Obama actually did have better points in his statement than you yourself made in yours. He makes many assumptions about rights and morality, but I'm not here to argue with him here. All I said in the last post, and what I want to reiterate here, is that there are specific grounds on which the Court previously held that abortion is a "right", and overturning court decisions on those same grounds does not necessarily mean any other rights (such as the right to vote, like you mentioned) will be overturned.
Also, do you think the Supreme Court can never get anything wrong? There's a presumption to uphold precedent, but it certainly isn't irrebutable. Would you have had the court refuse to strike down Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson because they were simply "old"? They stood as law for longer than Roe and Casey have.
Have you read the draft opinion, or do you know the legal grounds for why it ruled the way it did? I actually haven’t read the entire thing, but the reason why I’m asking is because abortion is generally defended on substantive due process grounds under the 14th Amendment (like in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey). From what I can tell, the holding of the opinion is actually quite narrow and limited to the issue of abortion itself, and the majority states that other substantive due process rights are not affected in any way by this case. As a side note, women’s right to vote comes from an entirely different amendment passed over 50 years after the 14th Amendment and has nothing to do with substantive due process. Not that it matters.
What is the Supreme court saying? They got it wrong for the last half-century?
That's all the proof you need that this is political haymaking. But Republicans are tossing matches on the haystack.
Overturning Roe vs. Wade is not just an affront to democratic principles, it's myopic.
Obama seemed to touch the high points... and closes with a call to action.
It would have been easier for you just to reply "no, I didn't read it."
Seriously, go read it. Just read the first and last paragraph. Don't rely on politicized Twitter accounts to tell you what to think.
Being against anti-abortion laws because you don’t think law should tell women what to do with their bodies is an incoherent and inconsistent position. It’s incoherent because law, by its very definition, is a regulation of what humans can and cannot do with their own bodies. Listing examples is unnecessary because of how trivial it is. It’s inconsistent because people who generally defend abortion on such grounds are often not complete anarchists, but rather just have opinions on what laws they think are just and unjust.
Even if the statement was restricted to speak only of medical procedures, it is no more coherent. Society, through law, is deeply concerned with the health, well-being, and safety of its citizens. In fact, one of the fundamental reasons why society exists in the first place is to provide the conditions in which human beings can flourish beyond what they can do on their own. So to say that the law should be unconcerned with, or should not be permitted to regulate the private medical procedures of its citizens also misses the nature of law. Besides, most people who are pro-abortion are also pro-vaccine mandates, so this too is inconsistent.
Laws aren’t bad because they regulate what people can or cannot do. They are bad because of the manner in which they regulate what people can or cannot do. If you think abortion is morally justified then say so! Don’t hide behind “the government can’t control women’s bodies”. They can and do all the time, and I bet even the staunchest advocate for abortion would recognize this at the end of the day.
I think you're confused over what my post was about, as I wasn't making any sort of arguments about law. Quite the opposite, I was giving some examples about how individuals (Ob/Gyns) attempt to impose their own values on their patients, and how that is one of many ways by which reproductive choice (in this case sterilization, which another poster suggested is available to women to avoid unwanted pregnancy), is eroded in practice, outside of the law.
To the gist of your post: part of having a useful conversation is understanding the difference between trying to get to the root of an argument vs. being a pedant. If you didn't know that "government shouldn't control women’s bodies" has been used for decades in specific reference to reproductive choice, now you know.
Also, I'd like you to explain your "affront to democracy" point. The Supreme Court is not, and never has been, a democratic institution. In most countries, the judiciary is actually even further removed from the political process than in the United States (often, judges abroad are selected based on professional qualifications, not on party affiliation). Do you think that a judiciary should be more tied to democracy than ours currently is? I'm not sure if that's an indefensible position, but it certainly goes against our nation's history and founding. What "democratic principles" are you talking about?
What makes this even more confusing is that you're defending a Supreme Court decision that took the question of the legalization of abortion away from democratically elected legislatures. Do you also think Roe was against democratic principles? And if not, why does the Supreme Court only act against democratic principles when it returns issues to elected legislatures?
