place holder text because rules and I agree and why didn’t we do that anyway. OH GOD DAMNIT
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if fetuses are little people then abortion is cruel and unusual punishment,
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It really would. I have a feeling that positive change will be prevented by any means possible in this election and any others going forward, but it can’t go on like this forever, right… right?? Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of pendulum swinging or something?
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That depends, are we on a pendulum or riding the porcelain, circling a gaping maw?
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Biden made an OK VP. Some problematic stuff in his past, the probably-harmless but optically cringeworthy touching, the unawareness of how blinkered he was as to his privilege, but enh, not a terrible guy as long as he’s in the background.
Turn the klieg lights on that stuff and he becomes full-bore toxic, and the DNC is either deluded about his chances, or is trying to throw the game rather than ride the populist progressive tide.
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They say the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.
Can’t you guys just get yourself a supremer scotus?
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Fetuses are persons.
Corporations are persons.
What next? Guns?
Seems like the US is heading towards every damn thing being a ‘person’ protected by the constitution, except ACTUAL PERSONS!!
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The Handmaid’s Tale, GATTACA. What else? It really does feel like the international right wing has based it’s vision of the future on various dystopian stories.
When do I get a future based on News From Nowhere? Something where life is worth living?
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Yeah, she keeps putting out these proposals that sound wonderful, but seem impossible given what she has to work with from a legislative, Constitutional, and judicial perspective. It leaves me to wonder what she’ll actually do as president, if she can’t get these ideas off the ground. What’s plan B?
Don’t forget, some of the most toxic congress-critters are up for the vote around the same time. If we vote in a few more progressives, maybe things would be more balanced.
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Yes, and this is why it’s NOT just a woman’s issue, but a larger issue that we should all give a shit about it, no matter if you have a working uterus or not.
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She’s one of the few current Democratic candidates I am financially supporting; I don’t give to the DNC or any of the other “establishment” organizations, only to candidates. I’m also a little bit hoping some of the contenders from the Senate STAY THERE. And that some of the contenders of states where there are vulnerable Repubs up for reelection RUN THERE.
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Because McConnell wouldn’t bring any of Obama’s nominees to a vote. Do you really think Obama saw all those vacancies and was like, “nah, I’ll make it the next guy’s problem”?
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It’s a much longer situation than that. The supreme court was set at 9 justices by an act of congress in the 1860’s. FDR proposed expanding it, essentially to gain better ground for progressive policies in the 30’s. Its come up repeatedly since as a potentially important thing the left should do. Including recently, but its usually been hand waved away as “improper” or an unsavory politicization of the court.
Generally speaking Supreme Court nominations do not come up often enough for the Supreme Court to be “packed” in the same way as the federal bench. So when people talk about “packing the Supreme Court” this is what they’re talking about. Either reviving FDR’s proposal. Or a simpler expansion of the SC from 9 to 12/13 and as many as 25 justices.
The same could be done with lower benches. And has been proposed as a solution to the right wing packing that’s been going on for decades. McConnell isn’t the first GOP member to do that shit, and Trump’s isn’t the first administration to appoint judges en mass based on their political connections not their qualifications. G-Dubs was all about it. Just like voter suppression what we’re seeing now is more of an escalation of a 25 year or longer project by the GOP to skew the playing field in their favor.
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*reins…
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The American public is deeply divided on this issue, and there is a huge middle which is okay with some abortions but not all abortions. Suppose that Warren’s bill passes the House 225-210 and the Senate 52-48. Does anyone seriously think that this “enshrines” anything and closes out the controversy?
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A federal abortion law subject to the consensus of the American public would, I expect, (as I understand it does in much of Western Europe) prohibit third trimester abortions, limit second trimester abortion to threats to mother’s health and permit it without restriction in first trimester. Absent Roe v. Wade and a federal statute, a few States would permit abortion right up to and including birth, a few more would prohibit all abortion. but I suspect most would follow the European model.
I agree that it’d be a hell of a thing to ascribe personhood to an unborn child but they don’t have to. They already have the interest in protecting the ‘potential human life’.
They don’t need to do that either.
There’s already enough in Roe v. Wade to justify anything they might want to do.
The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy. She carries an embryo and, later, a fetus, if one accepts the medical definitions of the developing young in the human uterus. See Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary 478-479, 547 (24th ed. 1965). The situation therefore is inherently different from marital intimacy, or bedroom possession of obscene material, or marriage, or procreation, or education, with which Eisenstadt and Griswold, Stanley, Loving, Skinner, and Pierce and Meyer were respectively concerned. As we have intimated above, it is reasonable and appropriate for a State to decide that at some point in time another interest, that of health of the mother or that of potential human life, becomes significantly involved. The woman’s privacy is no longer sole and any right of privacy she possesses must be measured accordingly.
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In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake. We repeat, however, that the State does have an important and legitimate interest in preserving and protecting the health of the pregnant woman, whether she be a resident of the State or a nonresident who seeks medical consultation and treatment there, and that it has still another important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life. These interests are separate and distinct. Each grows in substantiality as the woman approaches [410 U.S. 113, 163] term and, at a point during pregnancy, each becomes “compelling.”
Roe v. Wade is based on medical privacy, yes. But also states that one has to balance that right against other interests and that states can interfere if they have a legitimate and compelling interest in doing so.
Exactly how one balances those interests is where things get tricky.
The Roe v. Wade legislation did not balance adequately in the view of the court at the time. Too much on the side of ‘potential human life’ not enough on the ‘privacy & health of the mother’ side.
How would legislation fare which claims to more equally balance the health of the mother against the potential human life? I guess we’ll find out…
So essentially, Roe v. Wade 
(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.
(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.
(c ) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life [410 U.S. 113, 165] may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.
I don’t think there’s much consensus on anything in the US at present.
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I just had an epiphany. The right wing doesn’t think fetuses are humans, it thinks they are corporations! That’s why they are so dead set on protecting them, even at the cost of the mother’s life.
But that position is based on inflammatory rhetoric that is basically designed to make people fight. No one thinks it’s okay to abort a healthy pregnancy after the due date. Because no one thinks that no one will ever do that. However, if there is a criminal law against doing it then the cops get called when a woman has a still birth.
If you polled Americans with the question: Should the cops get called when there is a still birth? I think it would be at least 80% against. The question of criminal law is not terribly divisive if people understand what it means to pass a criminal law rather than just answering how they feel about abortion.
Canada has absolutely no criminal laws about abortion at all. They were struck down by the supreme court in 1988 and no politicians have wanted to wade into that issue since. Canada can be used as a case study for the impacts of keeping criminal law out of abortion. It’s fine.*
* “Fine” here means much, much better than the alternative in every way
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And given how shoddy, unregulated and politicized a lot of coronor’s offices tend to be…*shudders*
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I’ve always wanted to ask someone who believes life begins at conception, what about the tens of thousands of “potential” human beings currently cryogenically frozen at IVF clinics around the country?
All those poor humans frozen and stored for eternity. Are they not enslaved humans? Shouldn’t we arrest the men and women who abandon or destroy their “potential” offspring?
Inquiring minds want to know.
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