Texas lawmakers want Death Penalty for women who get abortions

If you are looking at “from fertilized egg” it is way higher than that. Of course, mom would not even know she was pregnant if she lost it at that stage, but most studies put it at 75% (with a wide confidence interval) of fertilized eggs never make it to live birth. Those numbers are about right for a known pregnancy.

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That’s ridiculously harsh and absurd.

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So, by that logic (if I dare call it that) any miscarriage at any stage is, at the very least, homicide. I seem to recall reading somewhere that about half of all fertilized ova fail to implant so it will be necessary to have a police force large enough to microscopically examine everything that comes down every birth canal all the time, just in case you know.

Fortress

There really is American exceptionalism - and you can keep it!

Meanwhile in Australia we have these sensible processes:

and New Zealand has just banned most semi-automatic rifles in one vote.

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Sadly that isn’t far from what some xtian fundamentalists think.

I can’t find the source right now, but he believed that miscarriages caused women to be possessed by demons that would cause more miscarriages. He also thought that wearing black or driving a black car was also a sign of demonic possession.

I had the misfortune of having him as my local Anglican bishop during the last years of my faith.

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Well, there are laws which tack on another murder charge if a woman is killed when pregnant.

And yes, there are state laws where an assault on woman that leads to a miscarriage can result in an attacker being charged with murder.

So this is one issue where I think it is impossible to apply any black and white reasoning to it, as there are many, many shades of grey. Which is why this legislation is so absurd.

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The State Department of Menstrual Discharge Inspection is going to attract some interesting employees.

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There is, at least, a sort of counter-protest bill for the gentlemen making its way through the TX legislature. And with about equal chance of passing. https://www.texastribune.org/2017/03/12/rep-farrar-bill/

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  1. “He who sheds man’s blood…” Cool. First man to have an abortion in Texas better watch out. We all know how Xianists are all about taking the Bible literally.
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They really work hard to make that obvious, too - by also doing everything they can to increase the likelihood that someone will need an abortion by also blocking access to contraceptives, etc. The maternal mortality rate in Texas is on par with third world countries; they obviously don’t give a shit.
I generally don’t buy the “pro-life” charade for a minute. You can’t tell me that someone who really believed that “abortion is murder” wouldn’t be fighting for universal contraceptive access.

You mean a “forced-birther”?

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Your story is heartbreaking, and yet so normal. Here in Ireland we have just finally moved from an ideologically based, authoritarian ban on abortions to a popular constitutional mandate to legalise abortion. And it happened because of testimonies like yours rather than polemics. In particular brave women were prepared to talk and make the abstract [ideological positions deal with] real human issues and people that voters can relate to: their sisters, daughters, partners, friends, mothers and their brothers, sons, partners, friends, and fathers. We all have stories like this or our friends and beloveds have stories like this and speaking these stories is, I believe based on our experience, the most powerful strategy against the hateful idealogues with no heart. The trollies were all sure they won all the terrible TV debates that they dragged down to the lowest possible level. But compassion speaks more powerfully. There is a high road. It’s a hard road and you have taken it. Thank you to you and all the brave people fighting the good fight with love and sorrow.

[edited “about” for slight improvement in clarity]

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Fewer people on death row is the last thing our legislature here in Texas cares about. If they could get away with imprisoning the entire population and take the profit for housing them, they would.

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Homocide is not the same thing as murder. (Murders are a subset of homocides.)

If life begins at conception, then we’re all about 9 months older. That means we can get our licenses sooner, consent sooner, vote sooner, sign contracts sooner, join the army sooner, smoke sooner, drink sooner, hold certain federal offices sooner, make “catch-up” contributions to our retirement accounts sooner, retire sooner, claim social security benefits sooner, etc.

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You’re assuming that they don’t also believe that contraception is a sin.

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Might that be considered punishment in itself?

Yep, that’s how it looks from Massachusetts.

The insincerity of laws that try to punish their way to a positive outcome really ticks me off. Threats aren’t useful in resolving most complex issues, but incentives are.

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Well science can prove that that woman is a live human being and this if Texas kills her, whom that we have agreed is a live human being, then Texas hath murdered and then we have to put Texas to death the penalty. You might be worried, “Won’t we then have to put ourselves to the death penalty ?” At this point I’d likely tut tut your comment and tell you that the law will cease to exist contextually; and we will be both immune from prosecution and free of Texas.

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If you killed someone in one state, can you be charged with murder in another one? I seem to remember there are situations where a state where the murder did not occur can still have jurisdiction in some way - seems batty but can it be that there are these situations or is my memory finally gone the way of the Dodo?

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