I just replied to your post because you have to in order to post at all, not because I was specifically addressing the content of your specific post.
And yes, I'm aware that "control over women's bodies" is used in the reproductive context. But it's misleading and incorrect. Returning to the vaccine example, it's misleading and incorrect to say "the government shouldn't pass vaccine mandates because they can't tell me what to put in my body." They can and already do (and should be able to). Nonetheless, that's what a lot of anti-vaxxers say when making their arguments.
I don't think government should legislate morality. This is similar to the whole gay marriage argument.
My personal opinion nor anyone else's opinion should matter when it comes to what a woman does with her body.
Similar issues (drugs, vaccines) are more about the public good. Someone on drugs, selling drugs, not taking a vaccine, etc, has an affect on the public. Brenda having or not having a baby doesnt affect me.
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I find it scary how many people I know personally and online who call themselves libertarians are celebrating this whole overturning of Roe v Wade. If you call yourself a libertarian but support bans like this of any kind at the federal, state, or local level, then you aren't a libertarian. This goes for firearms, abortion, weed, sex work, businesses choosing not to sell to certain groups, etc.
Almost no one agrees on all issues so you can be 95% or more libertarian and oppose abortion. Even more specifically, if you believe your rights end (like shooting a gun in a crowded theater) when it violates someone else's life and you believe that the science proves the unborn are human lives then a true libertarian would oppose abortion.
"Women shouldn't be held accountable for their own choices."
I think it’s telling how often the rhetoric shifts to punishing women rather than saving lives. A major part of why the radicals religious right wants to ban abortion is because they think sex outside of marriage is some sort of degenerate immoral behavior.
Whether the woman views birthing a child as a "punishment" or not is up to them. If a woman consensually has sex, and a child being conceived is the result of that choice, the woman shouldn't just get to murder the child just because bringing that child to term is inconvenient to them. A mother shouldn't get to punish their child by death for her sh!tty choices just because that child's existence is an inconvenience to her. Either raise the child or give them up for adoption, but killing is not the answer. I don't share the same attitude for cases of rape and incest obviously, since that's not a woman's choice, but I still don't think abortion is the right move.
I know this sounds like "punishment" to you because you make your moral judgements based on what feels good or bad to you in the moment rather than logic and ethics, which would probably explain why liberals tend to be such miserable, angry people in general since that's such a horrible way to make decisions.
Not false in the least. You evidently have no understanding of statistics and maybe less of modern science. Fewer than 1.5% of abortions are due to rape or incest. About 6% are for the health of the mother. Ectopic pregnancies and genetic issues are typically discovered in the first ultrasound (typically between 10-12 weeks) and subsequent amnio. If an individual would terminate a pregnancy due to a genetic condition (not all people would), there are NIPTs that can indicate the need for a confirming amnio for most conditions. My wife and I were told that one of our identical twins had a marker for downs syndrome (nuchal translucency outside of normal during the 10 week ultrasound). We didn't do the amnio because we wouldn't terminate the pregnancy because we would not end the life just because it might be imperfect (and because the odds that one identical twin would have downs and the other would not were exceedingly rare).
The thing that nobody talks about is how ineffective abortion is as a policy as a means of decreasing out of wedlock births. Before Roe v. Wade, the incidence of out of wedlock births was far lower than in the aftermath (even before Carter further destroyed the institution of marriage with the WIC program). This is because women were less likely to engage in sex outside of marriage (the percentage of 16-year-old females who had engaged in sex jumped from 13.8% from 1965-1969 to 28.1% by 1975-1979 after abortion and the pill became widespread). The increase in engagement in high-risk behavior due to the perceived risk reduction from the availability of contraception and abortion more than overcame the perceived reduction in risk provided by the availability of those same prevention strategies. Out of wedlock births increased from 322,000 to 515,000 over that same period (even with abortions among unmarried increasing from 88,000 to 985,000). So, the increased availability of abortions and the pill led to a 60% increase in out of wedlock births (and an increase in pregnancies overall by 265%. I'd call that a failure of policy.
