that I expect a huge impact to tourism etc. I've seen gay football fans willing to go to Qatar to watch their matches. Visiting a country that thinks they should die didn't seem to bother them :/
I'm not sure what 'overturned federally' means, but the decision shifts the matter of legality back to the states. There are tons of blue states where this is still legal.
Aha thanks, I was not aware of this. I'm not in the US (nor have I ever visited).
But I saw some politicians in the news saying they wouldn't want to enforce it. So I assumed it was a law that all states had to obey. Sorry I was wrong.
If Republicans take back congress and the presidency in the next election cycles, a national abortion ban becomes a serious possibility. This is not just a "red states" issue.
I'm not so sure. I predict they will torch the filibuster and enact laws that entrench their power for decades. The problem is already that they are barely accountable to voters.
The Roe v. Wade established certain rights to privacy.
This decision overturns the argument that Roe v. Wade was based upon and rights it established.
Overturning Roe v. Wade opens the door for banning contraception, interference with the right to marry (interracial relationships can be banned), family relationships, right to intimacy, the right to personal control of medical treatment. It will even have data collection limit consequences.
Not just abortion. The Roe v. Wade established certain rights to privacy.
Overturning Roe v. Wade opens the door for banning contraception, banning interracial relationships, messing with family relationships, right to intimacy, the right to personal control of medical treatment.
"In a solo concurring opinion, Thomas says the court should reconsider rulings that protect contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage."
For reference, his opinion stated "we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents", while:
> Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Equal protection is not substantive due process. Gay marriage & interracial marriage are on far firmer ground because of the right to "equal protection of the laws". Not that the conservative wing won't try but they're going to have to torture logic to do it.
Substantive due process is far shakier. It's Justices deciding what rights they think people should have and then working backwards as best they can to justify them. The back to back gun rights & abortion rulings lays it bare. There's just no intellectually honest way of finding a right to an abortion but not a right to bear arms.
IMHO, the substantive due process was the wrong way about this. It was a shaky foundation and as more rights were found the logic got shakier. They should have used the right to peacefully assemble and based most of these substantive due process cases on them.
They just tortured logic in the past few days. They removed Roe because they decided that amendments that have been interpreted for decades to give people the right to privacy don't actually do that textually at the same time that they struck down a NY law because they claim that people have the right to defend themselves, which is nowhere to be found anywhere in the Constitution.
Only District of Columbia v. Heller decided that the right to bear arms was independent of an official militia. No doubt such ruling could eventually be overturned by SCOTUS if they so choose.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Please point out the part of that amendment that references the right of people to have concealed carry for the purposes of self defense. Because it seems to me that they tried to be as obtuse and textualist as can possibly be with regards to Roe, but apparently the second amendment grants all sorts of rights that don't actually exist in the Constitution.
In Thomas's mind, one has long-standing historical precedence where the other doesn't.
Interracial marriage has existed for pretty much all of human history (though race as a concept likely didn't, at least not the way it is perceived in modern times). Heck you even have Moses marrying an Ethiopian woman and his siblings spoke out against him over it and were punished by God for it (see Numbers chapter 12).
Gay marriage, on the other hand, has near zero historical precedence outside of a few cases with Roman emperors and stuff like that.
The "it wasn't invented at the time they wrote the Constitution, so the Constitution doesn't apply to it" argument has been debunked long ago. Otherwise, freedom of speech would only apply to parchment and quill pens. The whole point of a court is to interpret the Constitution with new facts and situations that arise.
"The whole point of a court is to interpret the Constitution with new facts and situations that arise."
You're describing the "living constitution"[1] view, which has not been the dominant position among Supreme Court justices for some time.
Now they're all "strict constructionists"[2], who think the opposite of what you describe: that the constitution should be interpreted just as it was written.
Originalism was rejected by the court for the longest time, but we have since appointed new judges to the court who don't reject those arguments. They used originalist arguments to overturn the NYC gun ban yesterday.
Just to be clear, no SCOTUS case has yet stated that citizens are entitled to own fully automatic firearms, and it seems to me exceedingly unlikely that they would. Heller talks about how to decide what kinds of firearms can be prohibited, and strongly indicates that you can't ban 9mm handguns because they are the most popular firearm for self-defense and so on. It's hard to see how one can extend Heller and this case to say that you cannot prohibit fully automatic firearms.
The constitution was written in 1787. Guns were all muzzle loaded at that time. The automatic/semi-automatic distinction is meaningless to the constitution. Why would it draw a line at automatic and not at post 1820 percussion cap weapons?
Ignoring the fact that originalism as practiced is an embarrassing judicial philosophy,
> Interracial marriage has existed for pretty much all of human history
is not the answer to the question originalism is asking. It asks whether there is a historical precedence for protecting that action as a right.
You don't need to look any farther than this very ruling! Abortion has been practiced since the beginning recorded history (and likely much longer) and books like the bible even instruct you on how to perform one. That history has no bearing on Alito or Thomas.
>books like the bible even instruct you on how to perform one
Not really, that depends on which translation of Numbers 5 you're looking at. It's not clear at all that the "Ordeal of Bitter Water" was supposed to induce a miscarriage.
If GP is in fact referring to the sotah, then it would contradict their argument even more because it is explicitly the husband having power over the woman's body without needing her consent or even any justifying evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordeal_of_the_bitter_water
to be clear, its pretty irrelevant to the argument because the bible is just one such example of the history of abortion. There are hundreds more and if it would help you can pretend I mentioned one of those instead.
From a purely judicial perspective, slavery is explicitly abolished in the US Constitution, via amendment.
The approach that Thomas favors is "text, history, and tradition". The words - as written - taken in light of what the author(s) intended and what was happening at the time.
Well... we actually have a constitutional amendment directly banning slavery, and no such amendment for interracial marriages which are never mentioned constitutionally. It's easy to resolve from a purely constitutional perspective.
> In Thomas's mind, one has long-standing historical precedence where the other doesn't.
That would be an anomaly in setting judicial precedent. If legal precedent was formally acknowledged for historical reasons, then we would be having a really long conversation on civil rights, _all_ civil rights.
And the issue may not be gay marriage, but straight up sodomy laws, which were introduced as religious inspired laws, most extensively Judeo-Christian. For these to stand, we would need to ignore the separation of church and state.
And laws against abortion have existed for most of human history as well. Most haven't been outright bans on it, but there have been plenty of rules about who can get them and how all the way back to Hammurabi.
> Most haven't been outright bans on it, but there have been plenty of rules about who can get them and how all the way back to Hammurabi.
This sounds like it needs a source.
As far as I understand, anti-abortion laws started getting traction in the 1800s. Before that, these were scattered and mostly religious inspired. Also, Hammurabi doesn't make any references to voluntary abortions.
"The “eminent common-law authorities (Blackstone, Coke, Hale, and the like),” Kahler v. Kansas, 589 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 7), all describe abortion after quickening as criminal. Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.” 2 DeLegibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae 279 (T. Twiss ed. 1879); see also 1 Fleta, c. 23, reprinted in 72 Selden Soc. 60–61 (H. Richardson & G. Sayles eds. 1955) (13th-century
treatise)."
They go on for a few pages going over common law before discussing the historical record in the US.
And laws against sodomy have... you guessed it... long-standing historical precedence. Though in the case of sodomy laws banning it aren't as historically universal as the practice of interracial marriage was.
Equal protection cannot protect that which is unequal. For example, I doubt an equal protection challenge to unequal lengths of maternity / paternity leave would stand, given the obvious difference in what's happening. The sexes, when it comes to things like business participation and innovation, may be equal in ability. However, if one views marriage as a precursor to reproduction -- the historical view of marriage -- then it's quite clear that the sexes are not equal, whereas the races (for whatever conception of race you have) are.
It has been abundantly clear to everyone that a black man can impregnate a white woman. And a black woman can have children with a white man. If this act (reproduction) is what marriage is about, then the sexes are not equal, and thus not worthy of equal protection. A man cannot impregnate a man. Whereas, any race can impregnate / be impregnated by any other race as far as we can tell.
If you have evidence to the contrary (that both sexes are identical when it comes to reproduction, which is the historical view of marriage Thomas may adhere to; or that various races cannot interbreed), then please do share.
By this logic, should marriage between a man and a woman who cannot conceive be protected? Why or why not?
> However, if one views marriage as a precursor to reproduction -- the historical view of marriage...
The historical purpose of marriage is the exchange/pursuit of status and resources[1]. Reproduction was an inevitable outcome of lack of contraceptives. The idea of reproduction being the primary purpose of marriage is pretty recent.
'Cannot conceive' is a difficult definition, since you can't know until you've tried in many circumstances. Historically in the West, consummation of the marriage rendered it permanent. But anyway.
Historically, and actually still today, if you have actual reasons you can't conceive (for example, if a man cannot get an erection due to permanent and incurable impotence), then yes, the marriage can be declared anulled. Annulment is different from divorce because it makes it such that the marriage never existed at all at anytime. In other words, yes, certain conditions preventing conception can be used to claim that a marriage was fraudulent.
In certain legal jurisdictions, a castrated man cannot marry. While that may not always be true today, it has been the case historically. Prior to the modern day, people did operate under the assumption that those who certainly could not conceive could not marry, but of course, they didn't have the full understanding of conception we do.
> The historical purpose of marriage is the exchange/pursuit of status and resources
Yes, and the purpose of status and resources is to pass those along to your children. Also your article mainly talks about 'love' and marriage not reproduction.
> The idea of reproduction being the primary purpose of marriage is pretty recent.
This is completely baseless. Thomas Aquinas writes about the purpose of marriage as being for procreation. Given that at the time he wrote he represented an organization that represented the majority of moral thought in Europe... it's hard to actually believe these ridiculous claims. Moreover, status and resources were the main pursuit of the rich. The poor still married... usually for kids.
> It would seem that the "sacrament" is not the chief of the marriage goods. For the end is principal in everything. Now the end of marriage is the offspring. Therefore the offspring is the chief marriage good.
Given that Aquinas is also pulling from historical sources (in this cases the Sentences by Peter Lombard), it's extremely likely this idea -- written very clearly in the 13th century -- originated well before then. What's modern is the claim that the chief aim of marriage in previous centuries was status / resources. Everyone in previous centuries understood that the way in which marriage produced those goods was children. A woman from one family marrying into another noble family would have little claim over her new status if the couple were unable to produce offspring. If a man had no offspring to inherit, the status and resources would end.
MORE SOURCES FROM EVEN EARLIER
In the 5th century, Augustine of Hippo clearly indicates in his treatise 'On the Good of Marriage' that offspring are one of three benefits of marriage (along with faithfulness and the sacrament of matrimony itself). In the summa, Aquinas attempts to argue which of these is the 'chief' good of marriage. Thomas believes the sacrament of matrimony itself is the chief good. Now, most here don't necessarily have the religious view of marriage (nor do they need to), but aside from the sacrament, it's faithfulness and offspring that remain. Nowhere there is status and power. And these men are again writing on the predominant moral system of the Western world for the past thousand years.
Going to secular philosophers, Aristotle (from whom Aquinas derived a lot) also consistently writes that marriage is for children. His other aims of marriage are community stability and pleasure. Again, nowhere does status and power appear.
Historically, those with obvious sterility (castrated men, impotent men, women without vaginas) could not get married. In the Catholic church, which still adheres to roman marriage laws, these are absolute impediments to marriage. In fact, permanent impotence is an impediment to marriage in many US states today. A marriage can be undone if the man was found to be impotent before the marriage was contracted, and the impotence is permanent medically.
Scientifically, one cannot know if you're sterile until you've tried. There's no 'test' for sterility that truly works or that there hasn't been an exception too. Legally, once a marriage is fully consummated, it's more permanent than if it weren't. Historically, a marriage that was consummated could not be dissolved and was considered permanent at that point, so even if you later found out (usually after many years) that you couldn't have kids, the marriage would continue. Similar to how old people stay married.
I'm giving an historical view on marriage. Not saying how things should be. You seem incredulous at this view, but it was the prevailing view of marriage in Europe and the West for thousands of years.
Thanks for your response in the other thread (FTR your reply was already flagged dead by the time I noticed it). I’m responding to that.
I understand your position. On your point about why people think marriage is a right… I suspect this is because, at present, many rights are coupled with marriage - visitation rights at a hospital being the classic example.
For these particular rights, I think we should have a flexible kinship designation system. I don't see why you would have to have exclusivity for this right. In the madness over 'equality', I think we avoided a much better system for these rights.
It's an interesting sub-case of Dunning-Kruger that people with consciences and integrity try to shame people like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito about hypocrisy. They project onto them attributes they do not care about; their logic is that Loving impacts Thomas and Griswold, Olbergefell, and Lawrence do not. They dislike gay people and feminists, and things that hurt them are good. Things that hurt them are bad. Just look at the stunning hypocrisy on Bruen. It says in plain English: "well regulated militia", and they can't infer a right to regulate firearms by states there... but they can't find a right for a basic medical procedure in the Due Process Clause. I'm not being uncharitable, just read the majority decision. They can't hide behind inconsequential dissents now, their shitty jurisprudence is front and center. They can't argue on merits, so they appeal to a prior history that never existed. It is an embarrassing episode for those of us that follow Supreme Court decisions, and it's a tragic episode for those whose human rights they are taking away (and their loved ones).
You're right. i posted the wrong article. The point of that article is that abortion was so widespread and unregulated that most founders wouldn't even think it worth their time to write down their opinion about it.
Thomas - "...in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. ... we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents"
Just like how the people who are upset about this ruling can be upset that when their party controlled all 3 branches numerous times, they never put abortion into the constitution to firmly protect it, or the other "rights" you mentioned. Instead they use it as an emotional club every election to get votes, but did nothing to protect it when they had the power to do so.
> they never put abortion into the constitution to firmly protect it
Neither party has had the votes to do that in a while (2/3rds in both the House and the Senate). It must also be ratified by 3/4ths of the states (38 right now).
Your comment trivializes how difficult it is to pass a constitutional amendment.
An amendment on an issue this polarizing would never get the requisite support from enough states, no to mention that it doesn’t even matter if you control three branches of government to pass an amendment, only Congress is involved in the process.
The political point is valid, though. There have been multiple windows for Democrats to pass federal laws that would have helped solidify these rights. Nothing was done, because cultural arguments help both sides in the electoral theatre.
Except it isn’t valid, because while there was a Supreme Court precedent, such a law would be superfluous, and while there now isn’t, such a law would’ve be repealed the moment republicans regain control of the congress.
Do you really think that a Republican controlled Congress for the majority of the 2010s would have allowed such a law to remain on the books?
Do you really think no superfluous law is ever passed...? The books are full of them.
> such a law would’ve be repealed the moment republicans regain control of the congress
Maybe, or maybe it would have increased Democratic majorities and forced Republicans to face a politically dangerous repeal or even a major policy switch.
Politicians are ready to go with the flow... see for example gay marriage in the UK, which was cautiously introduced by Labour as a separate formulation and then brought into full existence, with great fanfare, by a Conservative Party that had been staunchly against it for decades prior.
> Do you really think no superfluous law is ever passed...?
A comment ago you were complaining about political theater, how is passing superfluous laws anything but political theater?
> Maybe, or maybe it would have increased Democratic majorities and forced Republicans to face a politically dangerous repeal or even a major policy switch.
This suggests to me that you aren’t very familiar with the last 50 years of American political history.
So doesn’t this simply create two Americas, those with regressive laws and those with progressive laws, and people can choose between them and the market will show which laws attract people that create economic value?
I see half of the US becoming economically fallow as a result of this decline into dystopia.
Well, poor people are less likely to be able to travel to get abortions where it's legal. So higher infant mortality, higher maternal mortality, and more kids in the foster system, putting a strain on a likely already small (because red state) budget.
But otherwise, I agree, this will just further the red states' economic bankruptcy.
These are next up on the chopping block and the same logic used to overturn Roe v Wade can be used to overturn those. Thomas is merely voicing that reality instead of playing coy like other reactionary justices.
Take heart! The majority ruling explicitly says that its reasoning does not apply to those, and goes into detail about why those rulings are different.
Note though that the majority opinion itself specifically calls out these cases several times as different from abortion because they do not result in the termination of a potential life. Here is one specific quote:
Unable to show concrete reliance on Roe and Casey them-
selves, the Solicitor General suggests that overruling those
decisions would “threaten the Court’s precedents holding
that the Due Process Clause protects other rights.” Brief
for United States 26 (citing Obergefell, 576 U. S. 644; Law-
rence, 539 U. S. 558; Griswold, 381 U. S. 479). That is not
correct for reasons we have already discussed. As even the
Casey plurality recognized, “[a]bortion is a unique act” be-
cause it terminates “life or potential life.” 505 U. S., at 852;
see also Roe, 410 U. S., at 159 (abortion is “inherently dif-
ferent from marital intimacy,” “marriage,” or “procrea-
tion”). And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood
or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision con-
cerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right.
Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt
on precedents that do not concern abortion
Have you read (or "read"; I don't want to be responsible for your death lol) the Texas GOP platform[1] for this year? The first sentence in the "Homosexuality and Gender Issues" section is "Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice". And they follow it up with "we oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality".
They are rearing for another battle in the gay rights culture war.
I occasionally wonder just how high the prevalence of closeted homosexuals is amongst conservatives, given how strongly they seem to believe that sexual preference is a choice. The only logical conclusion is that at some point they chose.
“Tyranny of the minority” is even worse and that’s what we are seeing now. This Court isn’t upholding minority rights against the State, it’s doing the reverse, taking away rights from minorities (poor women without easy access to travel to another state if necessary).
We have six jurists with an extremist legal view called “originalism” which is “let’s imagine I’m a white male in 1800, what would I think about X”. The first Supreme Court decision to mention originalism was in 1994, when Scalia dissented because he thought juveniles should be executed.
There are people who would dispute whether there's a helpless minority whose rights are being protected by this Court's decision. You can disagree on the resolution, but don't handwave away the almost unique conflict of rights abortion presents between the bodily autonomy of the mother and the right to life of the child. You'll convince nobody by proceeding so dishonestly.
I'm not about to dignify such an obvious bad-faith argument as is represented by your parody of originalism.
So what you are saying is that there is a huge gray area between a clump of cells and a child being born? Maybe even that pregnancy starts out nearly 100% a bodily autonomy issue and culminates in the life of a child?
Sounds like a good argument against allowing late term abortions, and a good argument against banning them outright.
That's a possible view, though not my own. I personally think it is going to remain contentious until, technologically, we can remove the conflict of rights by allowing the child to come to term outside the mother's body. It would be hard to support a right to kill the child when it could mature with no additional inconvenience to the mother.
My wife had a successful, “uncomplicated” pregnancy and has permanent lifelong physical and mental damage from it. Not that this is anyone’s business, but apparently I have to share this private information because of all the extreme ignorance out there.
It’s hard to believe there is such ignorance out there that pregnancy isn’t even considered an inconvenience by some men, let alone a life threatening event. If I can object to my corpse being used for organ donation to save lives, a woman should be able to object to her organs being used to support the extreme demands of a growing fetus. But now we are in the odd situation of corpses having more bodily autonomy rights than women.
I think I have not made my explanation clear to you, because what you have written, and should not have felt compelled to write, supports what I'm saying. I'm saying that abortion will cease to be an issue when we can, technologically, end the pregnancy without terminating the unborn life, avoiding exactly the situation you describe. I'm very sorry that your wife had to experience what she did.
You see a woman as an incubator of a "child" that has a right to life. This is biologically wrong and the fact that so many people share this view is an indictment of America's failed education system.
Even serious pro-choice scholars concede that a fetus is biologically a human life e.g., Peter Singer. If your argument is that a child is definitional not unborn then that is a semantic argument of no moral relevance.
Whether right or wrong, they have definitely provided a counterbalance against democracy. The Court has stood for what it believes are the rights of people who are unable to participate in democracy because they have not yet been born. They are, in the eyes of democracy, a minority of zero, though they number almost a million per year. Whether or not you or I agree with them, they have acted as a check on democracy.
A “monitory of zero” clearly has no need to be protected by a legal system.
Just like we don’t legislate that you can’t kill plants for the sake of the plant, a fetus spends up to 18 weeks in a non-sentient state where it has no subjective experience. It doesn’t need protection since a non-sentient being can’t suffer.
Edit: it’s also worth mentioning that many abortions happen at the zygote or embryo stage, before there is even a fetus.
I’ve taken to defining nihilism as being so dedicated to an ephemera and philosophy, harm to real people is ignored.
This decision gives states to impact interstate business. It controls what doctors and patients can discuss. So it goes a good long way to squashing other rights in deference to pudding brains traditions. They chose not with logic but delusion.
Figurative identity preferences are being leveraged to directly control human agency.
I don’t owe coddling anyone else’s sensibilities. There is no greater good. And I hope this society collapses around us and reminds the majority how meaningless their personal self image is to others.
That worked well before it became just another body of partisan zealots. Now we have the tyranny of whichever partisan zealots have a run a good dumb luck.
> So the issue is really what the hell is wrong with the states where the people elected feel empowered to take rights away from half their populace.
As I just said in my chosen Mastodon instance:
“Ever since today’s Supreme Court decision was leaked, some have said that this oddly might hurt the Republicans in future elections — i.e., they’ll no longer have Roe v. Wade to use against the Democrats. However, this ignores what made today possible: the power of the Christian Right, particularly those whose votes won’t be erased by some currently running for office on promising to make it harder for anti-Rightists to vote (or have their votes count).”
Those of you who don’t have a lot of exposure to that culture, and the way it has completely taken over a good chunk of American politics — not to mention one of the two major U.S. political parties — in the last forty-plus years, will find today a shock. And wait ’til you see what else they have in mind.
Won't pro-lifers still vote for Republicans in order, to, you know, legislate pro-life laws? All this decision does is place the issue back in the hands of the legislative branch, where it should always have been. Now, it's up to you to vote for what you want.
Of the following two forces, the Christian right and the atheist Marxist left, I promise you the latter is far more shocking, dangerous, and self-destructive to America.
And if you say something like, "these people don't represent
us," You can probably guess I'll respond: the small number of men who rioted at the capitol without any actual realistic plan to perform a coup don't represent us either.
Leftist activists, unfortunately, are much smarter about what it takes to really overthrow a government, and they've been in it for the long haul for almost a century now.
Oh I’m sorry did the protestors at Amy Barret’s house break in and smear feces on the walls? No, they just peacefully assembled? Yeah that isn’t an insurrection by any means.
People loudly protest all the time, that isn’t the same thing as “domestic terrorism” even if some property gets damaged or relatively few people get hurt. By that definition the civil rights movement would have been domestic terrorism. You know what is domestic terrorism? Firebombing abortion clinics and murdering doctors like some “Christian” right members have done.
Frankly the people who stormed the Capital are a sideshow. The real coup was directed from the highest seats of government to prevent the peaceful transition of power, and the mob was merely a minor part of the plan.
The real action was in getting Pence out and selecting alternate electors illegally sent.
"it is unlawful to protest near a “residence occupied or used by [a] judge, juror, witness, or court officer” with the intent of influencing “the discharge of his duty,”"
What they were doing clearly amounts to intimidating the justices, including by putting them in harm's way by announcing their home addresses on the Internet.
"Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."
What they are doing is illegally engaging in rebellion against authority. It is insurrection.
I also can't believe you are calling this "protesting loudly":
"The DHS agent reportedly told the diocese that “large groups with cells nationwide have already been discovered ‘casing’ parishes, including here in California.”"
What they are planning to do, is, in fact domestic terrorism. Your condemnation of the right while supporting the terrorism of the left is very revealing. At least people on the right are willing to condemn both. We at least have principles.
I read through the DOJ notice and it warns of multiple targets including abortion clinics. After the leaked draft, they say arson attacks occurred to pregnancy resource centers. Another area of concern is violence being directed against “First Amendment protected events” e.g. protests.
Then finally some vandalism at “religious facilities perceived as being opposed to abortion.”
So unfortunately they seem to say violence is more likely from all sides as the result of this.
Even with that, arson attacks are more serious then vandalism. So to date both sides aren’t equally indulging in violence.
Principles such as refusing to condemn the former President’s coup apparently. Or even watch evidence about it.
I have condemned terrorism on the left, for example eco-terrorism (which seems to have thankfully died off). I didn’t read the DOJ notice, but it is important to note their job is to take the worst case scenario and plan for it. I haven’t seen widespread attacks on parishes and don’t honestly believe they will occur. Some insane portion of people on both sides issue a lot of dumb threats but only rarely are those threats executed on. If they do I will of course condemn them. But I will always place more emphasis on events which have actually happened, not just hypotheticals. For example the recent troubling incident in Idaho where a few dozen men with guns were headed to attack a parade. Multiple studies have shown that 90+% of domestic terrorism is linked to the right wing.
I do not support harassing judges, but I hardly think that rises to any level of insurrection. They weren’t attacking the authority of the government or even of the justice in question. I doubt most of them even intended or expected her to change her mind. Even if you are right and they were attempting to unduly influence her, that wouldn’t be undermining her authority but relying upon it.
It reflects the current reality - justices have become partisan so people believe they are entitled to treat them as any other partisan politicians, who as elected officials are required to be accountable to the people. We should prevent that. Justices not acting as naked partisans would help, as would both parties compromising and writing laws again so fewer things of import are decided by unelected justices. Controversial decisions should allow both parties share some of the blame, because any good society requires controversial decisions to be effective.
By the way, if protesting outside a justices home is insurrection, then the right is guilty again - they protested outside numerous state election officials homes to attempt to pressure them to violate their oaths to keep Trump in power. They also issued numerous death threats, which thankfully didn’t happen. And published home addresses.
We need to step down from this level of rancor and return to democracy in action. The broad public is in agreement on most things and supports reasonable compromises, but our governmental structure has stopped making them viable.
Have you even been watching the January 6th hearings? Some randos posting fliers on telephone poles is hardly equivalent to POTUS leveraging the DOJ, DOD, state legislatures, the Republican Congress, Republican Senate, and extremist militias to mount a violent coup.
Am I watching one of the biggest shams of a partisan witch hunt in history? Of course not. Call me when they file charges against the former president or any other current or former government officials for insurrection.
Okay well maybe you should keep your opinions about insurrection to yourself if they are uninformed. As far as your claim about the committee being partisan though, the hearing yesterday was almost entirely conducted by Republicans, with exclusively Republican witnesses who were appointed by and served under Trump. How can you claim the investigation is a sham if you haven’t seen any evidence? How can you say it is partisan when the committee composition is bipartisan and witnesses have mostly been staunch Republicans drawn from the Trump admin?
Republicans have always been against abortion, yet people vote for them, isnt that how democracy works? Major chunk of the US population dont support abortion and keep voting for politicians who support those beliefs.
That is extrapolating too far. Many (perhaps most?) voters are single issue voters. Saying that all Republicans support banning abortion is not accurate; some people are Republicans for the tax breaks, etc.
I wonder how many voted republican in spite of abortion because of Roe vs. Wade. Given what happened today this could hurt republican support because it makes abortion a more direct election issue. I wouldn't necessarily just assume all republicans are pro-life.
The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing equal protection was supposed to end the patchwork system of having to live in the right state to be recognized as a full citizen.
As I understand it, at any point where the Democrats held the majority of the legislature (including now) they could have passed federal abortion legislation and this would be moot.
The Senate is split 50/50 with two Dems blocking significant portions of the platform. Saying they have control is misrepresenting the current situation.
The federal government cannot pass a law that restricts the state and local governments from passing anti-abortion legislation. The only remedy is a constitutional amendment, and there have never been the votes for that.
Roe v. Wade wasn't the will of the people. If the will of the people is to make abortion legal, they would vote for politicians that make abortion legal. In Mississippi, they clearly voted for the opposite.
It can't happen because 30% of republican primary voters are evangelicals, so every republican will vote against abortion protection, even if most of their constituents want it.
It's certainly a tricky question. How granular should we get? People's actions in other states still affect everyone in the country. I don't want unwanted children to exist in this country, they require government handouts and become a drag at a much higher rate. Plus kids are smart, they realize they're unwanted and that sucks. Since those people use tax dollars that I pay should I not have a say?
You’re specifying your opinion (which is reasonable), but that’s orthogonal to the rights of the people that live in that state and vote according to the rights they wish to exercise.
If state A wants to ban abortion based on what their constituency wants, isn’t that exactly how democracy works?
If country A wants to ban banning abortion based on what their constituency wants, isn't that exactly how democracy works? Why should local vs federal constituency matter more?
Because the country was explicitly founded in a way that local matters more. If you want abortions, go to an abortion state. Is it so intolerable that Mississippians as a whole want different things than you and your state residents do?
Then wanting to do things differently is fine of course. The problem I have is that Mississippi receives $7,000 more from the federal government than they pay per capita every year. Bringing unwanted children into the state will make that worse. Why should they get to collect my tax dollars and then make decisions that cause the rest of the country harm?
If we only want profitable people represented, we can skip the extra steps and just have a voting fee, or even just a landowning requirement! Then the poors won't be able to screw up the country at all
Virtually nothing any branch of the federal government does is "the will of the people"[1]. But even if our government were a functioning representative republic with strong democratic traditions as it purports to be, the purpose of the courts will still be to act as a check on the will of the people, not just a cheerleader for mob rule.
No, the will of the people should be expressed as amendments to the constitution.
It is a serious flaw is the US system that issues that carry supper majority support in the public for decades have no chance of making it into the constitution.
The last amendment was passed 30 years ago, and the one before was 50 years ago. Maybe most of the politicians in charge only pay lip service to an issue, and don't have the will to die on a hill for anything, or leave anything for those who come after them.
I think it's a combination of it being too hard, and politicians "saving" issues, keeping them live, to motivate voters. Many times in the past 30 years the dems could have passed a federal law protecting abortion rights.
They literally just overturned gun regulations that some states lawfully enacted. You’re cherry picking your views as much as the court is cherry picking their reading of the constitution.
They overturned "may issue" laws where you could meet all the training and qualifications to legally carry but a state official could make an arbitrary judgement call based on if you had a "good reason" to carry.
All states with "shall issue" are still in effect because its a straight here are the requirements, if you meet them and are not a prohibited person, you get your permit.
Also, the right to bear arms is explicitly enumerated in the constitution, so taking that right away isn't up to the states. The right to an abortion is not. So it goes to each state to decide.
It’s not explicitly enumerated more than anything else we’re talking about. It’s always up to interpretation. Does the constitution say where to draw line between me bearing a knife and a nuke? Nope, ‘arms’ is defined conveniently in the eyes of whoever’s in power when this is decided. That’s how all of this works!
> When liberal justices are in charge, they unconstitutionally force their will onto the people. When conservative justices are in charge, they just undo the damage of the liberal justices and place the power back in the hands of the people.
You have the alternative of dropping from the world and stop using all things paid with your taxes.
> The left have grown militant, and increasingly want to force their world view on everyone else.
I'm curious to know exactly _what_ harms you about gay marriage or abortions, other than your feelings.
On one side, we have people gaining rights, whereas on the other, there are people who don't agree with it. And I'm having a hard time understanding why your feelings are supposed to have more weight in a society, than their rights.
You frame this in a way so it is about tax money, but frankly, there is no possible tax system where people only pay for what they want.
And I thought hallucinogens was a left-wing shtick!
> The left have grown militant
So let me get this straight, the year is 2022, when the Soviet union is gone, the Chinese Communist Party is practicing free market, the percentage of unionised workforce is the lowest it's been since 1917 and the effective corporate tax rate is the lowest it's been in 70 years - this, here, is the time of left-wing world order and militarism?
> When liberal justices are in charge, they unconstitutionally force their will onto the people.
One person having a right to do something is not forcing it on anyone else.
> place the power back in the hands of the people.
A majority of "the people" do not agree with this decision. In fact, they were appointed by someone who did not have majority support, by a party that represents a minority of the actual population.
> The problem was activist judges making the Roe decision in the first place.
You just got a handful of judges making decisions based on their regligious beliefs. Please explain to me how you see that as different than an original decision?
The judges forced their morality on everyone by saying the constitution gave a right to an abortion. The constitution does no such thing, meaning the judges were acting as activists, legislating from the bench, rather than doing their jobs correctly. If you are honest, you should be able to say both that you are pro-abortion and that Roe v. wade was possibly the worst supreme court decision of the 20th century.
The secular argument against abortion is so incredibly simple: the unborn child has the right to life just as the mother does. Government is about managing the rights of everyone and balancing them when they come in conflict.
And, finally, abortion is forced on our society in the sense that our tax dollars fund it, our tax dollars fund public schools that promote it, and, if the left have their way, insurance companies will be forced to cover it, possibly free of charge: https://noqreport.com/2021/02/09/california-bill-would-force...
You are aware that Roe v. Wade was originally decided by a conservative court, right?
> The secular argument against abortion is so incredibly simple: the unborn child has the right to life just as the mother does. Government is about managing the rights of everyone and balancing them when they come in conflict.
That’s exactly what Roe managed to do for 50 years. Now there will be about half the country where these competing rights are not balanced, but tilt entirely in the favor of the fetus to the detriment of the woman.
Blacks gaining rights was done primarily via constitutional amendment and later civil rights acts, all passed by the legislative branch. Some believe the courts did in fact go too far during 60s.
Women I believe were always allowed to work, so I'm not sure what this example has to do with anything?
Women being allowed to vote was done via constitutional amendment, again, by the legislative branch.
If you think marriage should be redefined and repurposed so it is not primarily about rearing one's own children, then, by all means, get it redefined, but, do it via legislation, not judicial activism.
> Acceptance of gay marriage is being forced on everyone
Let's follow this line of reasoning to it's logical conclusion.
What if someone decides that acceptance of your religion, race and ethnicity is also being forcen on everyone? What if they get some funny ideas about Lebensraum?
Like, are you serious? Judicial fiat literally overruled the will of the people and forced concealed carry to be legal.
New York decided over 100 years ago that people shouldn't be allowed to conceal carry without a good reason and now a bunch of activist judges have forced concealed carry on everyone.
I fail to see what moderates can do in a two party system where gerrymandering is so heavily done that often Democrats have to win 3-1 to control any majority. At this point I see it as a fight between rich landowners+business owners+religion vs all the rest of the people . For a country where political lobbying and donations to effect legal decisions is common , I do not expect judgements to ever be fair.
The battle between union and state rights only muddies the waters for legal speak.
Well, Tennessee literally just split the 5th Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Nashville, among three different outlying districts. Literally makes it 3X harder for a Democrat to represent Nashville.
Not exactly gerrymandering, but there is a systemic bias against Democrats due to the structure of our government. The most obvious example, Republicans have won the national popular vote once in the last 8 presidential elections.
Those stats might hold regardless, but to be fair one would expect different voting patterns under the current system, versus a direct popular-vote election, so it's not accurate to say that anyone "won" the popular vote in any US Presidential election, since that wasn't the contest and the fact that it wasn't affected how voters and candidates behaved. It's like challenging someone to a foot race, losing, and then deciding afterward that you won on "style points" or something. That wasn't the contest, and the other participant might have done things differently under different rules.
The system as it stands makes voting pointless for people who are in districts that reliably go for the "other team". If they could at least influence the Presidential election, more of those voters might show up at the polls. GOTV and other campaign efforts take this into account, which magnifies the effect.
Fine, you want another example of systemic bias in our government? The 50 Democratic senators represent 41.5 million more people than the 50 Republican senators.
