Women aren’t incubators. We have rights to decide what happens inside our bodies.
I don’t care. They don’t get to have opinions about what happens inside my body.
You don’t get to decide what happens inside my body. Period.
This isn’t rocket science. You want to prevent abortions? Then you fund comprehensive sex ed and you make birth control easy to obtain. You also put women in control of their reproduction instead of making us jump through hoops for that to happen. As you said, abortions WILL happen, either way, so it’s better to work to prevent them before hand, and then make them legal and accessible.
BTW, the whole trope about women going out and getting an abortion the day before a baby is born is so ridiculous because it just doesn’t happen. The cases when women get abortions late in the pregnancy are almost always due to illness on the part of the mother or the fact that the fetus is not viable. They are more often than not difficult, morally complex situations that are tragic, not some woman who got pregnant because she’s irresponsible and then decided she needs to get an abortion at 8 and a half so she can continue with her wanton ways. It’s almost entirely made up whole cloth by the anti-choice “movement” to “prove” that women can’t be responsible with our reproduction and we need “logical” men to tell us what to do.
Yup, I agree with you. Thought experiments on this topic are a losing proposition, and irrelevant.
ETA:
Yeah, I was going from @docosc’s brother’s example where there is a clear difference between a five year-old and a fetus. But that opens up the question of where the line is, and, the whole thought experiment sets up the question as rights to be weighed and debated.
“You don’t get to decide what happens in my/anyone else’s body” shuts that down.
The biggest part of the argument is that prior to extrauterine viability, (at least medically) there is no debate about “rights” of a fetus vs. mom. There is certainly an argument that if elective abortions were being performed on 25 to 30 week pregnancies, or even moreso on 35-40 weeks, that there are rights of the baby to consider, but these just don’t happen in healthy pregnancies. It’s a right wing talking point with no grounding in reality.
Fair enough, but the phrasing of “Is an abortion OK in this instance?” kind of explicitly does open that debate. It’s cool that it is working for your brother, and presumably he knows his audience, but in general, if you are going to play that game, you need to anticipate the possible responses, and “the hypothetical mitigating factors don’t apply when they aren’t present” response is an obvious one.
You can disagree about that, and you and I both do, but it doesn’t “win” the argument or change someone’s mind.
But it’s never the pro-choice people who bring up these sorts of intellectual exercises. The stance tends to be pretty consistent, that women are fully autonomous human beings who should be making these choices, not the government. It’s forced birthers who bring up these hypothetical to specifically muddy the waters and strip women of their hard won rights. Always.
Most women are not sitting around thinking up ways we can abstract our bodies to score political points.
I think you need to take this up with @docosc’s brother. It was his “thought experiment” that I am critiquing. I don’t know why you are arguing with my argument that a thought experiment is not a useful way to engage on this topic.
Yup its a fucked up idea that claims a fetus is a person, but a woman is not. Its just a shorthand for turning women into chattel property of the state.
Well, but “the quiet part” is the part you can’t say because it will weaken your case. This statement doesn’t weaken his case. By “unconstitutional”, he means “unconstitutional now because of current precedent”. Obviously, he wants SCOTUS to overturn precedent so as to make this law constitutional.
They’re not going to stop at abortion. Their next stop would be birth control. (Certainly, any and all government-funded birth control, in domestic policy or as foreign aid.)
[But, boner pills for old infertile men will, of course, will remain sacrosanct.]
Well, here’s a recent example: Whole Woman’s Health (WWH) v. Hellerstedt was decided in 2016. Louisiana literally copied that Texas law that was struck down leading to June Medical Services, LLC v. Russo which was decided in 2020. Kennedy was the deciding vote in WWH and left the court before June Medical was decided (Kavanaugh replaced him). Roberts did change sides citing WWH as precedent, but none of the other 4 Justices did (Roberts also took this opportunity to whittle away rights). Since this case, Ginsberg has been replaced by Barrett.
One aspect of stare decisis is that more recent decisions should have more weight.
You want to fight the battle on that go ahead, all I’m saying is that there have been MANY instances of this and noone (as far as I can find) has faced any serious repercussions (let alone impeachment, nor a recall), not congressmen, not state level politicians, and voters are unlikely to punish them for that particular reason, they’re much more likely to punish for vetoing the law. Hell, there still haven’t been any repercussions for several congresspeople who commited treason, something that is both a crime in the constitution and a violation of their oath…
Arlen Specter - Wikipedia did it with the Military Commisions Act in 2006, he literally said it was “patently unconstituitonal”, still voted for it, and served 5 more years. There are plenty of other examples, republicans think that in impeaching Trump the democrats and 7 repubs violated their oath to the constitution (not bothering to read their reasoning), the same from many democrats about the republicans who voted to acquit.The boat has sailed, the barn door has been left open, pandora’s box has been unsealed. There were times when it could have been pratical, when honor still seemed to be given some lip service in government and people could have faced penalties, it didn’t happen, now it’s just how things are done.
And I still say that the only people who can actually declare a law unconstituional, and have it mean anything, are the judicial branch.
My conclusion is that nobody who can do anything about it cares, oaths work only when people have shame or can be shamed, or when there are repercussions for it. None of that is the case.
In the meantime, the law is passed, and is part of the continued asault on human rights in the US and you’re here complaining that the balls were slightly underinflated.
