Anti-Abortion Centers Find Pregnant Teens Online, Then Save Their Data
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
These scummy tactics work, or people wouldn't do them.
Obviously having children changes your life completely, it is a huge burden and you have to "sacrifice" a lot. But almost nobody regrets it. Probably because we are hardwired to have children. The joy outweighs any sacrifices.
I don't know anyone that wishes they hadn't let their children be born, no matter how harsh their circumstances.
It's worth noting how taboo it is to admit that you hate your children, and thus how vastly under-reported this attitude ends up being.
> I don't know anyone that wishes they hadn't let their children be born, no matter how harsh their circumstances.
I, in contrast, know several children who wish they hadn't been forced to grow up in abject poverty with an absentee parent who has no time or energy for them because of how much they have to work.
Perhaps it's selfishness on the parent's part.
Then how do you know anyone feels that way? Where do you get your information?
> wish they hadn't been forced to grow up in abject poverty
That's a different question altogether. We all wish we had been born in better circumstances, but that doesn't mean we resent being alive.
The solution to children growing up in abject poverty is not abortion, it's social safety nets. Nobody should have to live in abject poverty in a rich country.
Google for "I hate my children".
> [social safety nets]
One solution to children growing up in poverty is a safety net - a solution that is strongly advocated against as being "socialist" by our current government. i.e. It ain't happening in our lifetime.
Since that solution is not currently feasible, not having children if you can't afford them (i.e. it will put you into poverty, either from normal costs or advanced costs if the child is known to have a birth defect) is the next best solution. There are four well known methods for this, abstinence, contraception, abortion, and adoption.
Abstinence is not a realistic solution, this has been shown to be the case through the centuries.
Reliable contraception does not exist (or is effectively unavailable: see the crap women have to go through to get their tubes tied). It's also next up on some of the SC justices' hitlist.
That leaves abortion and adoption. The first is much more affordable and less likely to kill the woman than the second. And that doesn't count the already overloaded foster care system and adoption rosters we're subjecting the children to.
Regardless of abortion laws, this would seem like a basic requirement for any civilised society.
I'm not sure why you would say that reliable contraception doesn't exist. Condoms are extremely effective, and cost nothing.
When it comes to adoption, it is my understanding that there is a huge demand for adopted children, outstripping supply by an order of magnitude. Are you saying this is not the case?
Condoms are only 98% effective even when used correctly[1]. Women need access to abortion.
[1] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/male-condoms/
Why is it that we push for the killing of unborn persons instead of taking responsibility for the consequences of one's actions?
No, they're accepting the risk of having an abortion.
> Condoms are extremely effective
Condoms have an 85% success rate† in the real world (98% if used perfectly, but humans are rarely perfect, especially when... emotionally compromised). That means a pregnancy a year is absolutely within reason.
> it is my understanding that there is a huge demand for adopted children
A case where research is easy, and worth doing. But here's what I found Google:
"Of the more than 440,000 children in foster care in the United States, there are over 123,000 kids available for adoption right now. According to the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, children in foster care can expect to wait an average of three years to be adopted and the average age of a foster care child is 8.5 years old."
"... roughly 20,000 children “age out” of foster care each year. This means they are now legally adults without ever finding a family through adoption."
That "huge demand" is for families who will only take babies, not fostered children.
Historically, 2% of families in the US will adopt, meaning that even if every previously aborted fetus was carried to term and put up for adoption as a baby, there still wouldn't be enough families.
EDIT: The cost to give birth, without complications, is between $5 and $15k. That's just giving birth. And the parent doesn't receive the adoption fees; that cost is on them. For the adoptive parents, a private adoption (how you get a baby) is in the $25 to $50k range††.
† https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/condom...
†† https://adoptionnetwork.com/adoptive-parents/how-to-adopt/ad...
It was you that said "our current government". I would have thought the Democratic party was in favour of a working welfare system, at least for small children.
You adoption numbers are not relevant, we are not talking about children, we are talking about newborns. Since there are apparently 2 million American couples wanting to adopt right now, and only 18000 being adopted each year, I'd say the demand is very strong.