Not just DC. American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Northern Marianas Islands, US Virgin Islands, and Guam are all American citizens but can't vote for president at all, don't get a Senator, and collectively only get a few representatives, most of whom are ceremonial and don't get to vote.
I don't really have an issue with the way the senate is setup, since that was intentional. My issue is with the house, where we are supposed to have equal representation, but don't.
>House representation was supposed to be approximately equal limited by granularity and it remains approximately equal limited by granularity.
But the "limited by granularity" part is growing more and more limited. The size of the House originally grew as the size of the population grew. Once we capped the size of the House, we lost relative granularity allowing this problem worsen as the gap between the smallest and largest congressional districts increased.
States are not fixed entities. It's people that should be represented, not an arbitrary geographic boundary.
That intentional design makes it so depending on where you physically live, your vote is worth many times less or more than someone else's. That makes no sense.
Please bone up on government design. Democracy sucks, it’s majority rule. We’re a republic that is intentionally designed to provide balance rather than “51% voted to spend 99% of the budget on the cities so I guess rural folks can pound sand”.
Note that pretty much every country has something similar - some body that acts on a check of pure democratic representation.
But it’s not ending civil rights? The legislature is still free to pass laws protecting abortion. All the heavily blue states that support abortion won’t see any change at all.
That's not a systematic bias. The senate was DESIGNED from the beginning to be immune to population differences: each state gets two senators, regardless of population. It was one of the compromises that convinced the small states to join the union in the first place.
Democrats in general have some unhealthy obsession with the presidency that leaves important downstream races from local municipal government to gubernatorial races ignored. Republicans have been doing the grueling work for decades to dominate local politics and it shows.
Roe v Wade is so devastating of a defeat largely because democrats who support it don’t care enough about state and local government.
That statistic seems pointless? Republicans won 3/8 of the last elections (bush x2 , trump x1) with 2 losing the national vote. So 6/8 rounds came through properly.
More importantly, there’s apparently only been 5 presidents elected where popular vote != electoral vote[0].
Based on this metric… everything seems to be working mostly fine, with no apparent bias?
Before 2000, it was an interesting thought experiment but dismissed as highly unlikely that a president could technically win office without winning the popular vote. Republicans (but also some purist democrats) were apoplectic when Bill Clinton took office with an electoral majority and a mere popular plurality in 1992.
The ground shifted has shifted around the rules many times in the past, but the current rural vs urban divide of the two parties combined with the majority of Americans living in urban and suburban areas has led to some really distorted and unintended outcomes of the rules.
Exactly. Everyone must know and accept that some people's votes are worth more than others. Whether it is for a senator in Iowa, or for the electoral college that selects the president, the people in some areas of the country are allotted more power than those in others. It has always been that way and so shall it remain.
Anyone not happy with the power allotted their vote is free to up stakes and move somewhere where votes are worth more, from California to Iowa or New York to New Hampshire.
Also, I had forgotten this (and it was huge at the time, and I voted in those elections, so I should remember), but Bill Clinton didn't win the majority popular vote either. The democrats had a larger popular vote that the republicans, for sure, but not over 50% due to third party / independent candidates.
Contrast that with the last 6 elections where the democratic party has had more than 50% of the popular vote each time.
Ah... And W's second term the republicans had more than 50% of the popular vote...
National Popular vote for President is about the most worthless static one can cite to bluster their position for political balance
National Popular vote should not be used for any reason for any purpose, unless you want to completely change the American system of government ending federalism completely, which I have no desire for, I like federalism
>National Popular vote should not be used for any reason for any purpose, unless you want to completely change the American system of government
Well, yes, that is exactly what many people want, a government that is more representative of the will of the people. We don't have to throw out federalism to get there, but a system that was not intentionally designed to support minority rule would be nice.
You like federalism because you're a conservative and there is a higher percentage of conservative states than conservative people. And that is just a result of political territory gerrymandering battles of the 1800s. For example splitting Dakota into two states or admitting Wyoming as a separate state were all political gerrymandering battles that benefit your ideology today.
We just had a demonstration in the US of the desirability of a process that unambiguously reveals the winner of a presidential election. Well, having 50 smaller elections, then combining the results in an electoral college is one such process. In particular, if it werent for the federalized structure, i.e., if we had a purely popular vote, in 2000 we would've had to re-count not just the Florida ballots, but also the ballots in the other 49 states.
It's easy to like it when it provides you the outcome that you're favourable towards. For people, the majority in this case (as evidence by the popular vote count), who do not agree with these outcomes, federalism is a fucking mess.
In no way it makes sense that the Senate should wield the power it has when South Dakota has the same weight as California. It's ludicrous.
If the numbers 54 and 36 is correct, then one could be inclined to a simplified calculation and say that 1.5% of popular vote (54/36) equals 1.0% of seats. In that case, 75% of popular vote would equal 50% of seats. Or in other words: 3-1.
(and 50% of seats are not even a majority)
Another model would require 15% more to go from 36% to 51% of seats. In this case, 69% of popular vote (54+15) would be required for a majority of seats, or in other words: 2-1. Which effectively is just as egregious as 3-1.
Legislation needs to pass both Senate and the House, and in the senate, someone from a state like Wyoming has 65x more voting power than someone living in California.
States don’t need to be protected. States are not people. Government is of the people, by the people, for the people. Not of the states, by the states, for the states.
Do small countries in Europe not need to be protected?
I think the issue is that small states and countries would not join if they would be subject to whatever large states decided.
So the option would be to have a country without Vermont and stuff or to have them in the current config. Because that’s the math that was done 250 years ago that resulted in NY and VA choosing to accept it, and also smaller states.
And it is has led Europe to serious problems when there are two countries (Hungary and Poland come to mind) which protect each other from anything inconvenient.
I can't endorse his specific numerical claim, but if you look at the FiveThirtyEight projections for Georgia, a state that voted for Biden in 2020 and elected two Democratic Senators in statewide elections, also with Democrat Stacey Abrams coming within 2% of the governor's seat in 2018, you see four blue districts, one toss-up, and nine safe Republican seats:
I think any reasonable person would find it unfair that a 2% difference in the popular vote (for governor, before the major Trump controversies) leads to doubling the number of Congressional seats.
Some of the maps proposed by the Ohio GOP this year (and rejected as unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court) are close to this. I believe I read an estimate that the dems would need to average 70-30 statewide to control half the seats.
Note: All of those unconstitutional rejections by the Ohio Supreme Court are moot. The committee ran out the clock and even though the maps were ruled unconstitutional, they are the ones that will be used. The law that forced the committee to be formed left no way for the courts to force a valid map to be used. So, even though there was a very successful anti-gerrymandering campaign in Ohio a few years ago, it ultimately didn't matter. How that came to be is another story entirely.
In Ohio we passed a state law demanding fair districts. The GOP led Ohio congress and governor repeatedly submitted districts that the courts struck down.
It went to a federal court who ruled the districts not fair but will let them stand for the 2022 elections.
The GOP ignored the rule of law, ignored the courts, and ran out the clock. They will cement their hold on the state in 2022.
The far right has been fighting a locality-by-locality state-by-state war of attrition for a long time. There's far too much focus on national elections when local and state elections can sometimes influence your life a lot more.
Gerrymandering needs to be tackled possibly at the level of a constitutional amendment, but like the filibuster it's a nonsense loophole power that neither side wants to give up.
There is no way to tackle gerrymandering that doesn't ultimately end geographic representation. If you try to balance a map for every potential group, the end game is proportional representation. I think that's the bridge that people would be afraid to cross.
Why do we need geographic representation? People that eat everyone’s tax dollars and contribute very little to the economy should not have an order of magnitude in voting advantages just because they decide to move to places no one else would. Those might have been worthy incentives during the frontier days but are completely unnecessary now.
One thing I have been thinking more on lately is just that. Why are we so attached to geographic representation, why does a congressional district, or even a state need to be a continuous polygon on a map.
Why cant we break representation to be based on something else. I dont know what, and the simple answer it well geography is the easiest way but easy it often not the best
A geographically connected population is going to have a lot in common, and it makes sense that they would share a representative.
Two neighboring farmers in Alamaba are going to have a lot more in common with each other than with someone living in LA. For political representation purposes, it makes sense for those two farmers to share a representative.
You're correct that this isn't necessarily optimal, but I don't think it's that bad either. It's a pretty good heuristic in making sure that:
1) everyone has a representative.
2) each representative is representing a group of people who can reasonably be represented (because they have shared interests/goals/concerns).
Because of it wasn't geographic, it would end up going resident centric, and if you think the system is toxic or confusing now, imagine switching it up such that your representatives seat was assigned to you like a Social Security Number, and followed you through life. Also imagine that seat's occupant's job, trying to represent a bloc of people sharing little more than an accident of being born in a particular jurisdiction at a particular time, that have spread hither and yon with no geographical anchor to point to and go, "that's where the stuff is happening that I'm here on behalf of".
Physical locality was the primary social constraint when the government was architected. I honestly have a great deal of difficulty imagining any other way of doing things that would make even a lick of sense in terms of information propagation.
That seems like a False Dilemma there is no technical or logical reason to assume that anything other than geographic would mean you are assigned a seat at birth that would follow you for ever with no ability to "move" to a different seat.
Also my comment does not say to forego all geographic basis but more so questioning the idea that we need continuous geographic zones.
Maybe 3 counties in Iowa and 3 counties in Texas, and 3 counties in Montana all want for form a new zone....
I have been wondering about this. Every state gets two senators representing the _entire state_, so you can’t gerrymander senate seats. I wonder if we need something similar for congressional districts, perhaps by allotting no less than two seats per district, which themselves are composed of one or more counties (the idea being county lines are not drawn by election boards).
> the idea being county lines are not drawn by election boards
Until they're important for elections...
The house is screwed up largely because it's capped by a law passed a century ago. It's essentially impossible for it to be actually proportional with the current voter:representative ratio and districts being allocated along state lines.
Originally, the ratio was one representative for ~30,000 people. When the number was capped at 435 in 1929, the number of constituents for a representative was ~ 210,000.
The current ratio is over 700,000.
One could easily make an argument for geographic representation of 30,000 people. Those people should have a lot in common and have similar concerns. You could also make a good argument for 100k-200k people. However, 500k+ people cannot be properly represented by one voice in congress.
If we had even the ratio of representation when the number was fixed (1:210,000), we'd have over 1500 members of Congress.
It's important to remember gerrymandering cuts both ways. In my state, the D's just redistricted into a crazy looking map that will effectively give them a clean sweep.
Neither is right, obviously. Wish they'd codify into law something that restricts the shapes...something like that all districts must be contiguous, and smallest possible perimeter of a given area size.
The fact that you view this as a fight (using the word "opponent") is the problem.
It's not a boxing match. The fact that it has become one means your electoral system is flawed.
In a proper system, you have different people with different goals (eg Greens who want less pollution, businesspeople who want lower taxes, socialists who want worker's rights, etc) and they have to compromise (greens cancel the carbon tax is businesspeople accept to ban a certain type of very toxic manufacturing, for example) and WORK TOGETHER.
Obviously this is the problem. But its flaws have lead us to a situation that makes it impossible to fix them. Either we work within the system we have or we're left powerless.
If you look at the popular vote then this is clearly wrong in two ways. Rich land and business owners don't make up half the population. And if you're implying that most religious people vote republican, then they should be absolutely destroying the popular vote. This is just the worldview that's been sold to you by social media.
> At this point I see it as a fight between rich landowners+business owners+religion vs all the rest of the people
Based off of the responses itt, it's clearly not "all the rest of the people". But you know, maybe if you keep insisting that the political coalition in favor of Roe represents "all the rest of the people" it might magically become true
> I fail to see what moderates can do in a two party system where gerrymandering is so heavily done that often Democrats have to win 3-1 to control any majority.
Ofc democrats don't gerrymander. The Illinois redistricting wasn't a gerrymander, it was a fair process. Wherever the democrats have a hard time winning it's always because there was a gerrymander, and not because the people don't want them in office. /s
> In New York Democrats want to add four new seats through gerrymandering, to try to retain control of the U.S. House. One district is designed to guarantee the reelection of Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which has held hearings on the evil of — you guessed it — gerrymandering. [0]
This is backwards thinking. It's not a sports game, this is not about "winning" and "losing."
The goal is not to have voters choose their representatives, not the other way around. In a contested or closely divided district, the representatives must adapt to appeal to a majority, resulting in a more moderate position. In a gerrymandered district, the politician can do anything they want, because they know they effectively won't lose.
You're right that gerrymandering is not new, but it's gotten more aggressive, thanks to new technology and de facto sanctioning by SCOTUS.
This is blatantly untrue to the level of fear mongering. The politician can’t do whatever he wants. The election simply moves from republican candidate against democrat candidate to the primaries where the top 3 politicians from the dominant party are running against one another for the nomination. If they adopted policies the majority of their party didn’t like they would be replaced by another member of the party in the next election.
This isn’t about winning or losing? Then why do representatives say they “won” a race? Winning and losing appears to be the cornerstone of a democracy.
What you are complaining about is actually the exact tactics of the left, which is to expand their city boundaries so that their dense homogenous voters swing elections in the surrounding districts.
When the left does it’s called redistributing, when the right does it it’s called gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is an explicitly anti-democratic mechanism to allow for persistent minority rule. Both parties are engaging in this process and benefit in a localized way - but the US population a whole loses.
It’s either going to be the representatives which are directly elected by the people or it’s going to be an unelected bureaucrats.
Your solution, being the latter, is far far more undemocratic. The framers of the constitution knew this and that’s why they put redistricting into the hands of the ELECTED BODY.
In my home state of Wisconsin, redistricting used to be completed by a panel of elected judges. This process Created competitive districts that both parties grumbled about but lived with. This process was take away from the judges and put in the hands of the elected representatives, but those representatives have a direct personal interest in trying to draw those lines such that the districts are non-competitive in their favor. I’m not sure why you view this outcome as more democratic.
Interestingly: The NYT link was written 4 hours ago (~6AM EST) - but the decision seems to have been released around ~10AM EST. I suppose everyone expected this post the leak.
Without taking any side on this issue: this is a tough day in America, when a 50-year precedent is overturned.
I believe that pre-writing articles for both sides of major binary decisions and only releasing the one that turns out to be correct is standard practice at large news organisations, where the value of being first to publish is far higher than the cost of writing two articles.
Unrelated: A journalist friend told me that their (very big) media firm started writing obituaries of the public figures as soon as they landed in hospital and were old.
There were many (tens) obituaries written for the people who went to live on for more years or are are still living.
Id imagine for important news it would be easy enough to just write two articles and release the correct one, especially if your main concern is being first to publish
Dred Scott v. Sandford was a landmark supreme court case that, among other things, denied people of African descent US citizenship. The Chief Justice Taney believed it would finally end the debate around slavery in the US, instead it inflamed controversy that eventually led to civil war.
Perhaps the grandparent was suggesting that was a likely outcome here as well?
The parallel is that they were both Supreme Court cases that had their rulings overturned years later, and in both, a lot of people liked the original decision and were upset that it no longer stood.
“Both Hitler and Obama were disliked by millions of people”
Same energy. This ruling today has more in common with Dred Scott (reduces citizens back down to property because of founder intent or something) than the overturning of it.
It's not the undermining of precedent (for its own sake) that matters here. It's the contents of the precedent that are presumably bothersome to the upthread poster. Comparisons to precedents overturned in the name of progress are entirely reasonable to examine whether its the matter of precedents in general or specific contents that are issue.
That’s the bad faith part. This has nothing to do with precedence and the current Supreme Court will do what it wants and invent new and incoherent forms of logic as needed to do so.
Perhaps it’s time to stop politely tolerating fringe ideas just because they are backed by some religion. Being against abortion rights is a moral equivalent of antivax.
As an Australian, a few things about the SCOTUS absolutely shock me, aside from the obvious issue of politicisation.
I've only skimmed the judgment, but Roberts CJ convincingly points out that there was no need for the court to completely overturn Roe. It would suffice to jettison the viability standard. Going further was completely unnecessary to decide the case.
On the other hand, Thomas J took the occasion, without having heard complete argument on the respective issues, to opine that other substantive due process rights should be reconsidered. Including Griswold (no banning controceptives), Lawrence (no banning sodomy), and Obergefell (no banning gay marriage). This is simply astounding.
The second is the sheer hypocrisy of the members of the court who decry judicial activism while, in the next breath, engaging in the same.
Roe stood for years because the decision directly tied it to the right to privacy (via the 9th and 14th amendments), because that right "is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether to terminate her pregnancy". The Supreme Court reverses itself in this Dobbs decision; skimming the final decision, it attempts to tear down the original justification, but I'm not seeing an argument beyond "we think they were wrong", which is a pretty awful rationale for the Supreme Court.
The decision threw out Roe entirely (Roberts' concurrence notwithstanding) -- and Roe was based on two legal theories: a right to privacy (implied, but not made explicit, in the Bill of Rights, and interpreted by Roe to be under the 9th and 14th amendments), and that a law that could only be enforced via unconstitutional searches was itself unconstitutional. Alito's decision doesn't tackle _how_ Roe was wrong, it simply declares that the court erred when it considered those privacy rights.
In my opinion, It's up to the federal government to make federal laws, not the supreme court. Democrats had _plenty_ of time to put the right for abortion into a law and pass it. Now, they have a platform on which to run for the next election, convenient...
Politicians delegate too many decisions to the SCOTUS because they don't want to govern, well the SCOTUS isn't supposed to govern in their place.
If nothing can get done at Washington, then the problem is at Washington itself, not the supreme court.
I would buy this as an argument if the Court, when presented with ways to absolutely improve the legislative situation, add more checks and balances to the legislature, and make it more democratic, doesn’t turn around and do the opposite (gerrymandering and Citizens United are two obvious examples).
Laws like that would only be possible in certain years where there’s a majority across all 3 branches (e.g. 2008) and neutered when the other branch is in power.
Arguably a supreme court decision is more stable.
A constitutional amendment would be most stable but we will never get to that level of state support
The democrats would not have been able to make the right for abortion into a law during that period. And women should not have to suffer because the republic is dysfunctional.
The problem as always is the silent filibuster. If obstructionists in the senate actually had to stand up and defend their obstruction more things would get done.
i think it's a twrrible decision, but you have a point policians can keep kicking issues into the long grass- ultinately it will land on scotus and they have to make a decision
Judicial activism is altering laws according to what the judge likes, usurping a legislative role. The supreme court striking down state laws is the typical form of such abuse because the typical supreme court case is deciding whether a certain new law has a problem.
Roe vs. Wade is practically almost the same as a law that allows abortion, the other threatened precedents cited in the other comments are similarly almost laws that allow various rights, and so there is very little "upholding" of existing laws in this demolition and threatened demolition of "liberal" norms.
I've never heard such a limiting definition for judicial activism. It's typically understood more broadly as a criticism of American judges who, according to some, go beyond their duties of "interpreting law" and instead create it. To borrow from conservapedia (a resource I wouldn't otherwise defend, except in this limited case), it's "when judges substitute their own political opinions for the applicable law, or when judges act like a legislature (legislating from the bench) rather than like a traditional court."
Is anyone bothered by the court's dissembling after the leak?
"It's not final." True, but misleading.
"No decision has been made yet." True, but misleading.
The court voted to overturn Roe. The Chief Justice assigned Alito to write the brief. That was before the leak.
At the time the leak was made, the court had already decided the case and lied about it.
On Jun 6, this blog post was written https://medium.com/eudaimonia-co/how-america-collapsed-and-b... describing how the three-world split post World War II became a four-world-split now. You have Western social democracies as first, Russia and China on the wings as second, developing as third and the two fallen countries being USA and UK as fourth. Worse than the third. The trajectory is not upwards but down. This is but another step ... down. More will follow. And no, voting won't save you for multiple reasons: one, Democrats won both chambers of Congress and the White House and look what they have achieved. Two, Republicans are relentlessly rigging the vote. Three, soon they won't accept the results anyways.
I have grown to hate edgy comments that are like "Well actually now it is just a state's issue and Roe v Wade was poorly decided!".
You're not edgy & insightful. The impact of this decision isn't just pushing pieces around a chess board. It's scared women & girls around the country, it's women dying who wouldn't have otherwise.
There was no need to codify it into law, as it was already law! That's the whole point of a court ruling!
Roe v. Wade determined that the Constitution itself implied abortion as a right, meaning that there already was a law on the books which protected abortion.
It's not the job of the court to make laws. At one point the court decided that abortion fell under the 14th A, then they decided it didn't. Congress should have made access to an abortion a real law.
It's the job of the court to interpret the consequences of the existing laws.
At one point, the court determined that access to abortion was a right, according to the 14th amendment. Meaning, that the 14th amendment was, among other things, a law that granted the right to access abortion services.
Later, the court decided to override their precedent, and declare that the 14th amendment did not grant the right to access abortion services.
I think you need to define what a "real law" is, and how the 14th amendment doesn't qualify in this context.
Its somewhat hypocritical that the supreme court takes away an inherit right. That was part of the constitution. It was a demonstration of right to privacy concerning your own body. And they take it away and call it conservative.
According to polls, the end of democratic majority in Congress was almost inevitable. Now, democrats will put a federal abortion law on their banner. The elections is due this November, the timing is just right.
Thus, they will persuade non-partisan voters to vote for them. They will strengthen their majority in Congress and will have a 60/40 majority in Senate, which gives them an ability to overthrow a filibuster[1].
Then the world is their playground. Electoral laws, gun control laws - you name it.
There's some really ugly things now opened up - now there are no more protections for states to force an abortion or sterilization. A lot of 'undesirables' were sterilized in the early 20th century America, to the point that even Hitler in his Mein Kamph wrote highly about the US program of mass sterilization. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/06/race.usa . This reversal re-allows this possibility.
But next up is attacking Obergefell... So, if that's deemed unconstitutional, what happens to the gay and lesbian people who are married to same-sex partners? Are their marriages nullified? What of the legal issues in unwinding a marriage of X years?
And people who are trans - will they then have to "marry in line with respect to their listed gender"? Can their gender be changed legally? Will this pathway be available for gay and lesbian same-sex partners so they can "legally become opposite of their gender" to then re-marry their partners?
> What of the legal issues in unwinding a marriage of X years?
In the case of a binational couple, does the non-citizen (now-former?) spouse get to keep living in the US? Or is the situation going to go back to how it was previously, with no federal recognition, even if legally married in "gay marriage" state?
Married same-sex binational couples are minorities in a minority. They don't exist on the political radar unless a larger group takes up their cause. I fully expect them to get rolled here (again).
I'm asking in good faith, and ask for answers in the same: in a pro-choice framework, why do in-womb Homo Sapiens Sapiens have no rights to be considered, vis a vis the rights of the mother?
In this context, I'm not implying that an unborn human's rights override those of its mother, nor imply what the right balance should be (50:50? 20:80? 80:20?). But pro-choice arguments tend to assume that the in-womb human has no rights, since mother has the right to terminate the pregnancy basically without any good reason at all. I'd argue that where welfare of two beings is affected, you need to consider the rights of both. Is it clear that an unborn human has no rights?
Perhaps this can be straightforwardly spelled out, or is obvious - in which case I'm curious to know what that argument is. If not, doesn't some kind of cautionary approach require that err on the side of caution in considering the rights of the unborn human? For example, if a healthy woman is pregnant with a healthy human, but decides to terminate the pregnancy for no extreme reason (health reasons I guess), what is the argument that says "the unborn human's right to mature and be born and live is non-existent or trumped by the mother's preferences"?
There is a myriad of difficult scenarios that life can write, and for now I'm moving away from those. Not every pregnancy is terminated for life-threatening reasons, for example.
Why should you first put on your own oxygen mask on a plane in the event of decompressing, before helping others?
Because the damage is much greater otherwise. A child brought into this world under duress, to an unprepared mother and/or unprepared parents will have all the odds against him/her. There's a greater risk of dying. Of poverty. Of sickness. Of crime.
It's not that the unborn has no rights. It's rather that these rights cannot be realized partially. It's either the full package or none.
So just like the US electoral system, some people are in favor of abortion even if they are 49% in favor of the embryo.
Right, but in living/walking humans, we tend to prioritise right to live over many other rights. We don't euthanise children in adverse material conditions, for example. These get, or most people agree should get, state help, foster parenting and so on. "Let's euthanise the child" is not on any menu of interventions.
That's true, there are sudden changes in our collective evaluation of what rights a human has.
There are some really plausible reasons for birth, for example, as an important turning point:
- Before (and in particular during) birth, a child's life and physical well-being is immediately tied to the mother's. There is a real risk of one's sickness killing the other.
- Before birth, there is no mandatory, conscious care-taking. The embryo is automatically taken care for. Afterwards, it requires a (excuse my wording as a parent) shit-ton of work to keep a kid alive, happy and successful (however you define that)
- The risk of death is vastly higher for an embryo than for a child (with about 1/3 of pregnancies being unsuccessful) and decreases strongly after birth. I suspect this is one of the reasons why abortion is often intuitively seen as different from euthanasia.
That said, I completely agree with your argument that it's wrong to argue as if there was a sudden point at which humans are suddenly and naturally protected but aren't before. But I think that not many advocates would argue for such a radical position.
> I'd argue that where welfare of two beings is affected, you need to consider the rights of both.
About 5,000 people die in the US annually while waitlisted for a kidney transplant; they are deemed medically eligible and a donation would give them more quality adjusted life years, but there is not a willing donor available.
Consider, pairwise, the rights of two particular people: a person on the waitlist who will die unless they receive a kidney but who is below the cutoff line; and a healthy adult who lives next door to the sick person, who has two kidneys, and who could relatively safely donate one of them.
The law currently forbids the sick person from paying the healthy person money in exchange for their kidney. This prevents coercion[1] which could endanger the health of the healthy person.
In other words, the law prioritizes the healthy person infinitely and does not prioritize the welfare of the sick person.
Do you think this setup is correct? Or should we make legal changes that would balance the rights of sick people against those of healthy people? Under your proposed framework, should we sometimes allow sick people who have money to pay healthy people for their organs, buying a chance to live?
I heard this argument a couple of years ago via Youtube video and I liked its novelty (instead of having sides talk past each other it's gladdening to see some thought put into things).
That being said, for me, it fails on the responsibility front. The healthy person did not cause the sickness, is not the sick one's parent and did not in any way "give" life, so to speak. If we reimagine the sick neighbour's predicament so that her husband and child both need a new kidney and the healthy neighbour convinces her to give them up because the he has a special room in his house where she can convalesce and regrow her kidneys. Should the healthy neighbour now be allowed to withdraw the offer after the sick neighbour had donated both kidneys?
That kind of situation seems to align with some of the factors at play a bit better.
Yeah ... I'm fortunate that neither I nor my immediate family are immediately affected by this decision, which affords me the luxury of thinking about the ethics in the abstract.
> If we reimagine the sick neighbour's predicament so that her husband and child both need a new kidney and the healthy neighbour convinces her to give them up because the he has a special room in his house where she can convalesce and regrow her kidneys. Should the healthy neighbour now be allowed to withdraw the offer after the sick neighbour had donated both kidneys?
While I'm totally willing to engage in this kind of Talmudic thought experiment, is there a way you could recast your question to be more biologically plausible?
For example, suppose you offer to donate a kidney to your child, who is suffering from a fatal, heritable condition for which you carry a recessive gene. You thought that you were incurring a 0.007% risk of mortality (the average). During the surgery, the surgeon performing the extraction discovers that you have unexpected extra risk factors and their process will not work; they stop. They tell you that they can try again, but the new procedure they need to use will incur a 10% chance of your death. There is no other donor, and your child will die.
1 - Should you be allowed to withdraw your consent for the surgery?
2 - Should your child's wealthy spouse be allowed to pay you money to continue with the surgery?
> is there a way you could recast your question to be more biologically plausible?
It's a thought experiment, isn't the point that it is unencumbered by what is plausible? The reason for setting it up that way is to put responsibility for the sick person's life onto the healthy person through an action they took. I have no current alternative.
> 1 - Should you be allowed to withdraw your consent for the surgery?
Yes, the circumstances have changed.
> 2 - Should your child's wealthy spouse be allowed to pay you money to continue with the surgery?
I'm not against it but I can see why there could be rules against it.
> It's a thought experiment, isn't the point that it is unencumbered by what is plausible? The reason for setting it up that way is to put responsibility for the sick person's life onto the healthy person through an action they took. I have no current alternative.
> …
> If we reimagine the sick neighbour's predicament so that her husband and child both need a new kidney and the healthy neighbour convinces her to give them up because the he has a special room in his house where she can convalesce and regrow her kidneys. Should the healthy neighbour now be allowed to withdraw the offer after the sick neighbour had donated both kidneys?
> That kind of situation seems to align with some of the factors at play a bit better.
I'll admit that my preference for ethical questions to be realistic is an irrational preference. I don't know why I feel this way but I think we get answers which are more likely to be meaningful if we start with scenarios that could plausibly happen.
Let me try revisiting the one you propose:
Suppose there is a healthy person whose husband and child both need kidneys. Donating her kidneys to them both would ordinarily kill her -- people need at least one kidney to live, and she only has two. But her neighbor says "if you donate your kidneys to your family, I'll let you live in a special room in my house where you can regrow your kidneys".
Let's say this process takes 40 weeks, and at about week 10 the neighbor says "I don't want you in my house any more -- please leave". Should the neighbor be allowed to say this, even if this means the formerly healthy person will require daily dialysis, and may indeed die?
I wonder whether the answer changes on why the neighbor is saying "get out":
* What if the neighbor themself has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room?
* Does the answer to the above change if the room's special-ness is tied to the neighbor being alive (if they die, no one else can ever use it to regrow organs)?
* What if the neighbor's own infant child has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room; should they be allowed to evict the recovering kidney donor? Does the answer change if the kidney donor has a 1% chance of surviving on dialysis until the room is available again? 10%? 99%?
* If the neighbor is just being selfish and wants their room to be empty because they've decided think it looks better when it's tidy, should that be forbidden?
* One way or another, if the room is empty at the end of the 40 weeks, should the state use eminent domain to seize the room and force the neighbor to take in gravely ill people from local hospitals, housing them until they are well, for as long as the room is working?
When I have interrogated these views personally I have found that some things may be wrong to do, but society should still be structured in such a way that people may sometimes do wrong things.
And, btw, in this thought experiment my gut feeling is:
> What if the neighbor themself has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room?
The neighbor should be allowed to evict the donor, even if this causes terrible outcomes for the donor.
> Does the answer to the above change if the room's special-ness is tied to the neighbor being alive (if they die, no one else can ever use it to regrow organs)?
My answer doesn't change.
> What if the neighbor's own infant child has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room; should they be allowed to evict the recovering kidney donor? Does the answer change if the kidney donor has a 1% chance of surviving on dialysis until the room is available again? 10%? 99%?
My answer doesn't change; the neighbor should be allowed to evict the donor.
> If the neighbor is just being selfish and wants their room to be empty because they've decided think it looks better when it's tidy, should that be forbidden?
The donor should be allowed to stay under EMTALA.
> One way or another, if the room is empty at the end of the 40 weeks, should the state use eminent domain to seize the room and force the neighbor to take in gravely ill people from local hospitals, housing them until they are well, for as long as the room is working?
Yes. If there exists a special room which can heal people and if it is idle, the government should seize control of it and distribute its healing ability to help as many people as possible. Ideally we should raise taxes to investigate how this healing room works and replicate it until we can end all death in the world and heal all disease. But in the short term we should immediately maximize its use, and compensate its owner accordingly.
You gave me a lot to think about. Tackling the main one that I think maps best to the situation at hand:
> Let's say this process takes 40 weeks, and at about week 10 the neighbor says "I don't want you in my house any more -- please leave". Should the neighbor be allowed to say this, even if this means the formerly healthy person will require daily dialysis, and may indeed die?
I would say no, there is at least an implied contract with such severe consequences for backing out that it cannot be backed out of without it becoming murder (it would meet mens rea).
> What if the neighbor themself has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room?
This one maps to the mother's health, which will almost always be prioritised (though I'm sure there are exceptions/considerations depending on circumstances). I reckon this is done for two reasons, that an adult is a known quantity whereas the child may be born and still not make it, but also because the mother can probably try again. In the case of the room, if the room would continue to work its magic even though the owner died then I'm not sure society/law would prioritise them.
It might also map to a doctor treating someone in hospital then falling ill themselves.
> What if the neighbor's own infant child has suddenly developed kidney failure, no transplants are available, and the only thing that will save them is an immediate 30-week stay in the special room; should they be allowed to evict the recovering kidney donor?
This one was difficult but I'd have to say no, based on the same reason as above, that the treatment had started and there was (at least) an implied contract to finish it and knowledge to not to would be reckless and akin to murder.
In the UK the House of Lords ruled[1]:
> that it was lawful to withdraw life-sustaining medical treatment from [a] man who had fallen into the condition known as permanent vegetative state. Their Lordships agreed that although, in withdrawing the life-sustaining treatment, death would be intended, his death would not be regarded at law as caused by the withdrawal of the treatment, but rather by his underlying condition.
(I've edited that for consideration to the family and length)
That decision was considered controversial among the medical community (apparently[2]). However, I doubt one could justify withdrawing treatment to someone who would probably go on to live a full life.
> If the neighbor is just being selfish
No.
> One way or another, if the room is empty at the end of the 40 weeks, should the state use eminent domain to seize the room
No. Property rights mean something (to me, anyway), and in our analogy that would be like the state making someone forcibly pregnant or available for rape. That's not the same as telling someone who became pregnant through actions of their own free will to bear the ultimate responsibility for those actions, nor forcing someone to keep to a contract they made freely.
> I have found that some things may be wrong to do, but society should still be structured in such a way that people may sometimes do wrong things.
I agree, which is one reason why I'm against abortion but pro-choice (because it would go against bodily autonomy, so I choose the lesser of two evils). I'm not against quite short term limits.
A fetus clearly is a collection of human cells. It is an example of living Homo sapiens.
The question abortion ethicists ask is whether a fetus or embryo is a person.
If, in fact, all embryos are persons, then the logical ethical reasoning would be that taking steps to minimize miscarriages should be one of our highest priorities. This doesn’t appear to match most people’s moral intuitions, however.
It is not obvious that a newborn baby is a person, either. But defining a being as receiving the rights of a person at birth is a schelling point that many people are more comfortable with than spots earlier or later in development.
Generally, brain and neural system complexity is seemed to be necessary for personhood. During fetal development, the evolutionary older parts forms earlier, while cerebral cortex starts to develop at the end.
My view has always been that it does not even matter if the fetus has full rights.
People do not have the right to physically attach themselves to another person, and leach blood, oxygen, nutrients, etc off the other person. Period. Fetuses would not be an exception. This is not a rights balancing issue. A woman has the complete and absolute right to stop another person from parasitically draining her of resources.
I feel that a person who wakes up with another person surgically attached to them by some sort of mad-scientist doctor could have surgery to have the second person removed, even if this means certain death for the second person. I don't view abortion as any different.
I could support a ban on abortion methods that directly kill the fetus, but as long as the method is primarily about severing the connection to the mother and removing it from the body, I see nothing wrong with that, even if removal means certain death for the fetus.
If people feel fetuses have human rights, I could also support laws or medical ethics requiring doctors to attempt to save the fetus after it is expelled (if the condition was such that saving them might be possible) just like they would try to save any other person.
