It's really nuanced and difficult for outsiders to grasp fully. The author says "In Germany, abortion is always illegal (sort of) but simply not punished in the first 12 weeks." which is not true. You also have to have a "Schwangerschaftskonfliktberatung" (Pregnancy Conflict Counseling, gotta love German).
This counseling session is mandatory for abortion not being punished. The thing is, in rural areas this counseling is often only available through church-based institutions (which often try to discourage abortions) and during the pandemic many state-based agencies that provide this counseling were used for contact tracing.
So there are many small hurdles which are difficult to put into numbers.
I don't try to detract from the author. It's a good effort at classification. The devil's in the detail.
Edit: I do understand that the counseling itself is mentioned in the article. The intricacies of it are condensed to "tricky". Which is true, but really difficult to classify.
> "Schwangerschaftskonfliktberatung" (Pregnancy Conflict Counseling, gotta love German).
Just a linguistic note: German and English are almost exactly the same in how they make large compound words. The only difference is that when you write English, you put spaces between the different words that make up the compound, but when you write German, you leave out the spaces. But when spoken, they're exactly the same.
Germans could theoretically change their orthographic rules to write, "Schwangerschafts Konflikt Beratung," but they don't.
Honestly I often put dashes between words that should be grouped together when the parsing might otherwise be ambiguous. It's definitely not a perfect solution (no support for arbitrary nesting, not "standard" English), but it's a bit better for parsing than the German solution insofar as the delimiter isn't an empty string. :)
This is an excellent article that does what precious few "serious" online blogs do: it puts in the extensive research required and makes a conclusion based on that evidence.
Would that we had access to such thorough research and dispassionate discussion, on every other hot-button issue. If only there were an industry, whose job was to bring us information on things like this...
But anyway, agreed, the article is excellent, and that is rare.
Ever since Roe was repealed I wanted to know that graph the writer creates to understand the current reality, but simply couldn't find it and mostly just got articles that were loaded with histronics.
I would explain the repeated observation about lack of clear information on specific criteria as explicit policy choice that matches the explicit policy choice on many other complicated healthcare aspects in those countries - essentially, that you will get all kinds of weird edge cases that should get evaluated individually case-by-case; and that this determination should be done by a doctor (or a panel of doctors) and the patient, not be prescribed and enforced by the legal system.
It’s one of the oddest things about American “democracy” — if you survey people how they feel about medical treatment you will overwhelmingly get “medical decisions should be made by the doctor and patient [1] full stop and if a doctor prescribes it insurance pays for it no questions asked” but because the people with the real influence are insurance companies and the most politically involved are niche political groups that want to weaponize medical care for varying agendas we get minority rule.
[1] Minor asterisk being that in the case of minors blue tribe says child can override parent and red tribe says parent can override child. But that’s the bike shed when we’re all basically in agreement about the nuclear power plant dammit.
If medical insurance companies had to pay for every claim submitted by a doctor regardless of medical necessity or the availability of more cost-effective treatments then insurance premiums would be much higher for everyone. Would that be better? Healthcare already consumes about a fifth of our GDP. The reality is that resources are limited and demand is effectively infinite, so inevitably there has to be some level of rationing.
Except that most of the current cost is in enforcing all of those rules, not in the medical treatments themselves. The vast majority of Healthcare expenses are the enormous administrative costs of the huge bureaucracy that insurance companies have created to ensure they are paying the least possible amount of money to their clients.
Weird edge cases are very rare by definition. If they're not very rare, then they're not weird edge cases. And allowing them to exist and be handled in a bespoke way is not the same as handling all cases in a bespoke way. The law can help isolate those weird edge cases by handling the broad cases up front. That way the truly unique cases can get the resources/attention that they need.
My point is that the policy in those countries intentionally does not try to define what exactly is "the broad case" (because, frankly, any definition will have its flaws in some unforeseen and unforeseeable cases) but instead devolves that decision to the doctors, so that every case can be treated as a "weird case" if and only if the doctors say so, because the policy in these societies is that they trust the doctors to make the proper ethical choice more than their ability to prescribe exact criteria in a legal act.
In essence, allowing these cases to exist at all means that the law acknowledges that it can't explicitly state in legislation beforehand which cases will need bespoke review and which will not; and that it in such cases the law does not prescribe the final decision but devolves it to the medical specialists who see the individual case.
An alternative that I've read about from recent events in USA with hospital lawyers being present in emergency room to make a decision when a certain intervention (deemed necessary by the doctors beforehand) becomes "permissible" seems literally incomprehensible and insane at least to me, as from all the people in that room they are the least appropriate, least qualified, and with least moral rights to make a decision about what should be done or not - if you don't trust these particular doctors with doing what's right, you shouldn't let them perform operations on people at all.
Right, so the author should not have called them "weird edge cases"; forgive that typo and the main point stands:
This is a domain where upwards of 20% of cases do not fit standard frameworks. That's not unusual for medical situations, especially in this area where it is a combo of biology and social factors.
The problem with the "law up front" is that often this means that the unique cases get ignored or no resources.
The article describes a really important point, that the actual access can be very different from what the law says. I think the article might still underestimate this issue, especially political polarization around the topic. It's a very different situation in a country where protests near clinics that perform abortions are common and doctors are at times named and vilified for this. There are a lot of ways to add barriers within the legal rules, and that is not easy to compare.
I think the focus on the specific time limit is a bit misleading. I'm not sure about the exact statistics, but the vast majority of abortions are performed early. There are some laws like the "heartbeat" laws that set impossibly short time limits, but a time limit does not have to be an unreasonable limitation as long as it provides very robust exceptions for cases like health complications. That part is tricky of course, physicians do need to feel safe to make reasonable medical decisions here without having to fear legal consequences from overly vague or restrictive laws.
It is interesting that in many countries in Europe the situation have settled in some kind of middle ground, but in the US the sides seem to push for the extreme outcomes - either a total lack of restrictions (including some advocating for "after-birth abortions") or a total ban. Moreover, the propaganda seems to often conflate non-extreme proposals with extreme ones - such as calling restricting abortions after 15 weeks "abortion ban" without qualifications. I wonder if there's a place to arrive to some reasonable compromise here or the only solution is to oscillate between the extremes, geographically and temporally, depending on which tribe has more power at the moment.
No one is advocating for killing infants. The whole “after birth abortion” thing comes from a philosophy paper written by two British authors in the Journal of Medical Ethics wheee they argued that what they termed “after birth abortions” in certain circumstances could be logically consistent under some ethical frameworks. There was public outcry from pro-choice activists against their argument, and they later published a letter clarifying that they were opposed to any actual policies legalizing infanticide. This all happened in 2011-2012.
Anti-abortion advocated have claimed that people support killing children as old as 5, but no one who actually holds this view has been identified. Additionally, some people said they were in favor of “fourth trimester abortions” on a survey, but that question was obviously rather misleading. The respondents probably didn’t that pregnancy ends after 3 trimesters.
No one advocating for killing them directly, but there are people advocating for making it legal to kill them if the doctor and the mother so desire, even after live birth. For example: https://cnsnews.com/news/article/emily-ward/virginia-governo...
I didn't choose the source and it may be biased - I just took the first link to the matter I found - but I think the gist of it is adequately shown - the law as proposed would make it ok to kill live born infant if the adults present decide that's what they want. No limits, no restrictions, no conditions. It may not be the main goal of the law, but it would be one of the results. It's hard to pin down the exact position though because as I understand the law wasn't passed and the politicians are prone to change their positions if they lead to backlash, but at least as it was initially proposed, no state involvement in such decisions were intended - purely private matter concerning only persons present.
> we want the government not to be involved in these types of decisions. We want the decision to be made by the mothers and their providers, and, and this is why, Julie, that legislators, most of whom are men, by the way, shouldn’t be telling a woman what she should and shouldn’t be doing with her body
If the government is not involved, there's nobody to check the viability. There's nobody to ensure that viable infants aren't killed just because the mother and her provider decided it's the best thing to do. There's an ideological position that is based on "men can't tell women what to do" - and this position is not conditioned on "only in the case when we're talking about non-viable fetus" - it applies to all cases.
Also note that opinion is not the opinion of the author of the original law. It's another person trying to defend the law - but there's no guarantee that the letter of the law would match every tidbit of this interview, and there are multiple indications - including ones I quoted - that the intent of the law is to remove any limitations, not conditioned on non-viability of the fetus. Again, I am not saying the author of the law was dreaming about killing as many infants as possible - their motivations were probably closer to the ideology I quoted above - but the consequence of unconditional withdrawal of the state from the picture would be that it is not possible to enforce any conditions, whatever rhetoric the supporters used at the time.
The government is requiring federally funded hospitals to set up review committees to monitor life-and-death decisions about babies who need immediate medical care. Also, notices are to be posted warning that it is unlawful to discriminate against newborns by withholding ordinary treatment because they are handicapped.
I suppose some did argue that letting infants die from lack of medical care was not technically killing them. Koop called it infanticide. In the 1970s-80s Koop crusaded against attempts to classify newborns as fetus ex-utero that could be legally terminated at will.
When you read the writings of people like RBG this is one of the big reasons that she wasn't really fond of Roe v Wade to begin with. It took an issue that was gradually being moderated naturally, and then suddenly forcibly swung hardcore in one direction. In her words this "activated" people that, until then, had remained on the periphery, which must certainly go some way towards explaining the scenario in the US.
In many ways I think its an apt warning about trying to change a society through force or coercion instead of through cooperation and mutual respect.
I was was already aware that before Roe, abortion was only legal on a handful of states (including New York). However, I recently read in the NYT that New York even came close to repealing its abortion law a year or so before Roe. It only survived because of the governor's veto. The court's actions, especially when so poorly-reasoned, were bound to create a strong backlash, and the ones that could persevere long enough to counter such an undemocratic decision we're going to have the strongest opposite polarization to the court. And then that backlash created it's own polarized backlash. Now the backlashes reinforce each other.
On the contrary, they were very good at law - so good that they went much farther than the law should have gone, and used their mastery of the existing law to create a set of wholly novel legal constructs that had no basis in preceding law and were only supported by their art. However, what is created by legal art, can also be undone by legal art, it is lacks support in societal consensus. Eventually, that is exactly what has happened.
This is just silly. The Supreme Court realized the extremely obvious right to privacy in the Constitution. That was an inconvenience for the current hacks that stumbled onto the Court.
It's unfortunate that this is now being undone by pigeons shitting on the legal chessboard, but on the bright side, we now have an opportunity to even more firmly rebuke regressives.
> The Supreme Court realized the extremely obvious right to privacy in the Constitution.
There's no "extremely obvious" right to privacy in the Constitution. If there were, the concept of "penumbras" would not be necessary to support it. That is not a problem for a proponent of natural rights - to whom it is clear that the Constitution can not and should not enumerate all the rights - but for positivists it indeed presents a problem that needs quite a lot of artful work to resolve. Treating all that work as "extremely obvious" is not only silly but also not conductive to the good faith discussion - if you declare anybody who disagrees with you, including accomplished legal scholars, are idiots ipso facto, then there could not be any real discussion about anything.
> we now have an opportunity to even more firmly rebuke regressives.
If you goal is to hurt the other tribe, don't be surprised when the other tribe hurts you back. You sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind. If you want more pain, you will get more pain. That will continue until people realize there's value in finding reasonable consensus and hurting the outgroup is not a worthy goal in itself.
Note how you see yourself and you allies as human chess players, and your arguments as thoughtful chess moves, but your opponents as mindless pigeons and their arguments as "shitting" and in need to be excluded from consideration entirely. Do you think with this approach, when they gain power - and they will gain power from time to time, unless you plan to do away with democracy and somehow find a way to install an immortal Democrat God-Emperor - would they be inclined to consider any of your interests in any way? Would they be inclined to seek a reasonable compromise with you?
> (including some advocating for "after-birth abortions")
Could you double-check that? I've never heard this, but I've seen a couple of pro-life groups say that pro-choice groups are advocating for that, as a sort of propaganda to equate not just abortion with murder, but abortion providers with murderers too.
"After-birth abortions" just sounds like hospice issues. Are you obligated to leave a person plugged into a life support machine if they have no reasonable hope of recovery and can not survive without the machine? Trying to bring it into the abortion debate is just muddying the waters.
Yeah, IME that's what the anti-choice folks say about the pro-choice folks, but I've never heard it from actual pro-choice folks.
Yes, there is some joking about "post natal abortions" for certain extremist politicians, but it's never serious about permitting after-birth abortions".
I think Peter Singer at one point argued in earnest for legal infanticide in certain situations, but I'm not sure of his current position, and regardless infanticide is far from representative of mainstream pro-choice discourse.
FYI, "anti-choice" is a pejorative, as is "pro-abortion" for pro-choice people. Let's steer clear of mudslinging on such a controversial topic, so as to avoid a flamewar. :)
"Anti-choice" is purely descriptive. They are opposed to you having that choice.
It's less pejorative than the implication that "pro-life" connotes that the opposition is "anti-life". Few pro-lifers seem to put any effort into guaranteeing life for anybody -- often in favor of capital punishment, and practically never advocating policies that preserve life such as health care.
"Anti-choice" is about the most dispassionate, accurate label I can apply. There is a choice that the wish to deny. Any other term is a euphemism.
"Choice" is a weasel word here. You could call the Criminal Code "anti-choice" - because it limits choices of a wannabe criminal by threatening to put them in jail if they do things that are prohibited by the code. And there's not a word of lie in it - the code limits your choices. But this is a description so reduced that the reduction itself becomes the lie - you throw out the important part, that the choices we want to restrict are restricted for an important reason, not just because we hate people having choice. Proper term would be "anti-abortion" if the person opposes abortion, not "anti-choice" - because they do not oppose choice as a principle, they oppose one specific choice, and it's a crucial distinction in this case.
I think it was more that it bypassed the political discussion needed to come to compromise (in written law). Which is unfortunate, as the 70s and 80s were a much easier time to have US political parties work together and compromise.
It short circuited the political process and substituted it with legal doctrine, which lends itself to absolutist, logically consistent moral positions as opposed to the messy and incoherent compromises that come out of politics.
And yet what we're seeing post Roe, are absolutist, logically consistent moral positions in places like Idaho, where 1 party rule has resulted in a political platform that allows no exceptions whatsoever, even for the life of the mother.
This however is a pretty recent phenomenon, I think, as a result of rushing to the extremes. I suspect this position will be moderated soon, though with current toxic political climate, it may take a bit for things to cool off so that such things would not be seen as "ceding ground to them".
In early 2000s, the racial tensions in the US were less toxic. Then of course it kinda went sideways. Also, I think gay acceptance is gaining grounds. Some things are improving, though not too many, unfortunately.
We've already seen what happens when Republicans encounter the uncomfortable reality of the laws they are passing, in the case of the 10-year old Ohio girl. First they claimed it didn't happen, then they attacked the doctor, then they deflected to the issue of immigration claiming that was the real problem. This is all true to form.
Ectopic pregnancies are not a problem for Republicans because they are not the ones dying from those pregnancies. They don't care about the electoral ramifications because they maintain impenetrable strongholds in the states where these laws are being passed. It's not that they are passing the laws and will find out the consequences; they know the consequences (they're not dumb) and feel safe passing the laws regardless.
I'm not a Republican, but I think you can make strong points without the inflammatory rhetoric. In fact, I think your rhetoric weakens your argument--Republican women obviously aren't biologically different from Democratic or independent women, they can all suffer from ectopic pregnancy, and Republican women would have the most to lose considering they're presumably more likely to live in states where these laws are passed. Moreover, to the point of this thread, the proper solution is legislative (at the national level) rather than judicial--pass reasonable abortion legislation at the national level.
By "Republicans" of course I mean "Republicans in power who are writing and passing these laws". They largely affluent and largely male dominated. Insofar as women in power are passing these laws, those who will need an abortion will be unaffected by the laws they themselves pass, because they will be able to afford to travel to a jurisdiction where abortion is legal. I predict approximately 0 people who have passed these laws will abide by them if their life is on the line.
I see no indication Republican women radically differ from Republican men substantially on this issue, at least in the polls I've seen. And if there were, there are enough prominent Republican women that would be able to speak up on the issue.
So I think your simplistic take of "patriarchal Republicans oppress women again" is probably a couple of generations late.
Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin is 59 years old. I don't think she will be affected by a ban on abortion. If she does somehow need an abortion, I'm sure she'll get one in Canada or Washington. As for the poorest women in her state, they will not be able to afford such a luxury, and therefore have to live with the consequences of McGeachin's position while McGeachin herself will not. That's my point.
You are desperately grasping at straws. There are many conservative young women. Of course a prominent politician would be on the older side - where would you see a 20-year old governor (or lt. governor)? It takes time to climb the ladder. You point is wrong - McGeachin has this position not because it doesn't affect her personally, at least not primarily so, but because a lot of people in her state - yes, including a lot of women, check any serious poll and you'd see women and men differ very little at that question - support this position, and the is the politician that aligns with those people. You may completely disagree with them, and that's fine, that's what the democracy is for - but don't make it about sexism, or age, or anything like that, because it isn't about that at all.
Claiming that laws specifically targeting women's bodies are not about sexism at all is what looks like grasping at straws to me. I think maybe your mistake is believing that someone can't be sexist against their own sex.
Women are specifically targeted by these laws, they will face punishment due to these laws, and they will in fact die because of these laws. Their economic prospects will drop. Single women and their children will fall into poverty at faster rates. We know all these things will happen because the opposite happened when Roe was decided. This isn't a mystery to anyone.
> McGeachin has this position not because it doesn't affect her personally ... but because a lot of people in her state ... support this position
I'll remind anyone reading this that the Idaho GOP just voted to exclude support for a life-of-the-mother exception to their party's official platform. I highly doubt the majority of women agree with that, even in Idaho. That is a very extreme position. We'll have to wait on the polling to come out on that because it just happened this weekend.
But sure, let's just say for the sake of argument they do actually hold that position.
What I'm saying is that every woman who supports this position and needs a lifesaving abortion will either leave Idaho to get an abortion, or die in Idaho because they couldn't afford to leave. McGeachin and everyone she loves and cares about will be in the former group, I guarantee you that.
> Claiming that laws specifically targeting women's bodies are not about sexism at all is what looks like grasping at straws to me.
Nope. You need to understand the difference between "law affecting women because the matter in question is women" and "law affecting women because somebody wants to hurt women specifically". The abortion regulation can not be not about women (weird exceptions excluded) - it doesn't mean it is based only on the desire to subjugate and oppress women, this is just a stupid take that reduces everything to a bumper sticker.
> and they will in fact die because of these laws.
Nope, they won't. Idaho GOP position is not the law and I don't think it's likely it will become the law. The actual law is different and does not preclude pregnancy termination if it is necessary for saving woman's life. Women may die because they would make a decision due to these laws - e.g. to seek an illegal and unsafe abortion instead of, e.g., carrying to term and giving the child for adoption - but there would be always conscious choice and action involved. Again, you are confusing regulation that concerns women - because, obviously, any abortion regulation would - and one that is designed to hurt women, which it is not.
> I highly doubt the majority of women agree with that, even in Idaho.
I do not know about the majority, but I am sure some do. In any case, again, the reason why they take this position is not because they hate women, and until you realize that, you won't understand anything about their positions. Maybe you don't want to, but I am here to tell you your position is wrong. Maybe you don't care to know the truth - that's also your choice.
No, I think that the simplistic take still has the sting of truth about it.
As https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2018/09/14/age-race-and-gender-s... says, demographics of party support are that the Republican base is dominated by older men, while the Democratic base is dominated by younger women. Therefore Republicans really are going to have an institutional bias against issues that affect young women.
This can be seen by Republican opposition to abortion, childcare issues, and vaccinating against HPV (which causes cancer in women).
Republicans also opposed Medicare and Social Security expansion, so by that logic they hate older people too.
"Institutional bias" is a meaningless phrase that does not explain anything. Conservative positions and their sources are well known and do not need any magic invisible (or visible only to the left, magically) properties to explain. It is not a huge surprise why conservative Christians don't like abortion - they have been talking for decades why, and one needs no magic "bias" to understand that argument, even if you disagree with it. Introducing this just makes the whole political discussion weird - people tell you "we think so and so because of this and that" and you tell them "no, in fact you don't think this, you are just not completely sane and affected by 'bias', which you can not see but I can, so let me explain what you truly think and why!". That doesn't sound like something that can lead to anything sensical.
It is true that older people tend to be more conservative, statistically - but it is just silly to reduce all the gamut of political opinions and ideologies to that one thing.
What you are arguing is that, "The fact that their rhetoric doesn't agree with the take means that the take has no validity."
This form of argument is always available, and always meaningless. For example Russian rhetoric is that they are fighting Nazis, and not that they are attempting genocide. That doesn't change that they are attempting genocide.
In the case of Republicans, we have a group of mostly older white men. Most of whom agree with a set of cultural values around family, marriage and so on. For example in polls, Republicans are over 1.5 times more likely than Democrats to say that women should stay home and not work. It is no surprise that Republicans are far less likely to support programs to give women access to child care for the purpose of working. Republicans are generally opposed to abortion. Republicans are far less willing to accept that unmarried women should enjoy sexual freedom, cohabit without marriage, and so on.
Republicans will cite a variety of sources for these positions, such as the Bible. But what it adds up to is that Republicans broadly support traditional patriarchal positions about the role of women, while opposing social changes and policies that most women would like, and feel gives them more freedom to live their lives as they will.
It is not horribly unreasonable to describe this as, "patriarchal Republicans oppress women again." No matter how much that does not fit the stories that Republicans tell about themselves.
What I am arguing is that using some magic invisible entities like "institutional bias" makes possible to prove anything you want - and by that, proves nothing at all. Instead of trying to seek the real causes of event, you just say "oh, it's those white males and their institutional bias, nothing to think about here". That's a lazy and nonsensical take.
> In the case of Republicans, we have a group of mostly older white men
Here you are purposely confusing between "majority of them" and "all of them, or at least all worth considering". It's like saying "Americans are mostly white". Demographically, it's true, 73% of Americans are white, but continuing the conversation while ignoring the other 26% would be pretty much not talking about America. Also, 50.5% of Americans are female - the majority. Would it make sense to talk about America as "the country of white women" and ignore all others?
> Republicans are over 1.5 times more likely than Democrats to say that women should stay home and not work
"Should" does a lot of work here. Does it mean "banned by the law from working"? Does it mean "if man marries a woman, he should earn enough to let woman not work if she doesn't want to"? Does it mean "one-earner families are better environment for children than two-earner families"? Does it mean "I would never marry a woman who wants to work"? Does it mean "this is the ideal role-model situation, which we will strive for, though in real life we often fall short of it"? Can mean any of those and hundred other things. What it doesn't mean though is "Republicans hate women, including women, who have internalized self-hate".
> But what it adds up to is that Republicans broadly support traditional patriarchal positions about the role of women, while opposing social changes and policies that most women would like, and feel gives them more freedom to live their lives as they will.
Are you sure most women think working some mind-numbingly mundane job for 8 hours every day is more freedom for them than staying at home with their children (or even without them, just doing whatever they like)? Surely, if the women is a CEO she would like to keep the job likely. Most working women aren't CEOs though. Are you sure some of them wouldn't feel more free if they didn't have to work?
Anyway, this argument is like 100 years late - nobody prohibits any women from working, and no Republicans that I heard of proposed any legislation that would ban women from working. However, if you think that not taking money from other people to pay for some woman's childcare needs is equal to "patriarchal position" - that's nonsense of the first degree. Nobody owes anybody else - men or women - to pay for their childcare needs. It has nothing to do with "patriarchal" - it's just that I do not have to give money to care for your child, because it's my money and not my child. Take your own money - or, if you have a decent job, your employer's money - and care for your child, nobody bans you from that. Trying to guilt people into giving you money to care for your children and calling them "patriarchal" if they refuse is just an abuse of terms. Presenting them as if they don't give up their own money with no benefit for them to benefit some stranger women as them hating women is plain disingenuous.
You asked about Congressional power to legislate, not whether 14A grants an abortion right. These are different questions. For example, it seems Congress could plausibly pass a general abortion ban with exceptions for medically necessary abortion under 14A. Moreover, if Congress wants to give itself additional power more explicitly, it could pass an Amendment to give itself authority to legislate on abortion (of course, this requires bipartisan cooperation).
To be clear, you're talking about section 1 of the 14th amendment which reads:
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.
First, I thought we were talking about legislation allowing abortion at the federal level. That said, if this court is consistent (not guaranteed), then I still don't agree. This was ratified by states with laws allowing abortion. Therefore an originalist interpretation should not accept that person here refers to the unborn.
But I can see THIS court accepting that section 5 gives Congress the power to pass legislation, defining "person" is a proper legislative act, and therefore the Congressional interpretation of a disputed word should be accepted.
So sure. Congress can try ban abortion nationally, and might succeed. But I doubt that they can legalize it nationally and have that decision hold.
(Separately the amendment process is more complicated. The failure of the Equal Rights Amendment demonstrates that Congress alone cannot create an amendment, even if the public generally supports it.)
> are not a problem for Republicans because they are not the ones dying from those pregnancies
Wait, membership in Republican party guarantees you not having ectopic pregnancy? How does that work? That goes way beyond my knowledge of biology and human anatomy, I'd like to know more about it.
> they maintain impenetrable strongholds in the states where these laws are being passed
I think it was just mentioned above no laws are being passed that concern ectopic pregnancies. Is that not correct?
The no exceptions whatsoever bans are the model for the national ban that will come ones Republicans have the power to do it. If they believe all abortion is murder, what amount of murder would you expect them to tolerate?
> it's what you would expect from a group of largely white, upper class, me
If you try to see everything through identarian lens, no wonder your picture comes out skewed.
> No matter when a life begins, the posters here on HN feel they will largely be unaffected
So, you think we should shut up about it, because it's not for us to discuss such things. But you, yourself, do not. Because it's different for you, of course. You brought us the revelation of us being (statistically, because this is the only thing that matters) of wrong race and gender, and thus you are the exception from the rules.
> vast political project that is underway, a project that cares not for philosophical arguments, because it really cares about control and obedience.
Oh, you mean like we're being censored on every social network, deplatformed, fired from jobs for saying a wrong word at a wrong time, locked down, forced to surrender control of our movements, what we put into our bodies, what we wear, who we do business with, how we speak, how we teach our children? Constantly surveilled and monitored, and continuously gaslighted by our own government? Yeah, I feel you, I don't like that too. Not sure why you mentioned it out of the blue, but that's bad, I agree. But I have an idea. Maybe a bit less of power centralization would allow us to fight this control and obedience project? I mean, if the guys in control of it didn't have the power to tell the whole nation what to do - maybe they could demand less obedience and exercise less control? A wild thought, I know.
> I've read through most comments, and it's what you would expect from a group of largely white, upper class, men - a philosophical debate that HN seems focused on the definition of life and drawing tortured analogies because seemingly no one here can actually relate to what it's like to need an abortion to save their own life.
This is a site geared towards philosophical discussion. What were you expecting exactly? I would add that your claim regarding the people here being "unaffected" is disingenuous and presumptive. That no one here is on a moral crusade on your behalf, does not mean no one cares about the issue. We wouldn't be talking about it otherwise.
> barely even touches on the real experiences of women and minorities who will be the ones whose lives are most affected as a result of the new laws being passed.
Firstly, the absolute and relative populations of biological females on this forum are low. How exactly do you expect people to comprehend the "lived experiences" of a demographic that one is unlikely to run into on this forum?
Secondly, women and minorities are not ideological monoliths. Polls indicate that there are about as many women against abortion as there are for them across all ethnicities, levels of wealth, creeds, and religions. The lived experiences of a female South Korean Presbyterian or female Ugandan Anglican are going to fall closer to that of the stereotypical Christian male Republican than they do to the stereotype of the disenfranchised single mother-to-be.
> The second and third order effects of the recent court decision will change many aspects of our lives and our society, and it seems that has not actually caught up with many people here yet.
If you had taken the time to read a number of the comments, many have touched on the same point by way of the very philosophical discussion you disdain. Of course, this ruling has long-term effects. However, your approach to it ignores the hows and then whys and isn't conducive to discussion.
This comment is dangerous and harmful. It only mouths a nostrum that flatters white coastal elite sensibilities--that any discussion of abortion has to be about how sexist and racist(?) opponents of it are. It presupposes that minorities are incapable of considering moral or philosophical arguments. And, perhaps worst of all, it's damaging to the cause of protecting access to abortion: insulting people only serves to validate yourself to the in-group you're signaling to, as opposed to convincing people of abortion being an important right. In a time where elections have to be won if we want to protect abortion rights, you've got to learn to make arguments stronger than "you're a white man."
Dangerous and harmful? Sorry for my wrongthink I guess. I'm not saying any discussion has to be about racism and sexism, I'm saying that this discussion filled with thought experiments and tortured analogies barely even considers the prospect that there's something more at play here. As if there is no power dynamic whatsoever. This debate is as political (probably more so) as it is philosophical. Your post seems to presuppose that there aren't sexism and racism dynamics at play, which seems equally "dangerous and harmful" to me if we're going to go down that road.
As for in-group signaling, there's a lot of that going on here, including in your very comment (white coastal elite sensibilities). Talk about making a strong argument -- maybe saying a comment is "dangerous and elitist" isn't putting your best foot forward.