I'm not sure what cost has to do with it, surely you are not arguing that abortion should be a way to save money by not having to give birth?
And I'm sure a lot of adoptive parents would be more than happy to bear the cost of childbirth. In a civilised country essential healthcare is of course socialised, but we are talking about the US here.
Anyways. Have a great day.
I'm sure you don't think that it's acceptable that women would kill their unborn children because they can't afford the cost of birth?
Why don't we consider the combined probability of condoms + birth control (heck, even + vasectomy, etc.)? It would seem a lot more reasonable to me to take that as a more appropriate measure of real-world risk.
Yeah, no.
Gen X-er here - born before Roe v Wade. My own mother told me she'd have aborted me had it been legal. She felt trapped into getting married to someone she ultimately didn't love. I witnessed several domestic violence issues growing up. The "good news" is I wasn't alone - I knew other kids that had similar home issues. It was way more widespread than people let on.
This whole narrative of I had children unexpectedly at 18 and it was a miracle that changed my life - yeah it happens, but it's the rare case. That's not typically how that ball rolls.
The reality is it really sucks to be an unwanted child. Let them live, my ass. It's more like let them suffer.
This turn of phrase, which I've seen used often, is bizarre and demonic. It implies that the default for children is to be killed.
And needless to say, you can’t project your experience on every one.
What do you mean "we failed"? Clearly it's not impossible to have a working welfare system. Almost all developed nations manage it, many of which are poorer than the US. Just try again.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
I think Republicans have latched onto this issue and Christianity in America has adopted it, but there is far more at play here than just Christian nationalism.
Why 20 weeks? Are the voting populace or politicians knowledgeable enough about pregnancy to be able to legislate these things without exposing doctors and women to unnecessary legal risk? And again, back to the numbers, does the is even need legislating? Are women or doctors haphazardly running around killing perfectly viable fetuses for fun?
You realize that there are limits to voluntary abortions basically everywhere? Not having a limit is largely an american phenomenon. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abortion_Laws.svg
What portion of the world has limits or not has no bearing on the reasoning for exposing doctors and patients to legal liabilities for no reason.
The concept of viability is legal fiction. Given the technology, there’s no reason a fetus couldn’t live at any stage of development and likewise, until about age 3 or so, no child will live without external support. Culturally, we celebrate “birth”, but that event has nothing to do with life.
On the other end is the necessity to support the life of a mother. While unfortunate, I think that’s a rare time that terminating a pregnancy is appropriate. That doesn’t mean lifestyle or convenience, though. That’s situations where only one or fewer people will make it alive if nothing is done. This represents a fraction of one percent of abortions. Other abuses may fall into this category.
This cannot be true, and just because a fetus could live does not mean the quality of life is worth living. Not to mention the staggering costs of NICU healthcare.
The numbers I was asking about were specifically post 20 week, as a reply to parkingrift’s concerns.
Cost had to do with practicality. It does not seem reasonable to expect a society to invest $10M into raising a 1 week old fetus that will need 24/7 support to live. Point being that there are limits real life and a purely philosophical exercise is not useful.
The practicality of saving a life is certainly different than the legal justification to end a life. The point of technology being able to support development outside of a womb is evidence, imo, of the organism being independent from the mother. If that organism is individual and human, (s)he should have the full rights of all persons.
To me that means finding options that don’t involve terminating lives when the mother decides they are not prepared to parent. Right now the options outside abortion place significant strain on mothers, but as a society, 50 years have been spent not investigating alternatives and going all in on abortion. It’s already possible to transfer embryos fertilized in a lab successfully into an unrelated host.
Ultimately it is a philosophical argument. I can’t find any argument that has convinced me that a human is a human regardless of the stage of development or capabilities of the person. I’ve argued that “viability” will continue to be earlier for the past 20 years and haven’t been wrong about that yet. It’s currently limited by technology, but that shouldn’t impact the rights of individuals (in this case the unborn).
More embryos don't implant.