So suppose some adult decides to subvert your resources. Dun i, moves into your farm and starts collecting your crops. You have a right tk get rid of them, but only up to a point. In most countries for example you can't shoot them for trespass and theft (self defense might be different and US might be different too). You can call the police, have them removed and claim damages. But say the person cannot pay them, you cannot enslave then and force them to fix what they damaged.
So in other words, we value the right to life and freedom so much that even when someone is abusing our rights, we can't take justice into our own hands, and have to put up with the damage.
In addition, I'd imagine many abortions happen to women in relationships with pregnancies stemming from consentual sex. So I'm not sure if your analogy stretches that far. Other cases are, I agree, more complicated, and I'm not arguing about such circumstances.
>I'd argue that where welfare of two beings is affected, you need to consider the rights of both.
if you consider the welfare of the whole population then, you'd be ok if we took some people without asking and "donated" all their organs and other useful body parts to those who could use them
You're implying the unborn human is not in fact a human and thus has no rights to consider. Or at least that the only rights to consider are those of the mother. Which may be true, but the whole point of my question is to see a proper argument in support of that.
For me it's pretty simple: what causes the least suffering. Don't act that an unwanted child will have a great life.
Most sane countries have sane rules related to abortions. But I guess some people still hang on to an imaginary superpower that will make them live forever, if they follow certain rules.
I also find it funny that most pro-life zealots are also pro death penalty. Completely bonkers.
With retarded shit like this I'm very happy to live in Europe, where we already figured these things out generation(s) ago.
An important related question is: why don’t animals have rights?
I think something special happens to humans on the journey from embryo to child. Something like an awareness of their relationship to the world, that makes death more tragic.
As an aside, I think the same transition happens in many animals and their deaths can be just as tragic, although obviously nothing in U.S. law acknowledges that.
In fetuses, I don’t know when this “relationship to the world” begins, if it has really begun in earnest in the womb, or if it even has begun in earnest as a newborn.
But the problem with law is that such things must be codified.
I know “at conception” is too early, since we destroy similar creatures by accident every day. And even a sparrow has a richer concept of their relationship to the world than an embryo.
I’ll also add that “on their first day of kindergarten” is certainly far too late. By that time many of us have a very rich self concept.
“At first breath” is a clear middle ground, easy to interpret legally. It certainly seems that the “understanding of one’s relationship to the world” is greatly enriched at that moment of birth, and quite actively thereafter. And importantly, “at first breath” happens to be a moment where the child is no longer a danger to the mother. People have a right to self defense that clearly ends for the mother at that point.
All of that said, I think it’s possible some form of person is ”murdered” in some abortions. Just like some people are “murdered” in war. But there are simply limits to what can be fairly decided through the legal system.
At some point, other forms of justice take over. For me, not trying to push this on anyone, but that’s God’s justice. Many evils are punished not by the courts but by something greater, and that’s OK with me.
I believe it's self-evident that there is something in our brains that causes us to mentally separate things into in-group and out-group. In other words, we evolved to be social and generous, but only tribally so. Visual and behavioral differences such as skin color and culture can be the difference between in/out-group delineation. And so it is with animals. They are so similar to us and have so many of the traits that make us "human" that it's obvious they should have certain rights, if you think about it. In fact, some animals do enjoy rights to be protected against humans, as cruel treatment of animals is ostensibly taboo in Western cultures as long as you ignore current American factory farm practices, and in the case of some protected classes of animals such as dogs, enforced by law. But the differences between humans and other animals is enough to trigger the in/out group delineation, so almost no one bothers to recognize they should have rights, let alone fight for them. Those that do fight for those rights are typically relegated to the out-group themselves.
In short, it has nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with the primitive parts of our brains running the show.
Right, so apart from semantics, I'd say it's the same question. I feel like the widely-presented pro-choice arguments simply make that assumption and then conclude, well there's no human in the womb so let's move on.
I'd like to probe into this assumption - and if with good reason the conclusion is that, indeed, it's not a human, then so be it. But it being a "naked", or poorly-supported assumption, irks me.
I'm undecided on abortion when it's not early (X weeks) and/or for medical reasons.
As for the rights: Do we have the right to not carry another humanbeing even if it meant their "death"?
“...Start with my record, my respect for precedent, my belief
that it is rooted in the Constitution, and my commitment and its importance to the rule of law...” “...I understand precedent and I understand the importance of overturning it...”
“...Roe is 45 years old, it has been reaffirmed many times,
lots of people care about it a great deal, and I’ve tried
to demonstrate I understand real-world consequences...”
“...I am a don’t-rock-the-boat kind of judge.
I believe in stability and in the Team of Nine...”
I'm consistently surprised at how many people, both in these threads and irl, assert there is no "grey area", and argue that a fetus goes from being 0% baby to 100% baby the instant it is born and no sooner. To me, there is a very clear "gradient" where it goes from being 0% baby to 100% baby over the course of 8-9 months, the percentage ticking up every day or so. Many people can't imagine a 5-month old fetus being viewed as "alive".
This is the final chapter of a decade-long saga which basically boils down to the Republicans obtaining votes from Evangelicals and other Christian denominations in order to give them what they wanted. In exchange for that, they would use their power to cut taxes, regulations and let the riches become richer and richer at the expense of everyone else.
I hope that whomever supported this ruling is happy right now, and I'd like to remind them that, while Jesus Christ never gave to abortion the slightest mention, he was quite vocal about the fact that greed was not compatible with salvation. I'd like to see Evangelicals and other Christians being as vocal for social justice as they were for abortions and same sex marriage, but I guess they do care about putting woman back in the kitchen as indentured servants more than they do about social justice.
> I hope that whomever supported this ruling is happy right now, and I'd like to remind them that, while Jesus Christ never gave to abortion the slightest mention, he was quite vocal about the fact that greed was not compatible with salvation. I'd like to see Evangelicals and other Christians being as vocal for social justice as they were for abortions and same sex marriage, but I guess they do care more about putting woman back in the kitchen as indentured servants more than they do about social justice.
It isn’t about religion. It’s about power and control. We need to stop pretending it has anything to do with Jesus and everything to do with power over others. Nietzsche is more relevant here than Jesus.
> It isn’t about religion. It’s about power and control. We need to stop pretending it has anything to do with Jesus and everything to do with power over others. Nietzsche is more relevant here than Jesus.
We, as a society, need to stop constantly creating straw men like this.
Opposition to abortion is certainly about religion, or at least morality. Sure some politician can exploit morality to cynically gain power to accomplish other things, but that doesn't mean the voters are doing that. The voters are just caught in (many) moral dilemmas, and are therefore forced to make bad choices.
> Only a quarter of evangelicals in the United States believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, according to a new poll showing that a majority of self-identified Christians in the U.S. identify as “pro-choice” and less than half of evangelicals identify as “pro-life.”
Why isn't it a "science issue" because the pro-choice side is based on science? Or an "age issue" because old people are far more pro-life than young people?
I'm not here to argue semantics. The point I'm here to make is that the people who call it a religious issue are trying to claim legal protection that is undeserved. "That law violates my religion!" is not a compelling argument when half of your religion supports it.
> Why isn't it a "science issue" because the pro-choice side is based on science?
What now? Has "science" become a nonsense word that only used to lend authority to nonscientific policy?
> The point I'm here to make is that the people who call it a religious issue are trying to claim legal protection that is undeserved.
That's not what's going on at all.
What's actually happening is something along the lines of "my religion says X is morally wrong, therefore I support making X illegal" (or more accurately "my religion teaches Y, which I understand makes X morally wrong, therefore I support making X illegal").
There are lots of issues where there are religious people on both sides. Take immigration for example: there are Christians who support looser immigration laws for religious reasons, and other Christians who have religious reasons to disagree. You can say that makes immigration a religious issue, if you like - I won't argue. (Not because I agree, but because arguing over semantics is boring)
Separate from that, there are issues where the religious people are pretty much all on the same side. My point is, the pro-life side frames abortion as the latter, when it is actually the former. And they do this not out of confusion or misunderstanding, but as a politically useful act. It helps their cause to frame abortion as a religious issue, because if it weren't that, it would be a medical issue or a rights issue or a privacy issue, and virtually any other framing hurts their case.
Like I said, I'm not here to argue semantics. I just thought it was worth pointing out how divided the religious are on this issue, mainly because I wasn't aware until I looked it up.
But suddenly upon birth these same children need no societal protection?
I think it is convenient to point to the importance of the lives of unborn children but until the same protection is applied to children post-birth it seems like a convenient cover for controlling women.
The modern-day Evangelical Christian voting block does not have Bush Republicans. Not by a long shot. Bush made overtures to Hispanics[1], that simply can't happen today.
1. A block that also skews religious, and socially conservative - that could totally work. There's only one problem with that in the present day.
I don't think it's a straw man. You show me the big evangelical movement centered around adoption of children who would have otherwise been aborted. Which, you know, would be the obvious Christian answer here, rather than forcing your will onto others.
Who cares what you’re arguing? It’s about what you’re doing, and the only thing that conservatives get out of bed for is restricting abortion. Where’s the massive conservative push for easing the burdens of child care through social support?
Their stance is that abortion is killing babies. If that’s what you believe, it’s easier to get out of bed to stop baby murder than to help make child care more affordable.
That's the trap of America, All of the third world knows the type of logic America is founded on. Keep the servants weak so you can rule over them. They make the rules, and they make the loopholes. This sets the culture, which in turn creates morality. Unfortunately for them, we know their law is not based on ethics.
Legal basis? With enough mastery, it can be whatever you want it to be.
Because most conservatives believe that charity is a private, not government matter.
This is could be a reason that religious folks and conservatives donate much more to charity, even though their income is less [1].
For cases like childcare, they believe that burdened families are best served by a close community coming together to help each other, rather than government programs.
This. Kudos for pointing out irrational arguments from "your" side. Too many political arguments end up in tribalism, where all that matters is loyalty-signalling.
Btw, I agree with you. I believe women should be free to choose until the fetus is able to live independently of the mom.
This is because I don't think a 3 month old fetus is equivalent to a person.
But IF you agree with the premise that a fetus is a person, it follows that they should have the same negative rights as other people (freedom from being killed, for instance), that does NOT mean that the person has to think that every person should have a large set of positive rights (ie rights imply that tax-payers should provide welfare for all people).
The ability to rely on another person's body to keep you alive is clearly a positive right if it exists, which I think no one believes in general, some but people believe in the specific case of pregnancy, because it's "natural". Plenty of things we believe are violations of rights are also "natural" so I don't think this is a consistent position to take, of course people don't generally pick their ethics for consistency.
> The ability to rely on another person's body to keep you alive is clearly a positive right if it exists
That is one way to frame it. Usually, though, abortion requires someone to actively kill the fetus.
And there is another problem with this argument. The sacrifice it takes for the woman to carry the baby for 9 months may not be the real reson people have abortions. Rather, I imagine, the real reason is that they don't want what happens AFTER the child is born.
Let's consider a similar argument: A ship crew on an oil tanker going from Saudi Arabia to Huston discovers an uninvited "passenger" hiding in the ship. A 5 year old girl, let's say. Do they have an obligation to feed this girl until they reach LA, or can they throw her overboard?
Now, from a purely postive rights argument, one could say they're not allowed to throw her overboard, but they also are not required to feed her. But we all know that's not going to happen.
Honestly I don't care if a fetus is a person. I can be dying of cancer and it is still up to you to choose if you consent to a bone marrow donation. No country on earth will require you to make that donation, even though it would be less harmful to you than the average pregnancy.
This is what solves the dillemma for me, others may differ.
Maybe you really do not care. After all, neonaticide has been a common practice for poor mothers all over the world, in places where there were no welfare states or orphanages to take children that nobody could or would care for.
And neonaticide doesn't evern require an active act. You can just leave the child in the forest, to be taken by frost or animals.
But for a lot of people, it makes a big difference whether they consider the fetus an actual person, or just a lump of cells.
Clearly, collecting bone marrow from somebody by force is and active action, and to justify this, one would have to say that the active right of the person needing the bone marrow trumps your passive right to bodily autonomy.
For an abortion, you turn this on its head. If no action is performed, the fetus will most likely surivive in the womb until it's born.
Now, you may claim that fetus is somehow commiting a crime by extracting resources from the mother's body. The problem with this argument, is that this crime is first of all not voluntary. The fetus doesn't have a way to stop doing so by an act of will. Second, the fetus is not developed enough that we would assign moral agency to it (just like we would not do that to a baby after birth).
Now, if you believe (like me, especially in the first trimester) that the fetus is not a person, and doesn't have the legal rights of a person, it is still probably ok to abort it.
But if you think that the fetus IS a person, it also follows that it deserves the same protections as a person. In other words, the passive right of the fetus to not be "murdered" is in conflict with the passive right of the mother to not have its resources extracted. The fact that the passive right to not be murdered may be considered a stronger right than the mothers right to bodily autonomy.
Also, in this situation, there are two more factors to take into account:
1) This conflict between the two subjects involved was not caused by any actions of the fetus. Unless she was raped, though, the mother most likely played a part in the conception of the fetus, so bears some responsibility for being in such a situation.
2) Even though there is a real conflict of interests, the MOST passive approach is to not abort, while aborting requires active intervention.
So, I would argue, IF the baby is to be considered 100% a person, with exactly the same protections by the law as the mother, it is logical that abortion is banned.
Now, personally, I don't agree with this premise. In fact, I see the fetus as becoming a person gradually, and I'm not even sure if it reaches fully 100% at birth (though close enough for practial purposes, at least as long as the mother is not starving). Personally, I think the fetus at conception should have 0 person-rights. After 2-3 months, maybe similar to a farm animal, and during the 2nd trimester, probably similiar to your favourite pet.
Only during the 3rd trimester, once the baby would be able to survive outside the womb, would I consider it to get close to deserve the same protectino as a baby after birth.
> I wasn't clear then: I don't care in the context of this question. We already don't require you to donate bone marrow to save a specific person.
And with all due respect, I think perhaps what you're really saying is not that you disagree with the reasoning above, but rather that you refuse to seriously consider the premise of the Christian fundamentalists. In other words, I think you refuse to really imagine that you see the fetus as a 100% full person.
Now, I'm not meaning to imply malice on your part. To understand another person's perspective when they disagree with you about something fundamental is hard It requires a lot of empathy to do so, and it is not easy to find this kind of empathy for a perspective or group of people that one has negative emotions for.
I am sidestepping this issue by replacing the fetus with something that is 100% human, so it doesn't matter if the foetus is or not.
As for it being an active action or not: if we instead were to leave the foetus in place, but remove all the connection to the uterus only, it would still die due to lack of nutrients.
You are right that the woman might have been involved with an activity that can cause babies, but then you can get into the weird arguments about liability to third-parties that do not exist at the time of the action, and the feotus in the end is no different (it does not live) as it would have if the woman had choosen to use other means, such as condoms or not had sex at all.
In fact that’s not really the argument being made.
If you listen to the pro-forced-birth side, they claim to be speaking for and defending the most vulnerable “people” (if we are to admit their premise) in our society. They are advocates for the innocent, and abortion needs to be illegal to protect their vulnerable rights. You can see them all over TV today and the internet saying just this.
In fact fetuses are not the most vulnerable “people”; they have significantly more protections than newborn children. Aside from guaranteed food and shelter, fetuses also have the full support of a political party and religious institutions.
Newborn children are guaranteed neither food nor shelter. In America, we even separate newborns from their mothers depending on their immigration status. We’ve even jailed children and put them on trial. Gun deaths are the leading cause of death for children and that’s a problem the pro-forced-birth party doesn’t want to fix.
So all this talk about “protecting the vulnerable children” is clearly just disingenuous. It’s not about protecting the vulnerable at all. It’s about a religious conservative powergrab and we know this by how quickly Clarence Thomas invites challenges to contraception and gay marriage, on the basis of the Dobbs decision.
> Newborn children are guaranteed neither food nor shelter.
I'm not American, so I don't know these things. Can you document a single newborn child that, with the knowledge of the government, is starving to death outdoors?
> If I object to you murdering a homeless person, should I be obligated to help him get a good life?
Yes.
(Actually, the latter obligation attaches whether or not you have the former belief, but if you don’t believe that the entity involved actually is a “person” whose life has value, it explains, but does not justify, why you would not also feel the latter obligation.)
I'm in the same boat. I am not going to defend an invalid justification for a position just because I agree with that position, and furthermore when people spread misinformation in support of my position, I will work to refute it.
If anything, it's more important to me that I refute misinformation in support of things I believe as opposed to argue against positions I disagree with.
This argument is obtuse. The contradiction is that it is considered a matter of personal responsibility as soon as a newly born infant suffers from abuse, malnourishment, poverty, and/or neglect, but before birth it is a matter of moral principle that the child, however unwanted, is born.
What is allowing the mother to die because abortion is against the law but "post birth" abortion? Or do you think that the lives of women already born should take a back seat to the potential life of a fetus?
The argument "you only care about people before they are born" is what you find on reddit and is made in bad faith. This argument compares what is perceived as murder with minimizing government assistance after birth. Whether they are right or wrong is irrelevant as they believe their position before and after birth to be for the benefit of the child and therefore "pro-life".
Why? Guns kill (order of magnitude) about 4,000 children each year[1] in the USA. There are (order of magnitude) about 800,000 abortions each year[2] in the USA. If you are one of the people who believes that unborn child lives are worth the same as adult lives, then you should be 200 times more concerned about abortion than gun violence.
2020, United States
Firearm Deaths and Rates per 100,000
All Races, Both Sexes, Ages 0 to 18
ICD-10 Codes: W32-W34,X72-X74,X93-X95,Y22-Y24, Y35.0,\*U01.4
The propaganda win of the century is classifying chemical abortions (roughly half of that 800k) as abortions.
It’s a pill that basically forces a woman to have a period regardless of whether there’s an embryo in the lining or not. You can only do it before an embryo even resembles a human being.
Guns outpaced accidents for the first time as the leading cause of death for children in 2020. Now that abortion is illegal in half the country, will those same conservative abortion crusaders direct their attention to saving kids from guns? Somehow I don’t think so, but I guess we will see…
> But suddenly upon birth these same children need no societal protection?
> ... until the same protection is applied to children post-birth ...
The same protection is applied to children post-birth. It's still illegal to kill those children after they're born.
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Edit to respond to comments, because I'm "posting too fast":
Yes, the conservative position on social programs seems inconsistent with being pro-life to someone who believes that government benefit programs are not only helpful, but are the primary mechanism to help the needy.
But not to people who believe, like Reagan, that "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"
They don't look to the government for help for themselves and they don't see it as a mechanism for helping others. For that, they prefer family, church, charity, and community.
They also generally believe, contrary to some extreme positions that have been exaggerated by their opponents, that:
"we would not consider it immoral for a woman to accept treatment that is necessary to save her life, but which may end the life of her preborn child."
Starve a child, deny them education, deny them healthcare, freeze them in the winter, allow other children to purchase AK47s and shoot them, deny them housing and all the sudden it becomes a fiscal matter and not one of religion or fundamental rights.
The law may protect kids from being directly killed consequence free. However, indirectly, these good Christians support everything right up to that (spare the rod, spoil the child).
Edit: To respond to your edit, since you don't want to take the time to actually respond.
Reagan was good with the short quips, yet hardly someone you should look to for a "pro-life" attitude. He actively impeded AIDs research because "ewe, gay people". He has blood on his hands and invoking him in an argument about the sanctity of life is ridiculous.
Further, saying "Oh, let the churches feed the hungry". What would you do for the child of an atheist parent? What would you do if the church (like many of them do!) imposes strict morality clauses before aid is given. What if there is no church giving such aid in a community?
Why do you think there is child starvation in the united states? Because not enough kids know about their local churches and community centers?
It's also laughable that the same people who cheer on dumping 800 billion dollars into the most powerful military in the world are somehow afraid of the consequences of what happens when that money goes into a program to feed children. So what, the government is only scary when the money DOESN'T go towards guns? What kind of backwards thinking is that?
But it is legal to kill women suffering sepsis from having to keep a fetus that has died without getting a D&C.
It's legal to force a raped child to carry a pregnancy to term even if they will suffer lifetime damage or fatal injuries.
It's legal to force a raped child or woman to carry to term a child that is the result of incest and may suffer a lifetime of genetic damage and disability.
It's a nonsense argument that is premised of the falsity that a fertilized ovum is somehow a "child". It is not.
The reality is that the vast majority of abortions are not done because of rape or incest.
> smaller proportions of women in 2004 than in 1987 said that having a baby would interfere with their job or career (38% vs. 50%), that they were not mature enough (22% vs. 27%), that their husband or partner wanted them to have an abortion (14% vs. 24%), and that they and their partner could not or did not want to get married (12% vs. 30%). In both surveys, 1% indicated that they had been victims of rape, and less than half a percent said they became pregnant as a result of incest. [1]
The large number of unborn children that have been killed because of them being perceived as an economical burden, or other personal reasons cannot be ignored. But you ignore all this injustice and make it seem like abortion is all about dealing with rape and incest, while these in reality only account for ca 1% of all abortion cases.
I’m saying killed because we still have a large portion of abortions happening in the second (10-15% worldwide [2]) and third trimesters.
The point here is that a woman’s freedom does not override her child’s right to live. But you seem to think otherwise.
The positions above are extreme. Now I'm pro choice to begin with, but I imagine that MOST people on the right, even a lot of normally Pro Life people, think that it's not fair to deny abortions in situations as above. (Even if they do think the fetus is "somewhat" a child.)
If the Pro Choice movement starts a campaign aimed specifically at changing federal law to allow abortions in the situations above, I believe they have a fair chance of getting 60% within 1-2 election cycles.
Sure, but the (conservative) states pushing the new anti-abortion laws are also cutting back social programs, especially ones aimed at single mothers. "Just get a job, freeloader!" One can't claim to be pro-life and then refuse to provide support for those new lives.
I don't think they want to support fetuses (through prenatal care) either. I think it's just about protecting the "life". Pro-life people don't see a difference between killing a 3 month old baby and destroying a fetus at 3 months.
Anyway, I think that's mostly irrelevant. Say conservatives decided that abortion would be banned nationwide but there would be comprehensive social programs to care for pregnant women and children. The banning of abortion would still be a terrible idea.
The substance of this argument is essentially "If you don't support every social policy I do then you do not have any basis to object to what you believe to be murder."
Obviously absurd and far beneath the level of rigor I'd expect on HN.
Nope, the substance of the argument is "You aren't doing this to protect life, you are doing this to punish women for having sex".
Because, if protecting life was truly the goal you are after, then you'd do a whole lot more to actually, you know, protect life, long after the child is born.
Generally this argument holds very little water beyond making a gotcha-style bad-faith argument.
People understand that murder is illegal - but life isn't just two states. Alive or Dead. If we were living in 20,000 BCE then maybe we could be forgiven for thinking this way, but we live in an advanced, modern, (presumably) ethical civilization where life is about flourishing and giving everyone opportunities to thrive.
Focusing on the fetus's rights, yet condemning children to a life that's designed from the start to prevent flourishing is the conundrum people are referring to and pointing out the hypocrisy of.
They would say to two of three that didn't rape them.
Is the government really doing all that much for those victims? Our justice and foster care systems are pretty badly run. Democrats want to throw more money at the broken systems. Republicans want to tear them down. I'd support reforming them, but that is much easier said than done.
This is correct and illustrative of why the power centric version of Christianity in this country needs to be actively removed from all positions of influence.
All data shows that outlawing abortion does nothing to reduce abortion. It only makes it occur later in pregnancy and makes it more dangerous.
It’s time we just call religious fascism what it is because this month has shown the scorched earth approach it takes in this country to its demand of power.
Wrong because Roe v Wade was decided in 1973, the rate went from roughly 14 to 23 (a 64% increase).
Naive because as Jim said, the article clearly states the numbers are voluntarily given and therefore would not include illegal abortions. And the recording started in 1969, so it wouldn’t be surprising for it to take time before clinics even began reporting. In other words, abortions in states where it was legal probably didn’t DOUBLE between 1970 and 1971, but rather reporting of them improved.
The numbers went up because people started coming out of the closet and admitting that, yeah, they were doing something that was previously illegal but was now legal.
It doesn't mean that fewer of them were doing it before it became legal. They were doing it and hiding it.
It's the same as when gay people finally started coming out of the closet, once the laws and stigmas against being gay were reduced. Now they could finally admit what they were doing all along, with less fear of being stigmatized, arrested, imprisoned, or killed.
As explained by others your interpretation of data is wrong.
That doesn’t stop this falsehood from being repeated and it is one of many points of intellectual dishonesty that characterize the anti abortion movement.
Assuming you brought this to the discussion in good faith I would encourage you to reflect on your information sources because one side of this debate has shown a willingness to lie, mislead, cheat, and commit violence in support of their ideology. Personally I have found that ideologies that behave like that do so consistently and will choose to mislead to get what they want. That is a helpful heuristic for guiding how I interpret their arguments and attempts to support them with data.
"Yes, hello, I'd like to report the crime I've committed". Come on. That's the exact same reason why there are no openly gay people walking in the streets in Saudi Arabia. You don't report something that you did illegally.
"This is correct and illustrative of why the power centric version of Christianity in this country needs to be actively removed from all positions of influence."
They're not saying that all religion is bad. However, religions have their place, and it is not in positions of power. Historically, the religiously-motivated have used their power to enforce their brand of religious belief above others. All religion should be banned from government, period.
> They're not saying that all religion is bad. However, religions have their place, and it is not in positions of power. Historically, the religiously-motivated have used their power to enforce their brand of religious belief above others. All religion should be banned from government, period.
Do you think that religious people should be denied the right to vote or hold office? Because if you want "all religion should be banned from government, period," that's what you'll need to do. Otherwise, only actions can be controlled, not motivations.
If that’s what it takes, so be it (regarding holding office, at least - voting is not something I would restrict in that way). This government is not supposed to let religion dictate policy. If a person can’t demonstrate that they can consistently legislate or rule on law without letting their religion interfere, then we should not allow them to hold such positions. Human rights are what is important here, and we are seeing the result of unfettered access of organized religion to government - we roll back hard fought legal rulings. Look at the history of other nations that let religion rule the day - that power becomes useful then as a tool for oppression. Look at the modern world theocracies. They usually have abhorrent track records of human rights for women, homosexuals, people of the “wrong” ethnicity, and a whole range of other traditionally oppressed people.
> Shades of "you can vote for whoever you want to represent you, so long as they're a Communist who will govern according to the will of the party."
I don't follow. Removing people from the pool of eligible candidates because they want this nation to be a theocracy is not quite the same. We don't keep murder criminalized because God said so (although that was undoubtedly the reason murder laws were first codified in human history), we keep it criminalized because we understand that murder removes the agency of another person to remain alive.
> I think you have a serious misunderstanding of the establishment clause.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"
If the only justifiable reason for a policy is religious, then it is on the face of it prohibiting the free exercise of religion (as the result of that policy should be a personal decision consistent with each individual's religious belief or lack thereof).
The Court is likely to revisit several precedents derived from Roe v Wade. Many of these precedents will likely be sexual or marriage related in nature. Griswold v Connecticut (the right to buy and use contraceptives), Lawrence v Texas (the right to be private in consensual sexual activity between adults), Obergefell v Hodges (the right of same-sex couples to marry) have been explicitly mentioned by Justice Thomas as decisions that should be revisited. This means that in the future, there will likely be a case related to each of those that ends up making its way to the Court.
Taken broadly, this decision basically guts the right to privacy. I expect this to get really bad and cast a much wider net than anyone expects, before it's over with.
Not really. Most of the states literally had state religions. Almost all of the founders were religious and wrote about it. John Adams even said the Constitution was only fit for a religious people.
And yet, they made it the very first amendment, so any state with their own religion should have had it struck down quickly. Also, the term "separation of church and state" did in fact start with the founders. Who were mostly deists, not at all like today's Evangelical Christians.
>And yet, they made it the very first amendment, so any state with their own religion should have had it struck down quickly.
This is just incorrect. Before the 14th amendment the bill of rights did not apply to states.
>Also, the term "separation of church and state" did in fact start with the founders.
It started with a single founder not founders. Have you read Jefferson's letter? I would imagine you haven't if you think it meant a state couldn't have a state religion or that they couldn't push religious laws (not that abortion is strictly a religious thing).
>Who were mostly deists, not at all like today's Evangelical Christians.
Do you have a list? I am not sure that mostly is accurate. Episcopalianism (is that how you spell it?) was quite popular.
> This is just incorrect. Before the 14th amendment the bill of rights did not apply to states.
"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
I forgot about that brief time before the civil war when states felt like they could pick and choose which parts of the Constitution applied to them. Why do you think it only applies to the bill of rights, though?
I find it darkly humorous that it took an amendment to the Constitution to really drive home that the Constitution actually applies to everyone in the US. That seems like a bit of circular logic, but at the point of a gun it worked.
Imagine if states could just choose that the second amendment did not apply to them today. Ha!
States couldn't pick and choose what to follow per se. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights for the most part only applied to the federal government. This is well documented.
Quoting the Constitution is pointless since it doesn't prove anything. If the federal government has the authority to do something then it is the law of the land. What you are missing is that the Constitution only allows like 10 things (I made up 10, but it is close to that). Anything other than those 10 things were left to the states (10th amendment).
Barron v. Baltimore was a Supreme Court case (that was decided unanimously) that made it clear that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States. After the 14th amendment (though not immediately) something called the Incorporation Doctrine became the mainstream opinion. This was the process of applying the amendments to the states which only could happened due to the 14th amendment.
Prior to the 14th amendment states could ban guns though several of states had similar provisions to the 2nd amendment in their constitutions. Assuming they either amended their state constitution or never had the right in their constitution they could ban guns.
That was the entire purpose of the the way the US was set up. The federal government has a basic setup mostly to ensure defense of the nation (and a few other things like weights and measures) and the States deal with everything else. If a state wanted to ban guns they could. If you wanted to own guns you could move to a state that allowed gun ownership.
The US was intended to be closer to 50 distinct countries than one nation with 50 administrative regions like we have today.
It needs to be removed from the law -- personal faith is fine. A simple test for those that disagree: are you okay with Islamic Law becoming codified in our legal system too?
We don't use this standard of reasoning for anything else. If abortion is murder then it ought to be banned regardless of how effective the ban may be.
Your job is to argue that abortion is not murder. Any argument that sidesteps the morality of abortion is not going to convince anyone.
Abortion is clearly not murder. Treating it as such has horrible implications.
Let’s start with the belief that life starts at conception. With this belief, a fetus is equivalent in protection to a newborn. Following this, voluntarily ending it is murder.
Then what about miscarriage? If a newborn were to die under unknown circumstances, there should be an investigation. Should then all pregnant people be investigated for potential negligence or abuse for this already traumatizing situation? 1/3 to 1/2 of all fertilized eggs never implant. Should these be scrutinized? I cannot see how one can say a fetus and newborn deserve equivalent protections and then fail to give them.
Further, what about support for abortion exceptions for incest or rape? If the pregnancy in this scenario went to term and the child was born, one wouldn’t then support that murdering the newborn was OK.
If you don’t believe these things, then you don’t believe newborns and fetuses deserve equal protection. You only happen to believe specific fetuses deserve one specific protection.
For the purpose of surveillance, a legal induced abortion is defined as an intervention performed by a licensed clinician (e.g., a physician, nurse-midwife, nurse practitioner, physician assistant) within the limits of state regulations, that is intended to terminate a suspected or known ongoing intrauterine pregnancy and that does not result in a live birth. Most states and reporting areas that collect abortion data report if an abortion was medical or surgical. Medical abortions are legal procedures that use medications instead of surgery.
I’d like to engage, but I’m unsure what your point is.
Adding exceptions is antithetical to the belief it is murder. One does not get to murder another person because they were a child of incest. On the other hand, not adding an exception for abortion is monstrous.
If you agree that forcing a woman to give birth to a child of rape or incest is monstrous, then maybe you’ll agree abortion isn’t murder. If you think it’s not monstrous, I hope it never happens to you or someone you love just to be taught a hard lesson in empathy for others.
I’m unsure why you’re quoting the definition of a legally induced abortion and why you feel it important to your argument.
You’ve missed the point in the quote you pulled. Assault is hardly an unknown circumstance.
To draw the parallel to a newborn, some pass away from SIDS, some from abuse, some from malnutrition. Investigations are performed in suspicious circumstances. Sometimes it truly happens to be random or unknown or unpreventable.
If one were to treat fetuses the same, wouldn’t one want to verify there was no abuse or neglect? I.E. the causes are unknown, it could be a random natural event, it could be due to someone’s actions, the only way to know is to investigate. To my knowledge, nobody currently gets investigated for a miscarriage of unknown cause. One can only hope it stays that way.
> what about support for abortion exceptions for incest or rape?
If you’ve been paying attention, exceptions for incest and rape are being thrown out of the window in most red states. That was a pre supermajority compromise. Now that the supreme court is a conservative supermajority, the compromise position is no longer desirable for conservatives. They have the power and they are using it.
I’m aware and it’s terrifying. Traditionally most anti-abortion advocates supported the exception, and I still believe most Republican voters support the exception.
But they elect extremists to govern.
I’d like to believe being more aware of the extremism would temper voters towards moderation, but I fear instead history proves the voters are more likely to have their views shift towards extremism.
This argument has always struck me as odd. A miscarriage is, for lack of a better word, a random natural event. People die from random natural events all the time.
It's not murdered, the amass of dividing cells called a fetus isn't viable on it's own. When that fetus is unwanted, abortion is comparable to removing a tumor.
> We don’t use this standard of reasoning for anything else.
Yes, we do. All kinds of things are viewed as immoral and not criminally punished, or punished less than things viewed as equally or more immoral, because of the perceived social cost/benefit of the alternative.
It is murderously insane to consider only the problem addressed and not the impacts of the policy response in setting government policy.
If you drink and drive and cause a car crash that requires you give a blood transfusion is it murder to refuse? I think hardly anyone would say that, because society has decided the right of bodily autonomy is paramount. I don't see abortion as any different from refusing to save someone you hurt in a car crash you caused.
In the United States a warrant is sufficient for a compulsory blood test to check blood alcohol levels. If we accept that proving guilt in court is an appropriate reason to violate bodily autonomy than so too would saving the life of someone who's been endangered by your actions.
Morally however, I also do think it's wrong to not give the blood transfusion because the burden is small and the cost of not doing so is large. Whether it rises to the level of murder is a tougher question that I think would depend on intent.
Do you think a suicidal pilot has the right to stop flying a plane mid-flight even if she knows that no one else on the plane will be capable of landing it?
> If we accept that proving guilt in court is an appropriate reason to violate bodily autonomy than so too would saving the life of someone who's been endangered by your actions.
But we haven't decided that saving the life of someone who's been endangered by your actions is an appropriate reason to violate bodily autonomy. That's the whole point, society has decided that you can refuse to give the transfusion, even it leads to a death you essentially caused.
Society has already decided that proving guilt in a drunk driving case is a sufficient reason to violate bodily autonomy. I argue that saving a life is far more important than proving guilt for a fairly petty crime, therefore by the already accepted standard, it would be permissible to force the transfusion for this purpose.
> Do you think a suicidal pilot has the right to stop flying a plane mid-flight
Interesting example, but I don't think such a pilot whould cares about rights.
The better question might be - what could you do to force such a pilot to fly the plane, and it appears that you could only plead - they would not be afraid of being shot (which is illegal anyway), and torture is very clearly illegal.