An analysis of out-of-wedlock births in the United States (brookings.edu)
There's a difference between people reporting having sex out of wedlock and it actually happening. Also your quoting stats from 50 years ago and including a time-period where there was a "sexual revolution". Also, it's free goddam country, I don't give an S about people having sex outside of marriage. What gives you the right to judge people for their sexual behavior? Seriously. It is also a HUUUUGE misconception that married women don't have abortions. That is completely untrue, they are a large demographic group that need access to these services.
Your "facts" about ectopic pregnancies are just plain wrong. The first symptoms of ectopic prgnancy begin within 12 weeks, it absolutely CAN happen where it is not found out much later than 15 weeks, generally symptoms develop before then, but misdiagnosis happens all the time!!
Your information about genetic testing is also not correct. Yes there are many tests that begin within that time-frame, MANY POOR WOMEN DO NOT HAVE ADEQUATE ACCESS TO PRE-NATAL CARE and will not be tested until much later in their pregnancies. MANY PRE-TEENS and TEENAGERS WHO GET PREGNANT DO NOT KNOW THEY NEED TO GET TESTED AND HIDE THEIR PREGNANCIES UNTIL MUCH LATER INTO THE PREGNANCY. We should not force them to carry fetuses that are essentially dead in the womb. Same goes for anyone who has been raped, immigrants, refugees, people who normally have irregular periods (those with fibriods, endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome, or have IUD's,) might not KNOW they are pregnant until after 15 weeks. It happens. We don't live in a Utopia. There are so, so many examples where your perfect little time-frame just does not fit. So then it is just a rule that punishes these women for circumstance out of their control. And then it also gets into a creepy place where everyone is up in a woman's business when they are just trying to figure something out with their Dr's. Yes their should be a limit, and most people agree that it is if the fetus reaches a point where it is viable for life outside of the uterus, then an abortion should not be allowed to happen (unless there are extreme/severe circumstances at play)
Then you have health conditions that put mothers' at risk, where they have to decide to keep a fetus or abort. A terrible, terrible decision AND a private one. Some of those include finding out they have agressive cancer and need to undergo chemo immediately to survive, even though they are pregnant, or people who have rare heart conditions or who need to take blood thinners to stay alive, who find out they are pregnant and discuss options with their MD, and try for a healthy pregnancy but have "health scares" or emergencies later on that require a choice between keeping the pregnancy or literally continuing to risk their life. People who have severe seizure disorders, kidney/liver disease, autoimmune disease, type 1 diabetes. I've listed high risk situations, there are so so many.
What if something happens late-term? A car accident that deprived the fetus of Oxygen for too long of a period, so they are essentially brain dead but still have a heart beat? What about placental abruption where the placenta disconnects suddenly from the lining of the uterus, depriving the fetus of essential nutrients? You would force these people both to A) tell you everything about their specific health care situations to justify a needed medical procedure and or B)force them to keep something that is essentially dead inside of them for months, just so it can maybe, just maybe take one breath after labor then immediately die?
Even after you say all of these example are ok/exceptions for the rule, why then are they ok and not "murder" but a woman choosing to end a pregnancy because it's just not right for her "murder"? Same argument goes for rape. You are not a Doctor, you are not an OBGYN, you think you KNOW more than you do, you cannot replace these medical professionals, there are too many scenarios you just don't understand because you have not studied nor encountered them in your life. That's why it is between the MD and their patient, not up to pencil pushing law-makers or armchair laymen like you and me.
I don't think government should legislate morality. This is similar to the whole gay marriage argument.
My personal opinion nor anyone else's opinion should matter when it comes to what a woman does with her body.
Similar issues (drugs, vaccines) are more about the public good. Someone on drugs, selling drugs, not taking a vaccine, etc, has an affect on the public. Brenda having or not having a baby doesnt affect me.