Roe v. Wade didn't fall because more people were convinced it should fall. A minority of the country elected a President that appointed the current Justices. A Senate representing a minority of the country used hardball power-plays to install those justices on the bench. Those Justices lied (according to two Senators that voted for them) and obfuscated to make sure they would be confirmed, some of whom passed by the slimmest of margins and certainly wouldn't have gotten on the bench if they had been candid about their intentions. Abortion rights are falling because people in power used their power to get what they wanted, regardless of anyone's opinion.
For me, this whole issue has taught me that the best way to get what you want isn't to convince people and build a coalition (who have largely made up their minds anyway), but to use power in cynical ways to reach your desired outcome, the consequences be damned.
Given the structure of the Senate and the composition of the states, implementing policies by simple will to power is a strategy only available to Republicans. And if you think convincing more people, person by person, isn't a viable strategy for Democrats, we're in for a bad time for the foreseeable future.
> I've read through most comments, and it's what you would expect from a group of largely white, upper class, men
I'll hazard some unsolicited advice: besides being boring and morally reprehensible, tropes only diminish your credibility.
> I've read through most comments, and it's what you would expect from a group of largely white, upper class, men - a philosophical debate that barely even touches on the real experiences of women and minorities who will be the ones whose lives are most affected as a result of the new laws being passed.
There has been virtually no appetite to discuss the women who have had negative abortion experiences over the last 50 years (or at least not in my lifetime) under Roe v. Wade whether minority or otherwise. Cherry-picking experiences isn't a good formulation for constructive public debate.
> No matter when a life begins, the posters here on HN feel they will largely be unaffected, so the debate remains in the clouds.
On the contrary, it's such a serious topic that it deserves a dispassioned treatment. This is genuinely the first time I've seen an abortion debate that doesn't immediately devolve into "you want to murder babies" and "you want to oppress women". It's good to challenge our emotions with reason.
> The post-Roe era will be blanket and extreme abortion bans wherever the GOP has full control. They are telegraphing this and many posters here are seemingly willfully blind to what they have in store. So far they have said they desire to pass the most extreme bans possible regarding abortion at a national level, and when they are done with that they are coming after contraception, gay marriage, and even sexual acts they find distasteful. I don't know why anyone here is dismissing the possibility as far-fetched.
It's pretty hard to believe Republicans in general are coming for things like gay marriage when 55% of Republicans approve of it per a 2022 Gallup poll (I would imagine conservatives approve of contraception even more). I think perhaps the left-wing media may be exaggerating right now, as partisan media are want to do.
I think it's a good idea to establish legislative protections for these things, particularly by building a broad, bipartisan coalition (maybe take lessons from the gay rights movement, considering its remarkable success in reversing even Republican opinion). If Republicans want to pander to their extreme wings, then take their moderates (reverse the 2016-2022 trend).
And yet there is a reason the discussion here barely touches on women. We know how the demographics of HN skew, and that creates a huge bias in the discussion here. We shouldn't naval gaze through this debate, and instead recognize that of the hundreds of comments here going in circles about stealing kidneys, hypothetically poisoning people, and hypothetical lives born or dying, there are real people who are actually in harms way right now due to laws being passed.
> There has been virtually no appetite to discuss the women who have had negative abortion experiences over the last 50 years
There's definitely an appetite, but is there space? It's certainly not created here.
> it's such a serious topic that it deserves a dispassioned treatment.
Maybe it deserves a dispassionate treatment (I'm certainly not going to provide that), but certainly not a myopic one. The high-minded philosophical arguments here miss the forest for the trees in my opinion.
> It's pretty hard to believe Republicans in general are coming for things like gay marriage when 55% of Republicans approve of it per a 2022 Gallup poll
Republicans "in general" aren't who I'm talking about; I'm talking about politicians. If you haven't noticed, gerrymandering has created a situation where Republicans can choose their voters, so they remain in power no matter how extreme their positions. Maybe also flying under your radar is a complete disdain among many Republicans for the concept of elections and democracy as a concept. Perhaps you haven't noticed that the Supreme Court will soon decide on a case that determines whether state legislatures are able to have complete control, without judicial review, of their election results?
Frankly, it doesn't matter what Republicans writ large want. The extremists have taken control of the party, and they are stacking the deck to make sure they never have to lose an election again. Last time they lost an election they literally plotted and attempted to execute a coup. Now they are trying to make what they did in 2020 legal. What do you think happens next? Genuine question there.
> We know how the demographics of HN skew, and that creates a huge bias in the discussion here.
I hazard to guess there is a huge skew in your social circles and media consumption.
When was the last time you had an earnest discussion with a swing voter who leans pro-life? Note that I'm not talking about someone torn between voting Democrat or voting Green: I'm talking about someone who voted for Obama, then Trump, then was undecided on 2020. I'll hazard to guess you simply haven't: I have.
Simply yelling at them for being white men is ineffective, particularly when they're nonwhite and female. And they're absolutely capable of handling philosophical arguments, and it's deeply condescending to define nonwhites and women as nonagents who would never to think about the philosophical underpinnings of a political position.
And you would be wrong, because that describes basically my entire family. I watch a lot of Fox News, I watch a lot of MSNBC. I read the WSJ, I read the WAPO. My friends are both conservative Christians and self proclaimed Marxists. I dated a super pro-life Catholic for a decade. What more do you want from me?
Insofar as my actual approach is persuading using the experience of actual people rather than philosophical arguments, yes I've had success with that. It probably won't work with the people here, but the people here are very peculiar. What you see here on HN is not my attempt to persuade internet people. Does that ever work?
You can quibble about why so many on the right and the center are insulated from the harm, but that demonstrates that people don't want to discuss the intended harmful outcome of these state laws that will go national via SCOTUS or when a Republican takes power again.
It's totally reasonable to be disgusted at how convinced people can be that the conservative project won't come at us with a dangerous national abortion ban with no exceptions and then come for contraception, who you can marry, what your kids learn, how you pray and whose property rights are worth as little as their right to marry and have sex.
> It's totally reasonable to be disgusted at how convinced people can be that the conservative project won't come at us with a dangerous national abortion ban with no exceptions and then come for contraception, who you can marry, what your kids learn, how you pray and whose property rights are worth as little as their right to marry and have sex.
I don't think it's reasonable at all, because I think you're dealing in a particularly exaggerated caricature of Republicans (you're parroting all of the talking points from the most detached left-wing "media outlets"). Notably, 55% of Republicans support gay marriage in 2022 per Gallup--the idea that they're "coming for gay marriage" is ridiculous. Moreover, "what your kids learn" is something everyone is concerned about and have been concerned about for the last 50 years (recall it used to be the left that pushed back against indoctrination of children in schools). This is just baseless moral panic / hyperventilation, and its only function is to spread hate and division.
State laws passed by elected Republicans are not media. These bans existed in law not too long ago in this country not just in media. We just saw the Texas law and the intended SCOTUS decision fulfill the 2016 GOP campaign promise.
There is no reason to believe the desired outcome goes no further than the Dobbs decision. And it would be easy for elected Rs and R candidates to fight division by saying they won't come for contraception, who you can marry, what your kids learn, how you pray and whose property rights are worth as little as their right to marry and have sex.
Yes I want to create division between people who evaluate the movement on its desired outcomes and see the harm and people who think the US is exceptional and wouldn't use the law in immoral ways.
And I didn't say they're "coming for gay marriage", I referenced mixed marriage as "who you can marry." But it won't stop at gay marriage either, the right to be openly gay or trans is what they're coming for and people should know that.
> There is no reason to believe the desired outcome goes no further than the Dobbs decision.
Republicans definitely have an agenda, but there's not broad support among them for eliminating gay marriage (55% of Republicans support gay marriage per Gallup 2022) or mixed marriage (only 12% of Republicans believe interracial marriage is a social ill per Pew 2017). The view that Republicans are coming for interracial marriage, gay marriage, etc is just more of the same baseless hysteria that has characterized left-wing media for the last decade (and I'm not a conservative or otherwise right-wing, so please spare me the "the right wing media is also bad/worse!" stuff because I already agree).
I just don’t understand how you can say it is baseless left wing hysteria when powerful and influential Republicans are literally saying they want to do exactly that. That is the basis. If republicans weren’t saying they want to come after gay marriage, no one would be worried. But they are.
Baseless would be saying that Democrats want to come after gay marriage. Obviously there is no basis for that statement. But when powerful Republicans literally say exactly that they want to end gay marriage, it forms the basis for concerns that they will follow through.
Just last month the Texas Republican Party had a convention and declared “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice”, which sets the debate about homosexuality back decades. What about the Texas Republican Party platform is left wing media hysteria? What about the position that homosexuality is “abnormal” signals to you that Republicans aren’t coming after gay rights? We’re not talking about a single justice or senator here; we are talking about a state party platform, in a state controlled entirely by that party.
Well, groups are made up of large numbers of people, so we can’t understand the direction of those groups by looking at the opinions of those groups by looking at a relative handful of people (or rather, we can via polling, but that’s not what you’re describing).
Anyway, “abnormal lifestyle choice” isn’t a “decades” setback. Homosexuality has only been mainstream for a little more than a decade, and even then about half of Republicans have opposed it.
Honestly, people who are so concerned should focus on making the Democrats electable again, because we’ve tried enormous amounts of left-wing spin from every epistemological institution and all manner of divisiveness and that hasn’t worked particularly well so far.
We can understand the directions of groups by looking at their elected leaders. Take the US House for instance: just today those representing the GOP in the US House voted overwhelmingly against a bill protecting same-sex marriage at the federal level. Today!
I mean, a party platform is exactly a document declaring the direction of a group of people. They get together and vote on it. Why can't we take that to be a pretty clear expression of their values and beliefs?
How much clearer can this get? The Supreme court gutted the constitutional foundation of Obergefell. One of the Justices is begging for a challenge to the decision. A US Senator concurs. The former VP agrees. State parties agree and make it an official plank of their party's platform. And now House Republicans have shown where they stand. What more proof do you need?
I guess another way to ask this question would be, what would you need to see before you would agree that the Republican party is coming after gay marriage next? How much more explicit do they need to be about it?
And yes, the language used by the Texas GOP does take the debate back decades. Homosexuality is not a “choice”, and definitely not merely a “lifestyle”. I thought that debate had been settled, but I guess gay conversion therapy is back on the menu. And as a matter of fact, homosexuals are normal, and have been an integral part of human societies as long as they have existed, including American society since before it was founded. That Americans had not accepted them as such doesn’t change that homosexuality is normal.
> the idea that they're "coming for gay marriage" is ridiculous.
It would be less ridiculous if a conservative Supreme Court Justice and a Republican US Senator hadn't just expressed their intention to do just that. No one would be worried about the prospect if the party wasn't explicitly telegraphing the desire to come after these rights. Pretending that these concerns are ridiculous is to pretend that what Supreme Court Justices and US Senators say has no weight. In fact, they have power and they've proven they are not afraid to use it.
> so they remain in power no matter how extreme their positions
If you watched actual Republican primaries, as opposed to reading about scary Republicans on Twitter, you'd see this is wildly inaccurate - there is substantial variety among Republican positions, and there are things which different Republican voters (gasp! Republicans voter can differ!) are willing and not willing to tolerate. Which kinda would be expected from a party uniting tens of millions of people, if you think about it a bit...
> Maybe also flying under your radar is a complete disdain among many Republicans for the concept of elections and democracy as a concept.
This is also wildly false - if anything, Republicans are very upset right now exactly because they feel the concept of elections is under attack. Whether it is true or not, it's exactly the opposite of what would happen if they disdained the concept of elections.
> and they are stacking the deck to make sure they never have to lose an election again
This canard is dusted off on every election, and it is as false today as it was first time when it was invented. Nobody is ensuring "they never have to lose an election again", however sweet that may sound to a partisan ear, and it's not possible for Republicans even more given that Democrats almost exclusively control large population centers. Yes, there are places where Republicans routinely win (as there are places where Democrats routinely win) - it's not a nefarious conspiracy, it's a demographic fact. But this will never become everywhere, elections in the US in general has always been competitive, and remain so.
> Last time they lost an election they literally plotted and attempted to execute a coup.
No they did not. They had a protest. Which led to nothing except Democrats trying to milk it for the last drops of that sweet partisan outrage juice for the last year and a half. That's all there was.
> Now they are trying to make what they did in 2020 legal.
What they did in 2020 - namely protesting - already is legal. What some of them did - like fighting with the police, stealing things and vandalizing things - is not legal, and nobody is trying to make it legal.
> What do you think happens next? Genuine question there.
Next there will be 2022 elections where Democrats suffer some serious drubbing due to Presidential party routinely suffering drubbing in the midterms, compounded by dismal performance of the current President and generally unfavorable surrounding conditions. Some Democrats (not the smartest ones) will scream the democracy is dead in the US and fascism has been finally installed, and this is the last elections ever. Then there would be 2024 elections as usual, with the usual appropriate screaming and running around from parties involved. I have no idea who would win, but I am sure it'd be as close as ever, and whatever party wins, the other party would claim the election has been stolen and the democracy in the US has ended and fascism has been installed. The democracy will continue as it did for the last 250 years.
Indictments do not prove anything - indictment is just an opinion of people at DOJ, controlled by the party that wants to punish those people. All while ignoring much more harmful and violent protests both in DC and all over the country, all while they are being described as "mostly peaceful". There was no "coup attempt", and the protest didn't even get nearly as violent as many protests were in 2020. People going into government buildings happened many times before - including occupying them for many days, disrupting the proceedings, and even setting government buildings on fire. It's not a good thing, to be sure, but by the standards of what we've seen in the last decade, even the last couple of years, this protest was pretty tame. Only the partisan needs of the Democrats make them to inflate it into something it never has been.
It's pretty clear you haven't even paid attention to the developments of the past 18 months, and made up your mind in the week following Jan 6 as to what the event was. Comparing Jan 6 to BLM reveals you don't really know anything why those people went to DC on that day, and what was going on behind the scenes between Nov 3 and that day. You don't have to take my word for it; top-ranking Republicans including White House officials have already testified under oath as to the facts. They don't support your "protest" theory.
Will you change your mind when the convictions for seditious conspiracy start coming down, or will that just be the result of biased juries and judges?
The siege on the Capitol was 2021. That's when people were fighting with police but people convinced themselves that protestors in 2020 weren't beaten, gassed nor arrested by the busload.
> That's when people were fighting with police but people convinced themselves that protestors in 2020 weren't beaten, gassed nor arrested by the busload.
Who are "people" that don't believe (m/any) protestors were beaten, tear-gassed, or arrested in 2020? I'm sure there are some nuts out there, but I don't think many people on any side of the issue would seriously argue that out of the millions of people who were protesting all over the country (amid bona fide riots) that there were no instances of excessive use of force by police toward protestors. This seems like nut-picking.
Women make up the majority of voters in states passing restrictive abortion laws. 53% of voters in 2020 in Oklahoma were women, and they voted for Donald Trump 62-37. In Mississippi (the state that enacted the law that was upheld in Dobbs) women outnumbered men 55-45, and voted 56-43 for Trump. Conservative women are the backbone of the anti-abortion movement, just as liberal women are the backbone of the pro-choice movement. And numerically, those two groups are evenly matched, with most women falling in the mushy middle: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...
As to minorities, they are much more likely to view abortion as a morally complex issue than white liberals. The 25% or so of the Democratic Party that identifies as pro life is predominantly Black and Hispanic. In Georgia, for example, Black people and white people have identical views on abortion—half of Black people oppose it, despite voting democrat: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-stu...
It’s incredibly frustrating when minorities are used as tokens and proxies to advance views that are predominantly held by white liberals. It’s goddamn disrespectful to their political autonomy.
> barely even touches on the real experiences of women and minorities who will be the ones whose lives are most affected as a result of the new laws being passed.
I qualified "women and minorities". There are many women and minorities who will not be affected at all by a ban on abortion. Specifically, the wealthiest ones can afford to have high-minded philosophical opinions about what life is, because if/when they ever encounter the real need for an abortion, they can just get one! And we know they will because that's what history and experience shows us happens in places where abortions are banned; abortions are not eliminated, they are just displaced and made more dangerous.
But that doesn't change the fact that the people who will be most affected by these bans, the people whose lives are on the line, are in fact women and minorities. And it doesn't change the fact that real experiences of actual people are completely missing from the discussion here. I mean, if you want to take your position, where is the discussion from the pro-life crowd about people who weren't aborted and appreciate that? Or the people who decided against an abortion and what changed their mind? That would be a good discussion to have too and would reify the whole philosophical debate. But that's absent as well!
And I'm sorry it so frustrates you that you believe minorities are used at proxies to advance views that are predominately held by white liberals and find it so disrespectful, but a lot of people also feel that you championing the government to control our bodies is indeed very disrespectful, so there's enough disrespect to go around.
> And it doesn't change the fact that real experiences of actual people are completely missing from the discussion here. I mean, if you want to take your position, where is the discussion from the pro-life crowd about people who weren't aborted and appreciate that? Or the people who decided against an abortion and what changed their mind? That would be a good discussion to have too and would reify the whole philosophical debate. But that's absent as well!
And rightly so, because there's not much that's going to be accomplished by arguing from cherry-picked anecdotes. Moreover, the perspectives of women who have deep trauma and regret for their abortions have been firmly pushed out of the public debate for my entire life (indeed, for as long as I've been alive, the "debate" has only been pro-choice people arguing against straw men).
> And I'm sorry it so frustrates you that you believe minorities are used at proxies to advance views that are predominately held by white liberals and find it so disrespectful, but a lot of people also feel that you championing the government to control our bodies is indeed very disrespectful, so there's enough disrespect to go around.
Honestly, if you can't participate without inflaming the discussion in each of your comments, maybe just take a beat before commenting?
> Specifically, the wealthiest ones can afford to have high-minded philosophical opinions about what life is, because if/when they ever encounter the real need for an abortion, they can just get one!
Excerpt it’s overwhelmingly the wealthy minorities—the ones assimilated into highly educated majority white spaces—that agree with white liberals on this. It’s the working class ones and first generation immigrants that view abortion with more skepticism. Among Hispanics, just 29% of the ones who speak Spanish at home believe abortion should be legal, and 41% of first generation immigrants.
> a lot of people also feel that you championing the government to control our bodies is indeed very disrespectful, so there's enough disrespect to go around.
Those people can make their arguments based on individual liberty on their own dime. Why bring minorities into it?
If I’m being cynical, the reason is that the highly educated white people who have categorical beliefs about personal autonomy—and also usually reject religion—realize they aren’t a sympathetic political grouping. So they use women and minorities as a cover.
And that’s wrong! You’re trading on other people’s identities to advance libertarian views that most of them reject. You’re treating them as subjects in an application of your own philosophy of personal autonomy, instead of independent members of the body politic that have their own positions on these issues—positions that don’t reflect libertarian philosophies about personal liberty.
> And it is this feeling of disconnect from the real consequences of the post-Roe era that is causing most here to completely miss the vast political project that is underway, a project that cares not for philosophical arguments, because it really cares about control and obedience.
God this whole comment is a breath of fresh air. Thank you.
Well in its original form Roe laid out, without any legislative input, a full on trimester system in which abortion was definitely legal until the third trimester, thus making regulations like the ones you mention impossible. This was somewhat relaxed with PP v Casey, but I don't think the kinds of regulations you mention would even be legal then. Thus, by making the compromise position untenable, it naturally brought out extremists on both ends.
In the UK, certainly England (not sure if different in Northern Ireland), by law abortion is not 'on demand' and carrying one out as such (on demand without meeting legal criteria) is technically a criminal offense, though in practice this does not seem to be really enforced.
I believe that the law states that abortion can be carried out for specific "health or social reasons".
So it seems in general they are using a 'fudge' by invoking risk to "mother's mental health" but again legally there is no "on demand" abortion in the UK.
Edit 2: I find it odd that people seem to be displeased by a statement of, I think, important facts. If anything, people in favour of "on demand" abortion should lobby for a law change in the UK because at it stands a woman can legally be denied an abortion and a doctor carrying an abortion can be charged with a criminal offense (in a country that prides itself of having the "rule of law".)
I invite you to Google about decriminalisation of abortion in the UK to see that this is an active issue because, indeed it is not currently decriminalised.
> Technically, abortion is never available on-demand in Great Britain. (Northern Ireland is a bit different from England/Scotland/Wales.) However, the law allows abortions up to 24 weeks if there is a “grave risk to the mental health” of the woman and nowadays abortion providers—who make the determination—almost always view the fact that a woman wants an abortion as proof that such a risk exists. Thus, abortion is de-facto available on demand for 24 weeks.
Did you read down to the third paragraph of the article you're citing?
The third ground is typically interpreted liberally with regards to mental health to create a de facto state of abortion on demand, and nearly all abortions—98% in 2019 and 2020—are performed to protect the woman's mental health.
I have commented on this and I maintain what I wrote.
This is a topic periodically raised by health professional because, again, this is using the law at the limit and it would be much preferable to amend the law to make it on demand to protect everyone.
Okay, but the whole point of the article is to address the nuances around the realities of abortion access. It's not an advocacy piece, and it's not specifically about UK law.
If this is true, TFA is presenting false / incorrect information. They listed "Great Britain" as "available on-demand except for fetal abnormalities or mental health issues".
Edit: Thank you to all the child comments below for the clarifications.
There's no need to speculate, this is all very clearly addressed in TFA:
> Technically, abortion is never available on-demand in Great Britain. (Northern Ireland is a bit different from England/Scotland/Wales.) However, the law allows abortions up to 24 weeks if there is a “grave risk to the mental health” of the woman and nowadays abortion providers—who make the determination—almost always view the fact that a woman wants an abortion as proof that such a risk exists. Thus, abortion is de-facto available on demand for 24 weeks.
The law allows for abortions due to "risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family (up to a term limit of 24 weeks of gestation)"
And to quote this (correct) wikipedia entry: "The third ground [the one I quoted above in this comment] is typically interpreted liberally with regards to mental health to create a de facto state of abortion on demand, and nearly all abortions—98% in 2019 and 2020—are performed to protect the woman's mental health".
Maybe it would be better to legally enshrine it as "on demand", but every woman I know in England who either has had an abortion or thought about the possibility of maybe needing one, currently considers it to be on demand.
but “mental health” (i.e: well-being) is the reason someone would choose an abortion. If (hypothetically) water is legal to drink as long as you’re thirsty, is it a fudge to say “anybody is allowed to drink water”? You are thirsty by virtue of wanting to drink water, just like you want an abortion due to your well-being.
Unless the act of drinking water was this hyper-politicized thing that required basically splitting the atom to try to please all your electoral interests.
And so the end result is a law which negates itself, which might well have been the entire point? I have no idea if the drafters of the law actually intended it to nullify itself.
>I find it odd that people seem to be displeased by a statement of important facts
The article mentions this and goes into more details. I'm not sure what else your comment adds other than to be snarky and downplay the seriousness of the topic by using scare quotes.
because noone is happy, and the law is a negotiation between a large body of people and different part of society. This please noone but also allows sufficient slack for the differences to not explode into unrest. This is a working compromise that for now is relatively stable on the social contract of that law.
It will probably not stay that way, as the component of society evolve. We can hope for a different compromise ofc, but it is important to realise that the law is a compromise on a social contract, not something that exist in a vacuum
> If something should be a legal right, enshrine it specifically in law
I mean couldn't you turn that around? Normally things are legal by default, not illegal. Wouldn't the onus be on the law to explicitly make abortion illegal?
> Why is anybody happy with "de facto"? If something should be a legal right, enshrine it specifically in law.
Exactly.
At the moment everyone is effectively turning a blind eye to the law. If there is a concensus that abortion should be available on demand then the law should be amended to that effect.
The UK is not on par with other European countries where "on demand" does exist in law, which is what I wanted to point out.
It's not turning a blind eye, it's accurately interpreting that forcing a woman to give birth when she wants an abortion will be detrimental to her mental health, thus making her abortion legal.
Sure it could have stronger wording in law, but it's not causing any problems as it current is. But you've misunderstood it from your first comment, where you wrongly said it is a "criminal offence" when done here in England which is just entirely wrong.
> But you've misunderstood it from your first comment, where you wrongly said it is a "criminal offence" when done here in England which is just entirely wrong.
No, I never wrote that that abortion was always a criminal offence. I wrote:
Abortion is not on demand and any abortion that does not satisfy the legal criteria can thus be a criminal offence.
It is no more than a statement of fact. This the law.
"Mental health" is a very fuzzy term and it is not enough to say it to make so. It's just that at the moment no-one wants to create trouble on this and are indeed turning a blind eye by taking the approach you mention. But if for some reason authorities want to create trouble then they could just use the law as it stands as well. And indeed there are calls to decriminalise abortion because it isn't in law.
Maybe “disorder” is not the exact right word to use. Still, there should be a distinction in our words between “a regular, wanted pregnancy” and “a pregnancy which came as a consequence of a rape”, for example.
>Late-term abortion on-demand is nonexistent outside the US
By the stats he provides right below that statement, it's nonexistent in the US as well. 92.7% of abortions take place in the first trimester (13 weeks). All but 1% of abortions take place by week 20. People just aren't having abortions after that point unless something has gone horribly wrong with the pregnancy (the antithesis of "on-demand").
If something has gone horribly wrong with the pregnancy it doesn't make sense to force the woman to continue with it, yet that's exactly what the laws are doing. It's barbaric and inhumane. These blanket bans on late term abortions make very little sense when you actually think them through. It's legally enforced cruelty that helps nobody.
Right. The point is that something along the lines of "abortion for any reason up to 15 weeks, abortion only for the life/health of the mother or severe fetal abnormalities after that" is something that would cover 99.9% of abortions that actually occur today and that non-extremists on both sides of the issue could probably agree to. Unfortunately, pragmatism and compromise are no longer possible in US politics.
"Ok you have a medically valid reason to get the abortion. Unfortunately since our state takes a hardline stance on abortions in general there are no doctors or facilities that perform it."
What is astounding is how hard it is to find what the law says in some places. The article suggest that's the case in Israel where the situation is quite confusing.
For another example Brazil is quite confusing where even the phisicians don't know when it can or can't be done.
It's not surprising to me. It is an extremely complex topic that touches on so many aspects of rights, norms, safety, poverty, individual vs collective, etc etc. I don't think it will ever be settled, and the best we'll see is the laws vaguely reflecting different trends, but in the end they will rarely have teeth.
But there’s some cases where it should be crystal clear and still isn’t.
If the pregnancy isn’t viable (e g the egg is fertilised but hasn’t traveled to the right place on the womb before “taking hold”), then abortion should be legal. If the phoetus has died, then abortion should be legal. There’s some clear-cut cases like that where it’s clear it should be legal and yet in some places the law is still “vague”.
The laws are not even vague, it's outright illegal. These people are pushing to make abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancy illegal, and in at least one case have succeeded.
Amniocentesis can only be performed after week 15, which means you can only test for e.g. Down Syndrome after that. Not allowed to abort then, in Ireland or Florida.
Even noninvasive prenatal screening (maternal blood tests; possible because genetic information crosses into the mother's system), which is less conclusive than amnio but safer and can be done earlier, usually can't be done before about week 10.
> Not sure what political dynamics led Israel to leave abortion “illegal” but also add multiple redundant layers of extremely broad exceptions. Maybe the country has other priorities.
Those would be the political dynamics of pretending to be conservative while actually being liberal in order to jerk off both sides at once. Being paternalistic/nanny state gives the illusion of control, whereas "anyone can get an abortion anytime for any reason" sounds like immoral anarchy. When in reality half the abortions are illegal anyway, because unnecessary controls create more bugs.
When I think about why this is a political wedge issue, I think about how righteous people feel about their chosen point of view. I think about how that feeling of righteousness can drive people to vote and donate money.
I don't think that people are wrong to feel this sense of righteousness, but I do find it disgusting when politicians cynically exploit it.
I was raised in a Christian faith that condemns abortion as one of the most serious sins. I understand that point of view. I still feel it to some extent. What I no longer have is the feeling of certainty that personhood begins at conception. Even saying that "life" begins at conception is tenuous. Gametes (sperm and egg cells) are "alive" in that they carry out the same cellular functions that other living cells carry out. Is a zygote more alive than the gametes that came together to form it? If your faith leads you to believe that a zygote is a person, I won't tell you that you are wrong. I would ask that you consider if another person's sincerely held beliefs may be valid when they contradict this point of view.
It's important to note that whether this is sinful or not completely irrelevant to whether it should be illegal. The fact that so many Christians don't see this obvious fact is frankly disturbing - as is the fact that organizations like the Catholic Church are engaged in trying to push such theocratic ideas.
There are many huge sins that are perfectly legal. For example, eating pork, killing cows, and working on the Sabbath are much worse sins according to their respective religions, and yet they are perfectly legal activities.
For legal matters, the only thing that matters is balancing the rights of one individual with the rights of everyone else, and with the good of society of large. From all of these points of view, allowing access to early term abortion is a clear net win, even if it infringes on the rights of a kinda sorta potential person (the fetus). As the fetus gets closer to being an actual person, the equation changes.
I hear this a lot, but even as an atheist I think you're making a bad argument.
Murder is a sin in most (all?) religions. It's also against the law. It's not against the law because it's a sin. It's against the law because it violates another person's rights.
Some people view abortion in the same light. They think you're killing a person and they think that should be illegal.
And, yes, even lots of atheists like me get increasingly uncomfortable with abortions after the first trimester. And it's not because of any religious doctrine.
I think your argument was much better suited for an issue like gay marriage where -- no matter how you look at it -- nobody's rights were being violated, and it was entirely based on religious doctrine and tradition.