I agree it would be difficult to force a pilot to fly a plane, in this way it's not quite analogous. However, imagine if by some miracle the plane is landed without the pilots help– passenger happens to be a pilot, stewardess talked over the radio how to execute a crash landing etc. Should the pilot be charged with any crime upon safely reaching the ground?
On the contrary, I think it would be very popular to say that someone who directly caused the crash out of negligence should be required to give blood to save the victim.
Your version is actually pretty similar to a normal pregnancy (the woman brought about the pregnancy through her actions and now has to decide whether its morally okay to stop the babies' use of her body).
I think it's very hard to justify abortion along these lines and might be easier just to try to show that the fetus is non-human and doesn't have rights.
In this _particular_ case, I think it would indeed be considered vehicular homicide if you drove drunk and killed someone. If you could and did save them by giving a blood transfusion, then you would likely still be guilty of some crime for hitting them in the first place, but not homicide.
But that doesn't change anything - even if this person is a criminal, you still would not be allowed to use their blood for a transfusion without their concent. No additional crimes would result from the refusal itself.
Most people believe you are obligated to provide basic care (food, water, shelter). Anything above that is not an obligation and not murder. That is not to say you shouldn't go above that, but just that it is not murder if you don't provide anything above the basics.
<<Your job is to argue that abortion is not murder. Any argument that sidesteps the morality of abortion is not going to convince anyone.
This is an interesting comment. It is not your job to do anything unless you are actually paid by an entity that has a vested interest in an outcome. Your argument structure does not have to follow predetermined steps ordained by the high priests. All these arguments are not going to convince anyone. For better or worse, most have already made up their minds a long time ago. Just to make it all more confusing, GPT-chan showed clearly you simply cannot trust online fora ( or, frankly, based on Amazon's raise the dead skill, phone conversations ) to have real humans anymore ( although you could argue, this was clear during last net neutrality debate and how comments there were not written by individuals).
But going back to the crux of your argument, I disagree. This is HN. Morality will not impress people here. Rational discourse is a path forward if it is intended to sway anyone.
You'll need to carve out a definition of "viable" that excludes late term fetuses that could survive outside the womb but includes born babies that cannot survive without the care of adults.
There are people for whom this is about control. There are people for whom this is about preventing murder. The two groups, while they may overlap, are not the same; they just vote the same on this topic.
If abortions are bad, why are the same people who want to ban abortions the ones who want to ban contraceptives? That would do a lot more to reduce abortions in reality than any law can.
>If abortions are bad, why are the same people who want to ban abortions the ones who want to ban contraceptives? That would do a lot more to reduce abortions in reality than any law can.
I would imagine they believe the point of sex is to conceive. Both those things prevent conception.
If drugs are bad, then it's good if fewer people get them, whether or not the reduction is spread evenly across different demographics.
Therefore it's okay to use racially-targeted methods of enforcement and arrest poor, ethnic minorities, etc. as long as we get at least a little drug reduction out of it.
If abortions are bad then providing birth control and sexual education to prevent unwanted pregnancies would be good, right? But those are going to be gutted next.
I would think programmers of all people can understand complex problems do not have simple solutions. There are variables to weigh, numbers to be analyzed.
And that’s not even getting what is “good” and “bad” and if a laws purpose is to outright outlaw them without thinking of other measures and consequences.
Ah, but this is where it gets fun. Different power centers see abortions from different perspectives. The state wants ( and benefits from ) more taxpayers, while corporates benefit from ensuring workflow is not interrupted by biological needs.
a lot packed into that if - eg you are including categories such as rape victims who are expected to die in childbirth, feel like you should be explicit in the true extent of what you're advocating
Because they didn’t have their body subjected to those last, most difficult months of pregnancy.
My own surprise (but very wanted!) pregnancy was easy the first few months - I even skied up through week 16, but around week 30 I started developing back pain and intermittent numbness in some of my toes that is still around, after nearly two years and lots of physical therapy.
And I was always considered to be having a “healthy” pregnancy, and was pretty healthy beforehand. Only unusual thing is that I was 40.
For a more extreme but still realistic hypothetical, I have a severely physically disabled friend who weighs about 60 lbs and requires regular mechanical breathing assistance. She is, as far as she knows, just as capable of getting pregnant as I am. She also knows that she would not survive more than a few weeks of pregnancy.
There are many people capable of becoming pregnant who live somewhere between these two extremes.
The horror is already starting. A nurse sent this message to a nurse on TikTok who has a large platform:
I don't have a platform so I can't reach people like you can, but please share this! I work in ** on a small niku/l&d floor. Our trigger laws went into effect immediately after the decision. ofc we had a woman walk in with an ectopic at 11:30pm 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 because 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 and she almost died. I am so scared of how often we as nurses are going to see things like this now and not be able to do a damn thing about it. We're all livid at huddle tonight, several of my coworkers were in tears.
I don't think any states have a trigger law that doesn't have an exception for the mother's life being in danger. This makes me doubt the veracity of the rest of the anecdote.
If the emergency C-section is to get the non viable fetus out , how is that still not an abortion?
The only alternative I can think of is that a women should carry the non viable fetus into term for 9 whole months instead of getting it out of her as soon as she can.
Modern hospitals can save babies born as early as 22 weeks. If a full-term birth would kill the mother, then a date between 22 weeks and full term should be chosen that maximizes the chance that both mother and child survive.
I would imagine the states that outlaw abortions will have significantly fewer. Is there any evidence that comes close to suggesting the rate of abortions is the same now as prior to RvW? America has an abortion rate in line with former Soviet countries and exceptionally higher than most of the western world. It has disproportionally harmed the population that it supposedly “helps”. The eugenicist roots of the founders of the largest supporter should be evidence enough for the goals of that movement.
Other well-off western countries have much cheaper and convenient access to hormonal birth control. In the country I live in, Germany, a month’s supply of pills is about 10 EUR retail, no insurance. On the public insurance the vast majority of women have, they’re 5 EUR/quarter. For women and girls under 20, they’re free.
Should you end up pregnant, it’s illegal to fire you for any reason, and you must either be accommodated or put on paid leave. During that first year of Covid, any nurse or doctor or other employee that had to work with the public was put on paid leave if pregnant if something non-public-facing couldn’t be found for them.
We also get 2/3 of our previous net salary for up to a year after the birth to stay home with our babies, and that was as a mother with a well-employed husband. There is further assistance for women in harder circumstances.
Granted, abortion is (was?) more strictly controlled here. You have to go for “conflict counseling,” but it’s available from both of the major churches (the Lutheran church’s organization aims to help you if you want to go through with the pregnancy, but will give you information on the costs and logistics of termination), other religious associations, as well as secular organizations with a pro-choice point of view (e.g.: ProFamilia). After the 12th week, however, you can only get an abortion if your life or health is in danger, or the fetus has a serious abnormality. Yes, Down Syndrome is an accepted ground for termination, but social support services for mentally-handicapped children and adults are far more comprehensive and reliable here than in the US.
Result? One of the lowest abortion rates in the world among countries where women (mostly) have bodily autonomy.
Maybe that rate of abortion, as it was in Soviet countries, is due to the lack of contraception and family planning in the US. That is tied to the structure of the health system.
Why is it that people that want to outlaw abortion, and are willing to pay for the policing and prosecution resources necessary to enforce that law aren't willing to invest the same amount into contraception that would have a similar effect.
Is it better to clean up after an oil spill, or ensure that the spill doesn't happen in the first place?
The logic that a fetus is a person comes from the inevitability of birth starting at conception — as long as no one interferes, a human person will eventually be born. Therefore, ending the pregnancy early means that person will never be born, so it’s tantamount to killing a newborn baby.
Once you accept a fetus is a person, this same logic can also be extended to argue that life starts at ejaculation; impeding sperm from fertilizing an egg prevents the birth of a person, and is therefore tantamount to murder the same way abortion is.
It’s much more a tenuous an argument, which is why it’s only made by the most extreme people. But I guess that explains why Clarence Thomas is pushing to make contraception illegal today.
Because it's more exciting to punish Bad People for doing Bad Things than it is to create systems where the Bad People don't want or need to do Bad Things as much.
Unwanted or unloved by whom? Visit a foster/adoption group and you’ll meet plenty of people wanting to give kids a safe, loving environment. (I’m not saying any particular foster program is adequate, rather the idea that a child is “unwanted” or “unloved” is a fallacy.)
The wealthy/connected are probably better at getting away with murder/theft/rape/etc too, it doesn't mean we should legalise it in the name of equality. Also, nothing prevents further restrictions on abortion in the future, for those that still can get them.
The notion of having some kind of moral high ground based upon religious principle is absurd. The Bible is rife with Godly demands for the murder of all sorts of folk including children (1 Samuel 15:3).
Specifically, Numbers 5:20-27 prescribes ritualistic abortion if a woman has cheated on her husband. A thorough reading of the Bible gives one the understanding doesn't care about fetuses or children. He cares about the subjugation of women and everyone in their "proper" place in His hierarchy.
If this was really about unborn children, their solution would be to make contraception as widely available as possible and same for Plan B and methods to detect and eliminate pregnancy as early as possible. The life begins at conception crap is just plain nonsense.
Some voters may, but the main goal is to manage society.
It's a perfect replacement subject for income inequality, debate about guns, foreign policy like isolationist movement.
Because of the electoral system, Republicans in Texas had a big issue with immigrations from "blue states" - they could loose it forever. This is an existential threat for them - first fight was Heartbeat bill. Now they have a perfect tool to slow down the process or even reverse it.
If people from blue states really wanted to make a difference, they'd move to low-population states like Wyoming and Montana. It's the Senate that's the ultimate roadblock, not the House.
Why shouldn't pregnant women deduct these "children" from their tax obligation like any other child? Especially after Roe is overturned. Surely a pregnant woman counts as a caregiver to these "unborn children" and entitled to a tax credit?
That would help the children these voters are so concerned about!
> The voters who support the policy believe it is about the lives of unborn children.
No. It is old people wanting to stop young people having sex. It is about increased the biological risks associated with sex. It is about people who believe that sex should only ever be for procreation. It is about the oldest issue in history: old people not wanting young people to enjoy life.
I really want to talk with someone who believes this because I want to know what's the core of it. Is it that unborn children are considered the purest form of humanity? Is it that they're afraid of population decline/collapse and want more children in the world? What fears or other emotions drive the desire on the deepest levels?
:raises-hand: Emotion is not the driver, reason is. Two syllogisms:
1. Innocent people ought not be killed. Children are innocent people. Therefore, children ought not be killed.
2. What is conceived in a woman is an innocent young human being. Young human beings are children. Therefore (given syllogism #1) children in utero ought not be killed.
Those syllogisms can lead to emotion, but they are not based on it.
While I don't agree with your premise that emotion is not the main driver for the vast majority of people, I'll go with it:
- At what point do you believe it becomes a person? Viable to survive outside of the womb, heartbeat, insemination?
- How do you define innocent, as one who does not have actions that cause harm to another, one who does not have intent to harm another, or something else?
- If defined as one who does not have intent to harm another, how do we know what the unborn child's intent is? Do you assume that the child is not developed enough to have intent? At which point does the child develop intent?
- What if you would consider the child already dead from other causes and needs to be extracted, should the mother be allowed to have it removed? What if the baby is an ectopic pregnancy, growing outside of the womb and likely to cause significant harm or death to the mother, is the assumption that the mother is not as innocent as the unborn child and therefore we should prioritize the child?
I'm ok and even excited to take a reason-based approach (ironically stating how I have have feelings about taking a reason-based approach), I just hope if you want to go down that path, that you will go deeper down it with me.
The core of it, as with most terrible, regressive things in American culture and politics, is Conservative Christianity. It's also why Republicans oppose contraception and why many Christians believe masturbation is a sin.
Yeah, I've often wondered that. Is it the worry that if the baby dies in the womb, it will no longer go to heaven? Because if the unborn baby is considered to be one of the "most innocent" humans, then wouldn't the baby automatically go to heaven? And isn't the assumption that heaven is better than life on earth?
Or is it about wanting the mother to also go to heaven, and believing that if she did this, she would not go?
I appreciate you pointing out there may be a deep existential fear and doubt of the existence of heaven that drives people to this and oh how I wish we people talked more about our doubts, especially as they relate to religion. One of my favorite TED talks was about how doubt is essential to faith: https://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazleton_the_doubt_essentia...
> Is it the worry that if the baby dies in the womb, it will no longer go to heaven?
According to a lot of American Christian doctrine, yes. The Bible teaches that humans are sinful beings not because of what they do, but because sin is an immutable part of human nature. There's no such thing as an "innocent" baby where the doctrine of original sin is concerned - all humans deserve hell by default. So unless the baby is born, baptized and saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ (which can only happen through their consent and free will, you can't "save" an unborn baby as a loophole) it will burn in Hell for eternity like any other unsaved soul.
Although I'd suspect most Christians simply believe life, in terms of a divine soul and part in God's plan, begins at conception. To accept that a fetus is simply a "clump of cells" would be too close to accepting a naturalistic (non-theistic) view of biology. To interfere with procreation and birth is to commit murder for the same reason that shooting someone in the head is committing murder - only God has the right to decide when and how life can be taken.
I appreciate this answer. I hadn't realized a lot of this, especially the first part:
> The Bible teaches that humans are sinful beings not because of what they do, but because sin is an immutable part of human nature. There's no such thing as an "innocent" baby where the doctrine of original sin is concerned - all humans deserve hell by default. So unless the baby is born, baptized and saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ (which can only happen through their consent and free will, you can't "save" an unborn baby as a loophole) it will burn in Hell for eternity like any other unsaved soul.
As someone not born into or raised by a Christian family, I sometimes struggle to understand how deep some of these beliefs are.
So is the idea that one does not receive unconditional love from God unless one first consents to believe in God? And babies don't have the ability to consent?
Maybe this is too off topic for HN but I'm quite curious.
I'm not a pastor or Biblical scholar, I just grew up around a lot of Southern Baptists and Pentecostals and know what a lot of them believe. In essence that the love of God is unconditional, but forgiveness is not, and it also can't be earned by being a good person or doing good things, it can only be asked for.
Of course that said, there have been plenty of Christians who believe in infant baptism or a state of grace for infants and all sorts of things - Christianity isn't a monolith. But when it comes to the intersection of religion and pro-life politics in the US, the more hardline strains of faith seem to dominate.
> In essence that the love of God is unconditional, but forgiveness is not, and it also can't be earned by being a good person or doing good things, it can only be asked for.
Ah, so do they believe that if and only if one goes through baptism, then they have asked for God's forgiveness and then will be forgiven? I seem a bit confused by that, does it mean that the love is unconditional only after the one specific condition is met? Or maybe it's that unconditional love and forgiveness are separate things?
Also maybe you don't know and that's ok, too, I'm just grateful for you helping me reflect on this more.
Exactly this, a hundred times. Their actions betray them. If they actually thought there were half a million babies being murdered every year, tens of millions since Roe, they would have done something actively to stop it.
If there were 500,000 five-year-old kids being murdered every year, with the explicit approval of the government, there would be a civil war.
The fact that the overwhelming majority do not do anything is proof positive that they do not believe abortion is equivalent to murder.
You can't simply claim, oh, I believe in democracy, or I believe in the rule of law in the face of a government that actively murders hundreds of thousands of children. No one has such a deep attachment to the rule of law for its sake as to tolerate 500,000 explicitly-legal child murders.
> If they actually thought there were half a million babies being murdered every year, tens of millions since Roe, they would have done something actively to stop it.
By that argument, no abolitionist except for John Brown actually believed that chattel slavery was wrong. No suffragettes except the anarchists actually believed that women should have the right to vote. No blacks in the USA in the 1960s actually believed they were equal in dignity with their white brothers.
Non-violent responses to violent outrages are a very Christian approach to the problems of evil. That doesn't mean there's no suffering involved. Pro-life activists are regularly arrested, assaulted, battered, and insulted. Pro-life organizations spend millions of dollars (gifted in charity by hundreds of thousands of pro-life people) every year helping woman who find themselves in difficult positions choose life and give their children a better life after birth. Time and treasure poured out for a cause are a better measure of the importance of a cause that the total weight of bullets expended in overcoming the other side.
That's not remotely true. There were several million people involved in active efforts to undermine and end slavery through direct action, including through actions like the Underground Railroad, rebellions like Stono, and of course it ultimately did lead directly to civil war.
There's been plenty of direct action by pro-life people that wasn't violent ranging from prayer vigils / sit-ins / Red Rose Rescue through to pregnancy centers and education.
The side that triggered the Civil War was the side that was in the wrong, so I'm not sure what truth you are pointing to there.
Note that I do not claim that pro-life activists have no serious moral aversion to abortion. I believe that they do. I think pro-life activists believe unborn fetuses have certain rights worthy of protection.
However, their rhetoric goes much further than that. Their rhetoric says that abortion is equivalent to murder, and thus justifies curtailing inalienable rights held by women.
The right of self-defense of others is something very close to universally accepted. If there were an equivalent number of five year old kids being aborted, we would not see milquetoast efforts like sit-ins and prayer vigils, actions with both little consequence and impact.
I believe Eric Rudolph believed abortion is murder. But all those people at prayer vigils, sit-ins, Red Rose Rescue, and pregnancy centers do not. They see it as something bad, but less than murder.
If a half million five year old kids are being murdered, you can't just go about your life and attend an annual March for Life protest. What kind of a person doesn't do more? This is systematic, legal, mass-scale child murder we're talking about.
> If there were 500,000 five-year-old kids being murdered every year, with the explicit approval of the government, there would be a civil war.
Precisely this -> It is a common technique that someone believes in Position A because of reason X, but reason X is unacceptable to the wider society and won't win debates. You make up reason Y to rationalise your Position A.
Peole will debate you on reason Y and be wondering why they can't convince you despite demonstrating that reason Y is wrong. They can;t convince you because you don't care about Reason Y, it's just a ruse. Often your followers also know that reason Y is a ruse, at least the ones who are not totally stupid.
In the Brexit debate, you would have people claiming that it's about national sovereignty and 'all them bloody EU laws', but they wouldn't be able to name a single EU law. They never knew and cared about EU law, they had a problem with immigration.
If at least the country was discussing immigration, maybe they could discuss if it's cheaper to give some extra money to people who are affected by immigration or suffer the collateral damage of Brexit.
Yes, I think that was the point. If people genuinely believed that abortion is the same as murder, they would have revolted against the government a long time ago. They don't really believe it.
What they do believe, however, is that any woman who may need an abortion was being promiscuous, and should be punished for her actions. They absolutely believe that.
Any political system that allows for the murder of half a million five year old children is very obviously not legitimate. If ever there were a justification for outright civil war, this would be it. It doesn't matter one bit whether it's a democracy, or the will of the majority.
Any argument otherwise could equally justify any genocide.
If you really believe abortion is murder, you must believe that spontaneous miscarriage is the leading cause of death in the US, beating heart disease in #2 by a factor of 5. Where is the investment from religious fundamentalists in preventing spontaneous miscarriage?
By that logic - If I'm not willing to help someone else raise their children, I must (for consistency) allow them to murder their children if they wish to do so.
Wildly inconsistent how? I'm asking in good faith and would like an example of an actual logical inconsistency, not a meme non sequitur about AR-15's or free healthcare.
This is seen very Authoritative Governments and Dictatorships because it allows for the exploit of self-identity. People often create their self-identity around a religion and if you try to talk about any logical flaws with their statements or show them whole evident of facts proving them wrong they will still stick with their religion because they then would destroy their self-identity. When religion becomes self-identity then the person stops living reality and in a religious dream-like state.
Look at Benjamin Franklin, US Founding Father, was a Christian but didn't self-identity and also wrote a section in a book, Every Man His Own Doctor: The Poor Planter's Physician, how to perform an abortion.
He is an example of self-identity that goes beyond religion. But also the self-identity factor can also be tie not to religion but political parties or other extreme identities leading to group think.
With high confidence, and hopefully a good study is done, a high percentage of people that gave power to the anti-abortion / anti-liberty movements are self-identified with religion over other aspects.
This is simply a matter of law. The justification for Roe Vs Wade doesn't hold water, it never did, it asserts a right to privacy that apparently only applies in the specific case of abortion and not in warrantless surveillance or any other matter. It was a legal fiction.
It's the 4th Amendment. Justice Douglas in Griswold v. Connecticut:
> "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship."
If your counterargument is "the word privacy isn't in the Constitution", my rejoinder is "neither is 'assault rifle'".
Why is this right to privacy exclusive to activities around reproduction? Where else do you enjoy this implied right of privacy? Why not quote the direct text that provides this right to privacy if it's so clear and obvious?
It's also part of the 9th amendment. The point is that the courts ruled that people have an implicit right to privacy within their own home. That's literally why it exists, because it was to directly counter people who take the constitution at face value as being the ONLY rights it gives.
The Court's job is to balance your right to privacy with the state's interests. Let's say you're running a meth lab: meth is very bad for people, it's hard to cook it safely and you might grievously harm others in your house or those nearby. Therefore, if law enforcement has probable cause to enter your home (e.g. they have an informant who's provided evidence), they can obtain a warrant for the express purpose of ascertaining whether or not you have a meth lab. If you don't have a meth lab but you are smoking weed (in a State where that's not legal), they can't arrest you, because that's not what the warrant is for. Hooray 4th Amendment!
The War on Drugs is uniquely stupid, though there is an argument that the state has a compelling interest in making sure its citizens aren't all addicted to drugs.
The legal theory on which the right to privacy mostly stands is called "substantive due process", which more or less says the state can't abridge your liberties without trying pretty hard not to. So liberties here can be contraception use, or drug use. Indeed United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative had the coop arguing that the Controlled Substances Act "violates the substantive due process rights of patients, and offends the fundamental liberties of the people under the Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments". This has generally (and maybe oddly) been at odds with the Commerce Clause, pretty well typified by Wickard v. Filburn where the Court held that even though Filburn was only growing wheat on his own land for his own use, the US could impose a quota on him because it was regulating the price of wheat federally. This extends interpretation of the Commerce Clause from mere interstate commerce to production and consumption. Here's a good quote:
"Hence, marketing quotas not only embrace all that may be sold without penalty, but also what may be consumed on the premises."
I'm not an expert, but I believe this is the constitutional leg on which the CSA stands: the gov't can regulate what you consume. I'm personally sympathetic to the substantive due process challenge argument, but probably still too young to be on the Supreme Court. Call your senator! :)
It's not, see Lawrence v. Texas (same-sex relationships) and Obergefell v. Hodges (same-sex marriages).
You should honestly just read Griswold [0]. It is a strikingly conservative opinion if, for example, you think privacy is also about "the government has to show a compelling governmental interest to regulate firearms". Here are some gems:
"The association of people is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights. The right to educate a child in a school of the parents' choice -- whether public or private or parochial -- is also not mentioned. Nor is the right to study any particular subject or any foreign language. Yet the First Amendment has been construed to include certain of those rights."
"In NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U. S. 449, 357 U. S. 462 we protected the 'freedom to associate and privacy in one's associations,' noting that freedom of association was a peripheral First Amendment right. Disclosure of membership lists of a constitutionally valid association, we held, was invalid 'as entailing the likelihood of a substantial restraint upon the exercise by petitioner's members of their right to freedom of association.' Ibid. In other words, the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion."
"The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516—522, 81 S.Ct. 1752, 6 L.Ed.2d 989 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers 'in any house' in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the 'right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.' The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: 'The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.'"
"In presenting the proposed Amendment, Madison said:
'It has been objected also against a bill of rights that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration, and it might follow, by implication, that those rights which were not singled out were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system, but I conceive that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the
Page 381 U. S. 490
last clause of the fourth resolution [the Ninth Amendment]."
"Madison himself had previously pointed out the dangers of inaccuracy resulting from the fact that 'no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea.' The Federalist, No. 37 (Cooke ed.1961) at 236."
We can call the cops "Child-shredder protectors" as well, as the only shooting they prevented that day was one of the officers going in after his wife, who was killed. They didn't even try to open the door to the classroom, just stood around and made damn sure that nobody else did anything.
You want to disarm yourself in light of that news?
How was that an emotional argument? I was just stating the effect the weapon had on a bunch of those kids, not how awesome the weapon looked, or how powerful I feel owning one.
The amendment uses the word "arms" which includes every time of fire arm. It doesn't say "keep and bear muskets" just as much as it doesn't say "keep and bear semi-automatics".
Maybe every US citizen is the militia. Part of the point of the 2nd amendment is that the citizens have the power to hold the government accountable, both at the ballot box and the ammo box.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons , houses , papers , and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Like all rights, I see the Constitution forcing a balancing of state interest vs. individual liberty here. No right is absolute, and the Constitution outlines some examples of basic rights and their limits.
4A is pretty good at this. People have a right against unreasonable searches and seizures without probable cause. While the state's interest is implicit here, it's obviously law enforcement. This balances the state's interest in enforcing laws with the individual right against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In Griswold, the Court couldn't justify the state's interest in enforcing anti-contraception laws given its necessary invasion of privacy. Other concurrences found the right to privacy in other Amendments (the 9th and the 14th), but regardless of where you look, all of these Amendments lay out an individual liberty vs. a state interest.
Courts are faced with the unenviable task of taking a > 200 year old document and applying its precepts to a world that would bewilder its authors. Different philosophies try to do this in different ways; Scalia famously pushed originalism, but even he essentially writes out slavery, Native American disenfranchisement, and the chattel status of women in the 18th century, and other originalists are even less consistent.
Other justices look for the core liberties ineffably and imperfectly silhouetted by the Constitution--a document defining the most free nation ever yet made--in order to keep the flame of liberty burning. What originalists miss about the Constitution was that it was an extremely radical document. If we are to be consistent with the spirit of the US at its founding, we have to preserve that dedication to liberty and human rights.
Should what was once the beacon of liberty be tethered to what liberty meant 250 years ago? Is that a fitting destiny? Would Madison or Jefferson be proud of such an outcome?
>...Scalia famously pushed originalism, but even he essentially writes out slavery, Native American disenfranchisement, and the chattel status of women in the 18th century, and other originalists are even less consistent.
I am no legal scholar by any means, but wasn't Scalia's argument that if the people don't like the social contract (i.e. the constitution), the people should change it via amendments vs having judges change it? I think he would say he did not "essentially writes out slavery..." but rather the 13th, the 19th amendments etc. wrote those out of the constitution.
> if the people don't like the social contract (i.e. the constitution), the people should change it via amendments vs having judges change it.
This only makes sense when you dovetail it with originalism. The Bill of Rights isn't supposed to grow infinitely. Madison didn't even want it (if you're into appeal to authority to Founders). But when you make the dual arguments of:
- the Constitution only means what it literally says, according to its time period
- the only way to expand interpretation is to literally change it with Amendments
you completely ignore the 9th and 10th Amendments.
Originalism is largely a smoke-screen to roll back rights. Dobbs is a great example of this, it heavily relies on "eminent common-law authorities" (only eminent as the result of conservative opinions pushing them into the catalog):
"We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after “quickening”—i.e., the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy."
Concluding:
"The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions."
Well, the problem with the originalist take on this is: women. couldn't. vote. End of debate! Haha.
It's probably also worth saying our understanding of medicine, conception, and pregnancy was pretty rudimentary back then. Why in God's name would we look back to that time period for wisdom on this?
Well, it's because in those days "it was a crime". Pretty convenient.
> I think he would say he did not "essentially writes out slavery..." but rather the 13th, the 19th amendments etc. wrote those out of the constitution.
He doesn't incorporate this into his analysis though. Here's what he writes in Heller regarding "Right of the People" in 2A (he quotes a Rehnquist opinion he concurred with to start):
"‘"[T]he people" seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution… . [Its uses] sugges[t] that ‘the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.'
This contrasts markedly with the phrase 'the militia' in the prefatory clause. As we will describe below, the 'militia' in colonial America consisted of a subset of 'the people'—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to 'keep and bear Arms' in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as 'the people.'"
His argument is that "the people" means "everyone", and that "the militia" only meant "male, able bodied, and within a certain age range". But "the people" actually only meant white, land-owning men; it excluded women, free Black Americans (largely denied the franchise), and Native Americans.
I think you would probably argue that, OK sure 1789 wasn't wonderful if you weren't a white guy, but we can extrapolate, now that the franchise and civil rights have been extended and incorporated to the States, that "the people" means everyone.
But this is exactly the opposite of what Scalia's arguing. He's saying because "the people" meant everyone, we must understand 2A as applying to everyone. In doing so, he ignores that 2A allowed white men to be armed, but did not allow women, free Black Americans or Native Americans to be armed. "The people" absolutely did not mean everyone, and the Founders were well aware.
In short, he ignores the fundamentally oppressive construction of the Constitution when it was written, and substitutes an imaginary regime where all enjoyed the right to bear arms. It was never so, and hearkening back to such a non-existent time is a daydream.
Such is the problem with originalism. It idealizes men and a time period that were far from ideal. Looking to this period for wisdom inevitably starts to strip rights away from marginalized groups. And that's what we're seeing here.
That's the basis of many of these laws and unfortunately it's obviously illogical. Even if we accept that as an unreasonable search that makes the search unconstitutional. Not the law.
And this reasoning also applies to same sex marriage, and inter-racial marriage. And guess what? SCOTUS is now gunning for both. Congratulations America, welcome to the 1960s
"Simply a matter of law" is a meaningless statement. All rights, including Constitutional rights and the laws which support them, are legal fictions. Roe v. Wade held water simply because the Supreme Court decided it did, until today when the Supreme Court decided it didn't.
Oh not this nonsense again. If this were true than it would be easy for the current court to write an alternative opinion upholding the right as a liberty interest.
They didn’t because the argument you are repeating is wrong, as well as made in bad faith to undermine obviously correct legal analysis.
You are a victim of propaganda and it makes me sad.
Your comments in this thread have been breaking the site guidelines. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully, as they request? That means without name-calling, personal attack, and flamewar—especially religious flamewar, which you've been crossing into elsewhere.
For example, your second sentence here would have been fine on its own, or as the nucleus of a more thoughtful comment. The other sentences are the ones that break the guidelines. I understand that on a fraught topic like this, it can be next to impossible not to write such things. But then one should edit them out. That's what I do, or try to.
Edit: it looks like your comment history contains a fair bit of ideological battle. Please make sure you're not using HN primarily for that, because that's the line at which we ban accounts (regardless of which ideology is being battled, or battled for).
Yes, it is about power and control in the same way that society's prevention of the sexual abuse of children is about power and control. That's what laws are about: power and control.
Well, first of all, it is a foundational principle of democracy that you can vote how you like for whatever reason you like. You can vote for a rule that every governing board have at least one woman because you hate men!
But as a matter of fact, Christians who are Christians in more than name only do everything of import because of Jesus -- or because of biblical teaching more generally. I believe that I should tell the truth because of Jesus. I believe that divorce is wrong because of Jesus. I believe that those who take a life should forfeit their own because of Jesus (Gen 9.6).
If you need a demigod and a book of fiction to tell you not to lie, cheat and kill then you aren't a very good person underneath.
Morality and ethics are not the exclusive purview of Christianity, or even religion in general. Atheists and agnostics don't need a bible to tell right from wrong.
In fact, religion is often used as an excuse to subjugate others, which is what they're doing by overturning RvW. They are subjugating women of breeding age as baby factories and unpaid child minders whose life course is decided on whether a man ejaculates in her and fertilizes an egg or not (whether she wanted him to or not.) If she catches, her life is no longer hers. It now belongs to the state as a incubation vessel for a potential citizen, and her wishes are now unimportant.
First of all, I need a full-fledged God, not a mere demigod, and it is a factual error to call the Bible or the Koran or the Book of Mormon a book of fiction. You can, from your omniscient point of view, call it false, but it is not a work of fiction if its author believes it to be true.
You may be right; perhaps atheists and agnostics don't need a Bible to tell right from wrong, but that isn't something even atheists themselves have agreed on. The whole angst of the European existentialist movement had to do with the realization that without a god everything and anything was permissible (including abortion, one assumes).
Interestingly enough - Evangelicals where typically left of center prior to Roe v. Wade (even in states where abortion was legal). My hope is that things return to a more historical norm now that Roe V Wade can actually be "a fair fight" (to use Scalia's language)
>> It isn’t about religion. It’s about power and control.
The difference? Politics and religion are both about controlling the actions of people. It may be done for good or ill, but it is always about control.
> We need to stop pretending it has anything to do with Jesus and everything to do with power over others.
I can promise you that this has quite a bit to do with religion. My parents both voted republican because "Billy Graham's son endorsed Trump" and before Trump they voted republican for this issue among others. I fully understand that elected republicans are just paying lip service to religion/abortion but they have their constituents completely fooled (or happy with their cognitive dissonance).
> Jesus Christ never gave to abortion the slightest mention
That is misrepresenting the argument. There's a lot of people that believe that abortion is the killing of a human being. And killing another human being is, most definitely, on the list of "bad things" for every flavor of Christianity. For a lot of them, killing one human being (not in self defense) to save another is still on that list; because only God is allowed to end life.
You may not agree that an unborn child is a human life, but the people that are against abortion for actual Catholic religious reasons do believe it. And do believe it is against their religion, and against any reasonable set of morals.
The standard line in conservative politics (that abortion is murder) isn't supportable by the text of the Old Testament, which outlines distinct punishments for murder and for inducing a pregnant woman (unsolicited) to abort. Causing an abortion isn't even sin in the Old Testament; it just yields a fine. And it's true that Jesus doesn't explicitly address any of that to supersede or revise it.
The 'valid Catholic reason' for the a doctrine of ensoulment that prohibits abortion is just papal authority. Different popes, saints, and schools within Catholicism have had different beliefs on ensoulment; it's not like the reasoning has been decisive here.
Fucking up other people's lives for the sake of obeying a series of 'infallible' flip-floppers is in fact embarrassing and not respectable.
And even from a religious perspective, criticizing particular sects of Christianity as unmoored from their own sacred texts and traditions with respect to this issue is a perfectly valid line of critique of those sects and their adherents. That's what the GP is essentially doing, informally asking what the rational connection to the sacred texts and tradition even are on this issue. Just because the Catholic church has an answer to that question doesn't mean it's satisfactory.
Conservative governance in general uses Biblical teachings purely for show. In an effort to set modern society back to the 1800s, they are using what they believe to be an unassailable source for their actions.
As recently as the late 1970s, evangelicals and Southern Baptists were at worst ambivalent about abortion rights. The anti-abortion stance of that particular set of people is tied pretty heavily to opposition to desegregation.
This is a great point to emphasize in this thread, since it otherwise happens to focus on Catholicism. This cynical use of religion to grouns conservative policy in beliefs not adressable by normal public debate is not at all limited to Catholicism.
Then how do you explain them supporting the removal of gun laws like the court did yesterday? Why does the idea that abortion extinguishes life and therefore supersedes all other rights not apply in other situations in which someone’s rights will lead to death? Either life is sacrosanct or it isn’t. Why are rights to guns more important than life but rights to bodily autonomy aren’t?
The court didn't "remove" gun laws yesterday. What they did was decide that states cannot have "may issue" laws and deny permits for arbitrary reasons. 2A is an enumerated right in the Constitution, and so there's a pretty high burden to restricting the exercise of that right. Incidentally, "may issue" laws traditionally were used to deny certain classes (usually black Americans) the ability to exercise their rights.
>Why are rights to guns more important than life but rights to bodily autonomy aren’t?