What do you mean by “legislate morality”? If by morality, you mean a principle that says what you should and should not do (like, don’t lie, cheat, steal, etc…), then the things you mentioned at the end of your post fall under “morality.” You said that the government should be allowed to legislate on things that have effects on the public, but how should they go about doing that? The only way to take in facts and use them to make decisions is to already have some idea of what you value (like health, bodily autonomy) and then choose policies that reflect that. For example, if Congress wants to deliberate about what best measures to take to ensure public health, that’s all fine and good, but they first have to determine that health is a good thing in the first place. What makes health something that ought to be sought in society? Because it helps people live complete, fulfilled lives and it promotes the overall well-being of everyone. So they government is allowed to say what you should and should not do—don’t sell drugs, take this vaccine, follow these FDA guidelines—or in other words legislate morality. At the end of the day, law just is about what people should and should not do. The government can’t escape legislating morality, no matter what moral code you ascribe to.
When you have a clearly politicised Supreme Court - as this draft decision shows - that is but one more nail in the coffin of a functioning democracy. As commentators are now suggesting, it will be gone in the US by the end of this decade.
When has the U.S. Supreme Court not been politicized?
Any body of appointees formed by elected officials is politicized by the very nature of its formation.
As the liberal protestors in Washington are calling for Democrats to "pack the court" (i.e. increase the number of justices to permit the party in power (i.e. Democrats) to appoint the additional number of justices), I suppose such a Democrat packed court would not be politicized because Democrats never politicize anything.
The Court once straddled the range of political and cultural persuasions in the US. It has now become an instrument of the Right against the majority of American citizens. With the direction it is now intending to take on women's rights we know that the Taliban would approve.
I'm not reading through this 21 page horror show. I don't care what the middle aged divorced dads on here have to say about it.
Want to reduce abortion? Work to reduce unwanted pregnancy. Support things like:
Safe sex education
Access to affordable contraception
Teaching kids about sexual assault
Maternity Leave
Programs to help low income parents and single mothers afford food, basic needs, and childcare.
The "pro life" crowd showed their hand and revealed their motives when not one ounce of their "tireless efforts" to overturn Roe included any of these common sense things. The "pro life" crowd has no interest in saving the "unborn". They don't care about the fetuses. If they did, they'd be TRYING TO HELP the pregnant women who feel like they don't have any options because they don't have the income, or the support. They'd be TRYING TO HELP the teenagers who want to explore relationships because that's a thing teenagers do, but don't want a pregnancy to derail the future they dream of. They'd be TRYING TO HELP the campus rape survivor, not by lecturing them on how they must carry a pregnancy to term but by ensuring that such a thing never happens again. They'd be TRYING TO HELP all mothers by providing federal maternity leave to them so they can heal and bond with the new life they fought so hard to force to term.
Abortion is so much more nuanced than the "unborn life". Some babies won't live very long outside the womb, sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a day. Sometimes pregnancy can kill the mother. There are so many medical issues that can happen with a pregnancy. But the "pro lifers" ignore that.
It is such a stupid position to be pro life. It is filled to the brim with hypocrisy and makes no actual sense at all. You don't have to like the idea of abortion but to be so extreme that you actually fought to overturn a policy that will kill more living and breathing humans you can imagine is horrible. For shame.
Not false in the least. You evidently have no understanding of statistics and maybe less of modern science. Fewer than 1.5% of abortions are due to rape or incest. About 6% are for the health of the mother. Ectopic pregnancies and genetic issues are typically discovered in the first ultrasound (typically between 10-12 weeks) and subsequent amnio. If an individual would terminate a pregnancy due to a genetic condition (not all people would), there are NIPTs that can indicate the need for a confirming amnio for most conditions. My wife and I were told that one of our identical twins had a marker for downs syndrome (nuchal translucency outside of normal during the 10 week ultrasound). We didn't do the amnio because we wouldn't terminate the pregnancy because we would not end the life just because it might be imperfect (and because the odds that one identical twin would have downs and the other would not were exceedingly rare).
The thing that nobody talks about is how ineffective abortion is as a policy as a means of decreasing out of wedlock births. Before Roe v. Wade, the incidence of out of wedlock births was far lower than in the aftermath (even before Carter further destroyed the institution of marriage with the WIC program). This is because women were less likely to engage in sex outside of marriage (the percentage of 16-year-old females who had engaged in sex jumped from 13.8% from 1965-1969 to 28.1% by 1975-1979 after abortion and the pill became widespread). The increase in engagement in high-risk behavior due to the perceived risk reduction from the availability of contraception and abortion more than overcame the perceived reduction in risk provided by the availability of those same prevention strategies. Out of wedlock births increased from 322,000 to 515,000 over that same period (even with abortions among unmarried increasing from 88,000 to 985,000). So, the increased availability of abortions and the pill led to a 60% increase in out of wedlock births (and an increase in pregnancies overall by 265%. I'd call that a failure of policy.