> The concept of viability is legal fiction. Given the technology, there’s no reason a fetus couldn’t live at any stage of development
We could live forever given the technology. Is mortality legal fiction?
1% of the abortions occur in week 21 or later, of a total of 625.000-930.000 abortion per year. So about 6250-9300 abortion per year in week 21 or later. Assuming a number of these are health related, "livestyle" abortions is probably less than 9300 per year.
To compare, US had about 19384 gun related homicides in 2020, so that problem is larger than the abortion one. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081)
I live in New York. Abortion is legal for any reason up to 24 weeks, and then legal for any medical reason beyond 24 weeks.
Nationally, about 1.3% of all abortions are after 20 weeks. I don't have further data as to what percentage of that 1.3% were due to medical reasons. Big round numbers here 1.3% is roughly 8,500 20+ week abortions in the US per year.
> Why 20 weeks?
With current technology it is roughly where viability starts to climb from 0%. Possibility of feeling pain and/or terminating a living, viable, being. At 24 weeks the viability can be as high as 70%. It is okay that you do not find this disturbing, but I do find it disturbing. It's disturbing to me to think about voluntarily terminating a pregnancy after 20 weeks with no medical issues for the child or mother.
If given an option this is how I would vote. Unfortunately, there is no nuance in most American political issues. I don't have a choice to vote on allowing abortions for any reason up to 20 weeks, or for any medical reason afterward. I typically get to choose between "ban all abortions" and "allow almost all abortions."
It does seem to me that setting an arbitrary (but flexible) point of no return was going to be necessary (probably around 18-24 weeks)
I am also disturbed by strawman hypothetical edgecases.
Those words don't mean what you think they mean.
Yes, and polarization-fueled straw-man memes really obscure that. I swear some people's only understanding of "the other side" is a twisted view of the distortions of some overheated partisan bomb-thrower, stupefied into slogan form. But you kind of need something like that to feel confidently self-righteous.
If the SCOTUS decision was limited to that, the controvery would have been much, much smaller. Especially if it also considered medical exceptions.
But why be sensible when you can just go full Spanish inquisition on them, right?
If the SCOTUS did that, then they would be legislators, not judges; it is up to congress to decide where that cutoff should be, and then pass a law if they want - RvW didn't outlaw abortions, it just punted it back to the correct body to act if they wanted; I suspect they (congress) will be forced to pass a law, and it will likely set at a date that makes nobody happy - not the abortion at any time crowd, and not the 'zero exceptions' crowd. Most of Europe seems OK with a ~12 week cutoff. I suspect something around that, with narrow set of exceptions, would satisfy all but the most extremes on both sides.
I'd wager that the vast majority of abortions post 20 weeks are performed with extreme reluctance and sadness, and only out of great necessity.
wat
https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/jw-v-hhs-humanized-m...
Also some famous undercover videos: https://www.centerformedicalprogress.org/cmp/investigative-f...
Linking to a cryptic 575 page long PDF file is too conspiratorial to take seriously.
My point was specifically aimed at this parent comment. It is easy to make baseless wagers about motivation. I find it an equally compelling narrative that, given research and financial incentives, there is great motivation for abortion clinics to persuade individuals to abort children. Especially late-term abortions since developed infant organs are likely demanding a premium due to their rarity.
Both statements are conjectures.
Not really, no. You're spouting random conspiracy theories. You provided unverified primary sources. Any rando can make a website and post a PDF on it for $10.
Only 1.3% of all abortions happen after 20 weeks.
There is no logic on the issue itself at all, trying to find any logic will only result in conflicting results. (i.e. being against governmental influence, but wanting the government to control people's bodies; or having death penalties and weekly school shootings and not helping people to survive with basic living standards, but forcing childbirth wherever possible)
When people deny that power altogether, you’re dealing with fundamentally different notions of how society works, and that predictably produces conflict. And people perceive that conflict as involving more fundamental issues than what the marginal income tax rate should be.