> Some people view abortion in the same light. They think you're killing a person and they think that should be illegal.
> And, yes, even lots of atheists like me get increasingly uncomfortable with abortions after the first trimester. And it's not because of any religious doctrine.
I did say that I think abortions after the early stages of pregnancy are a more complicated question.
However, legal personhood and religious personhood are and should remain separate concepts. Even more, the legal question of abortion is not settled even if we accepted that legal personhood begins at fertilization - the interests of the mother, and of society, can still outweigh the rights of that legal person.
And as a religious person, you should be able to separate your personal belief that someone is committing a sin when having an abortion, and ending a life, from the rights and needs of that person. Just like we expect people who hold cows as sacred animals not to seek to stop us from killing and eating cows.
People who want a national no-excuse ban like in Louisiana believe bad health outcomes are God's will, so getting their desired outcome leaves suffering people for dead. We'll hear about how the casualties were "no angels" just like we hear in other situations now.
The desired outcome is to change the culture by making it too dangerous to wait to raise kids or reproduce at all without the resources to medevac to treat a complication.
I think this is beside the point. Most religious folk don't possess some special moral wisdom. When a Christian equates abortion with murder, they're typically parroting a belief they've accepted dogmatically from their preacher or faith community, not stating some organic belief emerging from some lengthy Socratic process. So yes, most (but not all) pro-life folk are imposing their religious beliefs on others.
Of course, one could argue that pro-choice folk are equally susceptible to dogma, but it's not as though they're forcing pro-life folk to have abortions.
Disagree. According to Pew polling, pro-life folk are more likely to be religious, more likely to be more certain about their belief in God, and are more likely to attend religious services.
Furthermore, more than 50% of pro-life folk identify religion as their greatest source of guidance for deciding right from wrong (compare with less than 20% for pro-choice folk). [1]
So yes, most pro-lifers are driven by their religious beliefs.
Interesting, 54% of pro-choice folk say "common sense" is their greatest source of guidance, comparable to 52% of pro-life folk saying religion is theirs (on top of 34% going with common sense).
please, continue to explain why a large group people other than yourself UNIFORMLY think the way they do, based upon self-reported poll results, as though that's a valid means of discerning complex human motivations for a broad group of people (that, once again, does not even include yourself). it must be really nice to be content in your own complex thoughts and motivations while boiling those of a large swath of others down to some chart data.
I didn't read panda-giddiness@ saying it is uniform, just that being pro-life vs pro-choice is highly correlated with being religious and some religions are against abortion.
I'm all for freedom of religion but I personally would rather not have laws that apply to everyone be based on the religious beliefs of a portion of the population which it seems like a good portion of religious people are trying to do.
Yes, precisely this. Most people are not moral philosophers, so I don't expect them to have a nuanced view of moral problems (this includes people who are pro-choice).
Abortion epitomizes a hard moral problem, and frankly I doubt we'll ever be able to solve moral quandaries the way we can solve differential equations. However, I have zero desire in having the solutions legislated based on some group's religious beliefs.
It is probably good that they don't, because the entire concept is surprisingly problematic. If you don't think about the implications it seems like a no-brainer, but in fact it causes loads of problems.
Making sin illegal is just importing the set of rules from a religion into your existing law. If you believe these rules are the direct word from an infallible deity then it calls into question the need for mortal laws at all. If however you think that sins are idiosyncratic to each religion and often even to sects within a religion then you have to allow for the fact that they may have been created by fallible mortal means. If you allow for this, then you have just imported a mortal law in an effort to improve your mortal law. Even worse, religions can have sins like "you are not allowed to worship any other religion", which directly contradicts your existing law and would be extremely divisive regardless.
Imagine if the government made sin illegal, but chose Buddhism for the list of sins? Would you feel ok with this? Or maybe Shinto? How about Satanism? Or even if they did choose Christianity, but settled on Seventh Day Adventists? Separation of church and state is essential for a stable and diverse democracy.
I don't think many Christians have problems with killing (I've been told many a time that the whole "thall shall not" thing is problematic when it comes to translation, which sure... the word of god is pretty ambiguous I suppose).
So maybe god said not to kill or not to murder. Ok, the killing thing seems pretty simple, but the Catholic supermajority of the Supreme Court has no problems with the state killing someone, but they won't let a mother do it to her baby, so maybe in that case they think it's a murder, which is almost definitely against Christian doctrine, at least that part of the Old Testament.
I figured since it was so confusing, I'd just ask Jesus since he's God's messenger and he's got a facebook page where I can contact him. He's actually big on the first breath thing - they can just recycle the soul into another host body up until then anyway, but every once in awhile they fuck it up and put a male soul into a female body or vice versa and then that's a whole thing and The Republicans have a problem with that too.
I used to live in an area with lots of very strict Muslims. Nice people, but they wanted nothing to do with alcohol. Wouldn’t sell it. Avoided stores that sold it.
Their religious beliefs absolute affected the legal situation.
We had much stricter rules about when liquor could close, open, etc. Laws against drunk driving were stricter.
There’s no constitutional right to alcohol. But there is separation between church and state.
But the issue wasn’t “church” (or mosque) it was the fact that everyone really hated alcohol and didn’t want their neighbors drinking it.
You're quite correct in observing that the religious issue isn't even relevant to the actual abortion debate. Overturning Roe's viability standard can be justified completely on the basis that it draws the that line on about when the "fetus gets closer to being an actual person" in the wrong place. As the article observes, most of the developed world draws that line around 12-14 weeks, versus closer to 22-24 weeks under Roe.
>It's important to note that whether this is sinful or not completely irrelevant to whether it should be illegal.
Why? There are plenty of legal jurisdictions that have laws influenced by religion. Israel and Saudi Arabia are the 2 countries that come to mind. But Utah also has plenty of laws that are influenced by Mormons- and no one is complaining about the liquor laws there.
If a group of citizens banded together to form a city, and then, collectively passed a law prohibiting people from walking outside after sunset on Friday - is that wrong?
We already have religious groups that have decided that physician-assisted suicide is OK - and it is illegal for Drs to not-perform them.
Why can't Christians form together and make laws to align with their religion?
> If a group of citizens banded together to form a city, and then, collectively passed a law prohibiting people from walking outside after sunset on Friday - is that wrong?
Yes, it is wrong - it infringes basic human rights of that person. Israel and Saudi Arabia are wrong and in violation of obvious human rights for some of their religious laws, as are Iran, India and many other countries.
> Why can't Christians form together and make laws to align with their religion?
No one should be allowed to do so, because it infringes natural human rights.
There is no such thing as natural human rights. It's something that gets redefined by the dominant cultures constantly.
If Christians want to live under Biblical Law, let them.
if Muslims want to live under Sharia, let them.
If Jews want to live under Jewish Laws, let them.
There absolutely is such a thing as natural human rights. Some are known since ancient times, some have been discovered more recently, and some are probably not well known or understood yet. But there are certain rights that humans and other beings musg have for any society to function well in an objective sense.
Most religions trample on most of the rights that we now understand to be fundamental, so theocraies are something to be despised and feared.
To be very clear: religious belief and practice, as long as it is not imposed on non-believers, is not a problem. The imposition of your religious beliefs on others - theocracy - is the problem.
Technically, the poster is still correct: there's no such thing as "natural" human rights. Rights do not exist in material reality, they're entirely cultural and thus made up.
Not even the international declaration of human rights is signed by all countries. Rights are not given, they are political and need to be declared and defended, constantly.
If people voluntarily give up their rights in order to feel a sense of belonging with a religion that is their prerogative. It is not fine for those people to attempt to enforce those restrictions on people outside of their religion.
If those people are causing actual harm to the community then it should be brought up through the secular legal process where lawmakers will weigh the harm to the community vs. the harm to personal liberty before deciding if the law is worth it.
That is a good point. Maybe America really could use a peaceful separation.
There seems to be a large part of the country that would be happy and content to live in a Christian nation.
I mean a lot of America's origins are English's religious rejects. Since before the constitution they probably we pretty happy to be in a Christian nation. There's a reason the 1st amendment is the 1st amendment and not part of the original constitution (some states felt their neighbors were going to force their puritanical believes upon them and so wouldn't ratify the constitution amongst other reasons).
Not op nor do I know which laws you are thinking of.
But, while I was in Utah for a ~week I saw plenty of (probably tourist) people be very surprised that there was a big distinction between the bar area and restaurant area of restaurants as those seated in the restaurant area _must_ purchase food if they're having alcohol.
From what I've heard instead of bars you have to go to "member only clubs" to get around the blue laws. I think they shut down liquor sales pretty early in the evening as well. It has been awhile since the subject came up with my relatives from Utah, but mostly because people don't want them to get started. They are also a state with a fair number of dry counties I believe.
Part time Utah resident here: you can only buy liquor/beer/wine > 5% ABV at state owned liquor stores and restaurants/bars draft beer has to be < 5% ABV but for some reason canned beer can be > 5% at restaurants (Makes zero sense to me). I believe there is like a 1 drink limit max per person at a time (maybe just liquor, I forget) and the state owned liquor stores are closed on Sunday too.
Polling has shown that 72% of the country supports per-trimester restrictions with essentially open access in the 1st, increased restrictions in the 2nd and emergency only in the 3rd.
I know you’re going to ask for a source, but I don’t remember where I saw it.
Yes, my understanding is also that most people actually hold a pretty moderate view on abortion - it should be legal without restrictions up to some gestational age (typically around 10-15 weeks), it may be legal for a longer time in more cases, it should always be legal when it seriously risks the mother's life etc.
I was not claiming I'm making a unique statement or coming up with some novel arguments, I was only arguing against the points of GP.
Polls look pretty extremely variable.
Some polls show half of Americans are against abortion.
Some polls show that of the Americans that support abortion, support drops after the first trimester.
I'm calling BS on the original op statement that 72% of Americans support abortion.This seems like the shy republican polling problem in 2016 all over again.
> Polls look pretty extremely variable. Some polls show half of Americans are against abortion.
> Some polls show that of the Americans that support abortion, support drops after the first trimester.
Those are two separate claims that can easily both be true. A big problem with polls about abortion is that its not actually a well defined term (how many weeks? is mothers life in danger? rape? etc).
> This seems like the shy republican polling problem in 2016 all over again.
Not quite on topic, but polls did not give hilary a 100% chance to win the 2016 election. Polls are extremely good at predicting events (compared to say a literal coin flip) but lower probability events do occur. Go flip a coin a bunch of times and you'll get 2 heads in a row (25% chance! thats even worse than what 538 gave trump [1]).
The history that some, including the justices, are reading is a merge of sinful and illegal. One interpretation of the English common law is that it left abortion to the ecclesiastical courts. To use your words, the equation changes at the quickening (first kick), but I don’t think that was noted in the SC opinion.
I think history is even less relevant than religion. This is a question of fundamental human rights, and it should be settled under a modern understanding of human rights, not medieval legal frameworks.
The problem is that when you put this stuff on a timer, someone has to decide what time it is. Why is 10 weeks ok, but 12 weeks not?
People are going to have different opinions, and societal norms and beliefs shape that. If I walked up to you and cut off your head, I’d be arrested and called a savage killer. If I was in the army and called in an artillery strike that fit the rules of engagement and killed 500 people, I might be lauded as a hero.
Abortion is a tough issue as it touches on so many issues. When does a mother’s life outweigh the child’s? When does the child outweigh the mother? When does the mental health of the mother outweigh the life of the child? When does the ability to support the child factor apply? Should a woman be able to use abortion as “free” birth control?
Different people will answer those questions differently based on their beliefs and perspective.
IMO, the rights of the child only exist after it is not wholly dependent on the mother's life to exist (ie. an actual child, not a fetus.) Which means that a dead fetus has no rights, and a fetus that would kill the mother isn't even a person, much less a person with the right to kill the pregnant person.
I’ve had the bad fortune of actually being in situations with these types of scenarios twice.
Personally, I’m pro-choice because I don’t think the law should make these decisions, as they are difficult, situational things that have nuance. I find aspects of abortion horrifying, but I respect that it’s none of my business.
> It's important to note that whether this is sinful or not completely irrelevant to whether it should be illegal. The fact that so many Christians don't see this obvious fact is frankly disturbing - as is the fact that organizations like the Catholic Church are engaged in trying to push such theocratic ideas.
I agree it has nothing to do with whether it's sinful or not. Basic human rights stand for religious as well as non-religious people. Therefore anyone can push human rights in the way they want, whether they're the Catholic Church or not.
> There are many huge sins that are perfectly legal. For example, eating pork, killing cows, and working on the Sabbath are much worse sins according to their respective religions, and yet they are perfectly legal activities.
Again, the things that are illegal, do not undermine the basic human rights. So, in modern society, eating pork shouldn't lead to death (which doesn't, not even in religious terms) but same goes for working on sabbath. ONLY if you subject yourself to it, and only then, you, personally, waive the human right to live.
> For legal matters, the only thing that matters is balancing the rights of one individual with the rights of everyone else, and with the good of society of large. From all of these points of view, allowing access to early term abortion is a clear net win, even if it infringes on the rights of a kinda sorta potential person (the fetus). As the fetus gets closer to being an actual person, the equation changes.
I think we're on a very bad slope here. The question of whether something is good for society at large is the one the Nazi's followed as well. By that, we should think of the rights of every single individual. Therefore, killing a human is not allowed, unless it's for the inevitable life of another human, there should not be a question what the answer is. Neither as a fetus, nor as an "actual person"
Identity politics and their resulting policies should be avoided at all costs. We should focus on the individual and their rights, and the group, or society if you
will, will benefit.
> I think we're on a very bad slope here. The question of whether something is good for society at large is the one the Nazi's followed as well. By that, we should think of the rights of every single individual. Therefore, killing a human is not allowed, unless it's for the inevitable life of another human, there should not be a question what the answer is. Neither as a fetus, nor as an "actual person"
There is virtually no legal decision that does not balance the rights of the individual with those of society. Most clearly, when a law punishes an individual, especially with jail time, that is a way of putting the rights of society before the rights of that individual.
Even more importantly, the question of abortion clearly puts the right of a woman to have the freedom to use her body in conflict with the right of the being growing inside her uterus. There is no way to legislate this without curtailing the rights of one of these beings (even if we don't consider the fetus as a person, non-human beings still have rights under the law of most countries).
There are complicated moral issues at the "zygote" stage, as you mention. But the article clearly shows that the vast majority of the developed world--most of those countries being far less religious than the U.S.--has achieved a moral consensus around the beginning of the second trimester, 12-14 weeks. (Incidentally, that's also around the point that much of the Islamic world believes that a baby gains a soul.)
The immediate political debate in the U.S. isn't about zygotes, but rather fetuses. The Dobbs case involved Mississippi's 15-week ban. Under Roe, states cannot ban elective abortions even at 15 weeks. At 15 weeks, the baby is a fetus, it has hands, feet, a face, and thumbs that it can suck. https://visitantlit.com/2012/11/19/pregnancy-week-15.
Most of the developed world has deemed that a human life at that stage warrants a certain level of protection. Most of the developed world acknowledges that society has a right to intervene after that point. Even if they recognize exceptions to that rule, they simultaneously recognize that society has a right to protect those lives and a good reason is required to extinguish them. For example in liberal and non-religious Denmark, abortions after 12 weeks require unanimous approval of a special committee, with an appeals process that kicks the decision up to the Ministry of Justice: https://abortion-clinics.eu/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Denma...
> immediate political debate in the U.S. isn't about zygotes
It's not just debate – it's already in law. Oklahoma HB4327[0], signed into law in May, outlaws abortions on "a human fetus or embryo in any stage of gestation from fertilization until birth." (It explicitly permits contraception, Plan B, etc)
The National Right to Life Committee, the largest and most important anti-abortion group in the US, has created a model law that likewise classifies an "unborn child" to mean:
> a living individual organism of the species homo sapiens throughout all stages of the unborn child’s development within a pregnant woman’s uterus from fertilization until birth
And there are six states without any term restrictions on abortion whatsoever, and prominent pro-abortion organizations are advocating those positions. But the fact remains that such extreme positions are unlikely to get nationwide traction. The central territory of the debate, and what the Dobbs case actually involved, is second trimester bans (12-15 weeks).
I understand why folks want to focus on the radical position that some parties have advanced, and not the fact that the actual law in the US for the last 50 years was quite radical in the opposite direction.
This should not be a radical position. In fact it is the only moral position. This probably sounds strange, but it comes down to who is getting late term abortions. The people who need these abortions are the ones who have discovered later in the pregnancy that their child has some sort of medical issue so severe that it appears in a sonogram. It might be possible to deliver the child, but that child would suffer from poor quality of life and/or a short lifespan. These are not the people who had an "oops the condom broke" moment, they have a serious moral obligation to avoid personal tragedy, and we are writing laws demanding that no, that child with only one lung and no face must be carried to term and cared for until they die a few weeks later of complications from the constant extreme pain they are in after saddling the parents and their family with enormous unnecessary medical bills.
You might be thinking "but this is one of those emergencies that has an exception right?" But that's not how the bans work. Even when the law allows for emergency procedures there are no doctors in the state qualified to perform them, nor any hospitals or clinics that will allow it due to the legal liabilities. Even with a fully justifiable reason the parents are forced to travel hundreds or thousands of miles on their own dime to get the necessary procedure. Even if the mother's health is on the line and she's not fit to travel you still need to get her across state lines, and if you are in the midwest or the bible belt she may just have to die, just to satisfy an overly simplistic "moral" position.
If your moral position requires you to torture newborns until they die you need to re-evaluate it.
I’ll preface this by saying I am militantly pro choice but, to the anti abortion side, abortion is also “torturing newborns until they die” because they believe the fetus is as much a person as a newborn. Your moral position is just as disturbing to them as theirs is to you.
When a baby is going to be in constant pain for its entire life due to medical complications it is really hard to justify bringing them into the world.
What’s the distinction? Is a a newborn cognitively different from a fetus at 18 weeks? 24? 30? Why is a baby that suffers for its entire “life” of two weeks outside the womb different? Why does its “life” inside the womb not count? When does this fundamental change occur? That’s the debate we should be having, not whatever this current debate politicians are having is. Extreme moral statements like the one you made only serve to be divisive and to distract from the real conversation.
You're creating a false dichotomy. The Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs had an exception for severe fetal abnormalities after the first trimester. So do the abortion laws of every developed country that otherwise bans abortion at 12-14 weeks. Support for such exceptions in the US is vastly higher than for elective later-term abortions.
You're incorrectly assuming that in substance there is no difference because all late-term abortions are the result of medical emergencies or genetic defects. In Germany, which bans abortion after 12 weeks but contains exceptions for fetal and maternal health, only 3% of abortions are performed after 12 weeks:https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/nine-out-of-10-abortion.... In the US that number is more than twice as high, at 7%.
Given the 600,000 abortions in the US each year, getting our number down to the German rate would affect 24,000 abortions of fetuses that most developed countries have deemed to be worth protecting.
The late term abortions may be technically legal in certain circumstances, but since the laws drove out all of the doctors who can perform them and closed all of the facilities it becomes a de-facto ban.
Wait what made it radical? You said that the general consensus is that the cutoff should be 12-14 weeks and Roe made it 15 weeks (or am I misunderstanding?).
It would seem radical to deviate from your chosen standard to set a limit at 0 weeks. It does not seem radical to enforce a standard that is only one week different from the one you’ve chosen.
No, Roe set the limit for elective abortions at viability, which is 22-24 weeks. Only a single European country allows elective abortions that late, the Netherlands. And that difference isn't inconsequential. In the Netherlands, almost 20% of abortions occur after the first trimester. In Germany, which has a 12-week ban, only 3% do (which reflects exceptions for medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities that are typical in Europe).
The Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs set a 15 week ban, with exceptions after that for medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities. That was consistent with both the consensus view in Europe, and American public opinion: https://www.wsj.com/articles/support-for-15-week-abortion-ba.... But under Roe, the Mississippi law was unconstitutional.
In the US, pre-Dobbs, over 90% of abortions occur before the 13th week. I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence to be found that allowing later-term abortions shifts abortion timelines back. People who get abortions after 22 weeks are generally not doing so on a whim.
Only to the states' interests. People were free to apply their own standards. Roe was only restrictive for people with extremely lax standards in the first place. I don't find these limitations on the state interest radical at all.
It’s a radical view to think that people should be “free to apply their own standards” to when a human life is sufficiently developed to be worthy of protection. The vast majority of the developed world asserts society’s right to draw that line.
Roe is an outgrowth of American libertarianism. In the 1970s, several high courts in developed countries heard abortion cases alongside Roe. The only one to find an affirmative “right” to an abortion was the US. Courts in France and Italy found it to be a matter for the legislature (except Italy found a right to exist when the woman’s life was threatened). Germany’s high court went further and found legalized abortion to violate the Basic Law’s right to life.
In a sense, the refusal of most of American media to even give airtime to the discussion of when a fetus should gain rights/protections is why such extreme measures are being on the table. They painted this as a binary issue with no nuance or even discussion as regards the status of an unborn fetus so the reaction has been similarly binary with total lack of nuance.
This is unfortunately every issue in American discourse now though - the media obfuscates and confuses, instead of illuminating and hopefully educating. The media is the biggest cause of conflict in the US system now, because it's just become hyper-partisans shouting at each other and otherizing the other 50%.
I don't think anything disturbs me more than the effects of American public discourse. It's gotten impossible to have reasonable conversations on most things.
It should be noted that even the Bible only seems to recognize the importance of the being inside a pregnant woman after quickening, which is essentially when the mother can start to feel the motions of the fetus, so around 16-20 weeks. The notion that life begins at conception seems to be quite modern.
> The immediate political debate in the U.S. isn't about zygotes, but rather fetuses.
No, it's already law that currently 10 states have bans on all abortions past 6 weeks, restricting women's control over their own body. But feel free to move to Texas where a 12 year old daughter could be raped and forced to carry a baby. Sounds like freedom to me. /s
I'll just add that many people who are pro-choice believe that the issue of whether a fetus is a person is irrelevant. You would have the legal right to back out of donating a kidney, even if you already agreed to do it and it would save someone's life. Similarly, the argument goes, you should have the legal right to have an abortion (or at least induce labor, if viability is possible) at any point during a pregnancy.
It should be noted that this is a rare and unpopular opinion. The overwhelming majority of people are going to be disgusted by a 32 week abortion on either side of the issue.
They very clearly stated that after viability, induced delivery is the course. Just like Casey V. Planned Parenthood originally made viability the cutoff. At any point a woman should be allowed to rescind the right to their body from anyone or anything, a fetus included. Whether that means abortion or delivery depends on viability.
So your straw-man of a 32 week abortion isn't applicable at all.
"the issue of whether a fetus is a person is irrelevant"
It's not a straw man. It's a hypothetical test of his reasoning. He says viability doesn't matter to his argument, but throws out that induced birth could be an option. His argument is not that "abortion should be illegal at viability, but you should be able to induce birth". You are twisting his words.
I'm not twisting their words; you've simply lost the ability to comprehend text that pertains to abortion.
> Similarly, the argument goes, you should have the legal right to have an abortion (or at least induce labor, if viability is possible) at any point during a pregnancy.
What does "at least induce labor, if viability is possible" mean to you?
Most people value human life over animal life. Also, I'd guess vegans might advocate making it illegal to kill animals for food (I don't interact with many, so I'm spitballing). The only reason they wouldn't is because it's so far outside the Overton window that it seems like fantasy.
FWIW, I'm a vegetarian who, if made world emperor, would ban killing animals for food, recognizing some caveats and edge cases. But, yeah, it's so far outside the Overton window that I don't think I've ever expressed it to anyone.
A 32 week abortion is an abortion of a baby with severe medical issues that may be threatening the life of the mother. If you add those details support for the issue is considerably higher.
The comment you're replying to didn't make a week-based distinction, just that the "personhood" claim of a fetus is irrelevant to whether or not an abortion is legal.
Personally I'd just prefer to base it on fetal viability (which was the standard). That's roughly 25 weeks or so (some variation and debate). If a fetus were to come non-viable after that, or endanger the mother, I think that should be back on the table too.
Indeed, the "at least" made me read it like this would be the minimum acceptable compromise, but reading the phrase without the parentheses would be the actual thing they want.
But I'm not a native speaker so that might very well be wrong.
Well multiple was perhaps a strong word - it was two people on two occasions, one 19 and the other 50. Prefer not to give my location but it was a liberal area (and more significantly, they shared the opinion with the knowledge that I would be at least open to the idea).
and you'd think the majority are going the be disgusted by the idea of a 10-year-old rape victim being denied access to healthcare by her state, but counsel for the National Right to Life argued she should keep have kept the child
Well, yes, the majority of people are disgusted by the idea of a 10-year-old girl is being forced to carry a pregnancy (the fact that she was trapped makes it all the more monstrous). That the NRL is of a different opinion only shows that they are an extremist organization, way out on the fringes.
Even in this extreme case though, if said 10-year-old victim were 1 hour away from being able to give birth, I don't think it would make sense to allow an abortion (though of course a C-section can be performed at any time). So clearly there is some line, even for the most extreme cases.
>> That the NRL is of a different opinion only shows that they are an extremist organization, way out on the fringes
> It's the oldest and largest national anti-abortion organization in the United States, hardly the fringes. They do a lot of campaign financing.
IHMO, whether it was fully understood by the GP or not, "extremist organization, way out on the fringes" was probably in relation to the US Democratic Party, not American politics in general.
It's toxic, misleading, and annoying, but I think a lot of rhetoric nowadays is trying to manipulate the "Overton window" to partisan advantage rather than debate the issue itself.
No, it's true in relation to the politics of ordinary Americans. Look at any polls on abortion, and you'll see that this type of ban is well on the fringes.
Even more so if you were to present this explicit situation - I'd bet even some of the most religious people you find would be hard pressed to say that a ten year old girl should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term.
Well we don't have to just blindly guess, we could also look at some research.
> More than a third of abortion opponents (36%) say it should be legal if the pregnancy results from rape, with 27% saying “it depends” and 37% expressing opposition to legal abortion even in this situation https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/05/06/americas-abo...
...and the largest anti-abortion organization in the country agrees with the decision to deny her healthcare. Does that match their constituents' beliefs?
More than a third (not counting "it depends" respondents)?! I guess I define "fringe" as something other than "mainstream" but your definition may vary.
Is the agreement by the largest anti-abortion organization in the country to deny her healthcare in line with their constituents' beliefs?
The Catholic Church is one of the oldest and richest institutions on Earth. Its views on contraception are still way out on the fringes of public opinion.
There are about 70 million Catholics in the US, 20% of the population. Are a majority of their members' views on abortion out of line with the Catholic Church? They're a pretty sizable part of "public opinion."
Oh, they aren't very good Catholics then! Those numbers are much higher amongst practicing Catholics, and their self-reported views on abortion are very mainstream, not on the fringes at all.
Of course, some legislation could ban abortions while make exceptions for 10-year-old rape victims or other extreme cases. There's a lot of middle ground between banning all abortions and allowing all abortions. We don't need to legislate according to extremes.
We don't need to, but that's the way things are going. Allowing abortion for rape and not in other cases is ideologically inconsistent with the idea that fetuses are persons, and so what we are actually seeing is that state legislatures are passing extreme legislation to maintain consistency with that premise. They are able to do so because states are so polarized that they can pass extreme legislation without any repercussions.
Half of the problem here is that reasonable people think this will be a states' rights issue with reasonable exceptions that local people can all agree on, but with which others might differ. Whereas what's actually happening is that extremist state legislatures are seizing on the issue to pass the most restrictive abortion laws they possibly can, and the GOP at the national level is salivating over the prospect of a national abortion ban as soon as they regain control of the government (see statements from VP Pence, Mitch McConnell, and various House republicans). People thought throwing the issue back to the states would be the end of it, but it's clearly not.
> Half of the problem here is that reasonable people think this will be a states' rights issue with reasonable exceptions that local people can all agree on, but with which others might differ.
It wasn't like we had a referendum and reasonable people voted for this to be a states' rights issue. Rather, we never had an abortion law or anything in the constitution that could reasonably be interpreted as a right to abortion, so the Supreme Court overturned RvW. What we need is a federal law (Amendment?) that protects abortion access for the most extreme cases (i.e., the cases where a healthy majority of Americans agree).
And yet, what we had was a reasonable state of affairs: there was a sliding scale between more permissive and restrictive abortion options as a pregnancy progressed, and every person could make up their minds as to whether they would seek an abortion based on their circumstances and health within those limits. The status quo was that 99% of abortions were performed in the early stages where the fetus is still not developed, with virtually none of the morally complicated late term abortions actually occurring.
What then happened is that a president elected by a minority of the country appointed extreme Justices, who were confirmed by a Senate that also represented a minority of the country, and they made a unilateral decision based more on their personal religious beliefs than the actual law. Rather than settle the issue as they thought it would, they have thrown the whole country into abject chaos. A lot of reasonable people, and in fact highly distinguished legal scholars (including decades of Justices) interpreted the Constitution as supporting Roe, so calling them unreasonable is, I think, not right and adds insult to injury.
What is certainly unreasonable is where we have landed. State legislatures are passing the most extreme laws they can possibly can, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Forcing 10 year olds to flee a state to get an abortion because she was raped is not reasonable. Forcing mothers to wait until an ectopic pregnancy has ruptured before providing abortive care just because a heartbeat is detected on an unviable fetus is not reasonable. Just this weekend the Idaho GOP moved so far as to advocate for no exceptions at all even to save the life of the mother. That's not reasonable, that's extremism.