An analysis of out-of-wedlock births in the United States (brookings.edu)
There's a difference between people reporting having sex out of wedlock and it actually happening. Also your quoting stats from 50 years ago and including a time-period where there was a "sexual revolution". Also, it's free goddam country, I don't give an S about people having sex outside of marriage. What gives you the right to judge people for their sexual behavior? Seriously. It is also a HUUUUGE misconception that married women don't have abortions. That is completely untrue, they are a large demographic group that need access to these services.
Your "facts" about ectopic pregnancies are just plain wrong. The first symptoms of ectopic prgnancy begin within 12 weeks, it absolutely CAN happen where it is not found out much later than 15 weeks, generally symptoms develop before then, but misdiagnosis happens all the time!!
Your information about genetic testing is also not correct. Yes there are many tests that begin within that time-frame, MANY POOR WOMEN DO NOT HAVE ADEQUATE ACCESS TO PRE-NATAL CARE and will not be tested until much later in their pregnancies. MANY PRE-TEENS and TEENAGERS WHO GET PREGNANT DO NOT KNOW THEY NEED TO GET TESTED AND HIDE THEIR PREGNANCIES UNTIL MUCH LATER INTO THE PREGNANCY. We should not force them to carry fetuses that are essentially dead in the womb. Same goes for anyone who has been raped, immigrants, refugees, people who normally have irregular periods (those with fibriods, endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome, or have IUD's,) might not KNOW they are pregnant until after 15 weeks. It happens. We don't live in a Utopia. There are so, so many examples where your perfect little time-frame just does not fit. So then it is just a rule that punishes these women for circumstance out of their control. And then it also gets into a creepy place where everyone is up in a woman's business when they are just trying to figure something out with their Dr's. Yes their should be a limit, and most people agree that it is if the fetus reaches a point where it is viable for life outside of the uterus, then an abortion should not be allowed to happen (unless there are extreme/severe circumstances at play)
Then you have health conditions that put mothers' at risk, where they have to decide to keep a fetus or abort. A terrible, terrible decision AND a private one. Some of those include finding out they have agressive cancer and need to undergo chemo immediately to survive, even though they are pregnant, or people who have rare heart conditions or who need to take blood thinners to stay alive, who find out they are pregnant and discuss options with their MD, and try for a healthy pregnancy but have "health scares" or emergencies later on that require a choice between keeping the pregnancy or literally continuing to risk their life. People who have severe seizure disorders, kidney/liver disease, autoimmune disease, type 1 diabetes. I've listed high risk situations, there are so so many.
What if something happens late-term? A car accident that deprived the fetus of Oxygen for too long of a period, so they are essentially brain dead but still have a heart beat? What about placental abruption where the placenta disconnects suddenly from the lining of the uterus, depriving the fetus of essential nutrients? You would force these people both to A) tell you everything about their specific health care situations to justify a needed medical procedure and or B)force them to keep something that is essentially dead inside of them for months, just so it can maybe, just maybe take one breath after labor then immediately die?
Even after you say all of these example are ok/exceptions for the rule, why then are they ok and not "murder" but a woman choosing to end a pregnancy because it's just not right for her "murder"? Same argument goes for rape. You are not a Doctor, you are not an OBGYN, you think you KNOW more than you do, you cannot replace these medical professionals, there are too many scenarios you just don't understand because you have not studied nor encountered them in your life. That's why it is between the MD and their patient, not up to pencil pushing law-makers or armchair laymen like you and me.
To address the 'murder' logic, I'm having trouble finding many examples where someone would die if they didn't kill someone else. The only example I can think of is Killing someone in self-defense isn't murder. So if carrying the baby to term has a significant chance of killing you, then it would be logically consistent with our current laws to say you can abort the baby so that the baby doesn't essentially kill you.