This strawman is bandied about a lot, but it deliberately misrepresents what is actually in the Opinions if you so choose to read them.
Because "killing someone" and "owning something that can kill someone" are VERY different things. Pretending that isn't the case is ridiculous. It is entirely possible to argue that what/how to limit ownership of "things that can kill people" is a much bigger gray area than "thou shalt not kill".
To be absolutely clear, I'm in favor of stricter gun laws and I don't believe in absolute bans on abortion. I just hate it when people claim that anyone that does want a ban on abortion is a hypocrite or out to control everyone else. There are plenty of people that believe that abortion is murder, and that believe is entirely consistent with their views. They're not all bad people, they just have a different view of the world than us. And anyone that tries to lump them all in the evil bucket IS the problem.
Broadly, there's two types of views regarding justice and how to construct a moral society: systemic responsibility vs individual responsibility. For the systemic responsibility view, you pull any and every lever to result in more preferable outcomes. For example, the response to rampant gun violence is more gun control. Here it makes sense to ask why we are not pulling every lever to prevent deaths from gun violence as we are deaths from abortion. This is in contrast to the individual responsibility view. Here, the response to immoral behavior is punishment for the wrongdoer only. Systemic issues are not relevant. In this case, there is no contradiction to punish women who get abortions and not increase restrictions on guns. (Of course, individuals will have views that are varying combinations of the two.)
You may be trying to compare very different things. Abortion by definition ends (aborts) a life. Having a right to own a gun does not automatically do that ( although it most certainly could ).
We keep balancing stuff like that all the time. The seeming major difference here is that guns are explicitly mentioned in the constitution, while abortion is not ( and was invented from other amendments ).
There’s neither scientific fact nor biblical teaching to support this position though. I often see “Thou shall not murder” as a defense for antiabortion policies, but it takes an unsupported leap to call it murder to begin with. Genesis says that life begins at first breath, which is far after most societies consider abortions legal and moral.
There’s also no indication that people even used to think that life began in utero, and that anything less than a fully formed infant was alive and capable of surviving.
What "science" says is that we can keep a fetus alive that had the misfortune of being born at... 24 weeks, I think? But the number keeps moving - it used to be 28.
So at least at some distance after conception, yes, medical science supports seeing a fetus as a human, with life of its own.
It says no such thing. It says that Adam's life began upon first breath. Adam was also created as a full grown man, so it's clearly not an example for human life as a whole. The Bible doesn’t teach that every man comes to life at first breath any more than it teaches that every woman comes from the rib of a man (from https://www.str.org/w/does-bible-teach-life-begins-first-bre...)
The Bible does say, in multiple places, clearly imply that life begins in the womb. For example, when John leaped for joy in his mother's womb, announcing the coming of the Lord.
And it's the current Supreme Court's prerogative to establish that specific religion, and forbid religious practice of, say, Judaism where the life of child and mother are weighed compassionately and abortions are permitted in certain cases.
the supreme court did not ban abortion. It removed abortion as a legal right. It means people cannot use the power of the federal government to overrule their own state legislature on the topic of abortion.
If you understand how the US Government works, then you understand that the Supreme Court cannot establish ANYTHING by removing laws. (ie overturning previous decisions).
What the Supreme court did was allow for the POSSIBILITY of a fully Catholic US State to practice Catholic religion with respect to abortion. It ALSO allows a fully Jewish state to practice Jewish religion however they want with respect to abortion.
They actual problem caused by overturning Roe v Wade is that some states who's laws are already catholic will regain the power to stop abortions in their state. That's it. California, New York, etc, are absolutely and completely unaffected by this decision, for example.
> They actual problem caused by overturning Roe v Wade is that some states who's laws are already catholic will regain the power to stop abortions in their state.
Quite the motte and bailey you've got there. Do you think that this court will make an about-face and suddenly recognize the constitutionality of the Establishment clause? Textualist/originalist, my ass.
Catholic people will make catholic laws. They wont literally be catholic laws.. but common sense would allow you to see them as such. There's nothing wrong with that either. The state does not need to recognize them as catholic laws and requires the laws be articulated and produced independent of the religion.
you cannot make a law that says "You must treat the poor the way Jesus would" but you can make a law that says "You cannot refuse life saving medical treatment to someone for being poor". Under Separation of Church a State can still create their set of laws to be 1:1 with the teachings of their religion. They just have to actually do that.. make the set of laws. they cant say "follow rules in the bible". The laws supersede the bible. Make the laws match the bible if you want people to follow the bible. So that's what these states are doing.
Only, they are saying the quiet part loudly now. And Clarence Thomas has been arguing that individual states can establish religions for at least two decades less three days[1]. Law is semantics.
Right, but that's also the point I was making. People think creating a law based on the beliefs of religious people violates the separation of church and state. It doesnt. the semantic nature of the law is relevant here.
I was highlighting that by saying you could make a state that effectively is a religious state using the current system. since the semantics are still there and must be accounted for, this prevents it from actually being a religious state.
By adhering to the semantics, no amount of religious belief can lead a state to violate the constitution.. even if the state bases every single one of its laws on religion. And if they try to, then the federal government has authority to enforce otherwise.
"There's a lot of people that believe that abortion is the killing of a human being. And killing another human being is, most definitely, on the list of "bad things" for every flavor of Christianity."
A lot of them seem to have no problem with killing human beings in war, or in executions, or killing done by police, or the killing of various human beings they hate (from "druggies" to gays to muslims or Mexicans).
As George Carlin said:
"Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to 9 months. After that, they don’t wanna know about you. They don’t wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re fucked."
"For a lot of them, killing one human being (not in self defense) to save another is still on that list; because only God is allowed to end life."
Horseshit, or the religious conservatives would also abolish the death penalty federally. Instead, the more Republican states tend to be the ones who wish to expand the death penalty. Look at the history of the death penalty in Texas, and who has historically been "eligible" for it.
It's all about control. These people believe America to be a "Christian" nation first and foremost. Their ultimate goal is to push America into that direction.
I believe within the lifetime of my generation's kids, we will see a push to repeal the First Amendment, at least the religious part of it. Although knowing how American Christians have historically handled freedom of speech, more than likely they'll try to gut the whole thing.
I do know some individual Catholics who reject the death penalty for the same reason that they would not themselves ever seek or endorse abortion, but I don't see the same phenomenon in national politics.
Yes, and the use of Catholic doctrine by politcal conservatives is cynical and selective.
That's what I meant— it's not as hard to find regular Catholic believers who are consistent in rejecting both abortion and the death penalty as a matter of their commitment to their religion as it is to find politicians who are the same way.
> while Jesus Christ never gave to abortion the slightest mention
Did the U.S. Constitution give abortion the slightest mention?
No, the right to abortion was inferred from a right to privacy, which was inferred from several amendments that did not explicitly mention abortion or privacy. The Ninth Amendment does makes allowance for rights that aren't explicitly enumerated, but it doesn't really give any guidance on how to know what those are.
Similarly, many Christian denominations recognize that Jesus didn't need to explicitly mention every single moral issue for the Church to develop doctrine around them. Heck, even the doctrine of the Trinity, a core doctrine of mainstream Christianity, requires some level of inference from Scripture.
So if your argument is that Jesus needed to explicitly mention abortion for there to be any justifiable Christian doctrine about it, you're applying a different standard than the standard that was used to define a constitutional right to abortion in the first place.
As far as Christianity goes, equating Abortion to murder has only recently become the popular interpretation. Not only is it written multiple times in The Bible that life begins at breath, The Bible even contains instructions on how and when to perform abortion.
As far as the constitution goes, amendments are treated as part of the text, not gotchas. The constitution protects your right to keep the contents of your pockets and your home private. Why not the contents of your uterus?
I would be curious if this decision hurts the Republicans going forward.
Religious Americans essentially held their noses to vote for Republicans just to get this issue rammed in.
Now that they have gotten what they wanted, are they still going to vote for Republicans with the same transactional decision process? Or are they now going to say the Republicans can no longer offer them anything additional and now the problems with Republicans being immoral and unchristian become too large?
Once Christians have an abortion ban do they become focused on helping the poor and other issues which were pushed by Jesus and whose teachings more closely align with progressive agendas? Or are they hypocrites and will vote for the Republicans to give the Pharisees & Rich of the world more power?
> Now that they have gotten what they wanted, are they still going to vote for Republicans with the same transactional decision process?
Yes; that's why Thomas's concurring decision openly threatens the gay marriage, contraception, etc. decisions. (He left Loving v. Virginia off the list, though. For some reason.) There's plenty more red meat to throw to the Republican base as far as SCOTUS is concerned.
He held up a flag and that makes him pro-gay-marriage? Is that all it takes? Some people are so stupid it hurts.
The 2016 and 2020 platform both said that marriage is between 1 man and 1 women, they didn't mince words. Pretending Republicans won't try to overturn gay marriage is about as stupid as the people who said they would never overturn Roe v Wade.
They will be if their various noise machines spin them up to be.
Southern Baptists largely didn’t care about abortion before the 1970s, even seeing it as a good thing in some cases. From The Baptist Press, who of course now spouts the party line that abortion is terrible and this SCOTUS decision is wonderful: https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/southern-...
It's literally part of their national party platform (banning gay marriage). I cannot believe that people honestly think that Republicans won't be chasing banning contraceptives, gay marriage, and trans rights next.
Where are you getting that religious Americans held their noses to vote Republican? That is not the mental model I have of people religious enough to ban abortion.
Abortion isn't the only issue Republicans use. We still have gun rights, "small government", "socialism", healthcare, drugs, human trafficking, etc.
Next on the list are LGBTQ+ rights, especially hormone therapy for teenagers, and contraceptives that may destroy or discard a zygote or blastocyst. Overturning Roe means allowing government to invade every healthcare decision and apply any arbitrary religious dogma to it.
The fear of abortion was used as a very effective tool for engagement. The more people sit and listen to people "argue" about an "issue" on Fox News or at church, etc., the more politically active they become.
It likely won't affect things much, or they wouldn't have let it go through. They will now be focusing on protecting this new status quo; "don't let liberals re-instate abortion and kill children!!!" etc
The fascinating thing about all this is the power of human manipulation. I grew up in a deeply religions area of the Midwest, the Bible Belt. Everyone was a hardcore Christian. However, as a youngster, I don't recall anyone talking about abortion. No mention of it. Back then churches would organize to help feed poor people and spread the word. That was it. Then, sometime around the mid-80s, everyone started talking about abortion. It seemed like that's all anyone talked about. And the tone changed, too. It went from, "Let me show you the way" to "You're going to rot in hell!"
> Ruth Ginsberg held that Roe v. Wade as a bad decision.
This is a very misleading reading of that critique.
Ginsburg would've preferred the right to abortion be established a) explicitly a right of women, not a right of doctors to practice and b) via many incremental decisions, making reversal harder.
Practical critique; not "bad law", but "not secure enough to trust". As the recent decision demonstrates quite effectively.
This isn’t really Christianity collectively. Lots of what’s happening in America is due to an American heretical brand of Christianity with its own motives outside the teachings of Christ.
* Numbers 3:39-40 is taking an account of those of circumcisable age (e. g. those who are inducted into the covenant between God and Israel). That says nothing about their humanity.
* The "ruah" of God is not the breath we take in with our lungs - and even if it were, that says how God created Adam, not how God created their children. Jeremiah 1:5 and Luke 1:44
* Numbers 5:27 - floor dust and burnt grain will not cause a woman to miscarry. Lying about the truth in front of the Truth Himself is grounds for punishment, but from God alone. Acts 5:1-10
> even if it were, that says how God created Adam, not how God created their children.
When one turns to The Bible for an answer about when conception becomes life, this is the clearest answer given. Arguing that it's not a clear enough answer supports my point.
> Jeremiah 1:5
> > Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart
You can still interpret that as development happening in the womb (not life yet) prior to the event that defines life (birth). I personally find that a clearer reading. Otherwise there is no reason to talk about birth as a second event.
> > As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.
Now The Bible has contradicted itself. Until now, life began at breath, but now we have a fetus leaping for joy.
We still have an unanswered question: when does the soul enter the body? At first breath? When the fetus is developed enough to move? When the heart develops enough to beat? When the blastocyst sticks to the uterine wall? When the zygote starts multiplying? When the DNA from the sperm is copied next to the DNA from the egg?
Was it just this instance that the fetus became a living person (with a soul) early?
None of these questions is answered clearly enough that I would be willing to base the law on it.
> floor dust and burnt grain will not cause a woman to miscarry.
I didn't say it would, the book did.
> Lying about the truth in front of the Truth Himself is grounds for punishment, but from God alone.
Is that a threat? How petty. But wasn't it The Bible itself lying here and not me? So you are using the book to threaten... the book?
Have fun with that. Just don't expect me to play along.
>> Lying about the truth in front of the Truth Himself is grounds for punishment, but from God alone.
> Is that a threat?
Not a threat - a description of what is going in Numbers. The woman is taking an oath before God that the child she is carrying is hers. If she lies, she is lying to God. I don't believe you are lying, I think you are genuine - which is a very good thing. I hope and pray that "you are not far from the Kingdom of God" could very well be said of you.
As to "life", "breath", "personhood", "ensoulment", and "birth" - how deep do you want to go?
> I hope and pray that "you are not far from the Kingdom of God" could very well be said of you.
Personally, I hope to get as far away from "The Kingdom of God" as I can.
Why? Because ideas that I don't believe in like "soul" and "sin" are being used to oppress me in the name of that very Kingdom.
Being genuine is not enough. This is about life and death.
Living breathing thinking feeling loving hoping yearning people are going to endure pain and even death because of this ruling.
All because people like you believe so strongly in a modern interpretation of an ancient collection of novels that don't even say what they have interpreted.
> As to "life", "breath", "personhood", "ensoulment", and "birth" - how deep do you want to go?
To me, it's not so much about the distance as the journey. I would rather live a short life in liberty than a long one in oppression.
How far do you, and the rest of the conservative Christians behind this decision, want to push us? How far will be bend to your collective whims?
As a Christian what strikes me is that very few who are free wish for slavery, and very few who are alive wish they had been aborted. Wealth makes this a virtually ironclad rule, and they'll have no excuse for killing those before they could find a voice or ability to defend themselves.
My understanding is that abortion is a major social justice issue for Christians. So you would want to engage with them on their social justice priorities and strategies, finding overlap, and so forth. At least that’s how I approach these dialogues regarding policies of lower levels of government.
Why is there never an expectation that Christian’s engage in dialogue and civility about this issue? There is never a demand they convince the pro choice people just that they be allowed to control and threaten them. Calls for dialogue are just part of the intentional narrative created to undermine peoples rights.
I'm a Christian and I've engaged people many times on this platform about this very issue. In fact your insinuation is so contrary to the truth I find it hard to believe you could possibly believe it in good faith!
Let me start with this: why should we as rational human beings assume life doesn't begin at conception? Is there a more logical place to ascribe life beginning, whether it be human or otherwise?
Probably not. The line is vague, but I'll say there's precedent that a murderer who kills a mom and her unborn child gets charged with two murders. Or in the instance of that mother that was detained by the police roughly and lost her unborn child in the process. In these cases, the women/families want the child so the unborn baby becomes a human for the sake of argument, but I think a lot of people can see that rationale being a bit weird, yeah? A human is a human whether someone wants them to be or not.
I might not understand your question. If life begins at conception, then of course a zygote is a human being and that zygote not making it would be a death by definition. Before implantation etc, you might never know that human being existed. So discovering you killed that zygote without knowing it isn't the same as abortion just like accidental manslaughter isn't murder.
You can go to prison for manslaughter. So should women who's body naturally aborted which happens quite regularly (30-40%) [1] be charged with manslaughter?
Birth control actually prevents implantation rather than conception every once in a while [2], would taking birth control be considered manslaughter if proven it prevented implantation rather than conception? This is actually what many are worried about now that Roe v Wade is down, Griswald vs Connecticut could be up next.
I do believe there's a case to be made that 'abortifacient' birth control should be regulated more carefully, and used for the protection of the mother instead of as a general-use contraceptive. Though this kind of manslaughter can't practically result in prosecution, so at the end of the day the use of abortifacients might have to be on the conscience of the potential mother (and father).
So you seem to be saying that anyone taking hormonal birth control could be technically commit a crime (manslaughter) but it's just not feasible to prosecute?
What about spontaneous abortion (miscarriage)? If the women is found negligent such as taking excessive risks (smoking, drinking, excessive age, some strenuous physical activity) they are also technically committing manslaughter correct? Again regardless of how viable it is to prosecute such a crime, are they committing a crime?
It's only a crime if there is a law criminalizing it, and I can see reasons why a just state would not make laws about abortifacients for several reasons not the least of which being it's unreasonable to prosecute such an offense.
It is both wrong and a crime to forget your child in a hot car to the point where they die. It isn't murder but it would be on your conscience regardless of whether the state prosecuted you or not. As I believe the unborn have an equal right to life as the born children it makes logical sense to enact laws such that crack use resulting in deformed children is a prosecutorial offense tantamount to neglect of born children. Of course, there is also criminal negligence vs. accidental crimes and all of that still applies.
EDIT: miscarriage isn't abortion, I'm not sure about its relevance to the discussion?
Miscarriage is literally called spontaneous abortion which is why I linked it to be clear. The woman’s body is playing an active role in rejecting the fetus as it deems it non viable, happens very frequently usually due to chromosomal defects.
What say you on ectopic pregnancies where it will never be viable and poses a threat to the mother?
Of course leaving a baby in a car is potentially manslaughter nobody is arguing that because there is general agreement that child is a person. The question is why you believe a fertilized egg is a person? Why is a separate sperm and egg combination not also considered a person? Why is conception the bright line? Why would you leave something as serious as homicide up to the state to decide?
When I refer to abortion I'm talking about a mother consciously choosing (or being coerced) to kill the baby in utero. Miscarriage is unavoidable and tragic, it has nothing to do with a mother's conscious decision. This is like saying a baby dying after birth from a severe birth defect is somehow the mother's fault.
Naturally in cases where you can only save one life but not both it makes no sense to let mother and baby die, this is logical and provides a terrible ethical dilemma for doctors to figure out where the borderline is - at what point is the risk to the mother so great that it warrants an abortion? These types of dilemmas are common as far as I understand in medical ethics.
I believe an unborn baby is a _person_ with the same intrinsic human rights as you and I, so I see no logical difference except in degree of uncertainty between the baby in the car and an abortifacient killing an unimplanted zygote. Of course the degree of uncertainty is very important legally. If I through an unforeseeable action end up being responsible for the death of an employee of mine, it matters how certain the outcome was based on my negligence. Maybe no one will ever know that I was in some way responsible but it will live on my conscience nonetheless.
>When I refer to abortion I'm talking about a mother consciously choosing (or being coerced) to kill the baby in utero.
Involuntary manslaughter does not require conscious choice to kill, premeditate conscious choice is murder, you brought manslaughter into the argument.
Just as someone drinking and driving does not intend to kill someone they can still be found guilty. A woman older than 35 having unprotected sex which could lead to geriatric pregnancy could be considered to putting an unborn person at risk due to much increased chance of spontaneous abortion.
>These types of dilemmas are common as far as I understand in medical ethics.
These choices will be easy in states that outlaw abortion with no exceptions because there will be no choice.
>I believe an unborn baby is a _person_ with the same intrinsic human rights as you and I
If zygote is a person does that mean freezing embryos that may never be used is homicide? Is embryo selection in IVF also homicide when only picking some of the embryos?
Not sure what your point is here. There are all sorts of gradations of one person killing another person and while I think ethical arguments can be made to restrict access to abortifacients I also think it's different from abortion morally and should be legally as well.
No state as far as I'm aware is outlawing abortion in the case of emergencies in the health of the mother, this is a common misunderstanding people have about anti-abortion legislation.
>Not sure what your point is here. There are all sorts of gradations of one person killing another person and while I think ethical arguments can be made to restrict access to abortifacients I also think it's different from abortion morally and should be legally as well.
Abortifacient - a substance that induces abortion. How is this different from abortion, that makes no sense logically or grammatically.
If a zygote is a person, then any action by another person which kills it is a homicide. If taking a birth control pill prevents implantation then you have committed homicide.
My point is you define abortion as a conscious choice, but that is not the definition of abortion, that is specifically induced abortion. You said just like manslaughter is not murder they are different, however manslaughter is a crime as is murder. Are you saying manslaughter should not be punishable or that abortion that comes from non-copious choice is not manslaughter even though a zygote is a person and the law would normally define that as manslaughter?
>No state as far as I'm aware is outlawing abortion in the case of emergencies in the health of the mother, this is a common misunderstanding people have about anti-abortion legislation.
Louisiana had a trigger law on the books since 2006 that did not have exceptions for ectopic pregnancies, luckily a democratic senator helped push a revision in the law very recently to make the exception [1].
The point being the is left up to the states and is also homicide if the fetus is a person. Hopefully it will be a justifiable homicide in all states.
I've been explaining why an abortifacient (as birth control) is different from getting an abortion knowing your pregnant. Homicide? Yes. Murder? I don't think so. I don't even think these should be illegal. There are wrongs we commit all the time that logically can only go on our conscience.
I use manslaughter as an analogy to explain gradations of homicide in terms of intent. I've been very clear that I don't think abortifacients as birth control make sense to be prosecuted at all, they aren't manslaughter in the legal sense because there's no way of knowing if anyone was killed or not!
It looks like your Louisiana case fixed a law that didn't make those important exceptions explicit (probably because it was a useless law anyway, only to signal a pro-life stance with no legal weight to it, but who knows?). This is good, the exceptions mentioned are just and necessary.
Not all homicides are illegal, all weigh on the conscience though - whether they be a soldier in war or a doctor performing euthanasia. Certain classes of homicide should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law to provide a just society and minimize the repercussions of injustice by penalizing perpetrators. In the case of a person making a conscious choice to end the life of an unborn baby they are making a decision that humans have no right to make in a way that leaves clear evidence and can be prosecuted. By the way, I personally think that doctors performing abortions should be prosecuted and not mothers.
Christians believe that all human beings are corrupt to the core. We take every aspect of the technological progress we've made and twist it to evil purposes, that's just what we do as humans. This is related to our dignity, our capacity for doing things gives us a unique capacity for evil. Some evil we do has terrible repercussions on the world at large and abortion is one of these evils. It unnaturally shapes our demographics in this country and in every country where it is allowed unrestricted. For example the black population of America is unnaturally small in proportion to the white population because of Roe, and there are more men than women in India and China because of abortion. Anti-abortion legislation doesn't help get those millions of lives back, it doesn't give them justice either. In my mind its primary purpose is to curb the wrongdoing in the future.
>I've been explaining why an abortifacient (as birth control) is different from getting an abortion knowing your pregnant. Homicide? Yes. Murder? I don't think so. I don't even think these should be illegal. There are wrongs we commit all the time that logically can only go on our conscience.
Your stance is a zygote is a person, yet you believe that killing one should not be prosecuted in the same manner as killing a born human it seems. Manslaughter does not require intent and is still a crime, either you believe the zygote is a person or you don't, if a person then the laws regarding killing a person should be the same. If you are ok with different laws between a zygote and born human then you must believe the zygote is less than human.
>This is good, the exceptions mentioned are just and necessary.
Something as serious as homicide should be codified at the federal level right? Why would you leave something like that for interpretations between states?
>Christians believe that all human beings are corrupt to the core.
Christians also believe god created everything including designing humans and their corruption correct? Where did evil come from? Did god create evil or is evil bigger than god and was not created by him? Again where did evil come from?
I think this discussion is not a good faith discussion anymore. If you kill someone and no one ever knew including you then law is kind of irrelevant right? A zygote is a human but not all killings of humans are equivalent in the eyes of the law, circumstances are important. That's justice.
> Something as serious as homicide should be codified at the federal level right? Why would you leave something like that for interpretations between states?
> Christians also believe god created everything including designing humans and their corruption correct?
Genesis 3 describes the origin of sin. God created people with the capacity to sin, He even set up a situation where they had complete agency of choice in the matter which is pretty amazing philosophically with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, we used this agency to choose sin and continue to do so to this day.
'Evil' as it pertains to human sin is a choice to behave contrary to God's will. God gave us the ability to be evil but didn't make us evil. In some sense it's part of the dignity of humankind that we have the capacity to do evil at all, but it is also our fall. With the fall in Genesis 3 we opened a rift between God and humankind, basically we ruined the relationship. We believe Christ gives a way to reconcile the relationship by paying the price for our evil on the cross.
>I think this discussion is not a good faith discussion anymore.
Is that what you call someone not believing the same thing as you and trying to get specific answers to logical questions? I am trying to understand why someone seems so fixated on personhood beginning at conception. I personally believe there is no good good line during pregnancy when someone becomes a person, it is a process that takes time, anything we pick is arbitrary to satisfy human law. For instance a zygote can split and become two people (identical twins) so I would think if you believe in a soul as the basis for personhood, ensoulment can not occur at conception.
Roe was a compromise, an imperfect law for a complicated matter where by it got progressively harder to get an abortion as the pregnancy progresses. Not only did it grant the right to an abortion, it also prevented it later in pregnancy, that is now left to the state.
>If you kill someone and no one ever knew including you then law is kind of irrelevant right?
Getting away with manslaughter does not change the fact whether it is a crime. You seem to be avoiding answering the question, do you believe taking birth control that prevents implantation is a crime? Regardless of the ability to prosecute, is it a crime of manslaughter? If not then obviously you do not think the same law applies to zygotes as people.
>Believe it or not, the exact opposite is true
So you are ok with a state outlawing abortion with no exceptions as Louisiana had for some time and there should be no federal protection for that situation?
Do you believe Griswold vs Connecticut should be overturned as well?
>'Evil' as it pertains to human sin is a choice to behave contrary to God's will.
How can the universe and anything it which was created by god act contrary to his will? That makes no logical sense, it was his will to design it as such in every detail. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the buck stops there. He also is omnipotent and knows everything including the actions we will take, or do you believe he does not in fact know everything?
If god has no control over our actions and is even surprised by them then there must be a source of entropy that did not come from god, who created that?
>we opened a rift between God and humankind, basically we ruined the relationship.
How does one ruin a relationship with their designer unless the designer is schizophrenic? If I design a program I do not blame the program for bugs, that's stupid, it is my failing. Perhaps there was an OS or hardware failure that caused the problem, but as god I designed them too! There is no one else to blame, certainly not my creation.
>I personally believe there is no good good line during pregnancy when someone becomes a person, it is a process that takes time, anything we pick is arbitrary to satisfy human law
So what should we do in your opinion? Are the unborn entitled to protection by our laws or not?
>Roe was a compromise, an imperfect law for a complicated matter
Roe wasn't a law, it was a legal precedent dehumanizing a class of people for another class's benefit. Now we do have actual laws that are made by legislatures across the country to try to do justice to a complicated subject as you admit it is.
>So you are ok with a state outlawing abortion with no exceptions
Of course not, this is the opposite of what I said.
>Do you believe Griswold vs Connecticut should be overturned as well?
There is a class of 'living constitution' decisions made by the supreme court during this era that are contrary to rule of law and make the supreme court into some sort of super-legislature. I think people should have access to contraceptives, I'm not sure it's guaranteed by the constitution though. Not all contraceptives are abortificients, even those should be accessible for the reasons I gave above, health concerns primarily.
>How can the universe and anything it which was created by god act contrary to his will?
Yeah, it's crazy! Christians think we have real agency even given the sovereignty of God. It borders on paradoxical. God surely knows the path we will go down and judged it necessary for some reason. Apparently He preferred beings capable of deciding to follow Him of their own free will rather than automatons.
>If I design a program I do not blame the program for bugs, that's stupid, it is my failing.
What's more impressive though? Designing a program that can choose between multiple options and determine its fate or designing a program completely constrained to make the choices I orchestrate? And yet, we would be comfortable saying a programmer would be totally justified if they shut down or even deleted a program erring as you've described!
>So what should we do in your opinion? Are the unborn entitled to protection by our laws or not?
I think Roe was a good compromise affording choice to the mother up to a point while protecting the unborn later. Again why do you fixate on conception, what turns cells merging and replicating into a person and why is it at the point when the sperm and egg merge, not before and not sometime after? Why did you choose that line to take your stand?
>Roe wasn't a law, it was a legal precedent dehumanizing a class of people for another class's benefit. Now we do have actual laws that are made by legislatures across the country to try to do justice to a complicated subject as you admit it is.
Decisions made by the Supreme Court are law regardless of whether you like them or not, specifically case law. Trying to act like it wasn't a real law is a petty argument, it obviously was until overturned. I am skeptical you believe this should be left to the states since because if you truly believe this murder why would you be ok with letting some state allow it. You seem to think this is very simple reducing a person down to a zygote but not a sperm and egg in a very black and white manner.
>I think people should have access to contraceptives, I'm not sure it's guaranteed by the constitution though.
The constitution does not guarantee the right to assault rifles specifically, are you ok with leaving that decision up to the states? Arms is a very open ended term as is the right to privacy this must be interpreted by the court to have specific meaning, currently allowing assault rifles but not nuclear arms and contraception but wire tapping is allowed with a warrant.
>Apparently He preferred beings capable of deciding to follow Him of their own free will rather than automatons.
The distinction between free will and automatons has no meaning to a being that creates everything including free will itself. To have true free will not predetermined by god would require outside input, it would require a source of entropy that was not created by god. The only way god could not control our actions is if there is uncertainty from some other source otherwise we are doing exactly as we where designed. Either the universe is deterministic as god designed or is non-deterministic due to outside input, simple logic.
>What's more impressive though? Designing a program that can choose between multiple options and determine its fate or designing a program completely constrained to make the choices I orchestrate? And yet, we would be comfortable saying a programmer would be totally justified if they shut down or even deleted a program erring as you've described!
This still make no logical sense, did god create everything including all choices possible or not? God created the constraints unless you believe there is something beyond god a greater universe created by whom?
If a programmer creates a sentient AI that makes its own choices I guarantee it will be getting input not created by the programmer that helps form and drive its choices. A programmer is not god and did not create everything, and if he did I would hope he would not be so stupid as to blame his own program for bad choices based on input he created!
> why should we as rational human beings assume life doesn't begin at conception?
'Life begins at conception' is just a nominally secularized reference to the doctrine of ensoulment, not a concept that is morally relevant to question of whether abortion should be legally permissible (or even interesting).
If we cared about the mere fact of life in the relevant way, we'd be interested in legal restrictions on pulling weeds. If the concern was with living tissue with human DNA, we'd be fretting over amputations. Even in the case of human life, not every end to human life is an equivalent of 'murder' to be categorically prohibited to the exclusion of all other considerations. And even if we grant that abortion is always morally wrong, it still does not automatically follow that categorical legal prohibition is a sound social response to the moral issue.
There's an expansive philosophical literature on the ethics of abortion that actually seeks to identify and address the moral core of the issue and its relation to law. The phrase 'life begins at conception' is just a political slogan for a religious dogma that very, very quickly falls apart when you try to use it ss an actual starting point for reasoning about abortion policy. Trotting it out pretty much represents a refusal to engage in good faith with secular thought on the issue.
I agree that 'human life' and 'ensoulment' are linked, but I of course disagree on your casual dismissal of my question. Maybe I can ask another question:
If murder is wrong for the born, what about the unborn makes that wrong lesser?
Are you trying to say a lack of evidence is evidence of a lack? But there is plenty of evidence nonetheless:
Maybe the most clear case comes in this way:
Christians believe that human beings are chosen by God just as much as they choose God (both must be true to be saved). This is most clear in Romans 8:29-30.
> For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
So God does decide who to save, he "foreknows" them, whatever that means. Now there are several examples of people being called by God, many of which happen before they are born.
Jeremiah is called by God before his birth in Jeremiah 1:5:
> Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.
Paul is called by God before his birth in Galatians 1:15:
> But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, ...
These are just some examples, there are more references to unborn in the Bible. The argument goes like this: if it's wrong to kill another being imbued with the image of God, fully capable of being foreknown by Him, called, predestined, justified and glorified, it is equally wrong to kill them before birth as opposed to after birth and the Bible makes no distinction between the two in terms of how this process works, evidenced by the above passages.
I can also include this interesting verse, Ecclesiastes 11:5:
> As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.
Quite simply, according to the Bible life begins at conception, our capacity for good and evil begins at conception, God chooses us at conception and our status of being in the 'image of God' starts at conception.
The above verses and doctrine are not 'Calvinist', Calvinism is the belief that God's choice is the primary cause of salvation as opposed to man's choice, but that distinction is irrelevant here.
If you're referring to the reference to the law on accidental harm to pregnant mothers in Exodus it's irrelevant to the question of when life begins. I can think of many reasons why courts would be lenient about sentencing regarding harm of unborn compared to born human beings. For example, if you when driving accidentally bump a man on the road and he dies but he was a hemophiliac, is it not just for a court to take that into account when sentencing? You did kill the man, but extenuating circumstances give the chance of leniency, justly deserved.
Of course there has to be a mutual expectation in successful dialogue. I was just replying to someone who seemed not to realize both sides have the same concept of civil/social justice. Those realizations can be helpful for those trying to communicate with political opponents. It sounds like you have no interest, and that’s fine.
To be fair, we’ll never know all the things Jesus said since it’s not like he wrote an autobiography or anything. All records of him were selected and written by other people, who may or may not have been comprehensive.
> I hope that whomever supported this ruling is happy right now, and I'd like to remind them that, while Jesus Christ never gave to abortion the slightest mention, he was quite vocal about the fact that greed was not compatible with salvation.
I don't really know the Bible, but I'm guessing Jesus probably didn't spend a lot of time condemning literal murder either, so it's probably not safe to assume that means he thought preventing greed is more important than preventing murder.
The very same paragraphs talk about it being comparable among early Christians to such 'grave sins as contraception and sterilization'. How should this inform the relative weight of the use of condoms and murder, for contemporary Christians?
This doesn't at all support the notion that Christianity has always been concerned with abortion as a corrolary to murder, which is at the center of contemporary conservative religious discourse on the issue.
Not disagreeing, but this comes from further back than a decade. It goes all the way at the very least to Gingrich, when Republicans locked on the religious vote by attacking the "immoral conduct" of Bill Clinton. It worked so well that they've made it a structural element of their strategies. You can see the traces of this even in the political allegory of clintonism that is The West Wing - this episode was filmed in year 2000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3VHK1NXIBw
I don't think it's right to place blame totally on evangelicals and other Christians. The Republican platform is reactionary top to bottom. This is further reflected in Republican politician's votes.
What I'm saying is, this happens even without fervent support from the religious right.
This also likely isn't the final chapter, as the opinion also gives thoughts to overturning rulings related to contraception and same sex marriage.
In 2016, Republicans who went to church weekly were far less likely to vote for Trump, than those who rarely or never went.
That means the lower taxes and less regulations were likely desired for their own sake not as a trade off.
Christians crazily believe Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was God incarnate within the womb. As crazy as that may be, it logically follows they would adamantly be against ending human lives before they’re born.
The use of state power to exterminate trans people is the next chapter, and its already well under way. More broadly, much of the next series of chapters is using selective application of “religious liberty” to establish unique and particular entitlement for favored Christian groups across the board, by dismissing the sincerity of other beliefs and/or judging the burdens imposed on them by a different subjective standard in applying the “substantial burden” test than is applied on favored Christian beliefs.
