- The decision in June Medical Services v. Russo, expected imminently, could lead to the shuttering of clinics across not just Louisiana but also large parts of the country. Worst-case scenario — which is a real possibility, given the court’s rightward lurch in recent years — abortion clinics would also no longer be able to bring lawsuits on behalf of their patients, as has been common for decades. For all future abortion cases, plaintiffs would have to be individual pregnant women who’ve been turned away from getting the procedure — women who would then need the resources and wherewithal to wage a legal battle that would almost certainly not be resolved in time for them to actually get an abortion.
for some reason Democrats have forgotten entirely about the tissue while the religious right has not. I have come to hold the belief that the pro-life anti-abortion crowd must be completely done away with in the political sphere. this dog whistle has been used to harm too many Americans for too many decades. Christofascist Republican policies increase the number of pregnant teenagers, increase the number of abortions performed. Scared, easily controlled pregnant teenagers is the goal. To try and talk about this issue a different way can someone Point me towards a secular force that is advocating to criminalize abortion? Because I know that me talking about religion negatively is only ever seen as bullshit.
It isn't a religious argument; it's a philosophical argument, but many anti-abortionists' philosophy is grounded in their religious beliefs. There's a big difference though. Abortion has to be illegal at some point, because otherwise you could abort a fetus up to the moment of delivery. I don't think that anyone is arguing in favor of that, so we need some definition of what an unabortable fetus is. We all know that line exists somewhere between conception and birth, but who knows where. It's supposed to be the point of reasoned democracy to find that water level. However, the left is almost as guilty as the right in their reticence to talk definitions, since we're arguing dogma not policy when we argue about abortion as a binary.
This is such a dude argument. Abortion isn't new, nor are the laws around it, nor has there been any shortage of laws passed in order to figure out when men are allowed to be mad at women for taking charge of their bodies and futures. Historically these laws have taken the form of livestock value for induced miscarriage (example: Exodus 21 because show me a pregnant woman and I'll show you a dude who thinks its his right to tell her what the fuck to do. Here's the thing. Take it from a guy who ended up owning and running a women's healthcare clinic, pregnancy is a pain in the ass and the longer you wait, the more of a pain in the ass it is. If you didn't want an abortion during the first trimester but you suddenly do during the third? Shit has gone horribly horribly wrong and you are living a tragedy. By the time you cross the third trimester you're better off taking the fetus to term anyway because babies fucking die. You don't take care of the kid and it's no longer a problem. Call it crib death, call it failure to thrive, call it whatever you want there are no shortage of ways you can take an unwanted baby and turn it into an unfortunate early passing even if you don't intend to, it's not like you need to put the kid in a basket and float it down to pharoah or some shit. We did this whole roundyround with "partial birth abortions" back in the '90s AND NO ONE EVER FUCKING HAD ONE. Not a single person on either side of the argument could come up with more than one or two case studies where partial birth abortions were even performed. It's just not the way you handle obstetrical emergencies, nor is it how anyone - ANYONE - wants to handle an unwanted pregnancy. It's like "well, I figured I could have just poisoned my husband but instead I forged a terabyte of documents to convince the CIA he was the head of ISIS so they would call a drone strike on my house while I was in Vegas with the girls." It's the most ornate, involved, expensive possible way to terminate a pregnancy and the only reason anybody even talks about it is so that a bunch of men can jump around angry at each other over some hypothetical woman somewhere in the background of the argument that nobody really cares about. Every law you make? Is going to be used to hit someone over the head. In the case of abortion laws, they will be used to punish the poor, the minorities and the disadvantaged. Nobody - NOBODY - needs to sit around legislating "well this is a fetus and that's a baby because POP at the magic 34 week 2 day 9 hour 7 minute 32 second mark WE GET TO REGISTER THEM TO VOTE!" because fucking hell, abortion rates have been plummeting anyway ever since a couple-three pills can be popped and all this posturing accomplishes is making it harder for my employees to help postpartum women with boggy uteruses and partially retained placental fragments. Fuckin' let it go. If someone floated a constitutional amendment requiring the possession of a uterus in order to vote on issues pertaining to uteruses? I'd fuckin' LOBBY for that shit.Abortion has to be illegal at some point, because otherwise you could abort a fetus up to the moment of delivery.