Far from this being an issue thrown to the states, now the GOP is turning toward a nationwide abortion ban if they retake the government. This is completely unsustainable and will likely tear this country apart.
> And yet, what we had was a reasonable state of affairs: there was a sliding scale between more permissive and restrictive abortion options as a pregnancy progressed, and every person could make up their minds as to whether they would seek an abortion based on their circumstances and health within those limits. The status quo was that 99% of abortions were performed in the early stages where the fetus is still not developed, with virtually none of the morally complicated late term abortions actually occurring.
I probably agree with some/much of the spirit of this paragraph, but I don't think "every person could make up their minds about <ending a life>" is a reasonable state of affairs--I want it codified in law as with homicides--generally prohibited with exceptions for a few extreme cases (e.g., self-defense). I think we should also strive to avoid the problem as much as possible by minimizing unwanted pregnancy (improve access to birth control). We should also invest more in family, adoption, and foster services on the backend. I think it's totally fair to criticize pro-life people for failing to support these sorts of programs while also advocating against abortion.
> What then happened is that a president elected by a minority of the country appointed extreme Justices, who were confirmed by a Senate that also represented a minority of the country, and they made a unilateral decision based more on their personal religious beliefs than the actual law. Rather than settle the issue as they thought it would, they have thrown the whole country into abject chaos. A lot of reasonable people, and in fact highly distinguished legal scholars (including decades of Justices) interpreted the Constitution as supporting Roe, so calling them unreasonable is, I think, not right and adds insult to injury.
I think packing the courts is reprehensible (as were many actions of that particular president), but we need court reform to prevent this kind of abuse in general. However, I believe (though I suspect you will disagree) that this is largely an orthogonal issue--I don't believe this court acted on their personal religious beliefs, but rather I believe (as do many prominent pro-choicers, by the way) that Roe v. Wade was extremely tenuous and the proper channel for establishing abortion policy is legislative.
> What is certainly unreasonable is where we have landed. State legislatures are passing the most extreme laws they can possibly can, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Forcing 10 year olds to flee a state to get an abortion because she was raped is not reasonable. Forcing mothers to wait until an ectopic pregnancy has ruptured before providing abortive care just because a heartbeat is detected on an unviable fetus is not reasonable. Just this weekend the Idaho GOP moved so far as to advocate for no exceptions at all even to save the life of the mother. That's not reasonable, that's extremism.
I agree with this, but again, the answer is legislative--the Supreme Court is responsible for interpreting the Constitution, and it's eminently plausible to interpret the Constitution as being silent on abortion. We should have passed some sensible abortion legislation decades ago.
> I don't think "every person could make up their minds about
Agreed, I was implying that it was left up to the individual within the bounds set by Roe and Casey, which had limits that worked. It seemed that most of the debate of the past centered on exactly the cutoff, which is an important issue but much different than the current debate of "should women have access to abortion whatsoever?"
> though I suspect you will disagree
I do disagree. The reason is that at least two of the Senators who confirmed the Justices who concurred with the Dobbs decision have come out to say they felt at least one of those Justices, one who squeaked by with a 50 vote margin, lied to them during his highly politicized confirmation process. If this were a straightforward matter of poor jurisprudence, then it would be enough to say that. Instead, there was a certain level of at best coy obfuscation, to at worst outright fingers-crossed deceit during the confirmation processes. That makes it impossible for me to see the decision as anything other than motivated by ideology. They said what they needed to in order to get confirmed, and as soon as the majority was solidified, they immediately used their power to do what they wanted to all along.
> Roe v. Wade was extremely tenuous and the proper channel for establishing abortion policy is legislative.
Perhaps it was tenuous according to some, but it was also tested in court, reaffirmed, and part of our social contract for 50 years. Maybe the stick holding up the roof of your house isn't the best, but it's still holding up the roof, so perhaps we shouldn't just get rid of it one day in June because it's not the best? Why isn't anyone thinking about the roof?
> I agree with this, but again, the answer is legislative
I don't think the conservative majority on the Supreme Court agrees. There's nothing in their opinion that would suggest to me that they wouldn't strike down Roe codified by the Congress. My reading of the opinion is that they would strike down any right to abortion not enshrined in the Constitution as an amendment. Amending the Constitution to protect abortion is neigh impossible, and so I don't think we will have anything close to a codified Roe v. Wade as long as the majority of the court remains conservative. Instead about half the states in the country will outlaw abortion full-stop, no exceptions; while the other half services the women and children fleeing those states seeking healthcare, likely maintain the same safeguards offered by Roe in the first place.
Why isn't it like parenting? If you wanted to give a child up for adoption, and no agency in your state could take on the child for three weeks, you couldn't just stop taking care of it. Parents have a unique responsibility to their own offspring. Is it wrong to extend that to at least very-late-term pregnancies? Requiring a woman to carry a pregnancy from 32 weeks to 38 weeks rather than destroying the fetus is certainly a weightier responsibility than just requiring them to feed and shelter a child for a few weeks while a state adoption agency is waiting on resources, but the two requirements fit in the same moral framework of parental responsibility.
> Why isn't it like parenting? If you wanted to give a child up for adoption, and no agency in your state could take on the child for three weeks, you couldn't just stop taking care of it.
"Safe-haven laws (also known in some states as "Baby Moses laws", in reference to the religious scripture) are statutes in the United States that decriminalize the leaving of unharmed infants with statutorily designated private persons so that the child becomes a ward of the state. All fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have enacted such statutes.[1]"
I assume these are meant to prevent infanticide among other reasons but yeah, you can just give up the baby. Apparently you can't just drop them off in most cases, as I thought you could, I think in the movies they show parents just leaving them on the steps. You have to find a responsible party to hand them too.
That is indeed a very limited responsibility, but I think the salient point is that it's still a responsibility of the parent and that the law protects the child from harm and neglect even though it compels the parents to act at their own expense.
I kinda think that the salient point is that the law can and often does provide outs to respect the fact that life is complicated.
Post 32 week abortions are debate within a debate because people aren't really talking about the same thing, much more than other parts of the abortion debates. Many on the pro-forced-birth side would have you believe that this is a common occurrence. The pro-choice side would say that abortion is a difficult decision in and of itself and if someone is choosing abortion after 32 weeks, it must be an exceptional case, and we should respect the parent-doctor relationship to make that decision.
Being in a situation where I'm at the 32 week mark with my wife, I can't imagine many people choose to knowingly wait this long, and then just have an abortion for "funsies". Pew Research suggests it is less than 1% after 21 weeks (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/24/what-the-da...).
I agree with you about the debate within a debate thing. It's genuinely hard to have a conversation about late-term abortion law in the current US context, where the really important laws being made are criminalizing abortions at the very earliest stages, and even possibly some forms of pre-implantation birth control.
But I also think it's helpful to cede some ground to the moderate pro-lifers. If we can acknowledge that 32 week fetuses are empathetically "infants in a difficult locale", to me it's clear that there is some legal burden there. I don't think the opinion of one woman and that of any one doctor she can find willing to agree with her are sufficient grounds for killing a fetus at that stage. Not all people make good choices, and thinking things deserve protection from bad choices.
I'll also add that the criminalization of late-term abortions rests heavily on
1. Guaranteed access to early-term abortions regardless of circumstances
2. Mid-term abortions under specific circumstances.
3. Affirmative defense for late-term abortion given even narrower circumstances, i.e. bodily risk to mother.
With those guarantees, and only with those guarantees, I think the argument can be made that a mother with a late-term pregnancy has willingly undertaken the responsibility to carry that pregnancy to term, and therefor aborting that late-term pregnancy may be treated similarly to a parent harming an infant. But I'll reiterate: only with those guarnatees. And, of course, lots of places don't have those guarnatees right now, which is why this is a "debate within a debate", as you say. And this is the smaller and less impactful of the debates.
I am not sure I am following but as stated this is a bit of a straw man. Even in California the latest you can have an abortion is at 23 weeks unless the life of the mother is at risk.
By definition, a fetus becomes viable if it is likely to sustain survival outside of the uterus. It has to be able to survive without extraordinary medical measures.
Doctors determine whether a given fetus is viable. They make this decision on a case-by-case basis.
Typically, a fetus becomes viable around the 23rd week of the pregnancy. Doctors also consider a fetus to be viable once it weighs at least 500 grams.
At the end of the day childbirth is dangerous and expensive and our US social safety net is terrible. If we truly respected life in this country there are better ways to show it than outlawing abortion.
What adoption agency is going to take a Downs syndrome baby? Or maybe a Cystic Fibrosis baby? The state's horrendously underfunded system certainly is not. And if that mother is low income and already caring for a family she won't be able to support it either. There is literally nobody who can care for the special needs baby properly, what do you do?
Since you've cut off the only other option available to her it is on you to come up with the solution that works nationwide for hundreds or thousands of mothers every year.
Can you find a single example of an abortion being done at 32 weeks? As far as I know there's virtually no way of doing so (vs premature live delivery) that wouldn't result in life-threatening harm to the mother.
Is abandoning a child under your guardianship really a criminal act in most jurisdictions in the US?
> Can you find a single example of an abortion being done at 32 weeks? As far as I know there's virtually no way of doing so (vs premature live delivery) that wouldn't result in life-threatening harm to the mother. Is abandoning a child under your guardianship really a criminal act in most jurisdictions in the US?
> "Gosnell had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered. ... The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that 'snipping,'" the report alleged.
> Prosecution experts said one was nearly 30 weeks along when it was aborted, and it was so big that Gosnell allegedly joked it could "walk to the bus." A second fetus was said to be alive for some 20 minutes before a clinic worker snipped its neck. A third was born in a toilet and was moving before another clinic employee grabbed it and severed its spinal cord, according to testimony. Baby E let out a soft whimper before Gosnell cut its neck, the jury was told; Gosnell was acquitted in that baby's death.
Wow. Unfortunately I imagine we'll see a lot more of that sort of thing as more and more women are unable to access safe/legal/well-regulated abortion clinics.
> Wow. Unfortunately I imagine we'll see a lot more of that sort of thing as more and more women are unable to access safe/legal/well-regulated abortion clinics.
IIRC, all that stuff was done in an actual licensed abortion clinic.
Also you have a weird kind of argument that seems to pivot on the false assumption that the issue is how gruesome the act is, not the act itself.
I read the wikipedia article, it seems there were multiple failings at various levels of government that allowed that clinic to remain open.
And where did I comment on the gruesome nature of what was done? It's the fact he was responsible for the deaths of mothers and infants post- delivery (earning him the title of convicted serial killer) that provoked my reaction.
I can only hope that every effort is made to ensure women in states where well-regulated clinics are no longer operating are able to travel as needed to access them.
> And where did I comment on the gruesome nature of what was done?
It was implicit in your response. The acts I cited were gruesome, and your response implied the response should be to replace them with better-regulated, more antiseptic version of the same act.
It's possible the interpret your comment as an extremely aloof statement of fact without implicit policy advocacy, but that interpretation strains credulity.
Absolutely I believe clinics run in such a way need to be shut down, I can't imagine anybody arguing otherwise.
Unless you somehow believe that doing so without providing a safe/regulated alternative will magically result in women no longer having health-threatening pregnancies or reliably deciding to persist with their pregnancies no matter what (despite all the evidence to the contrary from other parts of the world with very limited legal access to abortion), then I can't see how you could not advocate for better-regulated facilities.
And just in case there's any doubt as to my position - if a woman pregnant at 30 months were to decide she was no longer able to continue the pregnancy, such that live birth was not an option for whatever reason, and there were a way that the foetus could be safely and readily aborted with no risk of harm to the mother, then absolutely she is the only person who can reasonably make that choice. The rest of us have no right to insist we know better, no matter how much we may dislike the result (and yes, I would absolutely be saddened to know that foetus was robbed of its chance to develop into a human).
If a technique was developed such that it was safer to abort a pregnancy than to perform delivery at 30 weeks and that technique happened to involve snipping the spinal chord then I would definitely want to see that option be legally available and offered by well regulated clinics, yes. And sure, it sounds somewhat gruesome, but so do many commonly performed surgical procedures.
A sibling post to mine suggested that was not so. Some googling suggests it's a "felony". I'm not even 100% sure what the situation is in my own country - it's hard to imagine there's a significant number of mothers of sound mind who would deliberately abandon their child such that it has no chance of survival.
Not that I believe it has significant relevance to the abortion criminalisation debate either way.
> Can you find a single example of an abortion being done at 32 weeks?
> it's hard to imagine there's a significant number of mothers of sound mind who would deliberately abandon their child such that it has no chance of survival.
I don't see how either of these quotes fit into a discussion about abortion/childcare law. Shouldn't the law make as clear as possible when it is illegal to abort a pregnancy or give up the care of an infant? The argument that "nobody will ever/has ever (that we can think of) do something so horrible as that" does nothing but muddy the water.
Let's just assume that at least one person in the future wants to abort their healthy 39 week fetus, and at least one person in the future wants to abandon their infant. These would hardly be the most surprisingly immoral things ever done by human beings.
No, but using extreme possible scenarios as a basis for criminal law hardly seems like a sensible strategy either.
Criminalising certain activities always has consequences. If the threat of being thrown in gaol for abandoning an infant really does have the desired preventative properties, and doesn't lead to other unintended consequences (e.g. women choosing abortion or attempting an unsupervised birth instead if they're at all concerned they'll be unable to care for the child, and risk being gaoled for abandoning it), then sure, criminalise it. Both seem like unlikely propositions to me.
Criminal laws exist in part to express society’s moral norms. Abandoning babies to die isn’t illegal because it’s a widespread problem. It’s illegal because it’s wrong.
But if your point is that the Venn Diagram intersection between pro-choicers and folks who want to decriminalize infanticide is not a null set you’ve made it.
Charged with attempted first degree murder. But thanks for the link.
And while I accept laws do exist to enforce societal norms, if the effect of those laws is to make matters worse, they're still bad laws.
I can't say I have a strong position on infanticide. There are undoubtedly cut and dried cases where an adult deliberately terminates the life of a newborn baby that should be classified as criminal acts. Abandoning your own child probably deserves a separate legal classification.
>You would have the legal right to back out of donating a kidney, even if you already agreed to do it and it would save someone's life. Similarly, the argument goes, you should have the legal right to have an abortion (or at least induce labor, if viability is possible) at any point during a pregnancy.
that's not really a good analogy because prior to donating the kidney, the kidney recipient isn't dependent on your kidneys, whereas at the moment of conception the zygote/fetus is dependent on the mother's body. A better analogy would be being able to take back the kidney after it's been donated, although that's also flawed because you're not really giving anything up when you're getting aborted.
Point-in-time viability isn't the idea behind the analogy. The point the poster is making is that the continued ability to live into the indefinite future is what is contingent.
That describes me and I've made that exact argument before. I'd ask that anyone who feels gross at the idea that the government should have the authority to mandate organ donation or blood and tissue donations to save a life or disallow backing out of these procedures to understand that this comes from the same place.
The abortion relevant scenario would be something like: a person has a bad liver, and you agree to donate part of yours to save her life. Doctors remove the other person's liver, and you decide you don't want to donate part of yours anymore after the bad-but-functioning liver has been destroyed. There are no other possible donors, so the patient dies; if not for your initial agreement and subsequent backing out, the patient would be alive and could have found an alternative donor.
My intuition is that most people would say the would-be donor is at least immoral in this scenario, and many would say should be subject to punishment. Curious where you fall on this.
While I would hope that people earnestly enter into donation agreements, it would be a far greater violation to subject reconsiderate[1] donors to the horrors of forced donation. What would a forced donation look like? A person strapped to a bed and involuntarily sedated so their organ could be removed? Truly a hellish prospect.
1. for lack of a term for people who have changed their mind.
Respectfully, I think this analogy breaks down pretty fast.
First of all, pregnancy is overwhelmingly a choice (of course there are exceptions)--it's not our hypothetical organ donor's fault that the hypothetical recipient needs an organ, but it is the parents' "fault" that an unborn child (recall we're not debating point-of-life at this point in the thread) needs to be born insofar as the child's life is the result of a risk the parents knowingly entered into (again, there are exceptions).
Secondly, if our hypothetical organ donor backs out, our hypothetical recipient can get an organ from another donor--with few exceptions, there's no way to transfer a pregnancy (at least not outside of some extremely early window).
The term "unborn child" presupposes personhood, and "fault" is too strong a term even in quotes.
If a person poisons another person deliberately and causes their kidneys to fail, it is not an acceptable punishment to take their kidney and give it to their victim. This remains true even when the victim will die and has no other organ source available.
The argument is an attempt to get around the personhood issue: it's basically an attempt to build a case for abortion even granting fetal personhood, because personhood is very messy, ambiguous, and contentious and an argument for abortion rights that short circuits it would be very powerful.
Right, did you miss my disclaimer?: "recall that we're not debating point-of-life at this point in the thread" (based on upthread: "I'll just add that many people who are pro-choice believe that the issue of whether a fetus is a person is irrelevant.")
> "fault" is too strong a term even in quotes
Yeah, I put it in quotes because I wasn't sure what the analogous term is. "responsibility" is probably better.
> If a person poisons another person deliberately and causes their kidneys to fail, it is not an acceptable punishment to take their kidney and give it to their victim. This remains true even when the victim will die and has no other organ source available.
It's not about punishment, but about making the victim whole. But as discussed elsewhere, I think this analogy is broken for other reasons--specifically, an abortion is an active procedure to kill a dependent party who would most likely otherwise survive, while our analogy posits a dependent party who would die without active intervention. The analogy postulates the state requiring an intervention to preserve life, but an abortion ban is a prohibition on interventions which stop life.
Sorry, i just don't see those as compelling arguments. The ability or non ability to alternatively source organs doesn't logically lead to a change in consequence. If anything, our inability to fully supply donation requests makes it a greater imparative to force organ donations to save lives e.g. organ shortages with life ending consequences are a present reality.
You may not find them compelling, but your analogy fails to account for them nevertheless.
> The ability or non ability to alternatively source organs doesn't logically lead to a change in consequence.
But your analogy doesn't capture the responsibility of the donor for willfully creating the circumstances in which the recipient needs a kidney. Moreover, abortion is a procedure which actively kills a child which would likely otherwise live (without intervention); your analogy supposes a person who would naturally die without intervention. I'm sure we could contort your analogy to make it account for these things, but doing so would exhaust its utility.
It easily captures compelling parents for organ donation using the same voluntary sex mechanism we're examining for forced births. Should parents be compelled to donate their organs to their children when not doing so would result in the recipient's death?
At this point we've added mode of consequence to the analogy, but it seems you're introducing yet another constraint: active and passive intervention. I'm afraid I'll have to stop this here. It appears as though you will continue adding complexity until with the intention of forcing your result. Sorry, I don't debate with people acting in bad faith.
> It easily captures compelling parents for organ donation using the same voluntary sex mechanism we're examining for forced births. Should parents be compelled to donate their organs to their children when not doing so would result in the recipient's death?
If you're really deeply committed to this analogy, we would have to suppose a world in which everyone knows that voluntary sex produces children with an organ deficiency which can only be satisfied by a donation from one parent.
> At this point we've added mode of consequence to the analogy, but it seems you're introducing yet another constraint: active and passive intervention. I'm afraid I'll have to stop this here. It appears as though you will continue adding complexity until with the intention of forcing your result. Sorry, I don't debate with people acting in bad faith.
Pointing out that your analogy fails to capture the relevant dynamics isn't "acting in bad faith".
Not really, any mandated organ donation is always going be from dead donors. If you know of any forced donations from live donors in a democratic state, I'd be interested to know.
And that's really the point. The idea of forced organ donation is abhorrent. The same visceral reaction to the idea of forced organ donation extends to forced birth by way of bodily autonomy. No one, not even the government, should have more authority over your body than you.
To make the organ donation scenario analogous to most abortion scenarios you need to make it so the person being asked or required to donate directly caused the donee to need the organ for survival, and it is an organ donation that the owner recovers well from most of the time such as a liver donation (liver donations from living donors just take part of the liver, and the remaining liver will regrow the taken part).
We probably still would not force an organ donation in such a case, still leaving it entirely up to the person, but their choice could affect the consequences for them depending on how and why they caused the person to need the organ. If they choose to donate and save the person then they might only be looking at some kind of endangerment charge for causing the person to need an organ. If they choose to let the person die they might be looking at murder charges.
I feel like I'm starting to get an idea that this agency-obligation construct seems to be a important to the reliability of the analogy for many people. While I don't share the same sensibilities, I'm interested in how it came to be important for people. I get that from a narrative, or a just-world sense, it's easy to see how two comport, but I'm curious how people other people view this and why is it so important? Is it something that "just makes sense" or does it follow from first principles, and if so which ones?
It might help to analogize with some other examples: say for instance I get into a car crash with another driver and am compensated by an insurance agency. It makes no difference to me that the money comes from the insurance account rather than the other person involved. The end result is the same for me - I can repair the damage. Would it seem as though other people are much more concerned in the other driver paying the obligation themselves? Or perhaps there are other reasons?
The more that I think about this, the stranger it gets. It feels like a categorical imperative-type argument to justify their own obligated existence.
> No one, not even the government, should have more authority over your body than you.
The government already has rights over your bodily autonomy in many ways; just the right to incarcerate someone is controlling their body pretty dramatically. They regulate where your body can go, and to an extent what you can put into your body.
Yes I know. Doesn't it seem backwards though, to you, to make the argument that since the government has bodily authority over you in matters of imprisonment, that the government should also have authority over all aspects of your body? I'm over here trying to find a minimum amount of government authority over our bodies while others are basically saying, "let 'er rip!"
> Doesn't it seem backwards though, to you, to make the argument that since the government has bodily authority [...] the government should also have authority over all aspects of your body?
Yes it does seem backwards. However, nobody here is making that argument.
> I'm over here trying to find a minimum amount of government authority over our bodies
Perhaps I'm just splitting hairs at this point, but "No one, not even the government, should have more authority over your body than you." is just such a broad brush that it's trivially refuted for certain scenarios. Maybe you're talking about medical authority?
In any case the rule of law is very concerned with what happens when rights collide. It is possible -- perhaps common -- for individual's rights to be in conflict.
Maybe. It has much less rhetorical flourish though ;) I still think it's a valid ideal and even if realistically unobtainable in the absolute, it still incredibly worthwhile north star.
There isn't any, but if we take pro-life to its logical conclusion, there should be, at the very least from parents to children, and at least in cases where it doesn't lead to your death.
Also, mandatory organ donation after death should be obvious table stakes for a pro-life person, if they were logically consistent.
I don't think this is true at all. Pregnancy ("creating a life that requires birth" since we're not debating "when does life begin" at this point in the thread) is a predictable consequence of (voluntary) sex. "Organ donation" is not a predictable consequence of sex.
There's nothing inherent to the pro-life position that would require mandatory organ donation between parents and children or anyone else whether before or after death.
The pro-life position is that human life is so precious that preserving the human life of the fetus it is more important than any right the mother may have. There is no logical reason this argument would stop after birth - the mother (and presumably father as well) should maintain this obligation of preserving the life of their child by any means that don't require them to give up their own life.
Being legally required to, say, donate blood for their child should be a no-brainer, if you bleieve that the preservation of your child's life should be a legal requirement that trumps any other right you may have (except your own right to life). Donating their organs to their child after death should also be an obvious legal requirement.
Well, that's not "THE pro-life position", it's an extreme example of a pro-life position (nut-picking, effectively). A more moderate pro-life position argues that consensual sex constitutes a waiver of the right to forego birth (except in cases where birth puts the mother's life at great risk--for some value of "great").
I think you'll find that this position is actually less common among pro-life people than the one I am describing. Exceptions for rape are rarely accepted by those who want to ban abortion entirely. Even less so among those who also oppose classes of contraceptives that immediately kill fertilized eggs, such as the Catholic Church.
Exceptions for rape are much more common among those who also accept at-will termination of pregnancy up to some gestational age (e.g. at-will abortion up to 12 weeks, or up to 20 weeks in cases of rape).
Edit to add: the vast majority of active pro-life campaigners are also opposed to sex education and free contraceptives, once more proving that the question of consensual unprotected sex is not in any way at the forefront of their ideology.
> I think you'll find that this position is actually less common among pro-life people than the one I am describing. Exceptions for rape are rarely accepted by those who want to ban abortion entirely.
It seems like you're conflating "pro-life" and "people who want to ban abortion entirely". The pro-life position includes people who want to ban abortion in the general case even while allowing abortion for exceptional cases.
> Exceptions for rape are much more common among those who also accept at-will termination of pregnancy up to some gestational age (e.g. at-will abortion up to 12 weeks, or up to 20 weeks in cases of rape).
Agreed, but that doesn't refute pro-life people having rape exceptions (multiple groups can allow for rape exceptions).
> the vast majority of active pro-life campaigners are also opposed to sex education and free contraceptives, once more proving that the question of consensual unprotected sex is not in any way at the forefront of their ideology
Can you source this claim about the majority of pro-life campaigners (also, why does that seem indicative of pro-life people in general)? Also, even if it's accurate, I don't think it constitutes proof of much--in particular, they could hold that it's not the government's job to provide sex education or free contraception (I personally favor the government providing both of these, by the way).
In any case, rather than arguing about ONE pro-life position, it seems like it would be better to acknowledge that there can be multiple specific positions within a movement. I'm certainly happy to concede that the pro-life movement includes many people with extreme positions, why can't we agree that it includes some more moderate positions as well?
> The pro-life position includes people who want to ban abortion in the general case even while allowing abortion for exceptional cases.
Yes, but pro-life people are more likely to see “balancing mortality risks” cases as exceptional than “circumstances of parenting” cases.
Just like people opposed to deliberate homicide in general are more likely to see “self defense” as an exception than “the existence of the person killed reminded me of a bad thing that that person didn't cause”.
Rape victims are an issue that resonates particularly strongly with people who see the central issue as one of the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy, not those who see it as about the fetus as a human life.
I'm not following. In particular I'm not sure what you mean by "circumstances of parenting" that would make it comparable with "balancing mortality risks" with respect to exceptionality.
> Rape victims are an issue that resonates particularly strongly with people who see the central issue as one of the pregnant person’s bodily autonomy, not those who see it as about the fetus as a human life.
There are some pro-life people (per the parent's claim) who believe that a child's life is so precious that it overrides the mother's right to bodily autonomy even in rape cases; however, this doesn't mean that they care less about rape victims than people who care about bodily autonomy--for example, they could care the same amount (or even more), but value unborn life even more. Notably, the loudest (most popular?) pro-choice claim is that unborn children don't constitute human life, that they're mere "clumps of cells", so all we can say (at least as far as it concerns people who hold this view) is that they care more about rape-victims than they care about "clumps of cells" which isn't strong evidence that they care a lot about rape victims.
Sure, I agree that it is not the only pro-life position, but it is also not an extreme position among pro-life people (per some Pew research that someone else was quoting, approximately 37% of pro-life people don't make exceptions for rape, 36% do consider rape an exception, and 27% say it depends, whatever that means).
I also think it's reasonable to expect that those who actively campaign to ban abortion are more likely to have more extreme positions than those who simply passively accept these positions. I also think their positions are very relevant, as they have proven to have more sway over public policy than the majority of the population - so combating their arguments is more improtant than combating the beliefs of the more silent pro-life majority.
I’m fine with combatting their arguments, I was taking issue with the projecting their position onto pro-life in general (“the pro-life position taken to its logical conclusion…”). Thank you for clarifying, however—I think we understand each other better.
> consensual sex constitutes a waiver of the right to forego birth
This is the part I'm most interested in exploring. Absent a debate about "life", under what pretext does this construction arise? It's hard not to view it as a post hoc rationalization of a just world fallacy. Are there any other ways to construct the consequence of a waiver of the right to forego birth that stems directly from the act of sex? Some sort of sex teleology? Something else?
> under what pretext does this construction arise?
I'm not sure if I understand your question, but the general rule is that the person with agency also bears responsibility (this is a widely-held axiom). In this case, we have parents who have agency to predictably create a life which depends on carriage and birth, and thus responsibility to provide carriage/birth (obviously biological realities preclude an identical share of the responsibility between parents).
> It's hard not to view it as a post hoc rationalization of a just world fallacy. Are there any other ways to construct the consequence of a waiver of the right to forego birth that stems directly from the act of sex? Some sort of sex teleology? Something else?
Thanks for taking the time to try help me understand this.
I feel like analogizing here might confuse rather than clarify, but I'm thinking of other cases where agents taking actions waive their rights and how those waivers are socially justified. For example contracts bind people in ways that limit their rights.
Ex: if you and I enter a futures contract for you to purchase wheat from me at a certain price, there is a constraint placed on each of us - me to pay you the money, and you to deliver the wheat. The reason we socially allow such contracts of obligation is to facilitate commerce. We allow for other waivers of rights for other reasons.
What is the underlying social reason for the agency-responsibility regarding pregnancy? I'm genuinely asking with the understanding that there may be multiple reasons, but I don't have an internal sense of agency-responsibility toward pregnancy that apparently others do. Under what principles is such a responsibility formulated?
This possibly confuses things more, but we socially recognize that some rights are non-alienatible, ex: you cannot voluntarily enslave one's self in a legally meaningful way. So there do seem to be some limits to which rights people can consent to void.
> Thanks for taking the time to try help me understand this.
No worries!