And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?” Republicans won a majority of the Congressional popular vote in 2016. They got a million and a half more votes than Democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_Re.... They’re on pace to do it again this year. They’re also a couple of points ahead in the generic Congressional ballot.
It’s an error to rely on the Presidential popular vote. Because it doesn’t count nobody is trying to win it. It’s easy for Democrats to campaign in big cities in red states, but the GOP has no incentive to spend resources in rural areas of blue states. But they can and do field Congressional candidates in those areas, which is reflected in the Congressional popular vote.
And then lost the popular vote in 2018 and 2020. Not sure why 2016 would be particularly relevant
Because those 2016 results dispute the meme that Republicans are some kind of obvious and permanent minority with no democratic legitimacy whatsoever.
Trump was elected in 2016.
We’re only talking about the popular vote insofar as Democrats try to delegitimize Republican administrations by insisting that they are a minority party that can gain power only through the quirk of our voting system. But in doing so they conveniently ignore the House popular vote, which Republicans routinely win.
You shouldn’t drink your own Kool-Aid. This Nixonian “Silent Majority” thinking is bad for Democrats, insofar as it causes them to get over their skis. In 2010, Democrats lost the House popular vote by almost 6 million votes. They lost it by 5 million in 2014 and 1.5 million in 2016. The House popular vote is a far better proxy for where the parties stand with the electorate.
For example, look at the Federal Reserve. They are supposed to be independent from politics, but their head is appointed by the president every X years, and so they naturally make the decisions that guarantee them reelection and not the decisions which would maximize economic stability/utility.
You left out the Senate, the other house of Congress, which Democrats won by 10 million votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_Senate_elec... using your comparison metric.
This coupled with Presidential votes, even though technically only the electoral college counts, makes it quite fair to imply it is the Republicans that represent less than a plurality of voters.
Clearly that's not true, since Republicans are currently two points ahead of Democrats on the generic Congressional ballot: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/
The House popular vote more accurately reflects nationwide sentiment because both parties have an incentive to campaign in every state. Indeed, the leaders of both parties in the House are from California.
But both parties lack an incentive to try and win statewide "winner take all" contests in opposite-color states. Cross-referencing those results against polling suggests that this effect hurts the GOP, with their geographically more spread out base, slightly more than it hurts Democrats.
Rayiner. Dude. First, using the word 'plurality' the way you introduced it is confusing at best, and possibly just wrong.
Second, the 538 poll aggregation has massive margin for error. Filter down to just the polls rated A+ and you only get an half point advantage for Republicans. Change the filter to the polls rated B+ and above and you get a full point advantage for Democrats. Also, consider the changes over time. How confident are you that a 5% swing from Democrats to Republicans over the past year represents an actual ideological change mapping directly to abortion ideology?
The polls literally show Republicans with a plurality in the generic ballot.
> Second, the 538 poll aggregation has massive margin for error.
And in the last several cycles, polling error has undercounted conservatives.
> How confident are you that a 5% swing from Democrats to Republicans over the past year represents an actual ideological change mapping directly to abortion ideology?
I didn't say any of that, and I don't think that's true. My point is refuting this idea that Republicans are some sort of minority party. We're a closely divided country, as demonstrated by the fact that the GOP has won an absolute larger number of votes in more than half of House elections since 1992, and regularly pulls ahead of Democrats on the generic ballot.
I missed that the first comment you responded to was the one that suggested the Republicans didn't have a plurality. Thought you brought up a question of who has less than a plurality when both Republicans and Democrats clearly have at least a plurality.
Not nothing -- we have a constitution that guarantees rights, many of which are rights to behave immorally (in the eyes of some). In fact that's the core of the Democrat's argument.
> And people perceive that conflict as involving more fundamental issues than what the marginal income tax rate should be.
Agreed, and that's pretty much my entire point.
> It’s an error to rely on the Presidential popular vote. Because it doesn’t count nobody is trying to win it.
I see this argument a lot but I don't find it convincing. There are plenty of senate and representative seats that are not competitive and yet we still count their votes when discussing the balance of power between the two parties, despite the fact that one side is less likely to try to win.