Come at me, bro. The "partial-birth" bullshit was bullshit, and yet both sides recruited their brightest and best to argue it all the way to the Supreme Court who, for lack of a better term, split the baby. It was and remains dumb. I guess what I'd like to see is just some grand compromise so that we can move the fuck on from this worst of wedge issues that often boils down to arguments over angels on the head of a pin, except when it doesn't and then it's pretty important. I don't know, though. Slow day on Hubski, so why not argue something?This is such a dude argument.
LOL The best argument I've ever heard, pro or con, about abortion is that nobody got to legislate it. it went to the supreme court and pop it couldn't be legislated anymore, for or against. That was maybe thirty years ago, well before Turdblossom decided to put family values bills on everyone's ballot in 2004, before Gavin Newsom decided to say "double eagles bitchez we're marrying gays" and before pretty much the entire country went "you know, I'm not enough of a bigot to give my support to a law denying gay people human rights." This article has a fuckin' coloring book in the margin to illustrate the vigor and vim with which legislatures will approach the problem even when they aren't allowed to make it illegal. It is my firmly considered opinion that a house'n'senate passed, presidentially-signed sentence that said "healthcare decisions related to pregnancy are the purvey of women and the physicians supervising their care" would club this entire fucking issue in the head never to rise again.
That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with. The extent to which the world doesn't suck because of weighty compromises struck by American liberals and conservatives in the postwar years is lost on people like you and the Trumpers. The world is way worse when a single point of view dominates.
You're making my point for me without even realizing it. What constitutes when a baby can live outside the womb? It's not a binary, and even if it were it would be different for every individual. Everyone develops at a different rate, and devices and protocols for keeping babies alive outside the womb at earlier and earlier stages continue to push the boundary further back. This is a friend's wife. That kid is now 2.5 years old and basically healthy. So should the goalpost be moved to 23 weeks? Should the goalpost be moved every time a miracle baby survives an unexpected early delivery? This is a question for the law (that it, us) to decide collectively, and tons of secular people think that viable fetuses shouldn't be aborted, so your statement is wrong, since even most pro-life religious people aren't absolutists. (Actually it isn't even wrong, it's nonsense.)
What if I said this: "Setting a voting age is easy. You just pick the time when people can weigh evidence and decide for themselves." Now iterate that with literally anything that has a minimum age requirement. Nonsense. At some point we just make a compromise. It's of course difficult to compromise when some people literally think that what you're doing is an act of murder. However, I don't think that that's a large percentage even of the people who are self-identified pro-lifers. KB linked to a Gallup poll elsewhere that put the number at 6% of the overall population. Probably a similar number thinks that you should be able to abort a baby anytime for any reason. The rest of us are in the middle somewhere and labels are not helpful, as they ascribe to individuals beliefs that they do not necessarily hold. That goes for "pro-life" and "pro-choice". It's a false distinction, because basically everybody agrees that there's a few months' worth of grey area during gestation. Sadly, "pro-life" has become a litmus test for a position that almost nobody believes in. But the problem is that "pro-choice" has become a labeled to be rebelled against by a lot of conservatives who may not necessarily think that abortion is always wrong, but they just don't want to be seen as moral relativists or something (in-group phenomenon, maybe???). I'd personally love to see a truce called where we all agree that you can get an abortion until X time (sometime after everyone has had a good enough chance to know they're pregnant, but long before any reasonable chance of autonomous life) and then it's a flat "no" unless a life threatening condition arises for mother or fetus. I think that's the only way we ever end this debate. I would, however, be in favor of very late term abortions for any amoral politician who uses this as a wedge issue (e.g. Fuckhead-in-Chief).