> I feel like analogizing here might confuse rather than clarify
Agreed--finding accurate analogies is hard for most things, IMHO.
> What is the underlying social reason for the agency-responsibility regarding pregnancy? I'm genuinely asking with the understanding that there may be multiple reasons, but I don't have an internal sense of agency-responsibility toward pregnancy that apparently others do. Under what principles is such a responsibility formulated?
Protection of life. Indeed, as a society we purport to value life (especially vulnerable life) even above commerce.
We also don't let parents neglect children even though this restricts parents' liberties. When you elect into parenthood (e.g., via consensual sex or adoption), you have a legal/moral responsibility to provide vital necessities to your children while they're in your care. Of course, once a child has been born, parents can elect to transfer that responsibility (to the state or other parent/s), but for obvious reasons we can't transfer care of an unborn baby.
Of course, this is predicated on the axiom that an unborn baby constitutes human life.
This has helped clarify my thought - that bodily autonomy is non-alienable, not even through sex. Moreover it's non-alienable in the same way freedom from slavery is or less so in the way that certain contracts are unenforceable - they simply deprive too much.
I can understand that position if someone’s axiom is that an unborn child is “just a clump of cells”, but do you think it’s okay for a child to be killed in cases where a couple just couldn’t be bothered to use contraception?
If yes, in a hypothetical world in which giving a child up for adoption isn’t possible, would you support a parent killing their toddler because they don’t want to have to slave to support them (that is, their autonomy is harshly limited)? If no, how do you reconcile this with your position on abortion (e.g., perhaps you would draw some distinction between slavery/forced-labor and bodily autonomy?)?
Sorry, but this thread excludes arguments that presuppose the "life of a child" maybe there are different threads that follow that line of reasoning.
This thread is also not about post-birth situations. I'm strictly interested in discussing the construction of a bodily autonomy right to abortion that is not predicated on the aliveness of anything. Maybe you'll have better luck elsewhere.
To jump a few steps ahead in the dialogue, I'll posit that simply the medical reality of our ability to perform organ donations, and the consequence of donations saving lives makes have-ing organs a sufficient condition for forced donation.
Medical realities currently play a role in viability calculus so it is a perfectly valid analogy in that medical advances in organ donation being a possibility are equally valid.
This is a weak argument as are most "rationalist" pro-choice arguments - the kidney itself isn't a conscious creature 't dependent on you prior for it's sustenance. Most pro choice arguments fundamentally boil down to "my convenience outweighs any moral imperative"
Which is fine, but I'd rather people be honest about their arguments rather than dress it up in pseudo-moralism.
A fetus generally isn't believed to be a conscious entity (nor is a newborn for that matter). The important distinction vs. a kidney is more that it's something that likely will become conscious in the future.
The question of abortion is really interesting in that it scratches at a deeper moral question-- precisely why do we consider murder to be wrong?
In my view, there are a few different reasons. One is that we are preventing future consciousness for a being by ending the body's ability to be conscious. That one certainly applies to abortion. But another is that we hurt the people that have relationships with or dependencies on that conscious being. That one doesn't apply to abortion at all.
The latter isn’t a valid argument, because it would suggest the morality of murdering someone depends entirely on how many friends they have
But you’ve hit on my overarching point. The current pro choice argument is largely nonsense because the atheistic position doesn’t have a good answer to the “why is murder wrong” question.
If you don’t consider life sacred, the majority of our legal system unwinds. It gets even worse considering the pro choice cadre is also anti death penalty
The west is only now truly grappling with Nietzsches God is Dead and few realize it
> The latter isn’t a valid argument, because it would suggest the morality of murdering someone depends entirely on how many friends they have
I think you misunderstand my point. There are many reason murder is harmful, and abortion applies equally for some but not all of them. So the morality doesn't depend "entirely" on any of them (including the two I listed).
I do actually think its worse to e.g., kill a husband and a father of young children, compared to killing a hermit with no social ties. And it seems like society feels the same way-- otherwise we wouldn't hear about how victims are "a father of five" in tragic news stories.
I'm not taking a stance on the overall issue, but this is such a flawed comparison because a baby is dependent solely on the mother and not a large pool of potential donors.
Moreover, in this hypothetical, there's no indication that the donor made a choice that put the recipient in need of a kidney (whereas parents' engaging in sex predictably results in a child in need of birth--recall that we're not debating point-of-life at this point in the thread).
Personally I'm not seeing a foetus as being a conscious creature either. At some point it becomes one when its complexity level can support that, but not early on. Certainly it has the potential for that, assuming all goes well, but at the maximum point of normal abortion in the UK (24 weeks), I'm not buying it.
A baby isn't any more a "conscious creature" at 24 weeks than at 4 weeks post birth. The vast majority of the final trimester is spent gaining weight and finishing lung development, not on fundamental brain development.
I'm fine with abortions being accessible, more power to you, but this is something that makes me uneasy at a philosophical level, if that makes sense. Because you start asking yourself when exactly that moment is. Like, I get it, it's the stereotypical engineer/scientist kind of thinking, but there has to be one moment where the fetus isn't a conscious creature, and one second later it is. Can we ever know? Is a newborn even conscious? It hardly looks like it to me. It's pretty much acting on instincts only.
There are levels of consciousness. For instance, a brain dead boy lived for 12 years with a rare disease in which his brain was replaced with fluid. With a brain stem he could still react to light, sound, and other stimulus - but not much else.
In both cases, something is dependent on your body to live. Are you morally required to sacrifice your body for theirs? That has nothing to do with convenience. If anything is adding "pseudo-moralism" to the discussion, it's referring to this sacrifice as a "moral imperative."
> Similarly, the argument goes, you should have the legal right to have an abortion (or at least induce labor, if viability is possible) at any point during a pregnancy.
This is an example of taking some oversimple principle, and applying it too consistently without consideration of complicating factors.
If you induced labor at many points after the "point of viability," the baby still has a large change of dying or suffering harm even with long, intensive, and expensive care in a NICU:
> Long-term survival is possible after 22 weeks.[59] However, odds of long-term survival between 22 and 23 weeks are 2–3 percent and odds of survival between 23 and 24 weeks are 20 percent.[60] "Intact survival", which means survival of a neonate without subsequent damage to organs such as the brain or bowel is 1% at 22 weeks and 13% at 23 weeks.[60]
Firstly, your kidney donation comparisons is completely irrelevant here, it is not even remotely comparable to the situation of having a living person inside your body. I am not sure how your analogy would be able to backup your claim.
That being said, I will _assume_ that you are tying to make a variation of the The Violinist Argument [0] and so I will respond to that instead.
This argument claims that the question of fetal personhood is irrelevant because the mother’s right to an abortion would trump the fetus’ right to life even if he is a person.
The idea is that this situation is analogous to an unplanned pregnancy: against her plans, the woman finds herself supporting the life of an unwanted person and has the right to deprive that person of her bodily support, regardless of what the result is for the parasite.
The key logical flaw lies in its failure to distinguish between killing and letting die. In the context at hand, this distinction corresponds closely to the difference between what might be called ordinary and extraordinary life-preserving measures, whether they take the form of healthcare or some other intervention.
Let me give a simple example to illustrate what I mean by ordinary vs. extraordinary life-preserving measures. If you have fainted on the train tracks, it would be admirable for me to dive in front of an on-coming train and sacrifice myself in order to knock you out of the way. But you are not entitled to have me perform this extraordinary act of heroism. If I do not dive in front of the train, no one would say that I was guilty of manslaughter. On the other hand, you probably would be entitled to my assistance if I am standing idly by and see you collapse hours before a train is in sight. Where exactly to draw the line between ordinary and extraordinary life-saving measures might be fuzzy, but the basic validity of the distinction should be readily apparent.
Having laid this groundwork, we can see that the “Right to Life” is a right not to be killed. It is not a right not to die. The reason that the woman in the story can sever the tubes without violating the violinist’s dignity is because he does not have a right not to die. The tubes are an extraordinary means of preserving his life, and he is not entitled to extraordinary life-saving measures. However, the woman may not stab the man in the heart and only then sever the tubes. In this case, she would be violating his dignity because he has a right not to be killed. This latter scenario most closely resembles an abortion, in which the fetus is ripped or burned to death while still in the womb and only then removed.
Now, why does the abortion procedure go to such great lengths to kill the fetus before removing him? In many early-term abortions, the procedure is simply easier, but not so in late-term abortions. The reason is instructive: leaving a prematurely born infant to die without providing basic care would be illegal, a violation of the infant’s right not to be killed. Like the violinist, an infant is not entitled to extraordinary life-saving interventions, but he is entitled to ordinary sustenance. This includes the baseline level of care necessary for ordinary survival—food, water, oxygen, warmth, etc.—from those responsible for him. Parents who fatally neglect their young children are guilty of killing them, not just letting them die. Regardless of whether the parents want or ever wanted those children, the law understands that they have a primary responsibility to provide the ordinary sustenance to which young children are entitled. If unborn children have the same personhood status as infants, then they should be accorded the same rights. Since the placenta represents the ordinary means by which a fetus obtains food, water, oxygen, and warmth, it follows that he should have the right to remain in his mother’s womb until viability, even if she does not want him there.
The abortion debate is very much a question of personhood.
When Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun penned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion in the United States, he admitted:
> If this suggestion of [fetal] personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] amendment.
The appellant was Roe, and the 14th Amendment states that “no person shall be deprived of life…without due process of law.”
In other words, Roe v. Wade itself acknowledges this.
I'm 44 years old; and found a article recently that completely transformed my perspective:
FORGET when life begins. It's a red herring. A distraction causing us to diverge rather than agree.
Right now, today, there are countless people needing blood transfusions; but I'm not legally forced to donate my blood to them (I should; it would be great; it would be the right thing to do; but I'm not legally forced to do so).
Right now, today, there are people needing bone marrow or organs; or would like eggs or sperm so they can have a child; or long hair for wigs for cancer-struck; but I'm not legally forced to donate them to these clearly worthy causes.
Lest somebody tries to muddle the issue, I'm also not required to donate blood or organs to my two children, or my sibling, or my spouse; I should, and I likely would, but I'm not legally forced.
.... So even IF we grant that a gamete or zygote or 4 cells or 6 weeks old fetus or whatever are live beings based on whatever definition we agree or fail to agree on; what rational differentiator would cause us to force a woman to donate blood and organs, sacrifice and risk their health for them?
I may have come to this point late, this may be an old perspective to others, but it helped me shortcut a tremendous number of complex and relative arguments, and go back to - "it's a woman's body; where do we get off forcing her to donate it to anybody else?"
At the same time, I must admit I now find it harder to understand and condone the opposing perspective; I see it as forced organ donation for a select subgroup of humanity, and while I'm a moral relativist, that doesn't mean that I don't find some things morally wrong :-/
> .... So even IF we grant that a gamete or zygote or 4 cells or 6 weeks old fetus or whatever are live beings based on whatever definition we agree or fail to agree on; what rational differentiator would cause us to force a woman to donate blood and organs, sacrifice and risk their health for them?
Because the moral obligations of mothers (and parents generally) to their children are different than the moral obligations surrounding blood donations or anything else. If you said that fathers have a moral obligation to sacrifice their bodies and lives for their kids, either in providing for them or in war, most of the people who oppose abortions would agree with you.
"Lest somebody tries to muddle the issue, I'm also not required to donate blood or organs to my two children, or my sibling, or my spouse; I should, and I likely would, but I'm not legally forced."
I get this is uncomfortable; I understand it's unpalatable; most people don't like to get into nitty gritty dilemmas. But we do not, repeat do not, require parents to donate blood or organs to their children... at least, not after they're born. Some countries do try to require it before their children are born though. Through this perspective, this feels at least backwards and misguided, and plays into the pro-choice (unfair and dishonest) stereotype meme about caring more about unborn children than born ones :-/
I feel that's a worthwhile distinction to explore, but I really really place priority on honest discussions.
If you are putting forward "You are not required to get pregnant", I feel that's empathically not a honest discussion point. We can discuss rape, incest, non-consensual sex; and we can discuss consensual sex where precaution was taken against pregnancy that failed; but that sentence is patently and trivially and demonstrably not universally true, so immediately I feel we are not discussing from point of mutual honesty and charity.
Put it differently if that helps: what percentage of people that willingly tried hard to get pregnant, are undertaking abortions? And when they are, why? (we happen to be a couple that had to spend a lot of time money and hardship to get pregnant; but there would still exist scenarios where abortion would feel like a possible scenario, depending on outcome of tests, viability, health issues, etc!).
Similarly, what is "Action to kill"? If I take a morning-after pill, I am preventing a cell from implanting into my body. Somebody can present that as "action taken to kill", but somebody else can take that as "refusal to donate my body". We can take opposing positions on that, but I think understanding that both positions exist is required for honest discussion.
Leaving aside (for the moment) the moral question of abortion after rape, the issue is this: Once it happens, can you take action to reverse it?
If someone stole blood from you, and if you take it back the person will die, are you permitted to take it back? I don't think you are. Of course most people permit abortion after rape, so you need some other kind of justification for that, but on an intellectual level, this one will not work. You need a different argument.
> We can take opposing positions on that, but I think understanding that both positions exist is required for honest discussion.
That is definitely a very interesting question. I feel you would have to distinguish between a pill taken before implantation (birth control) and a pill taken afterward (plan B).
One prevents it from ever happening, the other destroys something that did happen. To me they are different.
Also, I must point out that none of this discussion informs my position on early abortion (although it does inform my opinion on abortion later on). So this discussion is more intellectual than practical. I say this to argue with your position that this line of reasoning transformed your opinion - I strongly disagree that this is a good line of argument.
I am still on the "where is it in relation to my body" as a point of reference.
If I start a blood transfusion, and they stick needles in my body and start sucking it out, I still have legal right to change my mind and stop giving blood to that other person.
If I start organ donation and they do surgery prep and I'm on the table with my buttocks exposed, I still have legal right to change my mind. It'd be complicated and sorrowful and devastating to others, but I retain that fundamental right to control of my body. I can actively take control and perform actions within my body that may have negative consequences to others, that may not be nice or beneficial to others, but still remain firmly within my control.
It may come to another perspective as well: am I actively murdering the person within me, or am I withdrawing services I am providing to another person within me.
This might sound a little abstract, but the government can nullify bodily autonomy legally in some cases, namely:
Circumcision: The skin of the penis in male babies can be taken from us with out our consent.
Conscription: Think about drafted war veterans who have lost limbs and such. They should have had the autonomy to keep those body parts, however they were forced to sacrifice them for the sake of the state (think about how we say soldiers give their lives, for their country.)
Using that argument, at minimum, there should be exceptions for rape. But, that's not where the US is currently heading based on the actions of several states and the decision recently published by SCOTUS.
>>"If this is true, any restriction on abortion is slavery."
This is currently my personal perspective; I mean not in those words, but yes, today I am that thoroughly pro-choice. This hasn't always been my exact position, I understand it to be extreme, and I am open and even (genuinely!) eager to be persuaded otherwise in the future; but yes - I have yet to see (and it may well exist!) a rational, non-contradictory argument or moral justification to force organ & blood donation before birth, when we don't enforce it after birth.
Suppose you have two adult conjoined twins, Liz and Cat. A procedure exists that would remove Cat from Liz's body but would result in the death of Cat. Not performing the procedure results in a significantly lower quality of life for Liz.
Is it okay for Liz to knock Cat out, take herself to a hospital, and have the surgeon remove Cat from her body? Or should society force Liz to share her body with Cat?
The opposing perspective would map this closer to the abortion debate than the blood transfusion scenario. I wonder myself which is more relevant and why I have such different responses to the two scenarios.
I can come up with an argument against this. You have no major premise. All you have are two minors premises and two conclusions:
* X actions ought not to be done, forced organ donation is a type of X action, therefore forced organ donations ought not to be done.
* X actions ought not to be done, forbidding abortion (like forced organ donation is an X action) is a type of X action, therefore forbidding abortion ought not to be done.
But what is X category of actions!?!
Is it:
* Violations of autonomy?
* Deprivations of moral agency?
* Distracting the proletariat from organizing against the capitalist class (why abortion was first legalized!)?
* Causing greater pain and suffering than it relieves?
You never actually take a position on why forcing organ donation is bad. It simply sounds bad, and scares people, so it must be bad.
In my country no politician will bring up the issue because it's so toxic, for all sides. You can't win and you will lose votes.
We have abortions up to 12 weeks.
Honestly, I think this is a good situation. It's a super divisive issue and there is no need to argue about it. Christians here accept that most abortions would take place illegally and endanger the mother if it was banned. It's swept under the rug. Pro abortion people think 12 weeks is ok, I mean you probably know youre pregnant by then.
It works. Everyone stays the fuck away from the issue.
I look at the US and think its fucking insane how this issue is being used politically by everyone. It's a terrible issue to make political. And frankly it is the supreme courts fault, as Ruth Ginsberg herself said. The court allowing abortions full stop meant one side won. No questions, no discussion. That is not how a normal society works. You can't ignore all pro life people and say abortions allowed up to birth. It's ridiculous and undemocratic.
Just to be clear - the elil17's statement that "Similarly, the argument goes, you should have the legal right to have an abortion (or at least induce labor, if viability is possible) at any point during a pregnancy." is not the normal/typical pro-choice position (at least here in the US). In fact, that statement is so far from the normal/typical pro-choice position that I seriously wonder if elil17 is trying to troll us (it's possible they're not, and I can never know what they're really thinking, but if I was trying to divide a group of people using a hot-button issue here in 2022 the way I'd do it is to post something that's like 80% reasonable sounding and then ends with something that'll get "the other side" riled up).
It's worth pointing out that this isn't accurate either: "You can't ignore all pro life people and say abortions allowed up to birth". Wikipedia even says that here in the United States "The [Supreme] 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" (from the 'Roe v. Wade' article) Wikipedia has two citations to support that. I can't decipher the citations myself - I think they might be court cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#cite_note-FOOTNOTE...
I thought it did, though, since it mainly restricted anti-abortion laws that apply in the first trimester, with it (and later decisions) allowing significant restrictions in the second and, especially, third trimester? It definitely didn't ban abortion restrictions entirely.
Except in most countries, abortion is illegal by the second trimester. Second trimester abortions (so up until 24 weeks) had to be legal under Roe. Only regulations that are about the mother's health were allowed. So you could mandate that second-trimester abortions have to be in a hospital, but you couldn't outlaw a 20 week abortion completely, the way most developed, civilized countries have.
PP v Casey changed that a bit, sure, but that was 30 years ago.
> It works. Everyone stays the fuck away from the issue.
Until they do not.
Legality is a big help for women. In a nod and wink, illegal but permitted regime women's health care is in danger of the political whims of law enforcement disrupting it.
Legality is not perfect protection against the misogynist brigade, but it is definitely a help.
>Even saying that "life" begins at conception is tenuous. Gametes (sperm and egg cells) are "alive" in that they carry out the same cellular functions that other living cells carry out.
The standard argument here is that an implanted egg left undisturbed will eventually grow into a human, whereas sperm/egg floating around wouldn't.
Sperm are floating around in the vicinity of eggs before fertilization. If left undisturbed, fertilization will occur. Many methods of birth control disrupt that sperm/egg interaction. It's not all that dissimilar from disrupting some intracellular interaction, or some other intercellular interaction, to prevent a fertilized embryo from replicating or implanting. Sperm+unfertilized egg mixtures in a uterus are on the path to life.
For that matter, mixtures of uneducated teenagers will, if undisturbed, make a whole bunch of babies.
Sperm and eggs cannot grow or divide further, which is a fundamental requirement to being alive (the ability to grow). They can only do so on the context of fusing together at which point a diploid organism is created, which seems to be a requirement for human individuals.
If you know of a case of a conscious haploid human being please inform us now
An human egg can only grow if it somehow combines with a sperm, a human child can only grow if it somehow combines with food.
The fact is life and death surround us. A single bacteria is roughly as amazing as all the rest of the cosmos combined (as far as we've seen). Each human egg and sperm contain great potential, if only the conditions are right, if only they combine with their environment in the right way. Yet death is everywhere. The miracle of life is destroyed so elsewhere it can thrive.
I'm not convinced losing a single human egg, fertilized though it may be, is especially tragic. At some point it is worth protecting with force and violence (because that's what we're debating in this thread), but not when it's only a few cells.
> a human child can only grow if it somehow combines with food.
Indeed, and in the United States, it is a crime for a mother or father (or even most random adults) to neglect a child.
The kidney argument is often used to make the case that a woman should not have to carry a child. However, this argument falls flat.
If you find an abandoned child, you actually... have to take care of it. If you don't, you can be imprisoned. If you're the parent, you'll be imprisoned for even longer. You have a basic duty to care for children, even if not a parent.
> I'm not convinced losing a single human egg, fertilized though it may be, is especially tragic.
I can find a lot of people whose death I would not find particularly tragic. The law -- thank goodness -- doesn't follow the whims of anon291.
Parthenogenesis is uncommon but not impossible in eggs.
We might have record of it happening once for humans in some holy writ, though the baby was considered male, which if genetically male would be impossible for parthenogenesis but not necessarily if the case were simply phenotypically male (like a female hyena). Certainly that story is more common in the US than other similarly derived folklore and myths, like Athena (female, so parthenogenesis is a potential).
She is in the Greek mythos and was worshipped by many. Historical enough for divinity claims, should I be interested in her patronage as a mortal. We can probably find a suitable historical figure to attach that divinity to. Maybe Mary Magdalene from the New Testament, she is already considered somewhat divine in the apocrypha (Christian holy writ arbitrarily not included in the Bible of mostly similar concurrency). Maybe even tie Canaanite and Greek pantheons back together through Asherah.
You're going way off topic. You asked why sperm and eggs are not living, but a diploid fertilized egg would be considered an individual human. I provided an answer (sperm and eggs lack a fundamental qualification to being human -- having a diploid set of chromosomes). Unless you can provide evidence of a human being with a haploid set of chromosomes (23 or less), my point still stands. Greek, Christian, or whatever mythology doesn't matter.
> Parthenogenesis occurs naturally in some plants, some invertebrate animal species (including nematodes, some tardigrades, water fleas, some scorpions, aphids, some mites, some bees, some Phasmatodea and parasitic wasps) and a few vertebrates (such as some fish, amphibians, reptiles and very rarely birds). This type of reproduction has been induced artificially in a few species including fish, amphibians, and mice.
Happens in vertebrates. Hasn't been observed among primates quite yet, but give it time and proper data capture. Thus why mythology (oral embedding of odd events preserved by religious contexts) could provide a single meta-observation in the stories of virgins giving birth.
You then asked for a historical Athena -- not sure why you wanted to go that direction but guessed you wanted to go off topic -- so I went with it.
You're trying to make the point of "can't happen" that eggs self-fertilize. We know they do, though, among vertabrates. That we haven't observed it in humans means one of three hypotheses: (1) it is impossible, (2) it is rare, (3) we don't capture the observation (perhaps the fetuses all miscarry, thus requiring abortion as a medical procedure).
I'm not talking about sperm and eggs dividing independently, I'm talking about a mixture of sperm and eggs in a uterus. That mixture is on its path to life, and it looks every bit as lifelike to the naked eye and (largely by extention) the moral instinct as a fertilized embryo does.
Without getting too philosophical, I think most people would agree that a mixture of sperm and eggs isn't a singular entity, whereas a fertilized egg/zygote/clump of cells is.
The problem is we've already gotten too philosophical. Nobody has any prepubescent moral instincts about fertilized human eggs. Nobody has any empathy for fertilized human eggs. Deciding that an ethically-burdensome life begins at egg fertilization is ridiculously modern, arbitrary, and, to use your phrase, "too philosophical". It isn't a threshold born of compassion, like mid-term or late-term abortion laws are in some people's minds. It's a threshold decided on by dispassionate intellectuals because it seemed kind of parsimonious if you squinted at it just right, and then adopted by politicians and partisans because it seemed like the best they were going to get on the road to their real goal, which is criminalizing birth control.
Is there somebody out there I could read who argues that the ethical responsibility to carry a pregnancy to term begins at the moment of egg fertilization, who doesn't also personally believe that extramarital sex and/or birth control are sinful? I am genuinely interested in being proven wrong about my characterization of people who argue for fertilized-egg-morality. I have questions for them, like "how far into the egg must the sperm penetrate before it becomes an ethically significant entity?" and "do documented cases of parthenogenesis in humans indicate that all eggs are ethically significant entities as well?"
> The problem is we've already gotten too philosophical. Nobody has any prepubescent moral instincts about fertilized human eggs. Nobody has any empathy for fertilized human eggs
Sorry, I vehemently disagree. I remember my parents explaining abortion to me as a child, and I thought it was pretty barbaric. My parents are less 'pro-life' than I am.
> criminalizing birth control.
Personally, I don't use birth control, because I think it's too dangerous.
> Is there somebody out there I could read who argues that the ethical responsibility to carry a pregnancy to term begins at the moment of egg fertilization,
There are even leftist orgs who engage in 'direct action', like pro-life Antifa: https://paaunow.org/. Not my cup of tea, since I typically disagree with leftist approaches to argumentation, even though we'd agree in this case. Here's their manifesto (https://paaunow.org/stances). They don't believe extramarital sex is wrong in a moral sense.
Honestly, most of the pro-life movement is not Catholic. Most evangelical and Protestant churches believe BC is fine. Many evangelical churches are okay with extra marital sex.
> Sorry, I vehemently disagree. I remember my parents explaining abortion to me as a child, and I thought it was pretty barbaric. My parents are less 'pro-life' than I am.
I'm not saying children aren't inclined to be repulsed by abortion, I'm saying they wouldn't empathize with a fertilized embryo any more than they'd empathize with a sperm cell. In fact they're probably a lot more likely to empathize with the sperm cell since it's moving around.
> Personally, I don't use birth control, because I think it's too dangerous.
I don't think I understand this.
> Sure. Christopher Hitchens was pro-life.
Thank you for this, it was interesting hearing his perspective. I really dislike his perspective, but it's interesting to hear anyway; it's the sort of example I was looking for.
What I dislike is how totally definitional his position seems. We musn't destroy fertilized embryos because they are humans, and they are humans because... we are defining humans to be fertilized embryos and beyond? Why not ask the question in the first place: Why is it wrong to kill? If it's because of the lost potential life that would have been lived had the killing not occurred, then we must outlaw all forms of birth control. If it's because of the termination of the neurological functions of a human or human-like brain, then there's nothing wrong with destroying embryos. But what is the ethical argument for the cutoff being fertilization? "Potential life" clearly does not work; potential lives are prevented all the time. "Imminent life" doesn't work either; sperm on their way to an egg are imminent life until they hit latex. The moment when "the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte" is very interesting, but so are many other stages that precede it and follow it. I don't see why that stage strikes an ethical chord except in the minds of people who can't separate arbitrary term definition from reality.
What if we defined sexual intercourse this way? Let's find the biological moment where sexual intercourse has technically occurred, and rest our moral judgement on that biological definition. So, for example, rape with a condom is a whole separate class of crime, because sexual intercourse never occurred. Nevermind that the real impact to thinking, feeling people is almost totally disconnected from that specific biological definition we've picked.
In addition to my questions from the previous comment, here's another thing I'd ask Christopher Hitchens (if he were still alive) or those who agree with him on this subject: Is it wrong to have sex with a woman born with a condition that allows her eggs to be fertilized, but leaves no chance for them to ever implant, thereby invariably killing one or two fertilized "humans" every month she has sex? Or, in abstract terms: Is it really the fertilized embryo entity that we care about? Or is it in fact the imminent life? And if it is the imminent life, then why is pulling out okay (or is it)?
> What if we defined sexual intercourse this way? Let's find the biological moment where sexual intercourse has technically occurred, and rest our moral judgement on that biological definition. So, for example, rape with a condom is a whole separate class of crime, because sexual intercourse never occurred. Nevermind that the real impact to thinking, feeling people is almost totally disconnected from that specific biological definition we've picked.
You are writing this as if this is not something we already do. Not in the way you mentioned, but in many states and jurisdictions outside America, rape refers to vaginal penetration with a penis. This is an attempt to define sexual intercourse. Other sexual crimes are classified differently (either as sodomy or sexual assault). This is not because these other crimes aren't equally terrible emotionally, but because PIV rape can cause a child, which is considered worse to do without consent.
> In addition to my questions from the previous comment, here's another thing I'd ask Christopher Hitchens (if he were still alive) or those who agree with him on this subject: Is it wrong to have sex with a woman born with a condition that allows her eggs to be fertilized, but leaves no chance for them to ever implant, thereby invariably killing one or two fertilized "humans" every month she has sex? Or, in abstract terms: Is it really the fertilized embryo entity that we care about? Or is it in fact the imminent life? And if it is the imminent life, then why is pulling out okay (or is it)?
I imagine it would be the same as his answer to generic trolley problem questions.
But again, you asked for one example. I gave you one. There's actually plenty of secular pro-lifers, modern, old, etc. You should perhaps read more before just pretending it's a primarily religious position. Ultimately, the Christian position on this (best explained by the Catholic church) comes from Aristotelian ethics, not a particularly Christian worldview, or even one that requires scripture to defend. Almost every pro-life defense rests on the simple claim that a fertilized egg is human and has particular rights. Perhaps the only 'religious' claim the Catholics make is that humans have rights independent of the status of their brains, because humans are made in the image of God. But frankly, if we were to reject that claim, we would be forced to reject the enlightenment ideals this country and secular liberalism were founded upon (most secular philosophers make little attempt to defend why humans have rights in the first place).