In other circumstances where the baby may not survive or would be brain dead, we already have scenarios like this where people have to 'pull the plug'. So saying abortion is okay in this circumstance is again logically consistent with our current laws.
With rape or incest, no, it would not be logically consistent to say you can abort the baby and not have it be murder. I get why that's troubling. I think everyone does. Rape, and all the consequences with it, are awful and victims of rape should get as much help as we as a society can possibly give them- but- as you stated, it wouldn't be logically consistent to say that abortion is murder, but that aborting a perfectly healthy baby isn't murder if the baby was a product of rape.
I'm not really against people being able to choose abortion, but I think people in the pro-life camp can maintain their position with logical consistency- although they don't always articulate it well.
When you have a clearly politicised Supreme Court - as this draft decision shows - that is but one more nail in the coffin of a functioning democracy. As commentators are now suggesting, it will be gone in the US by the end of this decade.
How is this Supreme Court clearly politicized? It is 5-4. How is that politicized? Oh you mean the 5-4 decision in favor of Roe V. Wade would NOT be politicized because it comes out in favor of Liberals?
Abortion has been an established right in the US for nearly fifty years. A significant majority of Americans polled want it to stay that way. The 5 justices who want to go against all of that, with no constitutional justification but only their own religiously-based views, are the willing instrument of a minority of fanatical religious conservatives. Yet this is in a country that nonetheless still purports there is a right to freedom of religious belief and practice - including the right to not believe. No longer. The male-dominated white conservative minority, with the help of the Evangelicals, will ensure that "freedom" will be entirely on their terms - their freedom, not yours.
Forced pregnancy... The US continues its desxent away from the first world.
Why not introduce legislation that criminalise men leaving their children and paying no child support to balance this out? Its all about a small group controlling women.
Except in rare cases of rape, nobody is forcing pregnancy. I’d wager that rape victims represent less than 2% of abortions, probably less than 1%.
This is not a reason to celebrate for either side. Abortion is a terrible process, but so is giving birth to an unwanted child.
There is no “winning” on either side of this argument. Women’s rights overrule baby’s rights, even if the baby is female? I’m not religious but I think life starts at conception. I think abortion is wrong, but I understand it’s the lesser of 2 evils in certain situations.
No. Life does not begin at conception. Life begins at creation. An egg and sperm are alive. Follow the science. We're heading toward eight billion on this little planet. Sad that the Catholic Supreme Court will soon impose their religious views on the rest of us.
I don't think government should legislate morality. This is similar to the whole gay marriage argument.
My personal opinion nor anyone else's opinion should matter when it comes to what a woman does with her body.
Similar issues (drugs, vaccines) are more about the public good. Someone on drugs, selling drugs, not taking a vaccine, etc, has an affect on the public. Brenda having or not having a baby doesnt affect me.
What do you mean by “legislate morality”? If by morality, you mean a principle that says what you should and should not do (like, don’t lie, cheat, steal, etc…), then the things you mentioned at the end of your post fall under “morality.” You said that the government should be allowed to legislate on things that have effects on the public, but how should they go about doing that? The only way to take in facts and use them to make decisions is to already have some idea of what you value (like health, bodily autonomy) and then choose policies that reflect that. For example, if Congress wants to deliberate about what best measures to take to ensure public health, that’s all fine and good, but they first have to determine that health is a good thing in the first place. What makes health something that ought to be sought in society? Because it helps people live complete, fulfilled lives and it promotes the overall well-being of everyone. So they government is allowed to say what you should and should not do—don’t sell drugs, take this vaccine, follow these FDA guidelines—or in other words legislate morality. At the end of the day, law just is about what people should and should not do. The government can’t escape legislating morality, no matter what moral code you ascribe to.
Very well said. People like him don’t understand most rules are based on morality.
For those who don't know this, after we get rid of roe v wade the United States will still be more liberal than Europe when it comes to abortion. Only the UK allows abortion out to 24 weeks. We have 32 states that allow 24 weeks or later.
Dear liberals, USA will still be number one in abortions after the conservatives win.
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