Viewed even more broadly, the focus is on dismantling substantive anti-discrimination protections for non-favored groups extending beyond religion by similar means (as is the case for the above trends, we’ve already seen some elements of this, such as the judicial dismantling of much of the Voting Rights Act; but that is just the beginning, there is much more to come.)
EDIT: Heck, this isn’t even the end of this chapter, if one considers the way this is part of the integrated campaign against sexual and reproductive freedom and the right of privacy established in the line of cases running (through Roe) back to Griswold v. Connecticut, which are all under attack, and span issues beyond abortion to include contraception, same sex marriage, sodomy laws, etc.
That.. seems excessively alarmist. It is on par with Sirius XM Channel channel reacting to the news by saying, and I am paraphrasing, 'they are going after all our rights next'.
I might agree in an abstract manner it is not a final chapter the same way just imposing red flag laws is not the end goal for gun control activists, but the paragraphs that follow are a little out there.
Then you aren't paying attention to the actual legislation being passed in States, the advocacy of leading members of the Republican Party, and even the things explicitly stated in the writings of Supreme Court justices on this case.
> It is on par with Sirius XM Channel channel reacting to the news by saying, and I am paraphrasing, ‘they are going after all our rights next’.
Thomas literally (to anyone who understands the scope and impact of the Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence) said that in his concurrence.
It is possible. I am not an expert in this area so I do not pay it as close an attention is it may warrant. That said, can you provide any links that would confirm your statements? The little I know is about Kavanaugh and Barrett and neither is an extreme in their writings ( although there are some unflattering bios on the net ). Which SCOTUS member are you referring to?
edit re concurrence:
I am going through SCOTUS blog(1) and the actual text(2) and I am not seeing the same thing you do. Could you elaborate a little?
There’s not a large number tyrannical Hindus, Jews, Muslims, or Atheists gerrymandering their way into office to push their religious nonsense into laws that threaten my life in the United States. I think singling out Christians is perfectly fine in this case.
> while Jesus Christ never gave to abortion the slightest mention
In his defense, Jesus came to fulfill the old law and not abolish it, as directly stated by himself. The old law has the 5th commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," which in the times of Jesus was unanimously interpreted to cover abortion (Psalm 139 being one reason why) and Jesus, by not speaking against this interpretation (unlike other interpretations), left that view unchanged.
The old testament also banned eating shrimp and that people working on Saturday should be stoned, so I kind of see lots of cherry picking here. It's also highly ambiguous if the fetus should be considered a human being or property (see Exodus), but that's not the point.
The core point was that most of the message and teachings of Jesus were clearly, unambiguously about social justice and charity, and yet modern Christians care way more about Old Testament moral rules than the actual Christian message, what Jesus clearly cared about the most, the last, the meek, the poor.
The modern Christian votes for racist ultra-rich that only profess hate towards everyone that's different from them in order to get abortion and gay marriage banned. That's the worst corruption of the Christian message possible, in my opinion, and makes those people phony believers to my eyes. They use their as an indentitarian way to distinguish them from the others, which is absolutely at odds with the ecumenical message of Jesus Christ.
Care about the young not being able to start families first, about those who are in need and can't make their ends meet, and then take care of the rest.
> what Jesus clearly cared about the most, the last, the meek, the poor.
You could say it is a matter of perspective, as to the Christian, the unborn child is the most last, the most meek, the most poor, and the most helpless compared to any person including the mother, and thus logically requires precedence.
Is the fetus a child or is it not? If it is not, then the mother should take precedence. If it is, in fact, a child, then it must be protected as such.
Exodus 21:22-23 recounts a story of two men who are fighting and injure a pregnant woman, resulting in her subsequent miscarriage. The verse explains that if the only harm done is the miscarriage, then the perpetrator must pay a fine. However, if the pregnant person is gravely injured, the penalty shall be a life for a life as in homicides.
Jesus was Jewish and fetuses aren't considered persons under Jewish law.
> Jesus was Jewish and fetuses aren't considered persons under Jewish law.
A counterargument would be that the Jewish law does not address whether they are persons, but rather focuses on the fine being the solution to the matter. The law also only addresses if the incident should occur by accident (the miscarriage being a side effect), whereas deliberately inducing a miscarriage was not included.
EDIT: Adding more information (also due to reply timers):
@DangItBobby The verse in question:
"When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life."
A few notes.
1. The law only addresses unintentional injury, and does not address intentional injuries.
2. The law does not specify "injury." It could mean an injury that occurs to the pregnant woman, the unborn child, or both. One way to interpret the passage is that if the woman is caused to have an early delivery, then the penalty is a fine, but any further injury to the child is covered under the lex talionis law of “an eye for an eye.”
3. The law actually calls the fetus a "child," and takes foregranted that the woman "is with child" which pretty clearly shows that the personhood was taken foregranted.
No, it's explicitly covered under Jewish law and has been for millennia. Under that the fetus is an organ of the mother under her complete bodily autonomy.
It doesn't say "with child" in the original Hebrew, that's added in your translation.
The way it's translated into English these days directly from the Hebrew is
> If men strive, and wound a pregnant woman so that her fruit be expelled, but no harm befell [her], then shall he be fined as her husband shall assess, and the matter placed before the judges. But if harm befell [her], then shall you give life for life.
> The law actually calls the fetus a "child," and takes foregranted that the woman "is with child"
And yet... If the woman is harmed, it's treated as if you harmed a human (eye for an eye), but if the fetus is harmed, there's a fine. It's quite clear that the fetus is not anywhere near the same importance in this law, not that this should have anything to do with modern law.
> The law also only addresses if the incident should occur by accident (the miscarriage being a side effect), whereas deliberately inducing a miscarriage was not included.
Nope, that's covered. In the verse, accidental damage to the human mother was punishable by death.
You are incorrect. The bible does not support fetal personhood. The bible clearly gives fetuses a lower moral valence than a living person and discusses that an accident that results in a stillbirth is not equivalent to "killing a person". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_abortion
Modern Judaism differs from Historical Judaism in this respect. For example, the "Rabbinic sources" sounds historical... but then the first person quoted lived in the 1700s.
Immediately after receiving the 10 commandments, Moses orders the Israelites to slaughter their friends, family, and neighbors who worshiped the golden calf. And God approved.
If it were elected it would be more political. Perhaps a better way would be to allow each party to prioritize a list of potential judges and appoint the one closest to the middle of each list.
Agreed, the legislative branch should push through a right to abortion matching the European standard (12-14wks). If our politicians were less cynical and self-serving, this would have already happened in redundancy to Roe.
I'm assuming you're not from here. I know the Opinion is >200 pages, but it's pretty clear that SCOTUS is doing exactly what you want: abortion regulations are returned to the State legislatures, where the people's elected representatives get to make them - not the Court.
Scientists have shirked their responsibility around abortion. The vacuum and silence around this topic helped push towards this day.
The "viability" debate, or the re-branded "when does this ball of cells become a person" debate, has been monopolized by philosophers and religious people. And as a result many women will die due to botched abortions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerri_Santoro or the inability to get one in the case of complications (which are fairly common) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar .
We can absolutely arrive, with a reasonable degree of certainty, when the ball of cells is capable of executing the processes we associate with consciousness. We can track the development of the neocortex, and monitor its activity to derive an answer to the consciousness question. We can do so via careful observation, and comparison with equivalent brain damaged patients, including those that we otherwise pull the plug on.
For what is the moral difference (from a consequentialist, utilitarian standpoint) between taking previously conscious humans with minimal brain function off of life support and an abortion of a non-sentient and non-conscious fetus? There is none, except for the fact that, in the case of a uterus, a human being is forced to act as life support.
Science can answer these questions. And do so with greater precision and accuracy over time. We can draw a map and arrive at a more enlightened conclusion. But the act of doing so, of so clearly putting a line down in the sand, makes most scientists uncomfortable. So they don't. And now many people will die because we created the vacuum that irrational belief filled.
None of this matters because the majority (probably overwhelming majority) of pro-life people also don't believe settled science like evolution or that the earth is more than 6000 years old. If we can't reach consensus on those things, how is telling someone that believes a zygote has a human soul that its okay because it isn't conscious?
Keep in mind that the protections provided by Roe and PP v. Casey only extended to 24 weeks. If scientists gave an answer to the question anywhere past 24 weeks then I don't see how it would move the debate even the tiniest smidge.
It's not the ardent pro-life people that I'm concerned about reaching, but most Americans who aren't that radical. The lack of scientists speaking out about abortion and bringing reason to the public discussion has led to a vacuum where the only voice they hear are either religious nuts or social activists trying to be heard. Social activists usually lack the scientific training and background to break it down and explain the problem.
It's definitely NOT human. For the first day or two, all cellular processes (basic cell metabolism, protein synthesis, that sort of thing) are controlled by extranuclear DNA that comes only from the egg. So instead of having a chromosome number of 2N=46 like all the somatic cells in your body, the embryo is functionally haploid.
While that's going on in the cytoplasm, the nucleus is a real mess. Sometimes it's 1N, sometimes 2N, sometimes even 4N! If we accept that humans are a species because of our DNA, then there's just no way you could ever call that embryo human in the first 36ish hours post-fertilization. I don't know quite what you'd call it, but it's definitely not that.
Women aren't just "life support"; that is an inaccurate view as well.
When a fetus is growing it takes from the womans body. For example, a woman's bones are dissolved so they can be repurposed to to fetal skeleton. The woman is literally giving up her body. The fetus is the woman's body in a literal way. She is not a passive incubator to something like an egg that has all it needs.
> For what is the moral difference (from a consequentialist, utilitarian standpoint) between taking previously conscious humans with minimal brain function off of life support and an abortion of a non-sentient and non-conscious fetus? There is non, except for the fact that in the latter, a human being is forced to act as life support.
There is one obvious difference: in one case, the person's consciousness has been irreversibly destroyed. In the other case, the person's consciousness is imminent.
From a utilitarian standpoint, the fetus has a considerable upside while the brain dead patient does not.
Utilitarianism is largely unconvincing anyway, IMO. A much more convincing pro-abortion argument is how the unwanted fetus infringes on the rights of the mother.
We very thankfully have more options for women that are much safer than coat hangers.
There are drugs that will allow women to have illegal abortions that are much much safer than a coat hanger. The important factor will be finding ways to get such drugs to women in states where they cannot be legally used, and ensuring that such a delivery mechanism delivers safe, and authentic drugs.
so basically corner meth dealers will now deliver abortion pills? IDK if thats gonna last, because you know we can always police the drugs out of the system.
Well, I hope we can find systems that avoid it being dangerous.
For example, pills can be acquired safely from outside of the jurisdiction and mailed in.
Or, many such pills have on-label uses that are not abortion related. So there could be avenues to helping people who need them for abortion purposes obtain them from reputable providers for legal purposes.
But, yes, the war on drugs has shown that trying to police drugs out of the system is incredibly difficult.
I'd just like to make sure that, once the war ramps up, we can find ways to keep the delivery of the drugs as timely, authentic, and the use of them as safe as possible.
A lot of fairly common prescription drugs are abortifaciants. Prostaglandin is the substance used in drugs designed for that specific purpose, but many drugs that influence muscle control, inflamation, or bloodflow can do the same thing.
It's going to be very difficult to regulate all of these drugs.
The real question is, what kind of draconian laws will they start hatching to make abortion tourism (flying to a state where it's legal, then coming back) illegal. How do you legislate that? Are people still free to go to another state if they want? Are they getting arrested as soon as they come back?
The next case they'll hear is about Mississippi v Some Nonprofit That Pays For Abortion Flights.
This is a good point - it's how the Texas law was written.
And not just travel - self managed abortions are cheap, safe, and the most common of all abortions nowadays. They can just mail you the pills, and its literally safer than ibuprofen.
You're going to see a lot of cases about "Can [provider, citizen, org] in [Legal_State, Legal Country] provide [medical care, advice, money, other_help] to [person, organization] in [Illegal_State]"
My guess is they'll try to outlaw home pregnancy test and start requiring doctors to report any positives. Wouldn't be surprised if someone already tried to pass such a bill somewhere.
They absolutely will and already are. There will be loopholes or lax enforcement for the rich and white, but the poor and non-white will have those options restricted and prosecuted.
Now let's see if far right leaning adults start lining up in droves for foster/adoption care classes. This will let them put their time/money where their mouths are. Cause and affect: you don't want abortion, you now have to take care of those who are not wanted.
They obviously won't. The Republican Party is explicitly opposed to expansion of the social safety net which would support the children from unwanted pregnancies. Outlawing abortion has nothing to do with protecting children. It's about exerting religious control over women and that's it.
has anyone done a comparison chart of the various "trigger laws" in different states? I ask because the other day someone on twitter accused my state of being "anti-semetic" for not allowing abortions when the pregnant woman's life is at risk, and a quick google search revealed that this is actually false:
22-17-5.1. (Section effective on the date states are recognized by the United States Supreme Court to have the authority to prohibit abortion at all stages of pregnancy) Procurement of abortion prohibited--Exception to preserve life of pregnant female--Felony.
Any person who administers to any pregnant female or who prescribes or procures for any pregnant female any medicine, drug, or substance or uses or employs any instrument or other means with intent thereby to procure an abortion, unless there is appropriate and reasonable medical judgment that performance of an abortion is necessary to preserve the life of the pregnant female, is guilty of a Class 6 felony. (Section 7 of SL 2005, ch 187, as amended by SL 2005, ch 188, § 1, provides: "This Act is effective on the date that the states are recognized by the United States Supreme Court to have the authority to prohibit abortion at all stages of pregnancy.")
Source: SL 2005, ch 187, § 6.
> The issue reverts to the states, many of which have taken steps to curtail or ban abortions.
Sounds like people need to get off their asses and vote now. Voting is more important now that it's ever been before. It's up to individual states how they want to treat abortion and related services.
This ruling isn't an end to anything, unless the populace doesn't care enough to grass-roots the effort to change their state's laws.
Now, go vote. Voting is the only say we have in this tumultuous country.
USA... Abortion illegal - Gov says you must have the kid. Guns legal - The biggest killer of kids in USA. From the country that self-proclaims as the greatest this is a low.
If your representatives in Congress would get off their butts and actually legislate, the court's "view" on the topic would be moot.
The fact is, lazy hand wringing house and senate members have been dodging these issues (more than just abortion) and passing them off to the court system for fifty years, or more.
They get good pay, they get good benefits, they should do their stinking jobs!
This all ultimately falls to the ineffectual legislative branch.
(edited) It's not like you had any more urgent issues than this?
That move greatly reinforces Galkovsky's position that USA is now a Latin American country not unlike Brazil; and indeed, Latin American countries also deeply care about this (non)issue and have abortion laws inappropriate to their general level of economical and human development.
The problem being, at least Brazil recognizes that it is Brazil and knows how to run Brazil.
It's a simple vote exchange, you know. People got triggered badly by Roe and "liberal" rulings that actually enshrined the right of women to have a sexual life and control their own life, so they made a pact with the Republicans to overturn it. In exchange for that, the Republicans had a free hand to cut taxes to rich people and ensure that poor people stayed poor.
I wish we saw more comparison between the US and Latin America in online discourse. There is an excess of references and analogies made to the emotionally salient topics of the US Civil War, the Civil rights period and Europe from 1918 to 1945 when discussing the current American situation and a dearth of comparison to Latin America. The frequent comparison of Trump to a dictator instead of to a populist president in the Latin American mold is an example.
Thomas will be remembered as SCOTUSs right wing sleeper agent. He's been irrelevant legislative furniture for so long that people nearly forgot about him. Then his time finally came. Now Roe is overturned. Griswold and Obergefel may well be next.
The only good that may come of this is a return to fighting issues out in the democratic sphere. Libs beloved Supreme Court won't save you now.
It becomes less hypocritical if you consider that they think that the fetus is another's body. It then becomes an issue of deciding upon someone else's life - which would be murder of course.
One thing I think they don't get, or care about, is the personal and societal consequences of having to keep unwanted pregnancies - mainly how much it makes life more difficult for everyone involved. And that with the difficulty, it comes degraded social relationships, unhappiness, substance abuse and crime.
Another thing I think they miss is that lots of people will have abortions regardless. Affluent people will have the safe abortions, and the less fortunate will have risky, potentially life-threatening, horrible abortions. Where there's a will, there's a way, so again, crime increases, and the desperate women's health will be in danger, becase the procedure has to go unchecked.
even if you consider the fetus at any stage to be a living human being entitled to certain rights, it is in another body of which the "person inside" should have no say over because its not their body
it would be like if you woke hooked up to another person who was relying on your body to survive. sure they're a person, but you never consented nor have to continue giving consent for them to use you in that manner
Yes, at this point, it resembles a trolley problem. Balancing what's more important, the new life itself, or the quality of the already established lives.
These new Trump Justices pretty clearly put the Bible's values above the Constitution's. Especially Amy Coney Barrett. It's gonna be a rough few life sentences for those of us who think Christianity is asinine.
I'm curious to ask some pro xhoice folks, respectfully, how they reconsile the fact that they believe abortion is murder, and also at the same time are seemingly pro military, war, and pro militarization of thr police.
I'm genuinely curious how those two world views can coexist in the same mind.
So a soldier who kills in the name of their country, even in a conflict that we can all agree was at best morally debatable, like the first Iraq war, or Vietnam. How is that different than a person getting an abortion to avoid a known bad outcome?
Because they are hypocrites (it's a fact, not a judgement). And it's interesting because hypocrites is one of the things that Jesus specifically calls out in the Gospel and seem to have much disdain for them. As a Catholic, I practice my faith with as much common sense as I can, to not judge, and forgive, as Jesus wanted us to.
As such, I am against the death penalty, against "preemptive" wars (of course defending your territory being invaded is justified), against 2nd amendment, and support women's right for abortion. To me, this is common sense that aligns with Jesus' message.
I cannot picture the loving Christ looking at a 13 year old child pregnant because of rape/incest and go "this new life is a miracle and it was my will". I reject this notion of "every conception was God's will and is sacred".
It's easy to want to paint with a wide brush, especially in times of crisis. One of my teachers was pro-life and anti-war. There's no need for such a conundrum.
Otherwise, frankly, they probably haven't thought about it deeply or support the military for cultural or economic factors.
It's not that I can't fathom the general case you describe.
A specific example:
A rape victim is obviously traumatized by being raped and does not want to carry her aggressors child to term. In that case the enemy is inside her.
It's the same in war. The single most important thing I learned from my grandfather and his time in WWII was that the individual combatants are not evil, or bad, they're following orders of bad, evil leaders. In war the poor foot soldier in front of your rifle is not the enemy, they are the same as you.
I'm not comparing enemies in war to babies. I'm pointing out the nuanced humanity of it all and highlighting synergies or disconnects in our thinking around these complex, human subjects.
I'm not saying that I hold these views myself, I think that these are straightforward generous readings that you can take of common conservative positions.
Killing in war is bad, even evil, but there is no other way. It's a lesser evil than the alternative. Killing Germans in WW2 was bad, but the alternative was worse.
Forcing a woman to carry a child to term is bad, even evil. It produces a great deal of suffering. The alternative is to kill an unborn child, which is worse. Therefore select the lesser of the two evils.
Again, I don't subscribe to these views, but it seems like a pretty coherent position to me.
On the feast day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Year of Our Lord 2022, a small but important victory in defense of the sanctity of human life and the dignity of every human person.
Much of the good fight remains to be fought!
Let us work diligently to greatly support and treasure – as individuals, local communities, and nations – every woman carrying an unborn child, and continue supporting them and their families as they raise those children to join us as mature brothers and sisters in human society.
The problem with the modern left is that they aggressively want to win every battle and don't even know what war they are fighting. As long as they can yell and scream and cancel and grieve, they don't seem to be too focused on having cohesive goals or policy.
And this is what that looks like.
The supreme court doesn't fit into their model because they can't cancel it on twitter. So they just moved on to other stuff they could cancel. Reap what you sow.
Most of the USA will still have more permissive abortion laws than Europe even after the removal of Roe v. Wade. [0] Most of the EU restricts abortion after 12 weeks - which is what the law at issue in this case does.
I find the whole matter insulting and demeaning toward women. They should, of course, have complete say over their body. They have control, except in the case of rape, over who they have sex with and whether or not they want to use contraceptives. Just like every person, they should be responsible and accoutable for their actions.
the supreme court did not ban abortion. It removed abortion as a legal right. It means people cannot use the power of the federal government to overrule their own state legislature on the topic of abortion.
If you understand how the US Government works, then you understand that the Supreme Court cannot establish ANYTHING by removing laws. (ie overturning previous decisions).
What the Supreme court did was allow for the POSSIBILITY of a fully Catholic US State to practice Catholic religion with respect to abortion. It ALSO allows a fully Jewish state to practice Jewish religion however they want with respect to abortion.
They actual problem caused by overturning Roe v Wade is that some states who's laws are already catholic will regain the power to stop abortions in their state. That's it. California, New York, etc, are absolutely and completely unaffected by this decision, for example.
> If you understand how the US Government works, then you understand that the Supreme Court cannot establish ANYTHING by removing laws. (ie overturning previous decisions).
This was actually part of the issue:
> After cataloging a wealth of other information having no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution, the opinion concluded with a numbered set of rules much like those that might be found in a statute enacted by a legislature.
For way too long the entire political argument in the US on way too many things has been punted to the Supremes to let the elected officials get out of any responsibility whatsoever.
well, voting majority - not exactly every citizen.
The US is an agreement. It is more comparable to the EU than it is Spain, or France, etc. Each state is meant to have autonomy relatively similar to a country, but are united together for purposes of national defense and human rights. that was the initial premise. it's expanded from there, but the constitution was a compromise.. states did not want to join the union just to transfer power from a king to a federal government.
The heart of the Republican platform is upholding that compromise. The heart of the Democratic platform is that was then, this is now, we are a single country and need to centralize more power.
What a travesty! What these pro life nuts don't understand is that if I can't have sex without consequences, my Friday nights will be ruined! A woman should have the right to choose whether or not to sleep with whoever and whenever! Support the right to choose!
I remember reading an article back in 2015-16 where the author argued that Trump's election was exactly about Ros vs Wade. Specifically they explained that a number of SCOTUS judges were expected to be appointed during the term. Once enough conservative judges were in place, one of the conservative States was going to pass a law with the express goal that it be challenged in front of the SCOTUS,so that they could overturn Roe vs Wade.
That is precisely what happened. I wish I had kept that article, given how impressively prescient it was. Sadly I don't even know where to start looking.
There is a lot that blows my mind with this. The level of planning involved, and the willingness by the American right to set the country on fire to be able to control women's right is just amazing.
It's a shame the abortion debate is overtaken by radicals on both sides when the majority of Americans would prefer laws similar to most European nations: legal abortion within the first trimester.
Congress can make new laws or constitutional amendments, so SCOTUS is not all we're discussing here. Nor did SCOTUS take away the rights of states to allow abortion. There is no "one side" having their say on this matter.
A world leaded by creationism, neo-imperialism and capitalism now facing climate & pollution induced mass extinction. What a beautiful time to be alive.
I think the real issue is that states often make horrible health decisions for individuals. People's right to make decisions for themselves needs to be acknowledged and protected.
tl/dr: my friend is forced by the State of Arizona to take prescription medications that do not help with her genetic condition of requiring methylated forms of Vitamin B-9 (she is harmed by foods with the shelf-stable food fortification folic acid). Her tendency to self-treat malnutrition-caused depression with substances (alcohol, mainly) is worsened by the psychiatric drugs forced on her. The FDA black box warning on one of them is for 'compulsive behavior'. Last January she was 'stabilized' with the medication that the Soviets used to re-educate their dissidents, when all she really needs is sobriety and an adequate diet.
On May 8 2022 she escaped from her guardian's custody, choosing to live on the street instead of a care home. After my petition appeared on the SCOTUS docket I agreed to help her. She got a housekeeping job at that motel. Her manager had no idea her forced treatment with anti-psychotic medications had lapsed.
While my petition is fundamentally about whether the States may perpetrate fraud on the United States Court, the core issue I presented is about medical freedom. From Page 21 [1]:
> While it may not be this court’s place to tell doctors
that they don’t always know what they’re doing, it is
the requirement of Constitutional governance that
doctors be required to respect bodily autonomy. If a
citizen of the United States does not consent to being
injected with the Soviets’ preferred medication for
dissident re-education, doctors should not able to use
the courts to force this, or any other drug, approved
or experimental, on any person.
> The principle of health freedom requires that people
be allowed to make decisions for themselves, without
coercion from others. If a person doesn’t want to
have their brain electrocuted by their doctor, they
shouldn’t be forced to endure this treatment. If a
person is concerned they’ll have an adverse reaction
to a medication or condition that the experts think is
good for everyone, there can be no coercion against
people making decisions for themselves, no matter
their perceived competency
I'm now trying to whip up outrage on the internet about Arizona's use of the Soviet techniques of torture on our most vulnerable. But maybe Medicine is a sacred cow? How do I convince people that doctors and politicians should not be able to make medical decisions for anyone?
Because its a huge balancing act, if 25% of population (no matter political beliefs) views the government as illegitimate it leads to chaos.
Our current technological civilization is EXTREMELY fragile.
5 attackers in 2014 took down a CA power grid and caused millions in damages.
They were never caught.
I’m surprised there’s been no call for a general strike. I think we would have seen one had Trump successfully illegally seized power and when the draft opinion leaked I was expecting rumblings of the idea of a general strike to start.
And the Senate. But another question I don't see answered much is, why are rural blocs so different in their moral stance from urban ones, and what can we learn from it?
Nothing. There is no equivalency, there is nothing to learn from it. Rural block voters can go about not getting same-sex marriages and not getting abortions and it won't impact anyone else, just like other people having same sex marriages and getting abortions doesn't impact them, aside from their desire to control how other people live their lives.
edit: My point - since it seems I was not clear - is "rural" people that object to the activities that Roe, Lawrence, Olbergefell, and Griswold allowed can individually decide to not do those things. They should not be able to compel other people to make the same decisions. Abortion was correctly determined to be a federal right. So are same-sex marriage, contraceptives access, and the choice to have oral or anal sex (that's literally what Thomas explicitly talks about wanting to overturn, the right to engage in "sodomy" as determined in Lawrence vs Texas). People that don't like these things should NOT DO THEM and leave the rest of us the hell alone.
If I were to take their words at face value, this group considers abortion to be murder. Because I don’t expect an argument of the form “if you don’t like murder, don’t do it” to have a good outcome, I would instead focus on the fact that in all other regards bodily autonomy is so important that we are not obligated to perform even safe procedures such as donating blood in order to save the lives of others, and indeed this respect for bodily autonomy (in the USA) also extends to organ donation after death being opt-in rather than opt-out.
Not to be harsh, but who cares what they think? Other major religions differ, and flat out contradict these viewpoints. It's a question of someone's religious doctrine, not federal law. We don't favor a particular religious viewpoints in the US - that is explicitly in the Constitution.
This group happens to have enough power that saying "who cares what they think" leads to them doing exactly what you don't want them to do. The only way I know to reduce that power while retaining your system of government is to make an argument which actually convinces them, which requires you to care what they think, both in order to understand their motivations well enough to actually construct an argument with this effect, and as an indicator of how much progress you're making with it.
They believe they should dictate the behavior of other people, that's fundamentally asymmetrical to the counterpoint. The "other side" is not advocating compulsory abortions, they are advocating individual freedom to make a deeply personal decision. The people that want to ban abortion for all people are taking away rights from people they disagree with. Who cares what they think, indeed.
If I want to disband and illegalize the Southern Baptist Convention because I sincere believe they are heretics, who cares about my sincerely held beliefs about what others should do? I should should just not go to a Southern Baptist church.
Their response would be that it isn’t that simple. That baker in Colorado (I think it was Colorado?) who refused to make a cake for a gay wedding was sued. Republicans see this and say that it isn’t as simple as not participating in an action since you will still be forced to do things against your conscience.
"In a 7–2 decision, the Court ruled on narrow grounds that the Commission did not employ religious neutrality, violating Masterpiece owner Jack Phillips's rights to free exercise, and reversed the Commission's decision. The Court did not rule on the broader intersection of anti-discrimination laws, free exercise of religion, and freedom of speech, due to the complications of the Commission's lack of religious neutrality."
What about their minor children? What about their minor children who have been raped (possibly by their parents or relatives)? Sadly, these are not theoretical concerns
> Nothing. There is no equivalency. Rural block voters can go about not getting same-sex marriages and not getting abortions and it won't impact anyone else, just like other people having same sex marriages and getting abortions doesn't impact them, aside from their desire to control how other people live their lives.
That's libertarian BS that misunderstands moral beliefs about collective "how society should be" as individualist "what actions I take." It's also usually hypocritical, as I'm guessing you wouldn't be fine with rural county clerks going about not registering same-sex marriages, since it "doesn't impact you."
> That's libertarian BS that misunderstands moral beliefs about collective "how society should be" as individualist "what actions I take."
This is you dictating how I behave - which I find a much larger pile of BS, personally.
> It's also usually hypocritical, as I'm guessing you wouldn't be fine with rural county clerks going about not registering same-sex marriages, since it "doesn't impact you."
This is not fucking hypocritical - once is a personal moral belief, that a person is welcome to either choose or not (abortion). The other is a clearly defined job you have been hired to do.
It is not hypocritical to insist that you do the job you are being paid to do - even if you disagree with parts of it. If you disagree so strongly that you feel you cannot do the job - Great. Stop fucking doing it.
> This is you dictating how I behave - which I find a much larger pile of BS, personally.
Societies dictate how their members behave in significant ways according to moral beliefs. It's always been that way and it always will be. The libertarian solution is BS in this context, because it appeals to libertarian morals that aren't actually held by the people who are being complained about.
> Societies dictate how their members behave in significant ways according to moral beliefs.
Of course they do - what we're arguing about is how we divide the pie. How much of your time and actions do you owe to society for the privilege of being a member.
I thought, as an American, it was fairly clear that we had decided that I owe you no part of the pie regarding my religion (1st) nor do I owe you any right to unreasonably search my body or possessions (4th).
I actually think we literally wrote those things in the MOST BASIC FUCKING CONTRACT we have that spells out how we expect our society members to behave. We call it the constitution.
Additionally I think that vast majority of the members of this society have decided that not only should we be secure in our right against unreasonable searches of body/home/possessions/mind stemming from religious bullshit, we should also be secure in our right to have confidential conversations with the people we literally trust our lives to: Doctors, Lawyers, Priests.
So when you say that my libertarian solution is BS - I'm a tad confused, where exactly did I get this wrong?
What part of this is not religious bullshit dictating how I behave, in a private setting where we have decided you don't get a fucking say? The only people who get a say are the woman who is dealing with the situation, her doctor, and the tiny pile of cells inside her. Turns out the tiny pile of cells makes a really shite debater, and it's only alive because it's sucking energy out of the lady.
So if, for example - that tiny pile of cells is killing the lady, or is going to die inside the lady either way, or is going to be born and then die shortly after, or fuck it... even if the lady just doesn't feel like letting it stay inside her anymore. I think that's a decision she can make for herself. With her doctors help. And without you nosing in like a fucking asshole.
I'm pretty sure that's the expectation for almost every other case of this. Why is this one different? Where did I misread the contract?
I moved from an urban are to a rural one. I now constantly feel like the rules of the county (permiting and all that) are being decided by people who have no clue whatsoever what it's like to live where I do. On top of this, you get people who are into doing things like redrawing the districts so that each one has an equal representation based on superficial characteristics like skin color while ignoring more pressing things like geography concerning wildfires and infrastructure. It's definitely a "clueless city folk trying to legislate things they don't understand" vibe.
That said, my moral/political stances haven't changed much, in fact I'm becoming more radical as time goes on. Who knows if it's because of living here or if it would have happened in the city anyway. Probably a mix.
Valid concern. You don't like being told what to do with your body/property by someone else that doesn't understand those concerns, and isn't impacted by their own decisions. It seems like you would have a lot of empathy for all the women who are in the same position today.
Yes, I do have a lot of empathy for them. I think the original Roe vs Wade decision was probably the best moral and legal compromise we could have made, and the fact that people take issue with it says more about their twisted need to control or shame others than their supposed moral fortitude. This is a dark day for a lot of people and an upsetting signal for the direction the country is moving. I'm not thrilled about it.
A large part of the rural working class don’t have the right to vote, because they are migrant workers. And even if they do have the right to vote, they have don’t have any real chance of electing someone that represents their interests. Political candidates tend towards the owning class and tend to cater to the owning class.
Then when you don’t have a chance to vote for someone that represents your interests, your second best chance is voting for someone that matches your ideology. And ideology can be easily persuaded. The democratic party’s ideology obviously matches the ideology of the business class (or the coastal elite if you will), so what you are left with is the republican party. And ideology is easily persuaded so you start believing in the conservative talking points they use to pursue your vote.
speaking quickly with broad strokes that really have a lot more underlying nuance than im implying:
there is a greater sharing of ideas in urban locations. more progression happens. they fail to spread the progression to rural locations.
It is a dynamic and evolving ecosystem and we are failing to educate and / or motivate rural locations to care about these things properly.
Instead urban culture usually acts superior, makes demands, and assume what they believe should be obvious and by not coming to the same conclusions immediately during a confrontation that means rural people are evil.
Rural people double down on the beliefs because at the end of the day nothing really matters and they might as well stick to something that gives them a sense of belonging since they very obviously do not belong with urban culture.
Just because people don't share your worldview doesn't mean they're uneducated or that education is the way to change their minds.
"...at the end of the day nothing really matters..." is the exact kind of worldview that rural people would prefer stay in the cities. If by "educating" me, you want to make me into a solipsistic nihilist, you can keep your education to yourself.
The only education in this thread that I would like to distill onto the rural populations is that Freedom of Choice does not take away your ability to have babies on whatever terms you want, nor does it remove your ability form a community with like minded people where abortions are frowned upon and everyone agrees not to get them and anyone who does is exiled from the community.
It does however mean someone has the right to choose whether or not they want to be a part of your community, and takes away your ability to use state and federal resources to enforce your choice as being more important than someone else's choice.
One, your choices also affect the people around you. Two, before the overturn, state and federal resources have been used to enforce and support those who choose to abort their babies, which is just the mirror of what you said, which negates your argument from that point. Three, all that happened is that now it becomes a state issue rather than a federal issue. Don't like your state? Move. Need an abortion but can't in your state? Get a flight or hop in a car.
In my initial post I was obviously aware that I was not going to paint a perfect picture of my opinion in this text forum. but sure, ill bite.
One - no shit, pro-choice has considerably less consequences on the people around you than pro life does.
Two - Nothing is invalidated, I made a sound argument that you are free to disagree with using your own sound argument. Using resources to support someones choice is not the same as using resources to take away someones choice. Abortion can be legal, and your state can still control to what extent resources will be used to support it.
Three - Yes I understand. I directed my previous message at rural people. the ones who decide on the laws. However, you advocate for people to go get an abortion in another state. that is pro-choice in spirit, isnt it? Why do you care if they cross a state border to get an abortion? If you are pro-choice, dont you want your state law to reflect that?
>Need an abortion but can't in your state? Get a flight or hop in a car.
except for the fact that "your" state can put you in jail for committing a crime if you do this.
I agree though that people should try to leave the state (entirely) if it has unagreeable laws and the majority in that state wants to preserve them. I also think the prolifers in my state should stop standing outside planned parenthood and move to a different state also. It's pretty dumb that people try to be a part of their community and improve it rather than move somewhere that already agrees with them, right?