> You should perhaps read more before just pretending it's a primarily religious position.
By your own link, it's an overwhelmingly religious position. If you look at the issue globally it becomes even more obvious just how religious it is. I'm interested in the exceptions because they are relatively rare.
> Almost every pro-life defense rests on the simple claim that a fertilized egg is human and has particular rights.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. It takes the implications of "human" in well-established ethical systems and attempts to insert the definition of "human specimen" from modern biology. That's not a valid move. Ethicists didn't have embryos in mind when they discussed things like divine rights and deontology.
I'm glad you brought up Aristotle, because he himself wrote on this subject:
"...but when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation."[0]
Aristotle didn't understand the specifics of embryos or implantation, but he was clearly capable of observing that there were stages very early in pregnancy where the thing growing did not yet have sensation, and then further stages where it had sensation but not the sensation of being human. This is astoundingly accurate; props to him.
Applying modern biological definitions to the established ethics of old is anachronistic. You can't just look to the letter of the ancient law and swap definitions from modern, unrelated fields and expect the intent to survive.
but surely there must be a difference between babies dying due to factors out of your control, vs you terminating it? Back in the middle ages the infant mortality rate was apparently 20-30% in the first year[1], but I doubt that would be a valid justification to kill babies after they're born.
Maybe. But I was responding to the assertion that embryos grow into humans by default. They don’t. A massive number are aborted spontaneously.
Banning all abortions leaves us in a position where women can be prosecuted for something that happened naturally. Or if not literally prosecuted, left without medical care to deal with a spontaneous miscarriage (as just happened in Texas).
Disclaimer: I was born and raised Lutheran but am no longer religious
Through a religious lens, it seems these arguments are proxies for "killing a soul bearing being." The key problem is a soul can't be detected - we don't actually know what carries a soul and what doesn't. Through the non-religious lens, the question is what constitutes a being with human sentience. At what point does a collection of cells cross the threshold from a chemical machine to whatever Descartes was referring to when they said "Cogito, ergo sum." Humans are pretty far away from understanding the phenomenon of sentience; AFAICT we don't even know where to look for it. I observe the universe - but I don't know where that "I" came from, where it goes when my cells die, how a random collection of molecules became attached to that "I," or how it stays attached as my cells cycle out throughout my lifetime,
Back to the religious take - depending on when you believe God has endowed a collection of cells with a soul is the moment you would consider stopping that process "murder." This, IMHO, is where things get problematic: that belief is a guess and getting it wrong has pretty massive implications under religion.
An example taken to the extreme: if God allocates a soul ahead of time, stopping a human from coming into the world could be a sin. In other words - abstinence would be preventing a soul from descending to this level of existence. If you abstain from the urge to produce a soul bearing being, and that soul had been allocated, what happens to that soul? Getting this wrong means you could be committing the same sin as "abortion" every time you abstain from an urge to procreate.
On the other extreme: What is special about the moment the Gametes meet? Why would that be the moment a soul gets allocated? Or when the heart beats for the first time? Or when long term memory develops? Getting this wrong means you are doing a pretty great harm to humans for something that may not be a sin.
From the non-religious perspective, I have no idea why my collection of cells is so particularly special that I was endowed sentience when other forms of life aren't. The easy one is human-like meat. Pigs, cows, horses, dog, cat, etc. I see no reason why something so similar to me wouldn't be sentient or why that sentience shouldn't be protected. But it doesn't really stop there - I have a hard time understanding why cows should be so special to be endowed with sentience while a palm tree or tomato plant isn't. I often think about the asparagus in my fridge and wonder if it "died" when it was harvested, or if it is a sentient being slowly starving to death in my refrigerator. Which then leads me down the ethics of consuming any organic molecules - is life just one big murder-dome in which sentient beings compete with one another to be the one that does the eating and not the one that gets eaten?
If you're still with me, I guess what I'm saying is it's messy and people are just guessing. At the end of the day, I wish we could own that these are guesses and approach the conversation with a bit more humility - it's very likely all of us are wrong (myself included) about this entire argument.
One of the best things I read recently was how a woman in Texas drove on the HOV lane arguing that because she was 2 months pregnant it was more than one person in the car by how Texas law defines a fetus as a person.
And further how this will have implications on health insurance companies because suddenly a pregnant woman is not one person but two people and so what can insurance cover and what it cannot . It’s both fascinating and a disaster. .
For health insurance benefits a pregnant woman already counts as two people, so it changes nothing at all. There's no disaster here, just a funny story.
I'm... pretty sure that's not true. For one thing, I can't ever recall having to enroll a child with insurance or having them on any of our insurance cards before they were born. They are, in a sense, covered, but not in the same sense they are after they're born.
It is absolutely frustrating to me that people are trying to say that pro life people are coming to the conclusion due to their religion.
I'm sure some people are, but the idea that the only way you can derive ideas like "human life has worth" is from religion feels like a huge step backwards.
I'm pro-choice but every time I read an online thread on the topic I spend the whole time face-palming over "my side's" bad arguments and total failure to understand pro-lifers' positions.
It's actually not the only topic on which I think it'd be a lot easier to work as a conservative operative or pundit crafting or delivering arguments against what I believe, than as a liberal operative doing the same in favor of what I believe. I'm not sure if that's true for a lot of people regardless of their beliefs—that is, that it's just way easier to argue something you don't actually believe, in general, so there are also some conservatives on the other side going "man, it'd be so much easier to argue for liberal positions"—or something about the level of nuance or whatever required to vigorously defend current liberal positions versus the difficulty of defending current conservative positions. Hard to judge which is the case, for me at least.
When does a person die? When the last synapse fires? When the heart stops? When your brain is too far gone for you to be responsive?
The truth is there is no bright line. Dying is a process, not an event. So is coming into being. Personally, I don't see a zygote as a person. But a 32 week pregnancy is pretty close? Close enough that I wouldn't condone an abortion except in extreme cases.
> As a conservative, a person dies when God comes and brings the person to heaven. It's very clearly defined.
As an atheist, that definition is as useless as one involving Father Christmas. If you want to define something that has the seriousness of "life" we need to use something that doesn't rely on religious dogma.
Every conservative is theist? I know several counterexamples.
Ergo, the clear definition is missing.
What is more, "God comes and brings that person to heaven" is pretty much only applicable to a minor subset of Christianity, which only overlaps about 40% with conservatism, hardly the modal belief or even a sizable plurality. That would be Catholicism, with purgatory. Further, it isn't the most novel of beliefs. That'd be Mormonism, with its "Spirit World" reinterpretation of swedenborgianism, or potentially some theories among Baháʼí adherents.
When you use beliefs to define biological and legal processes, things get murky and edge-case-y really really quick. You shouldn't advocate for using beliefs to define biological or legal processes, especially in a pluralistic society like the US and Western democracies, but also in general. It is a hallmark of bad governance.
This doesn't mean morals and ethics have no place in law. Only that unfalsifiable beliefs shouldn't drive law or science.
This question is unanswerable because nobody can define what is human and what is life. It's a spectrum. For any rule you can give that separates humanity from other animals, I can give an exception to that rule. Which is why intellectualizing the abortion argument from the point of "when does life begin" is pointless.
Instead we should serve to minimize harm, in which case legalizing abortion is the obvious choice, since criminalizing abortion has never decreased the number of abortions. It has only led to unsafe abortions and higher rates of infanticide.
What makes you human to me is your brain. That's why I feel no compunction about killing a fly, regret about killing a dog, and think it is wrong to commit murder.
So if I suffer an accident and suffer brain death, pull the plug. Appearances notwithstanding, I would no longer be meaningfully human.
Conversely a zygote with no brain is less to me than a fly. A fetus with pain reflexes but no higher thought is less to me than a dog. And even a newborn baby is not fully human. Lots of potential is there, but not yet reality.
When it comes down to it, I think one could make a convincing argument that individual sperm and eggs are alive. IMHO, what matters for what's generally considered "human life" is when consciousness begins and ends: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-conscio...
> But when does the magical journey of consciousness begin? Consciousness requires a sophisticated network of highly interconnected components, nerve cells. Its physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. Roughly two months later synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. Thus, many of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place by the third trimester. By this time, preterm infants can survive outside the womb under proper medical care.
That's a largely unanswerable question. What defines "human"? Is it the sequence of DNA? Is it the presence of a soul? Is it some level of thought? The first is knowable. The second is absolutely not knowable. The third is a bit squishy - is thought just synapses firing, or does a person have to articulate that thought into language (or something else)?
To me, it's viability, which is itself fuzzy and gradually getting to be a smaller window. Carry a fetus long enough that it's viable, you should carry it all the way (newly arising complications as an exception). Before that, it's not human enough to outweigh the costs/risks/etc to the mother.
Exactly, this is a very personal question and should not be up to police. I certainly don't want police to determine whether or not a pregnancy is threatening the life of the pregnant person.
The people that want to pass a national law like the Louisiana law want police interfering with your pregnancy, your contraception, your marriage, your sexual positions and whether you can be openly gay or trans. They have a pliant SCOTUS that wouldn't dare strike down their egregious legislative agenda.
I would call a zygote a human life. A zygote has a critical feature that no other cell has: if you don't kill it, it will someday love and suffer and have opinions and work and play and seek the meaning of life.
Humans are rarely fully human at any given moment. They sleep, during which they lose the critical characteristic of consciousness. They go insane, during which they lose the critical characteristic of intelligence or reason. They suffer the frailties of youth, during which they are dumber and weaker than many animals. They suffer the frailties of age, during which the same is true. They suffer injury and disability. They suffer under privation and oppression and abuse and fail to develop as they should. None of these things prevent them from being human.
The eugenecists of the early 20th century were scientists. They didn't say the negro was subhuman out of sheer bigotry; they tested the hypothesis. They gave IQ tests and the results were clear -- but they were testing victims of abuse and privation. Were they right to look at the man as he was, at that moment?
They were not. The true understanding of the value of a human being transcends the current circumstance and looks at the whole of life and the whole of potential. It respects what happened in the past and what will happen tomorrow. It respects what could happen with healing, or in a generation.
Sperm are cells. They do cell things. But that zygote - if you protect it - is a creature that will some day write essays. That's why it's human. That's the difference.
I think there is a high percentage of chance that the zygote will self terminate. That makes people who have difficulties to have kids serial killers no? I mean, my aunt had 19 zigotes implanted before she carried one to term, shouldn't this be illegal? Also, doesn't that makes people waiting to have kids (thus increasing the chance of early termination) immoral?
> I think there is a high percentage of chance that the zygote will self terminate.
There is. The figure that sticks in my head, off the cuff, is that something like in the neighborhood of a quarter or a third of pregnancies end so soon that the woman doesn't even find out she's pregnant -- a miscarriage is mistaken for (and in some ways actually is) a period.
If you want to know how I feel about this, I feel roughly the same as I do knowing that there are wars and oppression and disaster occurring in far away countries in which lots of people die. It is how the world is, and I can't change it. I didn't know those people, but it's tragic.
Turning to personal experience, I have detected an early miscarriage or two of my own. One I wasn't expecting and wasn't sure about, and it felt to me a bit like as if I came upon a dead stranger in the street. Tragic, if distant. One I was expecting and was sure about, and I mourned like the lost baby I felt it was -- she has a name and a grave.
> That makes people who have difficulties to have kids serial killers no?
I don't think so. The law recognizes a difference between trying to kill someone (murder) and accidentally killing someone while not specifically trying to (manslaughter). I think the law is right on this point, and intent matters. There's a funny and fuzzy line here -- manslaughter surely becomes more murderous as you raise the probability, right? Where's the line? I would say that morality is not so simple that you can place the line at, for example, 30% odds. If justice were something computers could do, we wouldn't need judges -- laws would be sufficient. ;) I would say more seriously that judging this sort of situation is a hard and human thing to do, and that philosophers with their pocket calculators tend to miss the point.
I would also say, in the case of trying to conceive, that living is so wonderful that it is well worth a chance of death, even if that chance is quite high. People even as adults generally believe life is worth risk, even extreme risk, and I see giving that chance -- risk and all -- to someone else as a kindness.
> I mean, my aunt had 19 zigotes implanted before she carried one to term, shouldn't this be illegal?
People who share my perspective are generally very uncomfortable with IVF. I certainly am, and would never do it myself. I think if my view were common, it probably would be illegal. But I can't claim this is well settled even within that community.
To be very clear, I don't intend to persuade you to agree with me. I was responding to the above poster who was incredulous that anyone could hold this belief. I do, and I know people who do, and I know communities that do, and you might be surprised by how many people it is, if you think it should be zero.
> Also, doesn't that makes people waiting to have kids (thus increasing the chance of early termination) immoral?
I would say no. And I would also say that the question gets at a deep, deep disagreement that I have with what seems to be a very dominant philosophical viewpoint.
You see, you seem to regard a chance of death as so important that it dominates all other calculations, and decisions must be made optimizing nearly exclusively on that variable. If the chance of a pregnancy being viable is 80% a this age and 70% at that age, it is actually immoral to try at that age.
The perspective I hail from sees this way of thinking as monomaniacal and unhealthy and perhaps a bit narcissistic. Trying too hard to optimize mortality is really beside the point -- everyone dies. You can't change that. And if you want to impact people in a positive way, you should do so writ large and awesome -- not fretting about how many toes you step on. By all means, be careful! But obsessing over that isn't good.
I see living a vibrant human life as much more important than being able to prove your negative impact on your neighbors was optimally minimal to three decimal places. In fact, I think that if you focus on that to such a degree that you neglect the awesome things you're supposed to be doing with your life, you've missed the point of living -- and that in itself is a great sin, tantamount to suicide. By all means, be careful not to hurt people! But making this a central focus out of a fear of judgement sacrifices too much on other axes. I would say that a life characterized by a fear of wrongdoing will always pale compared to a life animated by love. (I would also, paradoxically, say that a life animated by love will actually do a better job of not hurting people, at the end of the day -- both because it is generally more careful and makes better tradeoffs when it is less careful). I suppose that is one way to spell some of the magic of the gospel -- a dependence on grace is a secret key to righteousness because without it you don't have permission to fail.
One peculiar difference is that my way of viewing the world sees a big difference between statistical, unintended death and intentional murder. Paradoxically, I don't have a problem with declaring war, even though you know that statistically speaking innocent people will die, while I do have a problem with intentionally committing murder for a strategic advantage in the same war. I don't even care about the numbers at all -- the first could be a million and the second could be one, and I'd still care about the second much more. I don't care much about numbers and I care a lot about intent.
It is interesting to note that my worldview is Christian and therefore ancient -- forged in a very different world than this one. In the ancient world, infant mortality was high, regular mortality was high, and health care was nonexistent. It is easy to see how working too hard to shave points off of public mortality would have seemed pointless in such a world -- if you are lucky enough to have your life and health, do something with it! That was certainly the take of the ancients on the situation.
It is easy to see how the ancients might agree with me that working to improve public health is cool and all, if that's your calling, but that obsessing over your impact on your neighbor's health is kind of narcissistic and pointless. He's going to die of something else, and likely sooner rather than later, and in the mean time you've wasted your life -- which is precious and since you are lucky enough to have it, you have an absolute responsibility to do something!
The moderns don't see it that way. Since everyone's going to be healthy and long lived, small impacts are worth obsessing over. And somehow paradoxically, since life isn't such an unusual gift, wasting yours isn't a big deal.
Curiously, it's the ancients I disagree with in thinking murder's a big deal. While the Christians certainly thought so, many, many, many cultures saw the murder of the weak, poor, or infants as just... not a big deal. Certainly the Roman culture that Christianity was born in practiced routine infanticide, which the Christians rejected as ghastly.
The ancients held the view that since life was cheap, murdering a few people here and there was no big deal. I (and the moderns) strenuously disagree. The moderns hold the view that since death is rare, slight statistical increases are worth obsessing over, and since life is long and routine, wasting yours on such trivia is no big deal. I (and the ancients) would strenuously disagree.
I happen to think that's because my viewpoint is timeless and correct. ;) But one thing it certainly isn't is modern.
> I don't think anyone would mistake that for a human life.
I don't think many people claim a zygote is a person. I still don't see any plausible argument that human life begins at some time other than at the point of conception.
Unfortunately, evangelical leaders have promoted this as a sort of magic moment when a human begins. The has resulted in opposition to emergency contraception (Plan B) under the perception that it's an aborticant.
You have missed the essential argument: The claim is that "someone ELSE's life begins at conception". Obviously all cells are alive, but they are your own until they become a new human being. Once that new human being is created, it's no longer your decision to make. At least, that's the moral argument being proposed.
I think the “life begins” argument is overly reductive, some would argue you’re killing something by cutting off the supply of life that would otherwise be expected to play out (like plucking a seedling), that’s why they have exceptions for “danger to mother’s life”.
It also seems like a distraction. The real argument seems to be around when does it make sense to end another life. For example, we don’t tend to believe that it never makes sense.
> Even saying that "life" begins at conception is tenuous. Gametes (sperm and egg cells) are "alive" in that they carry out the same cellular functions that other living cells carry out. Is a zygote more alive than the gametes that came together to form it?
I don't know what they actually think, but it seems "life" in that sense might actually be a bit too fuzzy. Gametes are alive, but, for lack of a better term, they're not exactly human. Fertilization is the discrete event that creates an identifiable individual human life. Before that, you have cells that are created and die as a matter of course. After that, you have a more-or-less continuous process of development of an identifiable human organism.
> I would ask that you consider if another person's sincerely held beliefs may be valid when they contradict this point of view.
I think this goes for all sides. One of the major societal breakdowns regarding this that many people seem to think that they don't need to do that, and prefer instead to consider strawmen that reinforce their personal sense of righteousness.
The way I see it, the issue of abortion is obviously one of the most controversial things out there, some people think it’s baby murder, other people think it’s no big deal. With something so controversial, why not just let the person who is carrying the baby decide for themselves? You might think a mom is killing her baby, but she might not. Just let her decide for herself. Forcing people one way or another is a terrible solution. Pretty ironic for a party that loves to claim they’re all about personal freedoms and small government.
Playing the devil advocate here but if we extend that logic to other things does it still work?
If a sovereign democratic country passes a law to murder 5% of its population, don't we have a moral obligation to intervene and prevent them to do so despite them being free, sovereign and democratic.
My point is: Moral obligations can compel you to ignore any other concept you value if you consider the problem serious enough.
You are not extending the same logic though. The overwhelming majority of people, across all countries (hopefully 99%+) agree that murder (of innocent post-birth, actual people) should be illegal and indeed murder is illegal probably in every country that has a system of law.
There seems to be no recognition by the anti abortion side that even though roughly half or more of the world disagrees with their stance, they’re just going to ignore that, insist that they’re right, and try to impose their view on everyone else anyway.
>"Pretty ironic for a party that loves to claim they’re all about personal freedoms and small government."
This kind of sentiment is overly reductive and misses the point. No proponent of small government wants a government so ineffective that it cannot have laws against murder. I personally don't believe abortion is murder, but many people do, and they're not so libertarian as to "live and let live" on such a topic. I wanted to chime in because I really dislike the fallacy of 'you claim to like personal freedom and small government, but you want the government to enforce laws you support? Curious...'
Most of them don’t actually believe abortion is murder though. They give their hand away pretty easily. If they thought abortion were murder, why are they also against contraceptive use? Over a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage - far more than the number of voluntary abortions - why are they doing nothing to reduce that number? Maybe there could be mandatory pregnancy testing once a month to check if a woman is pregnant, and then intervene with drugs or behavioral guidance to maybe help avoid a miscarriage. Maybe more research is needed there, which they are not doing. And if abortion is murder, why make an exception for rape or incest? It’s not the baby’s fault it is the product of rape or incest - how does murdering a baby make a rape any better? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
>"Most of them don’t actually believe abortion is murder though."
How do you know this? Is this speculation or logical deduction?
>"If they thought abortion were murder, why are they also against contraceptive use?"
This doesn't represent all pro-life people. This mainly represents Catholics. Being anti-contraceptive is, I believe, an effective strategy for the Catholic Church to produce more Catholics.
>"Over a quarter of all pregnancies end in miscarriage - far more than the number of voluntary abortions - why are they doing nothing to reduce that number? "
Miscarriages are often spontaneous and there is little that can actually be done to save the pregnancy. Additionally, there is a categorical difference between a death due to natural causes and a death due to wilful intervention.
>"And if abortion is murder, why make an exception for rape or incest?"
You're on to something. Plenty of pro-life people take the stance that even these exceptions should not be allowed.
You actually don't have the empathy you think you do.
If Christians think abortion is child murder, then of course they SHOULD do everything in their power to stop it.
Honestly the article shows even Europe wouldn't approve of American Abortion. So it's clear this is more than a religious issue and more of an existential one.
I feel like that has sort of been asked already, in the context of abortions for women who have been raped/ are in danger. There's quite a few places that allow abortion only in those circumstances, and the reasoning behind that is usually that "fetuses are human, but in these cases the fetus can be killed because it threatens the women/ the women did not consent".
While an interesting avenue to explore, for the general debate it is less useful that discussing when life begins.
as you know, the thinking is that it is a community of people who gather to bless the union of one man and one woman, again and again, that is the way that children are born and raised, to make the community strong. In contrast -- an unrelenting focus on one individual in the rhetoric, is so uniquely American. Isolating the qualities of the pre-born is not the point. It is a cycle of life that includes both parents and their community, that builds the community over time in a typical Christian view. I can't explain a Muslim version of that, but put together, Muslim + Christian represent a substantial portion of all humans on Earth.
before you downvote, did I once say that you dear reader, have to participate in this? no, it is a choice. When it is not a choice, that is a root cause for the instant rage that is so common with this topic.
What the Supreme Court did was say that if there is to be a federal guarantee of that, Congress has to make it so by passing a law saying as much. That seems kinda reasonable to me?
The Supreme Court said NOTHING of the sort. They ruled on what the Constitution said about abortion. No ruling was made on whether Congress can create legislation, and I'd bet money that Congress can't.
But about the Congressional question, Congress are only able to pass federal legislation if it fits within one of their enumerated powers. And the interpretation of those enumerated powers depends on the Supreme Court. Despite the Supreme Court's silence, I'd bet that they would rule that Congress lacks authority.
If you want to dig deeper on that, Congress's enumerated powers are described well at https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8.... You probably want to focus on the Commerce Clause, that's the one which is the broadest grant of power.
It would be a Hail Mary, but you can also look at amendments and ratified treaties for more sources of Congressional authority. (Remember, treaties only give Congress power to pass laws if they are ratified by a 2/3 majority in the Senate. So we must have ratified it, not just signed. Most that we sign, we do not ratify.)
You have misunderstood what it is that they decided.
For example consider the affordable healthcare act (aka Obamacare). A decade ago, the Supreme Court upheld it. This is one of their "healthcare is a legitimate area for Federal lawmaking".
But read their decision at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf and that isn't what they decided. What they decided is that all of it fell under the power to regulate Commerce EXCEPT the individual mandate. However the individual mandate falls under the taxation power. None of this adds up to, "Congress can pass legislation because it is about healthcare." All of it is of the form, "The legislation passed fell under enumerated powers that Congress has."
Here is a sample passage from page 3 about why the individual mandate cannot be supported under the Commerce clause:
> The Framers knew the difference between doing something and doing nothing. They gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. Ignoring that distinction would undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers.
Now suppose that Congress passed a law mandating universal access to abortion, while Texas has forbidden the same. By the reasoning that I just quoted, Congress' ability to regulate commerce does not extend to compelling Texas to allow commerce where none currently exists.
This does not mean that Congress is powerless. The next legal battleground is going to be over people leaving one state to get an abortion in another. Conservative states would like to ban it. As https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/can-states-punish... says, it is a tossup about whether such bans will succeed. But if there was specific federal legislation to allow crossing state lines for the purpose of abortion, that pretty squarely falls under the Commerce Clause. Because it is interstate commerce, in a commercial activity which actually exists.
I also think it is reasonable - however - what the SC has done is throw out precedent here - there is a tremendous amount of "law" that has not been codified by the constitution or by congress, but instead relies on decades and decades of cases that have come before the supreme court. So in this instance they have specifically decided that these previous decisions were wrong and reversed it. I believe this was done selectively and purposefully.
That said, your precedent point is important. See page 119 of https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf for Thomas' concurrence where he says that Supreme Court decisions supporting access to contraception for married couples, for couples to engage in consensual sexual acts (specifically sodomy), and a right to gay marriage.
Abortion rights do not fall by themselves. They are part of a web of related rights that will rise and now probably fall in conjunction.
Congress doesn't pass any laws by itself [1], so of course I wasn't claiming it changed the Constitution alone. But Congress did indeed pass the 14th Amendment.
[1] "In order to pass [ordinary] legislation and send it to the President for his or her signature, both the House and the Senate must pass the same bill by majority vote. If the President vetoes a bill, they may override his veto by passing the bill again in each chamber with at least two-thirds of each body voting in favor."
You found the procedure for something completely unrelated.
The procedure for amendments is specified in https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution/artic.... There are two procedures, only one of which has ever been used. In that procedure Congress *PROPOSES AN AMENDMENT* (with a 2/3 vote in both houses), then 3/4 of the states have to ratify it within 7 years. Also no involvement from the President is required.
Therefore Congress never passed the 14th amendment. It *PROPOSED* it. And the distinction is significant because Congress itself lacks authority to amend the Constitution.
My point is unchanged: the legal position in effect from Roe until the Dobbs opinion was that the constitutional guarantee of personal liberty through the 14th Amendment would include abortion. Congress, being a party to the Constitution, had thus already spoken on the matter.
You mean something like “they need to be proposed by the concurrence of 2/3 of both the House and Senate, or by a convention called for by the legislatures of 2/3 of the states.”
I tend to err on the side of libertarianism. Everyone can govern hyper locally, why impose your view on others.
That avoids much of the conflict.
I think in this particular issue, the challenge is both sides view it as a global issue and they aren discussing on the same terms. On the one hand life does begin at conception, it’s a scientific fact. The question is whether or not it’s worthy of societies protection.
One view is that creation and life should be protected at high cost.
The other world view believes either their life matters above others OR society is better without certain life.
Listen to the arguments, that’s what it boils down to. Quality of life, career, mental fitness, problems with the fetus, removing genes from the pool — it’s eugenics.
I personally pass no moral judgement, to your point, I see both world views. However, it’s painful to watch people not recognize what it is. The discussions aren’t even framed properly; everyone just talks past one another.
That doesn't solve the problem at all, Because you still have to decide if the the fetus get's the right to that same absolute bodily autonomy.
Take that all the way to the extreme though and you would need to wait for the zygote to get to the point that it can give it's opinion on what should be done with it's body. After all letting the mother decide would be going outside the bounds of her own body and would be violating another human beings right to autonomy.
Absolute bodily autonomy doesn't even manage to sidestep the issue.
The fetus is utterly reliant on the mother to provide a hospitable environment, it seems self-evident that a body that is not autonomous doesn't have the same right to self-autonomy.
Just think through the consequences of the argument you are making. You've now established the government as the absolute arbiter of that fetuses best interests and given the government absolute control of the environment it relies upon, aka the mother. Should the mother be required to eat a government mandated meal to make sure that the fetus is getting the nutrition required? What if the mother wants to vigorously exercise? Are you going to strap that woman down to a bed and force feed her veggies to make sure the baby comes to term safely?
"The fetus is utterly reliant on the mother to provide a hospitable environment, it seems self-evident
that a body that is not autonomous doesn't have the same right to self-autonomy."
So you're saying that if a life is reliant on something external for its life, then it isn't autonomous and doesn't have the right to self autonomy?
Wouldn't that mean that we don't have to respect the living will of someone on life support? They are entirely reliant on other people to provide a hospitable environment.
The same would hold true for new born babies, who can't feed or shelter themselves. And, for that matter, that would hold for small children. At what point does a child become
self reliant enough that they don't have the right to decide if they want to be alive?
"Just think through the consequences of the argument you are making. You've now established the government as
the absolute arbiter of that fetuses best interests and given the government absolute control of the environment
it relies upon, aka the mother."
You're being somewhat hyperbolic here. But this isn't much different that what the government does now. Government
limits our rights in order to provide everyone with a set of equitable rights. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"
is what the goal is. And to do that, you have to limit what some people can and can't do in order for everyone else to
have those rights.
We have already granted the government authority to act on behalf of those who are too young to make decisions on their own.
Children who find themselves abandoned, or in homes that are dangerous, can be removed by the state and placed in a safer
(hopefully) environment. This system doesn't always work, but its acknowledged that its better than doing nothing at all.
"Should the mother be required to eat a government mandated meal to make sure that the fetus is getting the
nutrition required? What if the mother wants to vigorously exercise? Are you going to strap that woman down
to a bed and force feed her veggies to make sure the baby comes to term safely?"
You've pushed the idea to the extreme to prove a point. But what you've shown here is only that an extreme
interpretation of this is a bad idea. The other end of this extreme is equally bad. When a mother has total
autonomy to decide the fate of her children until they are old enough to live on their own without the support
of their parent, then a mother could kill their child right up until they were what, 5 or 6? maybe 10? Or force
the child to live under extreme physical or sexual abuse?
A better answer here is somewhere in the middle. At some point after conception a child becomes a person. When that happens,
the child should have all the same rights as any other person. They should have the right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"
the same as any other. And those who chose to bring that life into the world must accept the responsibility
to care for that life until it no longer needs that care. To do otherwise is to invite cruelty and societal
degradation.