You seem to be confused or at least "cloudy" about some things. The U.S. has the concept of separating religion from government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state).
Government does and should regulate behavior. But, morality based on religious beliefs becomes a problem, when the beliefs of particular religious groups are imposed on others who don't believe as they do. Effective government would find the correct balance, where the laws reflect what's best for the majority and protects individual rights and freedoms within reason.
> The state has the power to regulate, but simply tolerates abortion under certain conditions.
The issue the U.S. will now be running into, is that various states will have conflicting laws on abortion, adding to chaos and confusion.
The extremism involved in total or nonsensical abortion bans by various states, like even in cases of: rape, statutory rape, teenage/child pregnancy, incest, life of mother in danger, high percentage chance child will have major birth defects, various contraceptive measures (IUDs, abortion pills) etc... Then becomes a matter of showing a callous attitude of destroying and endangering the lives of various women and even the children they might be forced to bear.
As someone who wishes this was codified in our constitution, I'm afraid the 'concept' is held relatively weakly.
Clarence Thomas has stated, regarding the Establishment Clause: 'The text and history of this Clause suggest that it should not be incorporated against the States.'
I wouldn't be surprised if there is concurrence among the conservative justices sans Roberts.
If you hold a different morality (in particular the Jewish or Muslim views on abortion rights), you're just SOL because you're not a majority.
That's besides the point regardless. The "Establishment Clause" prohibits the creation of a national church: https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/inte.... That's what "Establishment of Religion" means--creating an official, established Church. Several states had an established church around the time of the founding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state.... For example, Massachusetts had "disestablished" its official church less than 10 years before the Constitution, and continued public funding of it until 40 years after the Constitution. The "Establishment Clause" prohibited the federal government from creating such an official religion.
The Establishment Clause does not prohibit people from voting for laws based on their religion. That is to say, it does not put a thumb on the scale in favor of beliefs based on secular philosophy versus religious philosophy. Voters (at the state level) can close stores on Sunday based on Christianity, no different than doing so based on secular beliefs about workers needing a day off.
Legal or not according to the intent of "separation of church and state", it's holding us back as a country.
> You seem to be confused or at least "cloudy" about some things. The U.S. has the concept of separating religion from government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state).
No, you're confused. The US has the Establishment Clause (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause) and the Free Exercise Clause, and they don't preclude religious people from using a religious basis to choose between secular policies. Abortion regulation is a secular policy area.
> The extremism involved in total or nonsensical abortion bans by various states, like even in cases of...
IIRC, most of those bans were passed when they had no hope of being enforced because of Roe v. Wade (e.g. they were for show). Now that case has been repealed, as things shake out, I expect many of those laws will be revised.
In the U.S. specifically, moreover, abortion is best described as an internecine conflict between different branches of Christianity. The pro-choice movement is an outgrowth of mainline Protestantism, with its focus on individual self determination. The notion that the morality of extinguishing a fetal life "is between a woman and her doctor" and society has no say is uniquely Protestant. It's quite alien even to other societies that permit abortions, which tend to do so on utilitarian grounds like overpopulation.
And all that is fine, because "separation of church and state" does not mean that the government cannot regulate behavior "based on religious beliefs." The U.S. does not have French-style secularism, where there is a separate body of secular philosophy animating government and religious belief is actively excluded. It doesn't matter what people's reasons are for voting a particular way, as long as the end result is otherwise permissible.
Realizing that this is getting more deeply into politics...
GOP Rep. Boebert: ‘I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk’ - https://wapo.st/3u7AkGL
> Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who faces a primary election Tuesday, says she is “tired” of the U.S. separation of church and state, a long-standing concept stemming only from a “stinking letter” penned by one of the Founding Fathers.
> Speaking at a religious service Sunday in Colorado, she told worshipers: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.”
It would be nonsensical for activists in Japan to spend time advocating that abortion become technically legal without regard to practical situations where it could be performed.
This is essentialist reasoning ascribing some kind of soul to the law, which feels out of character for you. I suppose you could argue that sodomy is 'technically illegal' in many states, but that Lawrence & Baker carved out situations where it is tolerated.