That rural voters live different lives than urban voters? There isn't much commonality between them, other than almost everyone agrees they want the government to keep its nose out of their business.
The urban vs. rural thing is so extreme I really feel like more effort needs to be put into understanding it. There really are no red states or blue states. There are states with more urbanized populations that tilt blue and states with more rural populations that tilt red. There are very few exceptions.
And those few exceptions are in the context of socialists or socialist lites who successfully appealed to agrarian voters over economic issues. Social issues are never a winning play for dems with rural voters
I grew up in rural Utah with plenty of religious conservatives. I spent 3 hours a week in church with them.
Now I live in SLC.
I've gotten to know a lot of different people and their perspectives.
Some are obsessively political, and no doubt will be celebrating this decision. They will spend 3 hours congratulating each other for it the day after tomorrow.
Others are quietly moderate. They believe in many of the same Christian values, but don't see it as government's place to enforce them.
A few are more loudly moderate. They will take the time to present a different perspective and actually argue for it.
The combination of these three creates a social dynamic that supports anti-abortion legislation and other conservative political goals. Despite it not being the desire of every person in the community, that is what the community at large will support politically. Those who disagree don't have the means or support to be represented.
Meanwhile, in the city, I walk around the corner to the trax station, and see a handful of homeless people going about their lives. They ask for help finding their way to court or therapy. They ask for change because they can't get it on their own.
What I have learned is that rural conservative communities are self serving. Conservative ideas are promoted, represented, congratulated, etc. Critical perspectives are either silently held, or spoken to deaf ears.
The fallout of conservatism can't make a home there, and must instead walk away to the city where she can beg for begrudgingly given change.
I'm sure there are plenty of conservatives who would like to argue for this decision, but aren't prepared to make that argument, because it's not about logic to them: it's about belief.
Maybe that's because the conservative with the compelling argument feels unwelcome. Or maybe it's because the compelling argument doesn't exist.
Making a less compelling argument under the guise of "devil's advocate" is more comfortable, because when you are writing a flawed argument you don't have to fix the flaws: you can let them sit there.
And the Supreme Court. For each Supreme Court justice, have a look at the portion of voters who voted for the president who appointed them and the senators who confirmed them.
Because the Senate represents the state, not the population of the state. That is why California has more representatives. Every state is equal in the Senate. This is basic civics.
Urban populations tend to include more low-income earners, who are more likely to favor receiving more assistance from their government, as such is likely to increase their quality of life. Rural blocks tend to earn enough to live independently and provide for themselves, so their QOL is likely to increase more with taxes being lowered rather than assistance programs they'd be means-tested against (or at least presume they would be).
Red States (made of rural blocks) collect FAR more federal subsidies per capita than blue states. Practically every blue state contributes positively to the federal budget while practically every red state siphons federal funds, ie. "welfare."
What does looking at people on the sidewalk have to do with your point? Especially in a major city where there's a massive amount of different jobs with all kinds of different hours and days worked.
If you want to stereotype you can make the exact argument about a rural trailer park.
Curious if you have any evidence for that claim. Looking at https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/article/?a=107 (Figure 1) suggests that rural vs urban unemployment rates have historically been quite similar; if anything, unemployment rates in rural areas were slightly higher than in urban areas. That changed during COVID but that appears to be a historical anomaly.
But there tend to be fewer rural poor per-capita compared to rural middle/upper class per-capita, which is why election maps tend to show blocks of blue in metro areas with red elsewhere.
Income and voting patterns are much less correlated than other factors. Income differences do not explain the rural-urban divide. The highest income counties in the US are... not red.
Reading the various discussions on HN, it is obvious that HN skews male.
The vast majority of threads are either regarding the interpretation of legal frameworks and their implications, or asserting a-priori values on start of life and following the rational implications thereof.
No-where do I see any discussions, or even caring about, how this affects women directly: the ability to govern their own bodies, their reproductive (and civil) rights. Or just the fact that they are de-jure 2nd-class citizens.
It skews male and generally consists of a very well paid group of people that have never had to struggle economically. This is the wrong place to find lots of empathy toward disempowered groups of people.
I have serious doubts how well someone is paid has anything to do with their ability to feel empathy. I do think making broad, negative generalizations is a sign of lack of empathy however.
Assume those studies are correct (I don't believe that conclusion, personally). It displays a certain lack of empathy to interact with people using assumptions about their presumed sociological groups. This may be the very definition of lacking empathy- abstracting people into groups might make sense in studies, but when those preconceptions bleed into condemning statements, it's just prejudice.
It's easy to have empathy for people like you or that you agree with, but the real test is having empathy for those who aren't / you don't.
Curious what you imply by readers being Indian Immigrant. Ironically, the abortion rights in India now are far more favorable for women than the US even though India is very religious and economically backward. Indian society has come to the conclusion that unwanted pregnancies burden women disproportionately and they should have the right to decide.
> Ironically, the abortion rights in India now are far more favorable for women than the US even though India is very religious and economically backward. Indian society has come to the conclusion that unwanted pregnancies burden women disproportionately and they should have the right to decide.
I'm neither Indian nor American, but just my impressions as an outside observer of both countries: in the US, the liberal-conservative divide on social issues and religion really latched on to the topic of abortion, in a way in which it did in few other countries (even most other countries with a traditionally Christian majority). The same divide absolutely exists in India, but it has tended to focus on other political issues instead – relations with religious minorities (especially Hindu-Muslim relations), the eating of beef, religious nationalism (Hindutva) vs secularism, citizenship and immigration (see the Citizenship Amendment Act controversy). Conservative Hindus and conservative Christians actually have rather similar views on the morality of abortion – the difference is not so much in the underlying ethics, rather what to prioritise in translating one's ethical views into public policy.
I think, it may be less that Indian society has "come to the conclusion" – more simply that religious conservatives have let the secular liberals have their way on that particular issue, because they've got other issues they'd rather spend their political capital on. Another big difference, is that in India criminal law is a federal not state responsibility, so the issue ends up being addressed once at the national level, instead of separately in each state in the US (especially in this new constitutional situation, but that was already happening to a lesser extent under the previous one.)
At first I felt personally attacked. But there is some truth to what you're saying. There is deeply rooted pragmatism among Indian immigrants, no denying that.
The reductionism is a necessary part of online forum based discourse. No one has the time to engage in hours long holistic discussions on a topic. A comment can at most aspire to capture 1 point well, and reductionism is the act of identifying the one act that has a disproportionate importance within the discussion.
Speaking abstractly about an unquantifiable rights allows you to pat your own back, but such discussions turn into ingroup signaling and adhominems instead of leading to productive discussion.
Most Indians come from a scarcity economy where bad decisions are catastrophic. This means that you must have skin in the game when championing an idea, because failure means starvation.(allow me some hyperbole). The society doesn't suffer delusion for too long.
Abortion rights are good. Yes, I believe that too. Republicans are actively interfering with women's control over their own bodies and that bad. Yes, I agree there too. Throw in specific anecdotes to appear nuanced.
Now what ? You still need to address the elephant in the room. Indians might point to it a little 'austistically', but it is an elephant, in your room. The nuance can wait.
See, this is my point. The topic is fundamentally nuanced and heavily connected to tradition and religion. You can't just ram through this with reason alone.
I don't want to personally attack anyone but I know a number of first generation Indian immigrants. They're great people but all of them seem to reject the conservative view of American politics (the one held overwhelmingly by the people who lived here before) as "backwards." It might be because of their experiences in India, I don't know. It's really frustrating though to have people come into your country and try to change things like that while calling you stupid for protesting it. Tradition often exists for a reason and it can take a lot of work and empathy to unwind that. If you're going to come into a new country and participate in their politics you should work hard to make sure you understand their tradition (and I recognize that's hard, I don't blame immigrants for not doing since I would probably do the same, but it's really frustrating to see it over and over again and that's why I call it out here occasionally.)
EDIT: I can back up my personal experience with statistics [1] Although interestingly enough it says that later descendants tend to be even more left leaning.
Strange, that hasn't been my experience at all. All the first generation Indian immigrants I know tend to be center-right, with a few who are libertarian in their thinking. My parents were registered Democrats but I would consider my father center-right still, he voted for Reagan as he had suffered under stagflation.
The pro life position is really simple:
1. Baby murder is wrong
2. Abortion is murdering a baby
3. Therefore abortion is wrong
That’s it. There is no requirement to meet some perceived bar of empathy beyond that for this to be a good faith argument.
“I bet you think shooting innocent people in the head is wrong, but yet you don’t volunteer at the soup kitchen every weekend, so do you ACTUALLY care about innocent people or are you just trying to control others?” Do you see how that’s a ridiculous non-sequitur? That’s the argument you just made against pro life people.
It's not unreasonable to ascertain people's positions by their actions.
"pro-life" really isn't as simple as you're making it sound. Only something like 15-18% of Americans support a total ban on abortion with no exceptions. So if we're limiting "pro-life" to only that position, then it's by definition a pretty extreme position, in fact most people would call it ridiculous: it's so extreme that it's very easy to ridicule.
If we widen a little to allow exceptions, well is that really "pro-life" anymore? Then you get into situations where you have to say, "well I think it's a life, therefore ending that life is killing, but the pregnant person will die if forced to carry the fetus to term, so... I guess killing is OK?". It's pretty weird.
Further, if the goal of pro-life Americans is to lower the number of abortions, here are policies we know work:
- sex education
- access to contraception
- support for parents and children (financial, educational, medical/mental health)
Oddly very very few pro-life Americans support any of this, which forces us to question their motives.
You polemically insisting that a fertilized egg is a baby is the basis of your reductionist “ view outlined above. Blatant antidemocratic power grabs and attempts to replace democracy with theocracy rank rather low on my moral scale.
This Supreme Court has also just thrown out Miranda rights out the window and stomped on New York’s attempt to limit concealed weapon carries.
States rights my foot!
It’s unfair that Obama couldn’t even get Merrick Garland appointed with two terms in office, but Trump GOT THREE JUSTICES JAMMED THROUGH IN ONE TERM!
Unprecedented and dangerous.
They all lied to congress about their intentions during confirmation too.
Immoral!
You will surely reap the whirlwind from what you sowed
There's a difference between not volunteering at the soup kitchen every weekend even when you don't like innocent people getting shot in the head, and actively fighting to stop staving people from getting food when you say you don't like innocent people getting shot in the head.
You can have a deep respect for innocent life and not be willing or able to spend weekends in a soup kitchen. You can't have a deep respect for innocent life while working to keep innocent lives from being able to survive.
"Baby murder is wrong" unless it's murder by exposure because the child was homeless, "screw the homeless!" the pro-life say or by starvation because screw the hungry! or by cancer, because screw the sick if they can't afford obscene medical costs! Pro-life people generally, don't care at all about the life of babies. They don't even care about murder. If baby food companies are killing kids by poisoning them with heavy metals they'll still decry any government regulations that would prevent that or hold baby food companies accountable. The Free Market can murder babies all day long. School shootings? No, we can't have sensible gun control laws proven to work in basically every developed nation around the globe! The pro-life say we just have live with those murders, nothing can be done! So tragic!
They want to claim the moral high ground but they are buried deep under their own filth.
Just for the non-US persons reading along, below are a few US Federal government programs for poor people. Some states (most?) have additional programs as well for some things, or supplement federal programs.
- WIC (https://www.fns.usda.gov/wic)
>The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides federal grants to states for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age 5 who are found to be at nutritional risk. WIC serves about half of all infants born in the United States.
- Food Stamps (SNAP - https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program)
- Medicaid (Health care for poor people) https://www.medicaid.gov/
- Section 8 subsidized housing (https://www.benefits.gov/benefit/710)
All those programs have a reputation for being wholly inadequate. Better to let a woman abort a baby she's not prepared for for than tell her "But you will qualify for aid programs!"
Are you of the belief that the conservatives who support overturning Roe also support WIC, SNAP, Medicaid, and Section 8 housing? Because the traditional conservative viewpoint is that these programs should be completely eliminated.
I believe this is what OP is referring to - the same people who supposedly believe in the sanctity of human life are also the first to cut any programs that support it. So it's difficult to take their "pro-life" arguments in good faith.
> That’s it. There is no requirement to meet some perceived bar of empathy beyond that for this to be a good faith argument.
You seem to be saying that because the argument is simple, it's in good faith, but this is not how good faith arguments work, nor is it aligned with the common understanding of "good faith".
Pregnancy is not simple. The circumstances surrounding conception are often not simple. The post-birth reality for many kids is anything but simple. Our medical/scientific understanding of the development of a fetus is anything but simple.
To simply ignore the 2nd and 3rd order effects that result from the "simple" position of a pro life person is to willfully ignore the complexity of this issue. This willful ignorance by definition renders the argument unqualified to be considered good faith.
The simplicity of an argument is not an excuse for ignoring the complexity of the issue. In general, a "good faith" argument is built from a foundation of common understanding between all involved parties. A good faith argument acknowledges complexities and offers its own solutions. A good faith argument isn't made by covering one's ears and pretending those complexities don't exist.
To claim that "X argument is good faith because it's simple" is in itself a bad faith argument, or at best, uninformed about what good faith is generally expected to mean in discourse.
I'm not one of the "pro-life folk" (I think it's more a question of where the lines should be drawn), but I'm not seeing a lot of empathy here on this site for the fetus, which if left alone (barring medical problems) will one day become a fully-fledged person with all the rights we now currently possess.
Exactly when it stops being a bundle of cells that can be removed without thought or empathy and becomes a "baby about to be born" where it should not be treated so negligently is in my mind the real question here. And don't ask me to tell you where that line is, because I have no idea.
I just hate that there is no room for nuance on this topic, no matter which "side" you talk to.
> Exactly when it stops being a bundle of cells that can be removed without thought or empathy and becomes a "baby about to be born" where it should not be treated so negligently is in my mind the real question here.
I avoid that issue entirely by leaving it as a matter of viability. As I've said elsewhere: As long as the mother's body is needed to sustain the life of the child, that life is subject to her whims. Her house. Her rules. The moment it can be removed and sustained without her, she should no longer have the right to abort it, only to surrender it.
It doesn't matter if it's a baby or just a clump of cells, if it's literally living in and feeding off of another living person that person should have a right to decide to continue or to stop allowing that. The child's right to exist against the wishes of its mother start as soon as it can do so without her.
"We're pro-life." It's like, well what does that make me? You know what I mean? You're so pro-life! You're so pro-life, do me a fucking favor. Don't block med clinics, okay? Lock arms, and block cemeteries. Let's see how fucking committed you are to this premise. "She can't come in." "She's ninety-six, she was hit by a bus!" "There's options!" "What, do we got to have her stuffed? What are you talking about, she's dead!" "We're pro-life, get her out of that casket! Get her out! She's not going, we're pro-life people. There'll be no death on this planet."
"Boy, I've never seen an issue so divisive. You ever see it, it's like a civil war, isn't it? Even amongst my friends, who are all very intelligent! They are totally divided on abortion! It's unbelievable! Some of my friends, for instance, think these pro-life people are annoying idiots. Other of my friends think these pro-life people are evil fucks. How are we going to come to a consensus? You ought to hear the arguments around my house; "they're annoying, they're idiots, they're evil, they're fucks!" Brothers, sisters, come together! Can't we once just join hands and think of them as evil annoying idiot fucks?" -- Bill Hicks, 1993
You can disagree for sure and I respect that (assuming you are woman and it is your decision what to do). But when men (predominantly) order women to prison for abortion - fuck those men. There is no need to demonize, they are already there.
> There is no valid pro-life position. Its all anti-women, anti-human rights, anti-humanity.
That's an extremely strong statement. It's the kind of thing someone firmly ensconced in a bubble would say. Is what you say true, or do you just lack the imagination or empathy to think of one?
> That's an extremely strong statement. It's the kind of thing someone firmly ensconced in a bubble would say. Is what you say true, or do you just lack the imagination or empathy to think of one?
All this says is: "What you are saying could or could not be true."
Why write so much to say so little?
If you think they're "ensconced in a bubble", say it. If you think they "lack ... imagination" or empathy", then say it.
Don't do this motte and bailey stuff of: "have you considered that you sounds like someone who's wrong?"
Again, I'm not very bright. I don't understand what this:
>That's an extremely strong statement. It's the kind of thing someone firmly ensconced in a bubble would say. Is what you say true, or do you just lack the imagination or empathy to think of one?
was trying to do, and this comment hasn't really made it any clearer. Can you explain it explicitly?
> It's the kind of thing someone firmly ensconced in a bubble would say.
You would have to be "firmly ensconced in a bubble" to think you have the right to force a women to carry their rapists baby. Or to even think you have the right to tell a women what to do with her body in the first place.
Its true. The only lack of empathy is by those that wish to tell a women what they can do with their body because they hate women.
Its really simple. Want an abortion? Cool. Don't want an abortion? Cool. Anything else is none of your business!
> Its true. The only lack of empathy is by those that wish to tell a women what they can do with their body because they hate women. Its really simple. Want an abortion? Cool. Don't want an abortion? Cool. Anything else is none of your business!
You know, there are a lot of pro-life women. Do you think they have those beliefs because they hate themselves? Abortion is a complicated issue, it's only "really simple" if you ignore a bunch of stuff and/or fill your head with slogans.
You'd be on firmer ground if you said something along the lines of "there is no valid pro-life position [for me]."
I stand by that there is no position that is acceptable to anyone accept their own body. You don't get to decide what other people do.
Yes I do think they hate themselves, or at least hate their sex, their world or their (nonexistent) God. It is intrinsic to the rights of women to do what they want to do with their own body. I accept that a anti-abortion woman does not want to have an abortion herself. I accept that a pro-abortion woman does want an abortion.
Its a complicated issue only to the parties involved. Lets not make it more complicated by taking away autonomy.
> It is intrinsic to the rights of women to do what they want to do with their own body
I think there is a deep clash of worldviews here. Some people view individual autonomy, and especially bodily autonomy, as among the most cherished and sacred of values – an absolute which should never be compromised. Other people, while they don't view individual autonomy as worthless, they don't put it as high in their hierarchy of values, so they are open to the idea that sometimes it has to give way to other values, and can rightfully be limited if necessary to protect something else of great importance. There are both women and men on both sides of this worldview divide. And there is something to be said for trying to understand the viewpoint of people with very different values from your own – a message both sides of that divide would do well to heed.
No. Fuck that. There is not 'two viewpoints'. There is:
* Oppress women
* Don't oppress women
This is the paradox of tolerance. You cannot negotiate with a monster who wants to force their views on people, especially those around forced birthing, you know, against the Helsinki Agreement on Human Right among others. There is no benevolent religion or philosophy that requires forcing a person to do something with their body.
I don't have pro or anti views. I just have a single view that you can do whatever you fucking like with your own body, and nobody can tell you that you can or cant. Anything else is fucking monstrous and will not be tolerated.
According to Pew Research figures from March this year, [0] only 21% of American women believe that abortion should be legal in all cases, no exceptions – by contrast, 77% of American women support some degree of abortion restrictions, although the most widespread position (42%) is support for limited restrictions such that abortion would still be legal in the majority of cases; only 9% of American women support an absolute ban on abortion (compared to 8% of American men).
So, is your position that 77% of American women – including the 42% who support limited abortion restrictions – "hate themselves, or at least hate their sex"? Maybe, rather than they hating themselves, it is you who hate them?
Fighting against other people seeking medical procedures is a hateful position. Yes, if you are opposed to another person doing something with their body, you are filled with hate.
Basically you are asking for a tyranny of a majority. It just doesn't matter what you, 1% or 40% or 99% of people believe -- they are free to believe and do whatever they want with their own bodies. They cannot dictate beliefs and behaviors for others. Its just a simple thing. Autonomy.
I think religion has poisoned many minds. Any belief structure that requires forcing a viewpoint onto others is unacceptable.
I do believe all access all the time to whomever wants it, yes.
There only one view that matters: A women has the right to decide what happens to her body. Anything else has no place on this planet.
You hate the vast majority of women-77% of American women, likely similar percentages in many other countries-if someone hates the vast majority of women, how is that not a form of misogyny?
I don't hate anyone. I think they are self-defeating and delusional, but I don't hate.
Hate is wanting everyone else in the world to believe your delusions, and using the full force of the State to ensure compliance.
There is only one hateful position -- that you have the right to force your beliefs on others bodies. I do not share this position.
You smear the vast majority of women as "self-haters", and want to deny them the autonomy to choose moral and political views which are different from those which you personally approve. If anyone is a "hater" here, I think it is you, not them.
You do not understand my position at all. I am denying nothing to anyone. Everyone has the autonomy to choose their own moral and political views, including those which I do not personally approve.
What is not granted is the ability to force another to take on those views. I am not forcing you have have a particular belief structure, but you are making an argument that because a group of people have some pretty crazy ideas we all must be beholden to it. When you want to force an ideology -- and my position is not an ideology, it is an anti-ideology at best.
I posit that forcing women to give birth to babies against their consent is a grave human rights violation and cannot be tolerated in a modern civilized society. It is the same logic of the paradox of tolerance that we cannot permit those to push a their hateful agenda against others, for they will push their ignorance and hate so loud that rights vanish quickly.
> but you are making an argument that because a group of people have some pretty crazy ideas we all must be beholden to it. When you want to force an ideology
77% of American women support some degree of abortion restrictions – although a majority of them only support limited restrictions. What do you mean to say that all those women have "pretty crazy ideas"? How are they "forcing" an ideology on anyone by acting politically in accordance with their own beliefs–any more than anyone else doing the same thing is doing?
I'd like you to lay out, very specifically, why what is essentially an extension or growth has more rights than a fully formed and independently living human
I think it’s totally fair to respond to this in multiple ways. Legal and economic repercussions are important discussions. So is the practical impact to women. There is no reason to belittle people for considering various aspects of this ruling.
The impact on women, the human impact, should come before everything else
But of course the slave owning framers of the constitution didn't care about that, considering the whole slave thing, so the federalist society judges that have been placed on the supreme court won't either
I would argue that legal consistency should be the priority.
The legal argument is simple:
- The Constitution enumerates federal powers.
- Abortion is not enumerated federally (Article 1 Section 8)
- 10th Ammendment states that anything not explicitly enumerated to the federal gov or explicitly denied to the States is the legal territory of the States
This reversal doesn't ban abortion across the US. It returns the decision to the states, where it should be legally.
If we want a federal solution, we need an ammendment. This is exactly the same as how prohibition required an ammendment to ban alcohol.
Emotions, morals, etc., while important for driving the end result, still must comply with the legal system.
> This is exactly the same as how prohibition required an ammendment [sic] to ban alcohol.
Can't wait for SCOTUS to apply the same logic to drug prohibition, which is also not at all an enumerated federal power (assuming the same logic that alcohol regulation isn't one either).
Agreed! I just finished writing a comment to someone else specifically stating that Schedule 1 drugs should be handed the same result as R v. W just got!
Though the one point I will make is that the federal government is enumerated the power to regulate interstate commerce, so while they can't ban the substances, they could make it illegal to transport them over state lines. Such is the reason you still can't take mj from one legal state to the next.
You're right they do, but the whole thing has been a giant way to shit on the fourth amendment and attack people that those in power don't like.
We should still be able to have bodily autonomy and consume whatever substance we want. Just like women should have bodily autonomy and not be forced to carry pregnancies against their will
I'm arguing that those things should drive policy and laws, but we can't implement contradictory laws, and we can't just ignore existing laws when making new ones.
Instead we need to revise, rescind, or modify laws in compliance with existing ones. Otherwise there is no point to having laws to begin with.
Yea, the legal system did not make humans. We made it to serve us and our purposes but now its being used to stifle the populace and profit off those less fortunate
I'm not convinced. The 9th is hard for me to interpret because of its purposeful vagueness.
But we do have some notes from judges such as the following:
As Justice Scalia observed, “the [ Ninth Amendment’s] refusal to ‘deny or disparage’ other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even further removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges’ list against laws duly enacted by the people.”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-9/n...
IMO, Congress should attack this from a Constitutional ammendment which makes its legality clear: abortions cannot be outlawed. Anything else is just another ticking time bomb, especially something contingent on a 9th ammendment interpretation.
Edit: after rereading the 1st ammendment, the wording of an ammendment should be consistent, so something like, "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the seeking or procedure of abortion."
Thinking more on the 9th, one would have to consider the right to destroy an unborn person, not just the right to bodily autonomy. This becomes a moral or philosophical exercise, perhaps. With the 14th ammendment, it now becomes a question of personhood, which I don't believe the Constitution defines. So I think I am content with my request for an ammendment and not 9th Ammendment guesswork.
Final edit:
Turns out we have prior rulings that state that the 9th ammendment does not cover assisted suicide, which may be applicable to the case (potentially Person definition pending).
Consider this a bit of code switching. Many of us absolutely are concerned about what this means for women, but we also know that this forum skews male and a particular kind of male. So we are making the argument here that resonates with this forum.
You are right though that more people overall - even those who skew conservative and pro-individual rights, should realize that if you take away rights from women, and then homosexuals, and then people who want to be married to someone of a different race... where does it end in terms of stripping away individual rights? I'd argue that if you view women's health care as a matter of individual freedom and rights, then is that not the same argument being made in interpreting the 2nd amendment as not about militias (IE: a standing army) but the rights of the individual? If I can tell women they can't have a set of health care services, what's stopping the government from telling men that they can't have a different set of health care services?
Rights has a very specific meaning in the US legal system. Abortion is not listed as a right in the Constitution, and it therefore is not a federal right.
We can argue that it should be, but now we're talking about an ammendment, which is legally necessary and the real conversation the nation should be having.
*I don't think it could ever qualify as a right. Rights are negative, not positive. You could not guarantee the right to an abortion because now you're guaranteeing someone to the right to have someone else do work for them. Instead, it would need to be enumerated as a negative right, meaning that there would be federal protection against the outlawing of abortions.
>> is that not the same argument being made in interpreting the 2nd amendment as not about militias (IE: a standing army) but the rights of the individual?
"The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved."
You can read pages 1 and 2 of that decision to see the summary of the Supreme Court's argument for why 2nd Amendment rights are individual rights.
There are many that would say Heller was an activist court making up law and completely overlooked precedent in Miller, in the same way the current court is overturning decades of precedent in another issue.
"United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174, does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to militia purposes, but rather limits the type of weapon to which the right applies to those used by the militia, i.e., those in common use for lawful purposes."
I’m curious (since you mention things skewing male), do you believe that a man who gets a woman pregnant should have to support the child? Why or why not?
As for the reproductive rights, as long as contraception is legal (and who knows what will happen next) isn’t the choice at conception? Contraceptives should be untaxed and widely available.
People talk about Roe v Wade as if women spontaneously get pregnant against their will and are forced to care for the baby.
That being said women who are raped should be able to get an abortion imo
> do you believe that a man who gets a woman pregnant should have to support the child? Why or why not?
As for me, I say no. If a woman can terminate the pregnancy. a man should be able to waive his part in it. That still leaves the issue of a man losing a child he wants if she doesn't, but that issue, as well as the issue of abortion, will be solved once we find a way to transplant the fetus to an artificial womb. Until then there are no perfect solutions.
> As for the reproductive rights, as long as contraception is legal (and who knows what will happen next) isn’t the choice at conception?
Contraceptives can and do fail. Even if you're doing everything right. Contraceptives help, and comprehensive sex ed promoting the correct use of contraceptives goes a long way to help prevent unwanted pregnancies (as evidenced by higher teen pregnancy rates where they only provide "abstinence only" ignorance) but it doesn't solve the problem.
> People talk about Roe v Wade as if women spontaneously get pregnant against their will and are forced to care for the baby.
"spontaneously" or not, women do in fact get pregnant against their will. They also can get medical complications that require them to terminate willful pregnancies in order to protect their health and their lives. The loss of Roe v Wade means that more women will die. needlessly. More women will cruelly suffer. More children will cruelly suffer as well.
> "spontaneously" or not, women do in fact get pregnant against their will. They also can get medical complications that require them to terminate willful pregnancies in order to protect their health and their lives. The loss of Roe v Wade means that more women will die.
Indeed, don’t misunderstand me, I’m not against abortion. The situations you’ve mentioned are good reasons to have it.
My point is that the choice that people want already exists other than rape. Abortion should be legal, but not because reasons, but for medical necessity and for situations in which the choice that a woman does have is made for her (rape).
My feeling is that until a fetus is able to survive outside of the womb, it is dependent on the women's body. It feeds off of it. It takes her nutrients, her oxygen, her energy. It alters her body to accommodate itself. Pregnancy is a great and special sacrifice, and it must be one made willingly.
At any point, prior to where the fetus could be viable without its mother, the mother should have every right to terminate that pregnancy for literally any reason at all. Anything less would deny women their right to have control of their own bodies and lives.
Again, plenty of people end up pregnant against their will. Others will have fully intended to have a child, but their circumstances suddenly changed. It needn't always be due to some medical necessity. As long as the mother's body is needed to sustain the life of the child, that life is subject to her whims. Her house. Her rules. The moment it can be removed and sustained without her, she should no longer have the right to abort it, only to surrender it.
>People talk about Roe v Wade as if women spontaneously get pregnant against their will and are forced to care for the baby.
They have never been forced to care for the baby, but will now be forced to birth the baby - that still doesnt mean they will care for it, even if it is in the same home.
To the other point, women get pregnant from male sperm, yet it is somehow the female who has been burdened with trying to police this - any male partner/husband can now force a pregnancy though subterfuge leaving the female with little no other option then to carry out his will. Women can have sex all day long, every day of the week with multiple people and they will never get pregnant so long as a male does not ejaculate his sperm inside of her. Yet males are not held accountable for irresponsible ejaculations - maybe they will be monetarily accountable 10+ months later
The burden of un/wanted pregnancy falls onto the female, males have a choice to provide comfort and support (emotional, monetary) if they chose, males can still choose to be absent deadbeat parents too - they are not forced to pay, they can chose not to and depending on their lawyer situation can do so and keep their money, or not do so and have to take steps to hide their money.
Also, contraceptives fail and males don't have to care because the full physical health burden falls on the female. Like this whole topic, wanting a yes or no on something like this or if males should have to support a child just doesnt do it justice, there are too many ways in which that happens - but if a female has the choice to easily get an abortion without all of the burden, then if a male does not want a child and a female does, he should be free from it - but before that can happen - the female must be able to have the choice to carry it or terminate it without burden.
> He emphasized a line the majority opinion that said "[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion."
"We have also explained why that is so: rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed 'potential life,'" Alito said.
um... why do you think these conservative judges were named to the court? They know exactly what they are doing and have every intention of ending contraception, sending women's rights back to the dark ages, and screwing over anyone not straight, Christian, and white. That's the job they were nominated to do.
> The vast vast majority of Americans are ok with contraceptives, same sex marriage has firm constitutional basis, etc these aren’t going away
Across-the-board bans on contraception aren't happening, because almost nobody wants such a ban.
But overturning Obergefell? I think it is likely. According to 2021 polling data [0], there is still majority opposition to marriage equality in Mississippi (55% oppose) and Arkansas (52% oppose). It looks like the state government trying to overturn it would be a vote-winner in those two states – especially considering that people who actually vote often skew older and more conservative than the population in general, so opposition to it in those states may be even stronger among voters. There are other states where support is still quite weak, such as Alabama (49% support, 47% opposition) and South Carolina (50% support), so the same might be true for them as well. It only takes one state to act to get a case before the Supreme Court.
While the Catholic Church does teach that artificial contraception is inherently sinful, it’s leadership has not - certainly in recent decades - displayed any interest in having that moral view enforced by law. If no state enacts a general ban on contraception, SCOTUS will never get the opportunity to directly rule on its constitutionality.
Also, much of the success of the movement to restrict abortion has been because it has been a cross-faith alliance - Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, among others. The same winning formula won’t work for a general ban on contraception, because Catholics are the only member of that coalition who believe that artificial contraception is inherently sinful-the others view its moral acceptability as more situation-dependent.
> You’re laying out the definition of a slippery slope argument.
When Clarence Thomas says "here's the slope I think we should slide down next", we're not in fallacy land anymore.
> these aren’t going away
Don't worry! They won't go away. It'll just be up to the state governments currently passing laws forcing women to carry rapists' babies to term to decide if you can have sex outside of marriage or not. States rights!
> The vast vast majority of Americans are ok with contraceptives
The trigger laws that just went into effect in several cases would appear to ban some contraception, like IUDs (or, rather, criminalize it when they work), since they result in termination of pregnancy as the laws define it. (Because they use fertilization, not implantation, as the definition of the start of pregnancy.)
Of course, there's a proof issue for any actual prosecution for homicide, but that's a practical barrier to enforcement that doesn't affect what the law prohibits.
Alito is one Justice -- Thomas stated that "In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell."
Sure, but no state to my knowledge has banned all contraceptives, even though they already could so even in the hypothetical states would make them legal.
They are targeting specific methods of contraception, which they claim are abortifacient. They have displayed zero signs of wanting to ban contraception in general, as opposed to just specific forms of it. By contrast, the law struck down in Griswold v. Connecticut was an across-the-board ban on all forms of contraception.
I think it is unlikely that Griswold will ever be overturned – simply because it is unlikely any state will enact a total contraception ban. To overturn a precedent, it is not enough that a majority of Supreme Court justices think it was wrongly decided, you also need a case – which requires a state to enact and seek to actively enforce a law violating the precedent. But almost nobody wants such a law now. 1965 (when Griswold was handed down), 1873 (when the law it overturned was enacted) was a very different world – when most Christians still believed that contraception was a sin. Nowadays, the vast majority of non-Catholic Christians (Protestants, Orthodox, etc) accept contraception as moral at least in some cases. And while the Catholic Church teaches artificial contraception is inherently sinful, it displays no signs of any interest in having the government make that sin illegal (unlike the situation with abortion). You might find some crazy Catholic integralist advocating it, but the Bishops and the Vatican aren't going to.
The bans on (allegedly) abortifacient contraceptive methods could be challenged, but I expect SCOTUS will uphold them – and the majority will probably just uphold them as state regulation of abortion, not overturning Griswold itself. However, I think a lot of groups are going to refuse to support challenges, on the grounds that they don't want to give this SCOTUS an opportunity to overturn any more precedents they support, rather save it for the day (whenever it may come) when there is a SCOTUS majority more amenable to their views.
> To overturn a precedent, it is not enough that a majority of Supreme Court justices think it was wrongly decided, you also need a case – which requires a state to enact and seek to actively enforce a law violating the precedent
You don't need a new law that seeks to ban all birth control to challenge and lead to a repeal of Griswold. Maybe a former court would have tried to limit scope, but Dobbs vs Jackson wasn't about a total abortion ban, it was a ban at 15 weeks, and yet here we are.
I think it is different though – Roe v Wade wasn't just a court decision, it was a political symbol, and an issue on which many justices have deeply personal feelings (one way or the other).
Griswold isn't a political symbol to anywhere near the same extent. And even people who think contraception is a sin, don't get anywhere near as emotive about it as they do on the abortion issue.
Indeed it is -- the ruling is about the fundamental right to privacy with regards to bodily autonomy. Without some major federal precedent like Roe V. Wade, states are free to impose to their medical will on their populace as they see fit.
>"..as if women spontaneously get pregnant against their will and are forced to care for the baby"
I would refrain from judgement at late stages of pregnancy but early on it is not your business what they do. Mind your own business and do not stick nose where it does not belong.