How would that settle it? Like if you go to get an abortion they extract the fetus and put it into an artificial womb, then put it up for adoption? It's not likely we're all going to stop inseminating each other just because we have a new gestation option.
From a libertarian perspective, if someone is dependent on you for food and shelter, what compels you to continue to provide those? There's no moral burden to help someone else, as they have no claim over your resources. Choosing not to supply a fetus with your nutrients and hormones - the result of hard work, fruits of your labour - is totally in line with my understanding of libertarianism.
So you must be against child support and child negligence laws right? I for one cannot wait for our new libertarian utopia stepping over the bodies of neglected, abused, and traumatized children. It's scary what some people fantasize about.
No. In the Hebrew Bible, Exodus 21, a man who inadvertently causes either a miscarriage or premature birth (the wording is uncertain) is liable for punishment by fine.
How much more so someone who deliberately kills an unborn child?
The early Christian communities also forbade abortion based on the Biblical idea of preservation of life. The Didache, an early Christian writing circa 70-100 AD, forbids abortion[0]:
> "Do no murder children through abortion nor kill them after they have been born."
And this should not be surprising, as Christianity was birthed from Judaism, and Judaism forbids abortion in all but extreme cases.[1]
The text in question deals with either manslaughter (accidental death) or premature birth. Both are distinguishable from murder, the deliberate taking of a life.
That's why the text starts with "And should men quarrel and hit a pregnant woman" meaning that they are judged as having done it on purpose because he intended to hit someone, he just hit the wrong person. It's not considered accidental.
And look at the next verse 23 - if they kill the mother they are judged as a capital crime.
The Bible does not consider a fetus a full person, but despite that it does not permit abortion.
On a practical level Judaism takes a middle of the road approach and [sometimes] permits abortion before 40 days from conception (or 57 days as is more commonly measured, from LMP).
You misunderstand my meaning. By "accidental", I don't mean the quarrel was accidental. We mean the death of the unborn child was accidental. (Even more, the text may not imply death of the child, but rather, premature birth. The Hebrew wording is uncertain.)
The fine imposed for either manslaughter or premature birth indicates the Bible values an unborn's life to some extent. But the text doesn't prescribe punishment for deliberate killing of the unborn child. One would presume the punishment would no longer be a fine. (Indeed, the following verses suggest that if a life is taken, the punishment is capital.)
Your statement about Judaism's view of abortion is misleading. Judaism generally forbids it, and allows for it in only certain extreme cases, such as to preserve the life of the mother.[0]
Forced conscription of soldiers. Men literally lose their freedom for long periods of time and are forced to follow orders and charge into battle and risk being killed by the enemy (or by friendly fire or other accident). Survivors often suffer from permanent damage, including physical trauma (e.g., lost limbs and organs) and mental trauma like PTSD.
Given that the largest global pro life organization, the Catholic church, engaged in pointed efforts to outreach prisoners, immigrants, the ill, widows and orphans, this criticism falls flat.
In fact, I'd venture the church spends more money on these things individually than abortion prevention.
with all due respect your religious beliefs are irrelevant to the discussion and have no place in a discussion about people's rights to health care being revoked by an unelected minority.
>in a discussion about people's rights to health care being revoked by an unelected minority.
I don't know, this seems like a "live by the sword, die by the sword" situation to me. Either you recognize the authority of the "unelected minority", or you don't. You can't support their legitimacy when it suits you, and oppose their legitimacy when it doesn't.
and that's why most of the Republican party tried to overthrow the election in 2020, including the wife of Clarence Thomas who continued to rule on cases relevant to the overthrow attempt. Spare me the lecturing.
not to mention Mitch McConnell stole a supreme court seat.
>and that's why most of the Republican party tried to overthrow the election in 2020 including the wife of Clarence Thomas who continued to rule on cases relevant to the overthrow attempt
1. Can you link to some cases where you believe that the court has ruled inappropriately?
2. even if we somehow accept that Thomas should be disqualified from serving, the ruling would still be 5-3 in support of overturning it.
>not to mention Mitch McConnell stole a supreme court seat.
People vote based on their beliefs. It's not common for people to separate their beliefs based on how they came to believe them. That is: I got my morals and beliefs and political leanings from the people I'm around, and there's not a clear demarcation in my mind between them.
Congratulations on making one more partly wrong map and contributing to the list, therefore proving that doing so it indeed hard! Florida is shown as having more access than say France, because France has the limit at 14 weeks, right ? Eeeep, wrong, because you can't read the law. Firstly, it is 14 weeks _from the start of the pregnancy_, as opposed to the US who counts as as since the last period. And magically, when you convert, 14 weeks in France is 16 in the US (https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1551). But that's not all. This is for abortion that is 100% at the choice of the mother. Except that abortion is legal up to 9 months, provided the health of the baby would be endangered _or_ the life of the mother would be endangered. And, would you look at this, "psychosocial risks" are a valid reason to ask for an abortion since 1974, or, in more simple to understand terms, "mental health bad if child born, or extreme poverty, etc".
Making cases like Andorra, Monaco and Liechtenstein take up so much space in the article overinflates their importance, considering they're about 100 000 people total and that crossing the border to any country is done in an hour. Sure, impractical, but also, insignificant. "Extremely minor leftover city state that is either a monarchy or just known for being a tax haven" isn't really useful on a map.
In France, after 14 weeks, you have to pass in front of a 'commitee' of i think 2 doctors and a judge (or someone that represents the government judicial power, i had this conversation a while ago and don't remember the details). The doctor give their thoughts and the judge decide. In practice, before viability, the judge will always accord the right. The doctors will only state facts and cannot influence the patient in any way or form (else they won't be on committees anymore). The judge will always defer to the doctors after viability.
The doctor who told me that also told me that they pushed 20 years ago for social assistants to be present too, to interview the family (sometimes, the expecting triggers stuff in the family that push the women to ask for an abortion a bit late), but the lack of personal prevented that.
In America the goal is to distract people from corporations not paying taxes so the media ponies up with other big companies to make abortion a pressing issue when in reality I doubt any man could care less about what a woman hes not involved with is doing to their body. Furthermore abortion should be legal and it should be handled between the man and woman with the clause that if they both agree to the baby, both will be held financial responsible. If the man wants the baby and the woman doesn't she has the right to abort. If the woman wants the baby and the man doesn't, she does not have to abort but the man is not responsible. If there is no man involved than the woman is free to do as she pleases. Extraordinarily simple yet it is one of the most pressing issues in our country....not poverty...not pollution...not coporations not paying taxes...not the justice and prison system....abortions. America is speedrunning to becomming a failed society. Personally I will make as much money as I can here and then leave.
>when in reality I doubt any man could care less about what a woman hes not involved with is doing to their body
You are simply wrong on this point. There is a large portion of the population that thinks their opinions on "decency and morality", that largely come from religion, should be applied to everyone. They try to get around this by claiming "life starts at conception, and therefore any abortion is murder", but there's not really a legal foundation for "life begins at conception" and at best that seems to come from their religion so that should be thrown out pretty much right away.
I am an atheist, and perfectly secular reasoning can be used to argue that the line can be drawn at conception. Like with any sliding scale, picking a specific spot on the gradient necessarily involves some kind arbitrary decision making. So what happens in this case is people either go fully towards "only a person at birth" or "a person at the moment of conception" at the opposite ends of the scale. Picking either extreme does not require a theological basis.
Specifically we are talking about a philosophical framework here that requires all: Life begins the moment sperm merges with an egg, that life has the inalienable right to develop using someone else's body for 9 months, that life has the inalienable right to be born, and that life has these rights even when being born is impossible (ectopic pregnancies for example), and has these rights even when they are a direct cause for the death of the mother.
I am eager to hear of such a framework that isn't either directly theology, which cannot be used as a justification for law in the United States, or just a rebranded version of theology
These are the requirements because plenty of the "trigger laws" that went into effect do not have exceptions for safety of the mother or "guaranteed failed" pregnancies, or even exceptions for what amounts to removing a dead fetus.
There is no philosophy or spectrum required. It is an issue between a man and a woman at an extremely personal level. If the man is not involved then it is for the women to decide. As for when in the pregnancy the baby should be terminated plenty of medical doctors have given their opinion and most states with abortion rights have a reasonable cut off. It is not a complex issue as my original point states. People are brainwashed into thinking it is so they ignore all the pressing issues. Any man that pretends to care about this issue is not a man but a brainless droid. To bring religion or philosophy about when life begins is turning a simple issue with simple cases and edge cases into an issue that cannot be agreed upon. Men who care about abortion have no life and should use their energy to do something useful
You're polarizing the discussion on purpose. How about stopping that before pointing the fingers at downvoters?
The debate is more complex than "oh so you want deadbeat dads to get away with it". Men can get babytrapped by women too. Those cases are rare, but rare cases don't seem to be a problem when discussing the female side of the debate.
I don't know, I think an exception for rape is usually an element of discussion on both sides. I'd be fine with such an exception here as well, no issue with that as the man is an innocent party in the creation of the child.
But you're totally fine with your taxes paying for a child where the parents chose to get pregnant without having the ability to financially support it?
This is precisely the "4th grade-level" discourse that was referenced a couple levels above. There is simply no part of this debate that is this simple.
No, I'd prefer not to have to do that either. That's not a choice, though, is it? People are gonna have kids when they aren't ready for them, it's reality.
Here's the simplicity. In making a child, two people are more responsible than anyone else. Both of those people, once the child is born, have a greater responsibility financially for that child than anyone else. Letting one of them leave and abrogate that responsibility would unequally apply the responsibility to the rest of society, and that is unacceptable to me.
Accidents happen, mistakes happen, bad things happen, all that can be dealt with. There's no need to enshrine a right to abandon.
There's a lot of shortsightedness in thinking not paying for something now means you don't pay for it later in terms of the effects on society (higher crime, poor outcomes, etc.).
I don't really see how a father paying for their own child causes crime rates to increase or poorer outcomes than a father not paying for their own child.
I can explain it to you, and this is backed up by studies.
You're forcing a parent to be involved in a child's life when they don't want to be. The person will likely be a force of evil / detriment / abuse in the child's life. The child will grow up with issues, which may lead to crime, health issues (mental or physical, our mental state greatly impacts us physically), etc. etc.
I would much rather pay for them not to be involved than put the child through that. Not only does it prevent issues down the road for society, it is the right thing to do.
Saying you don't want to pay is naive. You're paying whether you like it or not. And surprisingly, the pay now is actually cheaper for society in the long run.
> I can explain it to you, and this is backed up by studies.
I find this incredibly hard to believe. Please link a study or studies that shows that children where the father dodged and refused to pay child support had worse outcomes than children where the father paid child support as ordered.
It seems straightforward that forcing something on someone is going to lead to them victimizing someone. And if you think you can prevent it by policing them, I think you'll find it difficult (parents in America and around the world have a lot of leeway with how to treat and raise their children). I grew up in an abusive household, so I can confirm anecdotally some of these things. I made it out alright, my sister unfortunately did not.
Two questions if I may:
Why do you find it hard to believe?
Did you have loving / supportive parents?
1. In either situation, the child is unwanted. The only difference is money, not time. I find it hard to believe the lack of both money and time is better than the lack of time. It just doesn't make logical sense to me. Now, if it was the difference between no child and a wanted child, that makes sense. But that's not what we're talking about - we're talking about the difference between a child where the father pays child support and a child where the father does not pay child support and instead the child is supported by state social services.
For 1, I don't understand. What do you mean the only difference is money, not time? Are you suggesting compelling payment but withholding visitation rights, contact with the child, etc?
For 2, I ask because I was wondering where your baseline belief in parents starts at.
I now get where the confusion is coming from - custody and child support are two totally different things, legally speaking.
I'm only talking about child support, not custody. Whatever the custody arrangement, a person can't walk out on their financial obligation to a child they fathered. This means that yes, even if there is no visitation, the child is still entitled to child support.
Right. So if you're forcing child support, most are going to hold a grudge and demand custody of some sort. I literally know so many cases like this where the "bad" parent then tortures the child, doesn't feed them or gives them substandard care, etc. etc.
The real world kind of sucks. Which is why I'm saying there's no good way to force someone to pay without them taking revenge. I'd rather if they don't want to be involved, let them not be involved.
Like, let's say you propose allowing them to cut ties but then child support is higher. Most assholes are going to choose custody with less child support, and just be absolutely fucked up to their kids. That's the real world.
And unfortunately, most courts don't care. There are horror stories upon horror stories of being unable to restrict / take away custody from abusive parents.
> So if you're forcing child support, most are going to hold a grudge and demand custody of some sort.
Fortunately, that's not actually true. I get that you likely know of lots of times where this has happened, but the vast majority have uncontested custody. Where custody is contested, the father usually wins at least some version of shared custody, but most of the time that doesn't result in an abusive home.
It's been my experience and it's backed up by HHS data that the most common abuser in these situations is actually the mother, and the most common form that takes is neglect. Access to abortion and resources is more important to solve this than reforms to lessen child support payments.
I guess we'll have to disagree, I think we have different views on human nature due to our upbringings, and neither of us really have hard data (how do you really measure abuse / neglect in reality, or long term outcomes due to it). I would hazard it's more widespread then you think, especially since most abuse victims feel shame and hide it thinking they deserved it or it's their fault somehow.
Definitely agree that access to abortion is the best outcome.
So Dept. of Health and Human Services has probably the best data you're gonna get here, and I do additionally have hard data on contested custody vs. contested child support, but it's no worries. Agree to disagree.
It's the same bunch of crappy incentives wherein poorly designed welfare and safety nets incentivize people to work under the table and live crappy lives. Nobody wants to work harder to better their life when a huge fraction of the fruit of such labor gets taken from them.
Pick up any sociology book from the 1970s and it'll explain it in detail.
Sure, but I fail to see how that has anything to do with a father's supposed right to abandon a child he doesn't want.
Actually, I think I sorta see what you're driving at - 'if it's just about money, forcing women to have a medical procedure at a man's choice is cheaper'
The problem with that is it's unethical and morally wrong to do that.
If you are more responsible for the existence of a child than I am, by virtue of having fathered the child, why should I have to pay and you not have to pay? That's what it comes down to, not 'what is the cheapest thing to do.'
How about the scenario where the man wants the child, but the woman doesn't?
Do you not see the absolute imbalance here, where the woman gets to decide everything? If the man bears some responsibility (and he absolutely does) why does he get zero say in anything?
He got some say (except in cases of rape) during the initial kick-off event where the pregnancy began. After that, yeah, his part in equal or majority decision-making is complete. This is because the mother has a greater interest by virtue of the pregnancy occurring to their body and not the father's.
Now, if the fetus was developing in some sort of mechanical womb, sure, he'd still have an equal say.
The injustice is biological; the man can't carry the child and this doesn't confer on him the power to determine what another person does with their body.
Nothing else works in the way you're proposing. If someone could save your child's life by submitting to a harmless procedure, giving blood say, you can't compel them to. It's easily recognizable as morally wrong for them to let your child die, but we also recognize that they have that right as an extension of their rights of bodily autonomy.
You can argue that life's demands do incur this responsibility on others, and the rightful role of the state is to enforce it. I think that's fairly radical and would oppose it, but it is consistent. It would also open the door to all kinds of atrocities, like medical experiments on nonconsenting individuals for the good of others.
I am not saying that a man should be able to force a woman to get an abortion. I am 100% against that, just to be clear.
But I also don't believe that carrying a child in her womb for nine months should mean that a woman can force a man to give up his bodily autonomy (by being forced to earn and pay money under threat of imprisonment) for 18 years.
The man's financial responsibilities are to the child. Neither parent has the right to abdicate their own or the other parent's responsibility there.
The mother can make choices as the extension of her bodily autonomy rights that make the responsibility moot. But thinking of this through the frankly mens-rightsy lens of child support is limiting your understanding of the contours of these rights and responsibilities I think.
Living with a soon to be self sustaining tumor that your brain chemicals are telling you to be emotionally attached to for 9mo is an f-ing rounding error compared to the following years that either/both parent will have to expend either directly or indirectly (child support payments) raising the kid.
If a woman can unilaterally abdicate her upcoming responsibility to raise a child then a man should be able to abdicate his obligation to raise the thing in a similar manner. Or you can frame it the opposite way. A man should not be able to unilaterally burden a women with the responsibility of raising a kid and a woman should not be able to do the same to a man.
It's absolutely mind boggling that you do not see the double standard you are advocating for.
I don't really see a double standard - does the man not have choices over what happens in his body?
Lets say two people light a fire together, then one of them leaves. It's possible for the person remaining to take action and put out the fire, but they don't, and it spreads.
In that scenario, because the first person (who left) could have reasonably foreseen that the fire would spread, they are responsible as well as the second person (who stayed).
There's a lot to unpack here. I don't think that the male half of the population is routinely seen as 'breeders,' that's a new one for me.
Yes, you run a risk when you have sex with someone that can get pregnant and yes, that risk does not take into account your financial situation.
None of that has to do with access to abortion for the impregnator. They don't get abortions.
Yeah, I don't want my taxes going to that either. I don't really understand your point - one wrong thing exists and so we must allow other preventable wrongs to occur? Why? How about we both don't allow parents to financially abandon their children and we stop bombing brown kids?
Your entire argument is an attempt to spin something that is widely seen as necessary, that is, access to abortion, into a side discussion about your personal dislike for not paying for your kids. Aside from being a pretty awful parallel to make, giving people access to only having the kids they want lowers the chance of them financially abandoning them.
I believe you have wildly misunderstood my entire argument.
I was attempting to respond to something I have seen argued many times by men, including the literal comment I replied to here, which I paraphrase as 'if a woman gets to abort then a man should also get a say and so should be able to financially abort.'
I disagree with this, a woman should be able to get an abortion but a man should not 'in the interest of fairness' get a right to financially abrogate their responsibility. It's not a man's right to choose.
> although this may be important but public dialogue on this is 4th grade level
Well, public dialog on everything is at the 4th grade level - gun control, racism, trans rights, abortion, UBI, January 6, global warming, Covid... it's all at 4th grade level, sometimes below.
I can't think of one issue where there's actually a mature, nuanced public discussion.
If a man does not want the baby but the woman does why would the man be responsible? He does not want the child and makes it clear, the woman will choose to have the baby and then force the man to pay money and raise the kid.. that doesn’t make sense at all.
As for your opinion, “ In my opinion the choice to have a child (or to roll the dice on having a child) is made at the time of conception and once an embryo has been implanted it is the responsibility of both parents to provide support to the child.”
It is your opinion but it is a dumb one that should not be respected in any modern society. 1. Read a history book. 2. Learn about realism 3. Put yourselves in the shoes of the many circumstances in which pregnancy occur.
yeah man I mean you can call me dumb all you want but there are biological consequences to having sex and murdering your way out of it or abdicating your responsibility as a parent are not moral ways to handle those consequences. No amount of history books or walking a mile in someone else's moccasins is going to change my opinion on that.
This is a complex topic that I really enjoy an analysis being done on.
Effectively, the question is when does the state or society have the right to protect a human (whether that’s human fetus, embryo, baby, person). In addition what rights can be removed / protected from the mother. As the analysis points out it’s wildly different throughout the world and even in Europe and United States. The US Supreme Court ruled that prior US rulings overstepped and now it’s a 10th amendment and 4th amendment issue amongst the states - meaning it’ll become more diverse in the US.
To frame the US arguments differently — most people are uniformed about when a heart beat is detectable; when a fetus responds to pain, etc
As a general rule, when people are fully informed the consensus is “let’s avoid abortion, if we can”. The question is then, where is that line for “it’s too far”. Largely, and the article touches on this, that’s a hyper local issue.
Which personally, I don’t see an issue with, we’re typically all for self-governance. That implies freedom of movement, association, and defense. If people of an area choose a certain law so-be-it, just don’t impose your will on others. As long as you can move, if the issue is that troubling to you, associate differently or convince others to change the laws.
I view abortion much like the slavery issue historically in the US. The rights of the defenseless will ultimately be expanded. It used to be slaves had severely limited rights, but we saw the err in our ways. I believe we will do the same ultimately here, though it may take many years.
The alternative is setting an arbitrary line in the sand “birth” or “20 weeks”, it doesn’t make much sense. Why not “1yr old” or “12 weeks” they have much of the same traits. Barring harm to the mother (which ultimately is dangerous to baby), I see little argument to allow abortion in a logical sense. Morally, I think limiting medical intervention is wrong. And that is ultimately what it boils down to — what morally is correct to limit; which boils down to locale.
> If people of an area choose a certain law so-be-it, just don’t impose your will on others.
This statement is in conflict with itself. If a red state bans abortions then they are imposing their will onto others in that state. Why is it only "imposing will" when the Federal Government decides to dictate to a state what to do?
By this logic why not let a municipality decide to ban abortion? The state shouldn't impose its will onto the people in that city. Why not let people decide at the neighborhood level, or within their houses, or at the individual level. Why not let every individual decide what is morally acceptable and abide by their own set of laws?
Trying to intellectualize the argument about who can and cant criminalize abortion ignores the hard scientific facts that we know: Criminalizing abortion does not decrease the number of abortions, only the mortality rate.
Because the United States' founding documents explicitly set things up this way. The United States is not a European country, nor is it Canada. There is really no other country on earth like it from a legal perspective, especially of its population. You can decry the founding of the country all you want, but short of Constitutional amendments, it's not changing. States and the People retain any powers not explicitly granted to the federal government.
I understand why the mechanisms are the way they are, I'm saying that the intellectualization of criminalizing abortion in the US under libertarian theory is a lazy argument. "People shouldn't interfere with others" is fine in a hypothetical setting. Put into practice under the US legal system you just end up with tyranny of the majority at the State level, meanwhile the Federal government is powerless to intervene because of anti-democratic measures like the Senate and the Filibuster.
There's a reason why "states rights" has typically been used to justify inequity.
> Put into practice under the US legal system you just end up with tyranny of the majority at the State level, meanwhile the Federal government is powerless to intervene because of anti-democratic measures like the Senate and the Filibuster.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on election related issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if they rule (correctly, based on the constitution) that every state can manage its own voting laws. Alaska does rank choice voting now, for instance. Iowa does caucus voting. Illinois does majority vote.
The constitution didn’t prescribe how a vote should take place. It did say, it must be democratic. So while you may get some majority rule. The states are also setup to protect minority (politically) interests. Many have multi-chamber governmental setups, for example.
What is also often overlooked is that each state is self-governing. That is to say; there is no federal body dictating what happens / who is appointed in states. Similar to the EU, each state is effectively a country onto itself. The states came together to federalize (like the EU), but they retained most of the sovereignty.
Over the years (again, much like the EU), that has been stripped away. But I think we’re at a point where sovereignty is returning to states.
> The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on election related issues.
The Supreme Court rules all the time on election related issues.
> I wouldn’t be surprised if they rule (correctly, based on the constitution) that every state can manage its own voting laws.
That's the status quo, except for certain element of various federal elections for which there is an explicit Congressional role.
What the pending case is about the independent state legislature theory, which is a legal theory that the State legislature, in deciding various election-related matters assigned to it by federal law and/or the US Constitution, is not bound by the State Constitution as interpreted by the State Supreme Court but instead has sole and unreviewable (so long as exercised within federal constraints) authority. This extends to things like redistricting; assignment of Presidential electors, including by retrospective nullification of a vote of the people for that purpose; setting process for Congressional elections; etc.
> What is also often overlooked is that each state is self-governing.
The ISL theory contradicts that idea, and essentially holds that the State Legislature, in conduct of federal elections, is an arm of the Federal government, outside of the mechanisms by which the people of the State have circumscribed the powers and exercises thereof by the State government.
Our Federal system (each state having some autonomy) started because charters were given to English nobility to establish colonies. By the time of the revolutionary war the states needed a central authority to unify them, but also ensure that they couldn't impose punitive taxes on one another and gain too much power.
After the Civil War, the role of the states was severely limited. But the famous cry of "states rights" rang out any time groups wanted to defend regressive legislature. There is a reason why the Republican party, who cling to power through anti-democratic means, constantly bitch and moan about states rights.
In 2022 does it make sense that a state like Georgia, should be able to set the rules of a Federal election? Given the history of our country where states ONLY exist because of colonial charters? There is nothing inherently unique about states other than some Englishman 400 years ago was given lease to them.
States Rights has always been an anti-democratic rallying cry, and the main mechanism that the Republican party uses to stay in control is by limiting who can vote. The outcome will be large-scale disenfranchisement of poor people and African-Americans in southern states.
After responding to a lot of your comments it seems like you don't have a great grasp of US history. A lot of it seems sanitized/centered on Civics but without an actual understanding of why the system is set up the way it is and how the power dynamics have played out under that system. I would encourage you to read about the history of the Southern US starting from the earliest days of Virginian and Carolinian tobacco plantations. If you want to understand why a lot of your arguments serve only to embolden anti-democratic reactionaries, and have been for the last 200+ years.
> After responding to a lot of your comments it seems like you don't have a great grasp of US history
Lol I enjoy how often people on HN descend to personal attacks as opposed to discussion on the merits.
Just to point it out,
> States Rights has always been an anti-democratic rallying cry, and the main mechanism that the Republican party uses to stay in control is by limiting who can vote.
You realize this was a democratic rallying cry until the 60s? Democrats were the ones trying to limit who votes, hanging, and burning towns.
Both parties attempt to suppress / encourage demographics who support them. Been that way all of American history.
I encourage you to read source material. What I’m reading from you is exceedingly partisan and not really a balanced view or even historical view; it’s mostly propaganda.
> A lot of it seems sanitized/centered on Civics but without an actual understanding of why the system is set up the way it is and how the power dynamics have played out under that system.
Ah that 1619 project… the Marxist rewrite of American history.
> Lol I enjoy how often people on HN descend to personal attacks as opposed to discussion on the merits.
Not a personal attack, it was just an observation.
> You realize this was a democratic rallying cry until the 60s? Democrats were the ones trying to limit who votes, hanging, and burning towns.
I don't like the Democratic party either, but this ignores the party switch that occurred during the Nixon election. If you want to learn more about the Southern Strategy look up Barry Goldwater and Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater. "States Rights" has traditionally been the rallying cry of racist regressives, regardless of party affiliation.
> I encourage you to read source material. What I’m reading from you is exceedingly partisan and not really a balanced view or even historical view; it’s mostly propaganda.
I don't like either mainstream US party, also you don't know anything about the history literature I consume. The primary sources I consume inform my views. Here's one from the mouth of Lee Atwater, the aforementioned strategist:
> Ah that 1619 project… the Marxist rewrite of American history.
I have never read the 1619 project. I mostly read books written about the specific histories of commodities like lumber or tobacco or oil, but if you know anything about US history you understand why Slavery is so important and how it shaped our institutions and discourse. It's not "Marxist". But being so quick to dismiss a retelling of US history with slavery is a giveaway that you might be a little bit of a right-leaning reactionary. How is it any more of a rewrite than the deification of George Washington in our K-12 education?
It appears that you've exhausted your arguments at this point. You have no refutation so now you're claiming I'm biased when you are trying to make a "both sides bad" and "you're biased" argument to claim victory. You also failed to respond to my other comment in this thread because whatever stance you have taken crumbles under any scrutiny.
You are either being intellectually dishonest because you are too cowardly to take a hard stance on your regressive views, or you're just unaware of history. Either way it's not very interesting, I could have the same argument in a thousand Youtube comment sections.
From the first comment, you called me a reactionary, regularly been condescending and assumed I didn’t know anything. This is indeed a personal attack:
> After responding to a lot of your comments it seems like you don't have a great grasp of US history.
As you said, we likely see history through a different lens because of what we read / experience. Im familiar with Goldwater, the strategy shift was “required” after the democrats shift. Aka there’s two parties they’re always vying for votes. That’s the nature of things, my point was it wasn’t either party in particular. They shift over time based on the voting base they’re trying to capture to maintain power.
I can say that without any emotional attachment or support or endorsements. I’ve frankly endorsed nothing in these discussions, mostly pointed a contrary viewpoint out that hasn’t been mentioned.
Generally, the comments such as
> States Rights has always been an anti-democratic rallying cry, and the main mechanism that the Republican party uses to stay in control is by limiting who can vote.
Was in fact a false statement throughout history. It’s also an extremely bias and dangerous narrative being spun. Today, states like California claim to be a “sanctuary state”, which lets them capture extra electoral votes. Or Colorado ignoring drug laws. While the republicans do discuss states rights. The democrats are at least as willing, if not more willing, to wield power. Look at representative districts in Illinois lol. Yet all we here are “republicans are going to steal the election, blah blah blah” garbage. Both do the same thing.
Regardless, the condescension is think in this conversation is breathtaking
> You are either being intellectually dishonest because you are too cowardly to take a hard stance on your regressive views, or you're just unaware of history.
I don’t need to actually take stances to have discussions. I enjoy mulling over ideas and considering others viewpoints. Unfortunately, this has devolved to name calling.
Regarding:
> It appears that you've exhausted your arguments at this point. You have no refutation so now you're claiming I'm biased when you are trying to make a "both sides bad" and "you're biased" argument to claim victory. You also failed to respond to my
I try to respond thoughtfully. At the same time, personal attacks are beneath you. There’s a lot of comments, I don’t respond to all because I frankly can’t. The bias is being pointed out not to “claim victory” but attempting to point out a hole in knowledge. It’s difficult to have an honest discussion when one party is calling the other a “reactionary” or “regressive”. There are factually wrong statements:
> States Rights has always been an anti-democratic rallying cry
Such as the above ^ states are closer to a democracy in the US. The federal government is a republic, state governments are closer to and can be a direct democracy (e.g. Californians propositions).