Also if you are so pro life why not to go and right away imprison every official whose action (like sending people to war when not directly attacked) cause death.
If you’re pro choice then you must support pure freedom including citizens owning nukes, children taking heroin, and legalizing stealing from others right? Of course not.
Pro choice is doesn’t literally mean “pro choice in all situations”, it’s shorthand for “abortion is a an individual choice and should be protected as such”.
Likewise pro life doesn’t mean “save all lives in all situations at all costs”. It’s short hand for “abortion is murdering babies, that’s wrong and should be outlawed like any other murder”.
He was replying to the strawman about what you suggested he should do if he is pro life. He explained why you argument fails by showing how it would fail if you applied your logic to your own position.
> As for the reproductive rights, as long as contraception is legal (and who knows what will happen next) isn’t the choice at conception?
It's not so simple, when it comes to contraception, because various forms are controversial as well (even IUDs) and can also possibly become illegal.
In a submission that was posted and flagged for unclear reasons, it refers to an article that discusses some of the complexities and gray areas involved, like abortion pills or women being accused of murder because they had a stillbirth under "suspicious circumstances" (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/we-are-not-goi...). It might be worth a read, to see how various women can be looking at this issue, from a practical standpoint.
> ...women who are raped should be able to get an abortion imo
That's another part of the problem, when extremism gets involved, it can dissolve the issue into a total ban.
> ...do you believe that a man who gets a woman pregnant should have to support the child?
That's a good point, as various "Men's rights" have arguably been buried in the U.S. In various countries, an abortion can only happen if the father agrees or can't be found. To include other countries, where if a woman has a child against the will of the father, they allow or are proposing to allow men to renounce or give up their paternity rights or parental responsibility. Which is also kind of like how women are allowed to abandon (safe surrender) or give up a child for adoption, even against the will of the father, in various states and countries.
Personally, no. Consent can be revoked. Involuntary servitude is a violation of the 13th amendment. IMO a child can be abandoned without any moral guilt, so long as you leave them to their own devices or surrender them to someone else rather than say physically attacking them.
I actually find abortion a much trickier subject because there's an eviction involved, and it becomes a trickier subject because some physical force is typically needed to remove the entity.
The only person it is tricky for is the mother, who is the only person in the universe whos opinion matters on abortion, and we must abide by the decisions of the individual.
Anything else is absolute horror of biological control and loss of bodily autonomy, and should be rightfully ignored, and anyone that thinks differently needs to think about minding their own business and not making a difficult thing more difficult. Those that use the legal system to enforce their hatred of women? Get off the planet please.
Personally I'm pro-abortion but I think it's trickier than you say. Evicting a living entity, even for people who are pretty progressive, is usually seen as a delicate subject. To me evicting an entity is a lot trickier subject than merely abandoning it, and the points against using force to evict that entity could have merit. Although we are both in agreement that you can safely abandon the life you created without any moral obligation.
Personally I see no moral difference between abandoning life before or after birth. Neither wrong, but abandoning before birth requires a forceful eviction.
>The only person it is tricky for is the mother, who is the only person in the universe whos opinion matters on abortion, and we must abide by the decisions of the individual.
I mean to frame it as only involved life as the mother I think is disingenuous. Perhaps the fetus is not viable but it has to be at least considered in this equation, even if only to decide offspring has no rights to compel their parent to keep them alive.
Ok good :-)
I think my issue is the your idea of eviction, its not eviction, in the same way we don't 'evict' cancer, we 'treat' it. I think its best to leave it at 'no moral difference between abandoning life before or after birth.'. Agreed. Lets not make this difficult situation harder for women who have to make very difficult decisions in life.
IMO the courts did right though here revoking Roe v Wade. For such a tricky subject without enumeration of this right in the constitution, the constitutional basis for determining this would be allowing voters in the various states to decide. In some states they have decided to agree with you. In others they haven't. IMO supreme court did right here, and allows us to have our cake and eat it too. Democracy, if you will.
That is, if you play by the rules of finding nations and constitutions to be legitimate :)
Voted up. Reading comments here I feel like I'm watching Robert McNamara describe the hundreds of thousands of casualties that were required to win the second world war as if they were just figures on paper. Lives are going to be destroyed by this and women will be going to prison for what many civilized countries consider a fundamental right.
I'm a woman and extremely poor. I've been a member for nearly thirteen years.
It's possible but challenging to present a female point of view here. Reproductive issues and what I generally think of as human sexual morality are always hard to talk about anywhere.
I think for a lot of women, this is a very threatening turn of events. That's going to make it challenging to discuss it in the rational style required by HN guidelines even before accounting for the gender ratio here.
I'm quite fond of HN and have come to see a lot of the practices here as not male per se but as best practices for public discourse and I have come to believe that women tend to be raised to engage in a fashion more appropriate for private discourse.
So I think there's a somewhat steep learning curve involved for most women that gets conflated with sexism and complicates attempts by women to give voice to a female point of view here.
If you can express yourself in accordance with best practices for public discourse, you can be heard here. Trying to figure out how to do that while not spazzing about sexism ...well, it's challenging and I think most women lack sufficient reason to keep at it, so they tend not to.
Not only that but once half of the population has lost bodily autonomy why would anyone believe that their rights are safe?
Today a woman can be compelled to use an organ in her body to keep another person alive.
What’s to stop the court from ruling that if you have 2 kidneys you can be compelled to donate one to keep someone else alive?
What happens when a deadbeat dad is the only match for a child with organ failure? Why shouldn’t they be compelled to give up an organ to keep their offspring alive?
Libertarians should be in the streets protesting the loss of bodily autonomy.
And all of us should be afraid.
One of the reasons abortion is difficult to talk about is that it is the intersection of multiple rights. The principle of bodily autonomy you mention is foundational to our conception of liberty in the US. In this case, however, it intersects with the principle that human life should not be actively ended without extraordinary reason.
But it’s not. In no other case is one human forced to sacrifice their own body to keep another human alive.
The fetus is welcome to continue living. It simply can’t live in this particular womb.
If ‘pro-life’ people genuinely cared about the unborn (rather than controlling women) they would have invested in researching artificial wombs and pregnancy transfers. But they don’t.
> In no other case is one human forced to sacrifice their own body to keep another human alive.
Here's an analogy: if you're flying people somewhere in your helicopter, are you allowed to push them out, or are you required to "sacrifice" your own helicopter to keep them alive until you land safely?
> The fetus is welcome to continue living. It simply can’t live in this particular womb.
Your passengers are welcome to stay in the air. They simply can't in that particular helicopter.
> If ‘pro-life’ people genuinely cared about the unborn (rather than controlling women) they would have invested in researching artificial wombs and pregnancy transfers. But they don’t.
If people genuinely cared about helicopter passengers (rather than controlling pilots), they would have invested in jet packs and antigravity devices. But they don't.
Libertarians should be in the streets protesting the loss of bodily autonomy. And all of us should be afraid.
I agree, but I also tend to think this battle was lost when the SCOTUS refused to reject the "individual mandate". When you've reduced the notion of individual agency to the level that the State can dictate what items you must purchase, this is an entirely logical consequence.
I've always held that one can make a principled, well-reasoned Libertarian argument both for OR against abortion, based on the grounds you just cited. But I've also personally always held that there is no objective, universal standard for deciding exactly when to consider that unborn entity a "child" which has rights and against which it makes sense to speak of violence being conducted. That being the case, I don't find any value in adding the specter of State violence to the mix. I'd rather leave this whole situation to the mother, her family, medical professionals and others supporters.
This is why I'm a Libertarian who largely opposes abortion on a purely personal level, but is 100% pro-choice on a political level. But at the same time, I can respect those who hold the other position based on the NAP. I'd just argue that with no objective way to resolve the dispute, it's best to not bring the State into it.
If you take libertarinism to it's extreme like that then they should be protesting the lack of freedom of association as well but none are doing that either.
I’ve never understood this take - other than rape (in which abortion should be allowed imo), why is it a loss of bodily autonomy? Women choose to have sex consensually, no?
It's a loss of bodily autonomy because, well, that's what bodily autonomy is. The government is compelling you to use (and risk) your body for a particular purpose.
That's a separate question from whether that loss of bodily autonomy is justified.
> Women choose to have sex consensually, no?
Well, yes, sometimes. Maybe you could be more explicit about how you think that justifies the loss of bodily autonomy?
For example, maybe you have a principle like "If you played a necessary role in the creation of a person, then you can be compelled to use your body to support their life." Do you think fathers should be compelled to donate blood or organs to their offspring?
You're still conflating "pregnancy" with "pregnancy that you're forced to carry to term." The former is necessarily a potential consequence of having sex; the latter is not.
I'm still curious what principles you think justify the enforcement of the latter, and especially why they don't cover things like the OP's forced organ donation scenario.
Edit: Just to expand on the first point, I think there's some circular reasoning going on here.
If the claim is "people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term," you can't support that with "because people should endure the consequences of their actions" if "consequences of their actions" means "being forced to carry a pregnancy to term."
Because then you're just saying "people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term because people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term."
> For most of history birth is the inevitable outcome of pregnancy.
Induced abortion has, from documentary evidence, been a thing for at least ~3500 years, and even without induced abortion very many pregnancies historically ended in miscarriage (still the case) and/or maternal death (much less the case, now, but still a concern.)
Miscarrying is a very great point, as is still births. But my point in general is that once you’re pregnancy your body “finishing” is the inevitable outcome, intervention notwithstanding.
We do have still work to do in making the end of the pregnancy the desired one (healthy baby), yes.
This creeps close to an "appeal to nature". For most of human history once your heart stopped death was the "inevitable" outcome, but this is not a good argument for defibrillators being morally wrong.
> But my point in general is that once you’re pregnancy your body “finishing” is the inevitable outcome, intervention notwithstanding.
I think you mean something other than “inevitable” here, since “inevitable” means “cannot be avoided”, such that if A and B is the inevitable consequence, than B must happen with 100% certainty.
But childbirth isn't even approximately an inevitable consequence of pregnancy.
The fact of the matter is that other than rape, by definition, women are consenting to an activity that will put them at high risk for getting pregnant.
Your argument is effectively that people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable.
> "Your argument is effectively that people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable."
Well, yes.
Why did you say "other than rape (in which abortion should be allowed imo)"? Either you think the foetus has value and needs to be brought to term, or you don't. That makes it seem that you aren't deciding based on the value of the foetus or the importance of all life, but rather want to assert superiority and punish women for having sex. What difference does it make to the importance of the foetus if the pregnancy was rape or not? Why does that make more difference than whether the pregnancy is wanted or not?
You can eat meat from murdered animals every day, you can pierce or tattoo your body or kill brain cells with alcohol, you have the right to return a $5 plastic toy for a refund, but if your birth control fails you can't kill 10 cells. Has it any more soul or value at that stage than the hair or fingernails you cut off without a thought, or the dead skin you shed, or the spit you spit? Why does it have more value than the woman?
> people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable
I think you've gone a little too broad with that principle. If I ask a taxi to take me somewhere, I can get out if I notice the driver is drunk. If I accidentally spill a glass of water, I can clean it up. And so on.
Following your example, if after you ate something the state forced you to digest it and outlawed inducing vomiting then you would have lost body autonomy. You're not in control of your body anymore.
> Women choose to have sex consensually, no?
Consent to sex doesn't imply consent to pregnancy (or even the consent to carry to term after) - it just doesn't follow, even with the risks of pregnancy.
The intention isn’t relevant - sex leading to kids is hardly some unknown fact. Other than rape, in which case agency is removed, why is conception not the point in which the choice is made?
Is your opinion that anyone can reneg on known consequences of their actions?
Don’t misunderstand, women should have a choice in what their bodies are used for. My assertion is, other than rape, they already have it with respect to having a kid or not.
I don't agree or disagree with the consequences part, but...
> sex leading to kids is hardly some unknown fact
Oh, I'd wish. There are people who still - in the 21st century - do not have like basic knowledge about sexual wellness and have very weird (and sometimes very dangerous) ideas about contraception, safety and risks of pregnancy. I mean, it's hard for any educated person to believe in this shit, but I've met or read some pretty insane opinions. Like people who genuinely believe really weird nonsense such as that virgins cannot get pregnant their first time. And they aren't malicious folks (well, maybe some are, of course) - just awfully misinformed.
Humanity is in a very weird place. On the one hand we've walked on the Moon and about to conquer nuclear fusion power, but on the other hand we've just climbed down from the trees and learned how to make a fire.
We're only 8 years out from "legitimate rape"! How in the world can anyone think legislators and jurists themselves, let alone young people, are receiving sufficient information about sex and pregnancy?
The intention isn’t relevant - sex leading to kids is hardly some unknown fact.
That's ridiculous. Many people engage in sex using contraceptives design to prevent pregnancy, but we all know that contraceptives aren't 100% reliable. So the possibility of any given sex act leading to kids is absolutely an "unknown".
And that's before getting into the point about how, in many places in the world, knowledge of (or access to) contraceptives is withheld from portions of the population to begin with. For that matter, there are some (mostly very young, I expect) who don't understand the whole "sex leads to kids" thing.
>Is your opinion that anyone can renege on known consequences of their actions?
That's usually how medical treatment works, yes. We don't tell people who fall off a ladder, slice their finger chopping vegetables, or break a bone playing sports "You knew the risk, you're just gonna have to live with the consequences of your choices"
I think it's often misunderstood at how incredibly hard it is to stop reproduction.
For example birth control pills are 99% effective. From the NHS:
> When taken correctly, the pill is over 99% effective at preventing pregnancy. This means that fewer than 1 in 100 who use the combined pill as contraception will get pregnant in 1 year.
So, if you're in a relationship for 5 years, that's 1 in 20. For my group of people I know, this matches up pretty well.
I think it's often misunderstood at how incredibly hard it is to stop reproduction.
For example birth control pills are 99% effective. From the NHS:
> When taken correctly, the pill is over 99% effective at preventing pregnancy. This means that fewer than 1 in 100 who use the combined pill as contraception will get pregnant in 1 year.
So, if you're in a relationship for 5 years, that's 1 in 20. For my group of people I know, this matches up pretty well. I have one friend who has three children. They were all conceived while on birth control.
Buck vs Bell is a fucking travesty. You consider it acceptable that the State can sterilize 'feeble minds' because an old man in 1927 said it was cool?
How about the realization that the law is an ass, and we need to stand up for human rights?
I wasn't aware that having a baby was a crime, but yet, failing to birth it appears to be now. nb: Women have gone to jail for miscarriages as a result of such women-hating laws.
My thoughts on the prison system are not relevant to supporting that a women can do whatever she wants with her body.
Women can and do already choose what to do with their body. And rape is already illegal. The current blind spot is that abortion is not federally allowed in the case of rape.
And if you’re talking about bodily autonomy of course prison is relevant.
I get it, you hate women and want to punish them for having sex with you. Please reflect on your position.
Your position is horrendously misogynistic, and if you do not understand why, you should talk to some women. Probably don't lead with your sentence as you are likely to get hit in the face.
No, I dont hate them, in fact she is completely within her rights to determine what happens to her own body. What she does not have is the right to say what another woman does with her body. However, if she believes that she can force another woman to give birth because of her own beliefs, she is wrong, and her beliefs are dangerous and wrong.
I feel sorry for the anti-abortion women. I would say they are trapped in a broken world, confused by weird cults (xianity is actually pro-abortion, and the xian bible includes recipes), manipulated by controlling people.
> What happens when a deadbeat dad is the only match for a child with organ failure? Why shouldn’t they be compelled to give up an organ to keep their offspring alive?
If you can come up with a way to loan someone an organ for 9 months and then get it back when you're done with it, then this argument would be coherent. As is, I'd re-evaluate it if you have any intention of persuading someone on the opposite side of this issue.
Considering pregnancy can result in death (at a higher rate than kidney donation as noted elsewhere in the thread) as well as countless other long term conditions your 9 month limit doesn’t really make sense.
But let’s say you could loan out a kidney for a few months, would you really find it acceptable for the state to forcibly seize your kidney to keep someone else alive?
Well said. Too much of the debate on here is around logical fallacies rather than the direct impact this will have on women - particularly those who are poor and unable to travel for safe abortions in other states.
Banning abortion only makes access to safe abortions harder - if the right wing want to reduce abortions, making contraceptives freely available has been proven to dramatically reduce the abortion rate as evidenced in Colorado[1].
“If you really want to reduce murders, you can’t outlaw it, that just lets rich people murder. Instead, you make guns and other self protection widely available”
To anyone who is convinced abortion is baby murder, this is what you just said. This argument only ever makes sense if you treat the fetus like a non entity and believe the opposition to abortion is purely hatred of female autonomy. The vast majority of Americans in favor of some abortion restrictions (which 75% of Americans are) have that opinion not because of the above but because they believe that fetus becomes a person at some point between conception and birth.
Except that contraception prevents conception from ever occurring? Your analogy is fundamentally flawed, and there's no point in arguing in good faith with people who equate contraception to murder.
You said:
1. Outlawing abortion isn’t helpful at all
2. Actually helpful would be contraceptives
I (and the vast majority of people) agree that contraception is important and should be widely available. You’re argument against abortion restrictions is completely incorrect though and that’s the point I made
Maybe because it's just unanswerable? We're not talking about the right to pierce their ears or vote. We're talking about the termination of a living organism. I am pro-choice, but an intelligent mostly pro-life friend of mine tasked me to ask the most ardent activists on their side to answer, "when does human life begin?" It's a simple question to state, and yet many on the pro choice side absolutely refuse to grapple with it. It's become a great shibboleth question to find who is beyond reasoned debate on this issue. Yes, we are male. Yes, we acknowledge their is a thorny rights issue. There's also the question of rights of the organism being aborted. And the science of what a "viable" fetus is has progressed greatly since the 1970s. This is an uncomfortable conversation to have, but no one has a right of gender to say it can't be had.
This would then be an excellent time to introduce universal human rights. Reproduction should only occur through consent, and no one should be forced to be a parent against their will. Any action done to our own bodies or action people ask that we perform with our bodies should require continuously consent. Any negative outcome to society of people not providing consent should be address by the government in the form of social support.
It is also about time that we abolish all laws that makes distinctions based on gender and sex. That way there won't be any 2nd-class citizens encoded in law that is based on gender.
HN is about technical, objective things and those other points you mentioned are mostly emotional subjective topics. It would be strange to see them discussed here at any significant length.
It would be strange not to. Technology exist for people. Most choices in computers and software are made to accommodate people. We are in the people business. You need to understand people to be able to produce things for them.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Societal issues are apparently high up in what good hackers find interesting along with technical things.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I think if you take this to heart, you might interpret what they're saying as a defense of HN readers; that they are more inclined to talk about the technicalities of this decision rather than the effect it may have on women because that is something they can comment on.
Tact may also play a role in why people hesitate to make comments of empathy, especially since simply expressing your disdain for the decision isn't particularly substantive. I'm certain many of the people that are choosing to talk about other aspects of the decision are wholly empathetic to the people this affects.
You hit the nail on the head. On my social media which isn’t always a particularly intellectual medium, people are already expressing their outrage… but not really saying much else.
The result: reading about how yet another person is so mad about the ruling and “so tired of this country” and what a blow this is for women’s rights has gotten repetitive and uninteresting. After a certain point, reading such comments over and over again is just giving in to outrage porn.
Most members of HN recognize this and prefer the intellectual stimulation that comes from discussing more nuanced technical details.
I was about to post a reply that engages with your claims, but now I'm thinking you're not serious (I don't want to use the T-word here, but that's what I'm thinking.)
But after spending nine months in woman's body the child becomes the part of her life for twenty next years. Should it rather be "my life - my choice"?
If the other parent doesn't consent to an adoption it usually can't happen. Then you either have to raise the child directly through your labor (custody) or indirectly through your labor (child support).
There are lots of people raising children against their will with no mechanism to relieve them of that duty, even if they revoke consent to raise the child in any form.
I see this frequently repeated, but it's clearly sophistry,
similar to the language trick in a comment below where "It's not a baby, it's a fetus" is used to subvert reality.
Women can very well govern their own bodies, but a 6 month old baby is definitely not "their own body" and one can very well understand why large portions of society would want to see it protected against abuse.
It's not a baby, it's a fetus. The potential for being a baby is not a baby. And by what mental contortion is it not a woman's body? You're obviously not speaking from the position of having your life and health put at risk by carrying something that puts the greatest strain on a human body most will ever endure.
My wife believes exactly the same as the OP, and she is most definitely speaking from that perspective. :)
This isn't a gendered issue, it's a worldview one. There's a very small skew towards males preferring it be illegal, but it's not enough to write off all opposition as male:
It's a 11 percentage point margin shift, and that is the correct way to view it. While neutral is a small position on this issue because it has high salience and is polarizing, neutral is a valid choice (which is also why the difference in “should be legal” is not identical to the difference in “should be illegal”.)
I was thinking of it this way: Hallucinaut assumed that armitron was male, because a female would never make that argument. However, 46% of people who believe that abortion should be illegal in almost all cases are female, which makes Hallucinaut's assumption very bad.
Your approach is valid in other contexts, but I don't think it's the most relevant to the question I was addressing.
Fetus literally means unborn baby. The only difference between a fetus and a baby 10 minutes before birth is position in space (one’s in a womb). Would you support abortion 10 minutes before birth? A day? A week? At what point are you just murdering a baby?
And development, which you seem to skip over. Most people draw the line at third trimester, which is generally when a fetus is viable outside the body.
A fetus in the first or second trimester isn't capable of life outside the mother's womb. A vanishingly small percentage of people are even considering late-term abortions, but that's what you seem to be fixated on in all these threads.
I “fixate” on that question because that’s the argument everyone is making: that any interference in abortion is unjust. The reality is (as you seem to agree) is that in some instances there’s little difference from baby murder - hence why restrictions on abortion can be just
sure, it was "only" states enforcing it (as if it would make any difference for someone living there), exactly same as it's now only states deciding whether they wanna ban abortion or not, you are arguing against yourself and not realizing it
Do you have the right to straight up kill other developing life in your body? It's your body after all, same stupid logic.
Btw I'm pro choice, just don't like hypocrisy of people who have no problem with forcing unwanted vaccination, but then have problem with forced unwanted pregnancy.
You are killing viruses/bacteria, not future human life. Are you able to distinguish between them? Seems quite difficult for some "liberals"/"democrats".
From 1973 until 2022, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was officially deemed by the Supreme Court to be a Constitutional protection of abortion. The idea that "most legal scholars agree" is pretty silly; there's been significant debate for decades.
2nd amendment is a right codified in the constitution. Abortion is not in the constitution, which is what this ruling states. If congress wants to legalize abortion, then that's their job...to make laws. The supreme court does not make laws.
Firstly, the 2nd amendment.... was an AMENDMENT to the constitution. Second, the right of abortion was determined from incorporation of other guaranteed rights (here, the right to privacy). Please either brush up on your undergrad political science course materials or review summaries of decisions via the Library of Congress.
Coming poorly equipped to these arguments shows much more about the individual than their interpretation of constitutionality.
Exactly. If you want it as a law then work with the appropriate people who operate through the appropriate channels to make it a law. Don't try to circumvent the process by using a different body that is not meant to legislate.
> Second, the right of abortion was determined from incorporation of other guaranteed rights (here, the right to privacy)
Correct, and it was a very unstable way to enable abortions. It has always been under threat of being over turned because it was a weak argument. Even RBG said that it was weak.
Yeah, I've see a few other people parroting the "RGB even said..." thing, but what's your point?
The rights to privacy and bodily autonomy are not nascent concepts in the course of this country's establishment of civil liberties, and today's ruling was a disgusting application of the Supreme Court's power.
Lots of things aren't in the constitution, which is the purpose of the 9th amendment. Surely bodily autonomy is something that falls within the spirit of what the founding fathers were aiming for. Benjamin Franklin certainly took no issues with abortion.
Yeah this seems like a quite simple affirmation of states rights in matters which have not been explicitly deferred to the federal government. I was kind of hoping to find good discussion at least on hacker news but it's the same nonsense as every other back water shithole on the internet. At this point 4chan is having a more nuanced discussion :( I'm increasingly convinced we will see the US split - and to be honest after today I would be quite happy for that to happen since a large contingent of people don't seem to understand or even want to operate in the legal frameworks we have.
this is the conservative slight-of-hand democrats & intellectuals don't understand. Invoking originalism on a 250year old document is in very basic fundamental terms anchoring social progress to 2 centuries old thought.
Add to that the Senate's massive favoring of 'underpopulated states' plus filibuster 60 and you basically get a deep understanding of the state US is in today.
Damn, I knew the forced vaccinations would came back to haunt us.
Republicans keep throwing "my body, my choice" as meaningless because of it.
I guarantee the hypocrisy around that radicalized millions of them.
The US senate is 2 senators per state. The smaller states are mostly rural conservative issues. The senators that confirmed the three trump justices represent 43% of the population.
Personally I think this is a good thing. My hope is that SCOTUS passing rulings down from the federal level to the states will encourage more (young) people to vote in their city and state elections. The voter turnout for presidential elections is always decent, however for local and state issues there's a clear difference in number of voters. Additionally, younger people don't vote as often in local and state elections. I wish it was not true but there's no arguing the statistics.
Because in contrary to the states' rights argument being touted, the legal theory underpinning the decision opens the door to a federal ban. You might not get the chance to vote for the people that ban abortion for you.
"Just vote with the people that won't ban abortion" in insufficient in a system with an undemocratic Senate. The Senate controls who gets on the Supreme Court, and it requires 60 votes to advance legislation.
In many states that has no effect whatsoever because district boundaries have been gerrymandered to ensure that the party that favors banning abortion will not lose control of the legislature.
I mean isn't that the will of the people in that state? If you live in a state that will be affected, it could certainly be a problem for you. If you don't then you are wanting to subvert their democratic process, no?
Imagine if it was something else like marijuana legalization and whatnot.
> I mean isn't that the will of the people in that state?
That really depends on when those laws were passed, and whether attitudes have changed since then, doesn't it?
Most of these laws weren't passed last year, and the issue has been legislatively moot for 50 years, so you're going to have a very hard time convincing me that those laws represent the current will of the people in every state.
> you are wanting to subvert their democratic process, no?
Yes. I believe there are and should be restrictions on what the majority of a state can pass.
I do want to subvert the democratic process in some specific instances. For example, if the majority of a state I didn't live in wanted to legalize slavery, I would say that they do not get that choice and that they may not.
It's not like this is groundbreaking. There are all kinds of federal laws that preempt state laws on various topics.
Pretty sure CA just had the will of its voters thrown out just yesterday relating to their gun laws, so maybe it's not so sacrosanct.
Some states are pretty big, and have diverse populations- maybe we should make it the choice of the county! Then again, some counties are pretty big, maybe we should make it the choice of the city or town! Then again, some cities are pretty big, maybe we should make it the choice of the block! Then again, there might be a lot of differing opinions even on a single block, maybe we should make it a choice of the individual!
In practice, this ruling bans abortion in those states. Regardless of your opinion of those states, people DO live in them and will be adversely affected. Lives will be ruined, people will die, and ultimately this will probably be counterproductive wrt lowering the number of abortions overall.
The Supreme Court never had the authority to even hear the original Roe v. Wade case. It has always been a states rights issue. Glad to see the current Supreme Court returning to the constitution and rule of law.
> It's not anyone's business what you do with your body.
Sure, but abortion is also about the fetus's body. (And other things as well: dignity of humans, paternal rights [1], etc.)
> You want to protect innocent lives? [...]
You don't get to dictate what others should care about, but I agree with some of those, though often with a different framing.
For example, I think in a well-functioning society, you should be able to raise a family on a single stream of income. This is a framing currently advocated by people like Bake Masters (the AZ US Senate candidate). Elizabeth Warren (who, unlike Masters, is a left-wing politician) has also used this framing in her 2004 book titled "The Two-Income Trap" [2].
> christofascists
That's a personal attack, which I don't appreciate. Also, despite the Bible quote in my bio, I'm not a Christian.
What a disappointing showing from HN. 120 comments and so little substantive discussion or truth-searching. Everyone rushing to share their feelings and no one trying listen.
I have thoughts I'd like to discuss, but apparently this isn't the place to do it.
The only place you might see substantial discussion is a message board for legal scholars/students. The next week minimum online in almost all americancentric forums is going to be about primal screaming from one side, and arrogant gloating from the other.
> Everyone rushing to share their feelings and no one trying listen.
There you go.
It is also quite clear that the Supreme Court of the United States doesn't care about their feelings. All you get here is reactionary takes, outrage, screeching and a mixture of trillions of emotions on display.
Yes frankly this website is not capable of entertaining certain contrarian ideas. Which of course are only contrarian in the narrow societal bubbles they occupy.
I blame the downvote mechanism for rewarding echo chambers and punishing outlier opinions.
A 2020 study showed that nearly 70% of Americans have less than $1,000 stashed away in their bank accounts. 40% have less than $300. How are these people supposed to afford to take time off work, drive to another state, have an invasive medical procedure performed, and then drive back home and potentially miss another day of work for recovery? If they have difficulty doing that, imagine how much more difficult it'd be to literally move to another state, lose all your friends and family connections, displace your kids from their school and friends, lose your support network, and have to find new employment? All for the sake of something that should be a protected right. Your perspective is really lacking compassion.
Except there are laws that allow one state to prosecute abortions in another. And SCOTUS will absolutely uphold these laws. They've already upheld the right for private citizens to sue people that they believe have had one.
There are no laws prosecuting abortions done out of state. It’s possible some will be passed but I also think they are a) impossible to enforce and b) won’t be upheld by SCOTUS because they violate the dormant commerce clause.
This isn't true, and it is also unconstitutional. You cannot be held liable for an action you perform in one state, where it is legal, for a crime in another state.
OP is saying SCOTUS doesn't make abortion impossible (ruling that it is always tantamount to murder and thus never permissible). A ban would prohibit states from allowing abortion, and this isn't the case.
SCOTUS has said that states may decide how to regulate it. Individual states will either ban, or not, as their constituents wish.
Because the state went through a democratic process and decided to do that. Democracy doesn't mean that everyone has to vote for the policies you like.
"We have decided that rich people who can travel to a different state have different rights than poor people" is a very bad process.
That's the difference between rights and privileges -- As of this week I can't vote away your your right to carry concealed weapon in my city, but you can vote to take away my access to abortion, or even contraception in yours?
1930s Germany had no democratic tradition so it's unsurprising that a reactionary conservative movement resulted in a dictator. That is absolutely not the case here, our republic is an enormous part of our tradition so it's extremely unlikely that such a movement here would have the same result.
Also if you keep calling conservatives Nazis eventually they might start wondering why, they might start remembering and noticing things you'd rather they forget.
Ahh, so any democratic process that results in a policy you don't like is 1930's Germany. While any democratic process that results in a policy you do like is... ?
aah, so as long as something happened though a democratic process it's fine and dandy and no examination is needed as to the possible consequences of that decision?
Yes. As I understand it, Roe vs Wade argued that a right to abortion was implied by the constitution, and thus such a right was created implicitly, rather than by the explicit passing of legislation.
The next step is clearly to advocate for explicit legislation.
We don't do that with other state laws like murder and theft. And different states have different ideas on what those laws should look like too.
EDIT: I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you upset about SCOTUS citing common law tradition? Most of our law works that way, you have to build on something. Even "reason" needs axioms and you have to find a way to pick those.
EDIT2: There are a surprising number of people who want to decriminalize theft and even murder in some situations (look up "mutual combat" in Chicago.)
That framing begs the question. Virtually everyone agrees murder and theft should be crimes. There is vast philosophical disagreement on whether abortion should be a crime. You can believe it is murder, but the majority of Americans disagree. Ultimately, it should be up to the pregnant person to weigh the morality of that decision, not the government.
> Virtually everyone agrees [...] theft should be crimes
Wasn't there just a thread here a few days ago that had a bunch of people arguing that the decriminalization of shoplifting in San Francisco is a good thing?
Abortion is not murder or theft. An appropriate comparison would be an appendectomy. If states started banning appendectomies, I would hope the fed would codify it as law.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. What you're saying is exactly correct. That's what this ruling affirms: it is a state issue. Abortion is not in the US Constitution and many - even left-leaning - legal scholars have said Roe v Wade was ruled incorrectly.
I downvoted it because it's hopelessly naive and incorrect. This does not return the power to the states, it gives the power to the State to prevent people from having access to reproductive healthcare. Every American just had rights stripped away.
The second that Republicans have a majority in Congress and the Presidency, they will pass a federal ban on abortion in all the states.
Not entirely sure how this phenomenon is called, but we live in times where we no longer speak the same language. On purpose. Which facet of reality are we going to emphasize? Which facet of reality are we going to deny, excising it from language itself?
"reproductive healthcare", correct.
"mothers killing their own babies in the womb", also correct.
SCOTUS just ruled that no, laws that ban abortion aren't unconstitutional. There is already precedent and practice of the Federal government to regulate healthcare, the power to make specific crimes against children federal, or any number of various ways they could argue the Federal government has the power to ban abortion.
The members of the Court that claim to be pick and choose which material they're originalist or textualist regarding, particularly in this case. Others are just idealogues nominated and confirmed to be political tools of the Republican party. You should not have faith in them, their credibility is shot.
The Supreme court enforced slavery - and virtually ensured that the civil war would occur when it expanded slavery with Dredd Scott. (On the basis of something not in the constitution). The legislative made it illegal and changed the constitution. This opens the same path to legislatures. Hopefully without the civil war that occurred because the Supreme court played a role in preserving slavery.
No it practically has not, the republicans would immediately filibuster any attempt. And they will keep doing so by locking in enough states which means that the majority of the American people can vote what they want, it wouldn't change a thing.
I mean… let’s not act like the 2nd amendment is interpreted in any serious way.
The Supreme Court invented a personal right to bear arms from a 250 year old amendment during my lifetime and is now not only ignoring words that are in there but adding words that aren’t
Anyone trying to apply logic to this is just facilitating nonsense because these decision are based in ideology not logic. Don’t launder it for them.
Except for all those constitutional rights... Freedom of religion being one, and their are at least two recognized religions where abortion is a religious right.
So there you go, freedom for Christian's not for anyone else, a good Christian nation! /s
It leaves it up to the states now because there is no meaningful federal code on the matter. The underpinnings of the decision allow for a federal ban since it's just saying that there's no inherent constitutional protection.
Lots of anti-Catholic comments and anti-Christian comments here.
To blame this on Christians/Catholics is singling out a religion, a protected group similar to blaming Blacks or Jews. In fact its exactly the same - its literally a protected class.
To be honest I am pretty fine with it. For a few reasons:
1) Abortion (in my opinion) should not be a constitutional right. I can't name a country that has abortion as a constitutional right. More generally: the constitution should care about super-general, universally-agreed values, let's leave everything else to the legislative branch!
2) Roe v. Wade was a bad decision. Before you downvote me, read the 14th Amendment: how the judges could infer from it at the time a right to abortion is beyond me! I can squint my eyes a lot, but the right is simply not there!
Edit: downvoters, go read the 14th Amendment, and tell me if you can honestly read a right to abortion in there.
Indeed, even though I generally support guns rights, I think they should be regulated by state law.
However, notice the difference: the 2nd Amendment is extremely clear in granting the right to bear arms, whereas the 14th Amendment needs to be twisted in an almost comical way to get out of it a right to abortion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31862258&p=3 [etc.]
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