> It’s also an extremely bias and dangerous narrative being spun. Today, states like California claim to be a “sanctuary state”, which lets them capture extra electoral votes. Or Colorado ignoring drug laws.
I see no issue with states having the ability to make laws that contradict the federal government, so long as it is an expansion of rights. Allowing states to constrict the rights of its citizens will always result in a tyranny of the majority. Again, I don't care about the mechanisms I care about the outcomes. "States Rights" have always been a thing, but it is only invoked as a rallying cry when trying to pass legislature that goes against the moral grain of the majority of the country. Californians don't need to say "States Rights" to pass weed and immigration laws, it is understood that they can mind their business. Southern States need to cry about "States Rights" during slavery, segregation, abortion, and now voter suppression, because their views are nationally unpopular and considered backwards my a majority of Americans.
Again, your inability (or unwillingness) to understand the difference between a state increasing net freedom and encroaching on human rights is the source of my frustration.
> Regardless, the condescension is think in this conversation is breathtaking
Whatever you perceive as condescension is because you have so far seemed incapable of understanding that my entire point has been about the outcomes rather than the process of legislation. I don't care who has what power if that power is only being used for negative means. Do you really care about the structure of government if the outcome is bad for everyone? Your inability to reconcile that fact leads me to believe that you are either naive or hold reactionary viewpoints that you wont explicitly list. After all you have said that you think the 1964 Civil Rights act was overall bad. There is no "both sides" to human rights, that is what you continuously fail to understand and why I assume you are either naive/uneducated or a reactionary.
> I don’t need to actually take stances to have discussions. I enjoy mulling over ideas and considering others viewpoints. Unfortunately, this has devolved to name calling.
Except you're incapable of factoring in the real-world harm that occurs to people. Politics is not something that you can look at like a mechanical system to be arranged in any sense. Certain arrangements cause untold human suffering.
You also immediately referred to The 1619 Project pejoratively as "Marxist". You are defensive of reactionary policies like abortion bans and hesitant when it comes to anything left-of-center like the Civil Rights Act or a history book on Slavery. YOU have shown me your bias and only take offense when I ascribe it to you. If that's name calling then show some objectivity.
Whatever partisanship has come through on my side comes through in the defense of human rights. I despise both parties as corporatist and would vote for whoever is trying to maximize human liberty. However in the current paradigm the Republican party seeks to restrict it more than the Democratic party, although I would consider both to be fascist.
> Such as the above ^ states are closer to a democracy in the US. The federal government is a republic, state governments are closer to and can be a direct democracy (e.g. Californians propositions).
This may have been error on my part. I was using "anti-democratic" as shorthand to mean "harms minority groups", a democracy is better for the majority in-group, but allows them to have tyranny over minority groups. A republic may restrict the majority group from total control, but it allows minority groups to have some protection. Again, I don't care if a system is a republic or a democracy, I care about how that power is used.
I think the federal government does maximal harm anytime it passes any laws. You’re correct the federal government shouldn’t pass any law. The states probably shouldn’t either regarding this.
Basically my view is that impositions of will is best served at the smallest possible unit. Hopefully, that’s at the individual level, ie I don’t want to hurt you so you don’t hurt me. But if a law must exist, do so locally. If it really must be broadened, then do so at a larger scale.
If a town up the creek is poisoning a town down the creek, then at the very least you have to impose law between two said towns, else you risk violence. That would be the minimal range you could impose. The legal system is only there as an alternative to war.
In this case, it seems rather obvious to me there should be no laws really. That said, If the majority of a region / town disagree who am I to impose my will from across the world? That vast majority is split on this issue globally, so I don’t think law is a good idea as it may lead to violence as it’s imposing will as opposed to resolving a conflict.
I don't really care about ideologies or hypotheticals. I understand the libertarian worldview but I'm more concerned about the real-world effects of policy than their theoretical underpinnings. The outcome of criminalizing abortion is higher mortality rates in childbirth, higher mortality rates of abortion (back-alley abortions), and higher rates of infanticide. Not to mention the destabilizing social effects of millions of unwanted young men entering adulthood:
> I think the federal government does maximal harm anytime it passes any laws.
This is why I don't take libertarians seriously. Do you honestly think that the Civil Rights Act was maximal harm? Or the 1934 Firearms Act? Or the 14th Amendment? What a ridiculous hill to die on.
> Do you honestly think that the Civil Rights Act was maximal harm? Or the 1934 Firearms Act? Or the 14th Amendment?
Pretty much, yes. That’s not to say I think all the outcomes are bad. But by many measurements these acts had far reaching, catastrophic consequences that negatively impacted the United States.
Just look at the African American incarnation rate, single parent household rate, etc. look before and after the civil rights act.
Was it done with good intentions — perhaps. But the implementation caused impacts locally which had massive negative effects as well. Localized governance would not have had the same negative impacts.
Also as an aside, I’m always open to changing views. I don’t want to die on any hill. That said; I can acknowledge and entertain various views without degrading them or calling them ridiculous. People tend to have views for a reason so I tend to listen and discuss rather than degrade..
> Just look at the African American incarnation rate, single parent household rate, etc. look before and after the civil rights act.
First leap of logic, attributing these issues to the civil rights act and not to years of systemic injustice in the US (and backlash to the civil rights act). This is like looking at the US before and after the civil war and pointing to inequality afterwards saying: "look how bad the inequality was after the civil war" due to slaves becoming sharecroppers. Do you actually think African Americans are worse off post-1964?
> Localized governance would not have had the same negative impacts.
Second leap of logic. Localized governance would have had slavery and Jim Crow laws still enacted. The reason why the Civil Rights Act was implemented at the Federal level was because it WOULD NOT have ever been implemented at the state or local level.
There is no "libertarian" solution when it comes to dealing with racism or similar conflicts. Consider any genocide, be it the Bosnian genocide or the Holocaust, etc. How do you combat that through a libertarian framework?
"Well, it would be government overreach to limit their ability to enforce segregation. Let the states decide."
"Well, it would be government overreach to limit their ability to do mass murder. Let the states decide."
Finally, consider why the concept of libertarianism exists in the first place. It exists to maximize personal liberty. If one person is meaningfully limiting the liberty of another, be it through violence, or economic means, ostracization, or intimidation, then wouldn't that be the BEST time for government to intervene to maximize the overall liberty of the system? I think we can all agree that the freedom to not be oppressed is more valuable than the freedom to oppress others.
> Do you actually think African Americans are worse off post-1964?
I think a lot the changes are misattributed and it depends by what metric.
To your point,
> First leap of logic, attributing these issues to the civil rights act and not to years of systemic injustice in the US (and backlash to the civil rights act).
We’re on the third generation since the act. If the act was effective we could argue systemic racism has been overcome. We could declare victory.
If it was a success this wouldn’t be a discussion. You can’t legislate things better. What we can say is since the 60s, there are more drugs, more single parents, reduced cultural strength, and supposedly still lots of racism. It doesn’t seem better.
> If the act was effective we could argue systemic racism has been overcome. We could declare victory.
It's a game of cat and mouse. Like in the Lee Atwater video I linked, the arguments for racism have become so abstract that it requires intimate knowledge of reactionary talking points to call them out. Red-lining, means-testing, austerity, and voter ID laws come to mind. These policies seem innocuous at first but they are an extension of Jim Crow into the modern day. My frustration with you in the other thread has been trying to point out that these tools are often defended under the guise of "election security" and "states rights" but are just tools to continue suppressing minorities.
Furthermore, segregation wasn't ended until a full decade later when the federal government started withholding funding for schools in the South.
> If it was a success this wouldn’t be a discussion. You can’t legislate things better. What we can say is since the 60s, there are more drugs, more single parents, reduced cultural strength, and supposedly still lots of racism. It doesn’t seem better.
Non-sequitur. How is a law from 1964 to combat Jim Crow supposed to account for a concerted effort by the US government to ship drugs into the US during the cold war, and then hardest criminalize the drugs used by minorities, then pass the crime bill under the Clinton administration and militarize the police and expand prisons massively?
I must repeat myself, your desire to play "devil's advocate" or whatever is happening, causes you to appear naive or willingly ignorant. Saying that the Civil Rights Act was the cause for African American drug use and incarceration is laughable and ignores the drug war started under Nixon, ramped up under Reagan, and given sharper teeth by Clinton. How is that argument supposed to be taken seriously?
Did the CRA usher in a post-racial utopia? No. To claim that it was ineffective because other factions in the government continued to undermine it is silly.
Just because harm is done, doesn’t mean you should do more?
Abortion poses risks to the mother psychological and physical.
While there’s some mental risk to the mother related to carrying a baby. Ultimately, you can give it up for adoption. I haven’t seen studies on the exact damage carrying a baby to term is, but I expect it’s relatively low when compared to abortion. That said, I think we should follow the evidence.
Luckily, those cases are extremely rare. Further, the question is still when do you take the life of the human the woman is carrying? I think that’s a complex issue, as even if someone was born of rape or incest, we don’t discuss killing them at 1yr old.
You're expectation is wrong. The mortality rate alone is 23.8 per 100k for live births were it's only 0.7 per 100k for abortions and there many of the abortions that resulted in death were for complicated pregnancies that would have been at high or even certain risk. Have you ever talked to your mother about what pregnancy was like for her? Mine has never quite gotten the bladder control back they had before and that was for kids they choose to have and love. Physically a pregnancy is insanely tough even when it goes well.
Emotionally, let me just say that the idea that giving a child up for adoption is pain free is crazy. Put yourself in their shoes. You've just gone through one of the most painful moments of your life. You have a crying baby in front of you, all of evolution, not to mention society, has conditioned you to at this moment rather than throwing away this little annoying being to sacrifice the next several decades of your life to the thankless job of caring for them and you think it's easy and uncomplicated to put them up for adoption?
I'm not saying abortions are uncomplicated of course, but letting a mother make that choice for herself seems much less likely to get it wrong, and frankly from where I'm sitting taking a pill seems a lot less traumatizing, but it a decision I will never actually have to make and I'm fine letting the people who will make the decision
> Abortion poses risks to the mother psychological and physical.
> ...
> While there’s some mental risk to the mother related to carrying a baby. Ultimately, you can give it up for adoption. I haven’t seen studies on the exact damage carrying a baby to term is, but I expect it’s relatively low when compared to abortion. That said, I think we should follow the evidence.
You couldn't be more wrong. We're talking orders of magnitude difference between giving birth and having an abortion. Abortions are comparatively extremely safe—especially when done legally in a medical environment. There are 0.4 deaths per 100k abortions. [1] Comparatively, 23.8 per 100k women die in childbirth every year. [2]
> even if someone was born of rape or incest, we don’t discuss killing them at 1yr old.
Important distinction: a 1 year old can exist outside of another human being's body. They can be put up for adoption or into foster care. An unborn being cannot.
There’s a lot of data out there; it’s political and I’m sure we can both point to evidence. My point was simply that abortion isn’t a non-risky event; it’s high risk. Not simply due to immediate risk, but long tail risk.
It’s hard having this discussion because we can both find evidence to the contrary. That said, if you know people who’ve had abortions, many regret it. The risks really aren’t tracked or shared either.
Regarding your 1 year old comment, a 20 week old can also exist out of a body. And there are 1 year olds who need life support. The argument doesn’t hold. The same arguments against infanticide hold up for abortions. I hold no judgement really, but the debate should be taken in good faith.
You want to talk about good faith? You just said "people who've had abortions, many regret it". Without even providing a ratio.
UCSF studies show 95% of women who went through abortion believe it was the right decision.
In another response in this thread you pretend to be neutral about the debate, but the example I mentioned above makes you dishonest and clearly opinionated one way.
> even if someone was born of rape or incest, we don’t discuss killing them at 1yr old
You are correct in this quote. But to a lot of people, there is a fundamental difference in the moral consideration due to (e.g.) a 15 week old fetus and a 1 year old child. You may disagree with that, but that is where you have to make your argument.
Just saying "well, you won't let parents kill their toddlers, so... checkmate!" is really not doing any work for you, and just makes it look like you're not engaging. I guess that's par for the course for this debate now... but since it's back on the legislature, let's start trying to figure out how to engage with one another.
How about this: Let's say you are god-king, and everyone seeking an abortion has to petition you for one. Can you construct any scenario at all (no matter how outlandish) where your decision would change if the pregnancy was the result of a rape?
> Abortion poses risks to the mother psychological and physical.
> While there’s some mental risk to the mother related to carrying a baby.
> I haven’t seen studies on the exact damage carrying a baby to term is, but I expect it’s relatively low when compared to abortion.
Post natal depression is a thing, and has both mental and physiological impacts.
Likewise post birth trauma is a serious issue and can result in permanent health issues for the mother.
In the United States, if I am about to die and need donated organs, blood, bone marrow, etc., you are not required to donate your body to me. This even extends to dead bodies, which is why organ donation after death is opt-in.
Knowing this, why should a mother be forced to give up her body to another (the baby)?
Why do you think the other body deserves death because of a mothers whims?
Do you see the point? The arguments aren’t framed properly. Have you done proofs in mathematical induction? You typically have n and then prove n+1.
Do that with this argument. If you’re okay with 10 week abortion; why not 11 week. You can keep going. Infants at birth are really no different than 1 day old. They have the same fundamental requirements.
I don’t care either way frankly, I just pointed out the logic lacking in the debate. The “line in the sand” approach is rather strange to me.
Generally speaking, for the vast majority of mothers, childbirth does not have long term negative physical consequences. It can, and I have experienced one of those, however it is the exception, and not the rule.
Generally speaking, for the vast majority of HN commenters, authoritative statements on the consequences of childbirth for mothers should be taken with a grain of salt .. given as much credence as you would a third-party anecdote from someone who's closest connection to the source material is a daughter, partner, sister or their own mother.
You may be the exception here, but going by the numbers I would expect not.
Edit: to be clear, in my experience childbirth (and what comes after) has undeniably lasting, long term consequences for the "donor" / mother. Not to mention the immediate family, broader community, society at large, even the environment. Certainly more so than any organ donation (in my country at least these tend to occur in the moments surrounding death). To me, the parent comment seemed so removed from reality that a lol summed it up :)
She shouldn't be forced to, but her choice is whether or not to conceive the baby. Consider that while you can't be forced to donate an organ, once you choose to do so, you can't later demand that the organ be taken out of the recipient and put back in you.
She shouldn't be forced to, but her choice is whether or not to conceive the baby.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the concept of rape? That's without getting into much more controversial points concerning how very much female income is frequently in some way tied to sex (among other issues).
> Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the concept of rape?
Even if you wake up in a bathtub of ice and learn that someone harvested one of your kidneys, you still aren't allowed to kill the recipient to take it back.
Just because pregnancy is a possibility of sex does not mean it is a choice. By that logic, getting an STD is a “choice” because its a possibility of sex too, even if the other person lied about having one, broke the condom, etc.
If you chose to stay out in the sun all day without sunscreen, isn't it fair to say that you chose to get a suntan? In both cases, it's a direct, foreseeable, obvious, and common consequence of the action that was a choice.
> The alternative is setting an arbitrary line in the sand “birth” or “20 weeks”, it doesn’t make much sense. Why not “1yr old” or “12 weeks” they have much of the same traits.
Yes, because we need lines. Why 18 years or 21 years? Why 55mph instead of 57?
Except "birth" is a pretty clear line. There is a big difference between "could survive outside the womb" and "is surviving outside the womb".
Unlike the line between 17.5 and 18.5.
And if you require that the unborn child is given the full rights of personhood in society, does "full rights" include full rights?
Access to child support payments?
Do they have a legal name? Can you register them with the Social Security?
If you wish to be Christian about it, can you baptize an unborn child? Can you offer them communion? On what moral grounds do you deny them the basic sacraments of the religion?
> Except "birth" is a pretty clear line. There is a big difference between "could survive outside the womb" and "is surviving outside the womb".
Okay, so a woman at 20 weeks wants an abortion. Do you wait 2 weeks so the baby can survive or is it prudent to abort right now?
Is it worth a whole lifetime of experience to limit a woman’s bodily autonomy for 2 weeks?
I think a lot of people feel emotion during these discussions. I dont, I seriously don’t understand the logic. My bodily autonomy is limited all the time. I have to get vaccines to go to school. I can’t drink and drive, etc.
>>> I see little argument to allow abortion in a logical sense
This is akin to saying "let's avoid major surgery, if we can", and then arguing that this leads to the logical conclusion that major surgery should be outlawed.
https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/roe-v-wade-reversal/ Is all you need to understand why the state should not only allow abortion, but actively encourage people to get them. Unwanted children unequivocally make society worse.
If you're arguing from a purely utilitarian perspective, it seems you should argue to legalize not just abortion right up to birth, but also infanticide by parents. If either parent can kill an unwanted child, then by definition all surviving children will be wanted by both parents, which solves the problem of one parent potentially being a "deadbeat" and the state having to step in, etc.
The government playing ads that say “don’t have kids if you’re not ready” isn’t eugenics. I fully believe 95%+ of people are capable of being good parents at some point in their life. That point might not be when they have kids though.
Now obviously we shouldn’t be killing people, because that’ll lead to everyone being scared of being killed. Since people aren’t fetus’s they won’t worry about society discarding them.
How so? Almost every European country is in the 15-25 weeks zone. Many extend that significantly based on case-by-case consultancy between doctor and patient.
In high-income countries 90% of all abortions are done BEFORE 12 weeks.
Unfortunately, many European countries have laws (not just regarding abortion) which almost directly reflect the religious establishment of the country.¨
In general, the more catholic a country is, the more heavy handed the (abortion) laws seem to be.
Even seemingly progressive countries have various quirky laws, which are nothing more than the ghosts of a religious past. Still a hot topic in countries with multi party systems, where small niche (and often highly religious) parties can have a say on a small number of issues.
There's no single Abortion in post-Roe USA standard either-- in fact it's more internally variant than Europe. So I guess it's kind of like comparing a basket of apples, oranges and bananas to a different basket of apples, oranges, and bananas (and maybe a couple grapefruits).
I think you missed the point, abortion as a right means many different things in different countries.
Florida a red state has more abortion rights that most of Europe.
It also looks like the majority of Europe would not approve of American Style Abortion either, which is the most radically surprising thing to me by far.
Not missing the point. Giving my impression as a non-American - which is why I mentioned where I come from, because as you say it's important to the context.
It's also apparently (currently sitting at -1) an unwelcome opinion [grin] but being butt-hurt at foreigners criticising your country is hardly unique to America...
> I, uhh, I guess that’s quite close to de-facto abortion on demand? Not sure what political dynamics led Israel to leave abortion “illegal” but also add multiple redundant layers of extremely broad exceptions. Maybe the country has other priorities.
Someone isn't familiar with Israeli politics.
Since this is HN and a snarky comment won't suffice, let me elaborate: Israel is a cultural mishmosh of so many different varietals of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and every other thing that literally every view on every given issue exists. The country doesn't have a constitution because it can't agree on one.[1] The current government, which is falling apart, is a right-wing-left-wing coalition government that includes ultranationalists, Arab anti-Zionists, the left wing who was out of government for a decade, and vaguely centrist "yeah whatever Zionism" parties.[2] The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is administered by no fewer than six (!) different churches who all share the space and have to carefully coordinate the timing of their rites and services.[3]
And don't even get me started on gay marriage.[4]
This topic is something that people who are blindly anti-Israel (as opposed to anti-Zionist philosophically, anti-the current Israeli government, anti-occupation, etc.) just do not understand. Israel is a melting pot that boiled over onto the stove and made the fire stronger instead of snuffing it out. It is a very strange place to have a government.
So "we theoretically ban abortion because traditional sects of various groups don't like it but in practice we allow it for everyone because lots of people want it and we don't really want to make them angry either" is a typical Israeli policy position on something like this. It is just the nth example. This way, Israel can plausibly claim to take every position on this issue, all at once, and thereby appease a coalition of about a zillion different views.
Now try to get the country to agree on an approach to Palestine and you see why the current situation is so messed up.
Take this for what it's worth, but my experience of my (liberal) Jewish heritage is that copious amounts of nuance is required in literally every argument, and often just literally directly opposing positions will be happily taken. My experience of it is that it's a philosophy that is very happy to both say "Abortion is completely wrong" and "Sometimes abortions have to happen". Trying to distill any of this down to hard facts or statistics is doomed to failure. There are ideological positions (sanctity of life), scientific positions (the point at which life begins) and pragmatic decisions (the weighing of two different lives), and that tension underpins all these different decisions.
This is my experience as well. And it is critical to maintain a separation between "I personally would not prefer my unborn child be aborted" and "nobody should be allowed to abort a child anywhere because abortion is equivalent to murder in all cases." You've gotta be comfortable holding both those thoughts in your head and realizing that your beliefs don't generalize to everyone.
Judaism is littered with nuances and complexities that make it very different from other religious traditions that predominate in the US, for instance.
> This way, Israel can plausibly claim to take every position on this issue, all at once, and thereby appease a coalition of about a zillion different views.
I'd like to point out that this hasn't started with Israel per se; the roots are in Jewish tradition, Judaism, and Jewish philosophy. There's rarely a "this is right and that is wrong" situation. The whole Talmud is basically "here's the problem; here's one view; here's an opposing view; now learn both by heart" stuff. Allowing for opposing views to co-exist is rooted deeply in the society, and maybe something worth if not adopting, then at least admiring.
The reason Florida is an outlier among the rest of the southeast US is an explicit right to privacy in the state constitution, which was of course the basis for Roe v. Wade and has precedent at the state supreme court as protecting abortion access. The 15-week ban is seen as a test case for how the current state supreme court will rule, since it has 3 DeSantis nominees. If they uphold the law, expect to see FL follow the rest of the region, post-haste.
State courts' interpretations of their own constitutions aren't bound by the federal courts' interpretations of the federal constitution. "If they uphold the law" is the wrong way to phrase it because the Florida supreme court will decide what the law is for Florida.
It was meant as extra context. While I don’t like the Supreme Court’s ruling, I hardly think the US is taking a “theocratic approach.” Even now most of the US population will live under a set of laws that are more permissive than those in Europe.
Imagine if Poland, Malta, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands all had to have centralized set of laws across wide array of contentious issues. It would be a mess.
There are in fact quite large historical and cultural differences between different parts of the US. You could write whole books about the differences. The government as it stands only became so centralized and powerful between WWI and the Great Depression. Prior to WWI some 5% of Americans were primarily German speakers. Large populations today primarily speak Spanish. There are large divides in culture, economic activity, religion, and on and on.
The founders weren’t all “slavers”, and in fact a number were abolitionists. They very idea that people didn’t need a monarchy or landed nobility was literally revolutionary at the time. The whole global abolition movement grew out of the Scottish enlightenment which heavily informed America’s founding. I would also point out that most democracies have constitutional courts.
Frankly this whole situation could have been avoided if either congress had literally ever acted, or if progressive jurists weren’t so afraid of Lochner and substantive due process around individual rights. Bending over backwards to find a right to privacy in the “penumbras” of various rights was a complete failure.
> with a terrible political system made 300 years ago by slavers
... a political system that was widely considered revolutionary and incredibly enlightened at the time, including (or especially) by Europeans, who lived under much less democratic forms of government.
I'm on your side on the abortion issue, but bashing the American Revolution and blaming the founders isn't going to help your cause, and it's just bad history.
Your hyperbole is, of course, incorrect. The "US" has actually explicitly not taken an approach--that was the entire purpose of the Supreme Court's ruling. In fact, fifty states now individually take approaches, which currently represent quite a wide spectrum of beliefs. Some approaches are rooted in religious beliefs (aside: the United States' legal system is actually itself rooted in Christian beliefs and morals) and some are secular.
Florida yes, but you're missing the whole last portion of the article:
Tl;dr: Florida has more access than some of Europe, but Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas have more restrictions than pretty much all of Europe except for Poland.
"On the other hand, several states have banned abortion from conception, with only exceptions for the life of the woman (no exceptions for rape, incest, or lethal fetal abnormalities): Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas. (For Texas, the law is currently held up in court.)
These laws are more restrictive than almost anywhere else in the rich world. Poland is similar, but is it “rich”?"
I think most people basically understand that part though. It's not like no one has noticed the bans and restrictions in red states.
The much stranger thing that's happening is Europeans protesting in the streets against a ruling in America that declared a 16-week abortion ban legal-- when their own country has a 12-week abortion ban!
It seems that many people both inside and outside America are missing the fact that the laws of most European countries would have been declared illegal under Roe for being too restrictive.
I don't think he does however I think I'll post a quick analysis by me here:
1. India: Pretty much on-demand
All women can terminate pregnancy (for a valid* reason) on advice of one doctor upto 20 weeks.
Note: Valid reason can be as simple as failure of contraceptive, economic difficulty, or risk of death
In special cases (rape, incest, women being a minor*, change in marital status, mental illness, or fetal anomalies) it can be done upto 24 weeks.
Moreover a pregnancy can be terminated anytime in case fetal anomalies are found later in pregnancy, however it requires approval from a board (which consists of a gynecologist, radiologist/sonologist, pediatrician, and other members decided by the state)
India (and China) had a rampant problem with sex selective termination, this has been combated by making it illegal to reveal the child's sex before birth. In practice, till 2021 failure of contraceptive was not recognized as a valid reason for termination of pregnancy in unmarried women. Furthermore high abortion costs, lack of awareness, and societal stigma, make unsafe (and illegal) abortions rampant (accounting for 56% of abortions)
* Consent of minor's guardian is needed to perform a termination
2. China: on-demand
China's one child policy made abortions a "remedial" measure to fight overpopulation. So in some way it was encouraged.
Abortions seem to have little oversight, however some regions do ban non-medically necessary abortions after 14 weeks of pregnancy. Sex selective abortions (and pre-natal sex determination) are illegal.
3. South Korea: on-demand
It used to be be legal only for reason like genetic disorders, rape, incest or threatens the life of the women. However in 2019, the Constitutional court declared the law unconstitutional, now it's legal for upto 14 weeks. (Upto 24 weeks in case of previously specified reasons)
4. Singapore: on-demand
Upto 16 weeks: Must be done by a authorized medical practitioner.
16-24 weeks: Must be done by a authorized medical practitioner with surgical or obstetric qualifications.
After 24 weeks: Can be done if life of women is in danger
Only consent of pregnant women is needed for termination, even in case of minors.
Side note: You need to be a citizen of Singapore or hold a work visa and have been in Singapore for > 4 months to get a abortion, this means you can't travel to Singapore for a abortion.
5. Thailand: on-demand
Can be terminated on demand (upto 12th week!), can be done anything in case of rape, risk to women's life or fetal impairment.
Minors need permission from guardian.
In practice: Majority of population follows Buddhism, and often regard abortion as a taboo, this puts Adolescents at risk whose parents might not support a abortion. Not to mention a large number of physicians are unwilling to perform abortions because of their beliefs.
6. Japan: Legal only in case of rape, endangerment to health or economic difficulty. (upto 22 weeks)
In Practice: Exceptions are broad enough that it is widely accepted and practiced, effectively being quasi on-demand.
The lesson should probably have been how most of the developed world doesn't care. In most "developed" countries it's a healthcare issue mostly now, except after the "land of the free" has an episodic meltdown all over global media and rakes it up... Again...
Thanks again for the nonsense endless articles explaining how none of you colonialists can get along with each other.
> lesson should probably have been how most of the developed world doesn't care
Did we read the same article? It’s clear every country cares. They just cover the issue in ambiguity and boringness to keep it from becoming a hot button.
Or looked at another way, a healthy functioning democracy that actively debates extremely contentious issues and settles them via legal process instead of violence.
I disagree that there is not going to be violence over the most recent SC decision. There are now places where women are going to die as a result. Those places are generally the 'red' states where lots of people have lots of guns. Guns and insufferable grief are not a great mix.
Technically the US is a "flawed democracy" [1] and if the SC go ahead as expected with their 'states rights' crusade [2], then it's going to possibly lose the 'democracy' part of that...
The article talks about the difference between legality and access but doesn't mention two key differences between the US and European countries. The first is funding. Healthcare in America is expensive to begin with, and there are no federal subsidies for abortions allowed (e.g. via Medicaid) due to the Hyde Amendment. The second is that even before the Dobbs decision Republican-controlled states in the US went to great lengths to harass clinics and abortion-seekers by imposing extreme and medically-unnecessary requirements for things like the size of the clinic building, mandatory waiting periods, and forced transvaginal ultrasounds. On top of that, clinics that provide abortion are usually surrounded by a crowd of screaming anti-abortion activists who yell at patients and providers. To my understanding, that sort of stuff doesn't generally happen in most European countries. I suspect their sex ed classes and contraceptive access are much better than ours, too.
There's also a long history of stochastic terrorism toward doctors who perform abortions, but I don't know how European countries compare on that front.
This counseling session is mandatory for abortion not being punished. The thing is, in rural areas this counseling is often only available through church-based institutions (which often try to discourage abortions) and during the pandemic many state-based agencies that provide this counseling were used for contact tracing.
So there are many small hurdles which are difficult to put into numbers.
I don't try to detract from the author. It's a good effort at classification. The devil's in the detail.
Edit: I do understand that the counseling itself is mentioned in the article. The intricacies of it are condensed to "tricky". Which is true, but really difficult to classify.