Does the technicality of being prosecuted for non-consensual act of sodomy vs. an explicit sexual assault crime actually mean anything to the perpetrator if the penalty is the same?
> And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?” Party affiliation and political ideology are far from an exact match. That's why there are a handful of Republican governors posturing to uphold abortion rights.
Abortion is often a singular issue for pro-life advocates, who have had a particular motivation to mobilize built up over the past half-century. I personally have met a handful of people who hated everything about the Republican platform except for its stance on abortion, and that was the sole issue that decided their vote. Polarization has progressed to the point that there's only one
The pro-choice movement doesn't have the same fervor at this point, and I think a backlash is not going to be rapid due to a combination of: - those who are pro-choice but happy to rationalize that it's now a state level issue and that the reversal of Roe v Wade was simply the correction of improper judicial activism. - defeatist stances by those who feel disenfranchised and that voting is ineffective, particularly when done strategically to 'win' instead of based on a hard ideal - those who would vote for abortion rights if a ballot was set in front of them but who personally find abortion repugnant or deserving of severe restriction
I'm simply pointing out the difference between the government tolerating certain conduct, and the government lacking the power to prohibit that conduct. Abortion in Japan and Germany are examples of the former--legalization happened without denying the power of the government to have made it illegal in the first place.
Roe (and Lawrence), by contrast, not only legalized certain conduct, but declared that the government never had the power to make it illegal in the first place. That's actually quite radical compared to how most advanced countries view the issue.
> The pro-choice movement doesn't have the same fervor at this point
I don't think that's accurate. For a significant chunk of the pro-choice movement, it's a moral issue as much as it is for dedicated pro-lifers. They believe that the purpose of life is fulfilling one's individual hopes and dreams in the same way pro-lifers believe that the purpose of life is to be fruitful and multiply. For dedicated pro-choicers, the possibility of derailing individual aspirations is so unthinkable that it justifies ending a nascent human life. For dedicated pro-lifers, reproduction is such a clear mandate that it justifies derailing individual ambitions and aspirations. That's the fundamental conflict in world view that I'm talking about.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/04/1096154028/the-movement-again...
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/06/1103372543/abortion-was-once-...
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/22/1106863232/evangelicals-didnt...
Meanwhile, the US is vastly more religious than Western Europe. In terms of people who pray every day, it’s up there with Poland and Iran (both countries where abortion is illegal). On the religiosity front, the United States is more like the rest of the Americans (minus Canada) than like Western Europe.
Kinda sounds like religious people are the ones actually trying to impose a regime to me. Because I couldn’t possibly care less what anyones preferred god thinks, yet religious beliefs are being used to drive political changes that affect everyone.
I would argue that denying a woman with pregnancy complications a lifesaving procedure is *way* more analogous to murder than abortion.
Fetuses aren’t granted the right to “pursue happiness”. Abortion doesn’t absolve a mother of obligations while giving the child a chance to part ways amicably. As the potential organ donor you cannot choose to actively terminate the life of the recipient, they are free to continue on until they can no longer.
What does supervene on the ethicalness of the action is autonomy. Bodily autonomy gives a donor the right to back away at the last minute, not the concept of passive action or medical support. I'm not disagreeing that those exist, but they don't lay the foundation for the ethicalness of the action - bodily autonomy does. No one, not even the government, has more say over one's body than oneself.
The donor concept is a perfectly valid parallel. I can understand that someone wouldn't like it if it challenges their conclusions, but that's sort of the point. No one, not even the government, has more autonomy over ones body than oneself.
Edit to add: racial minority is just one way that in power groups have oppressed out of power groups, but that is not a unique delineation. Often it’s the most visibly obvious, but humans have done a great job of dehumanizing others based on just about any demographic feature you might want to choose. In American history there is ample example of racial discrimination, but there is also religious, gender, age, physical or mental ability, political affiliation, etc. I don’t really see this as any different from those. Choose a reason why some group isn’t “human” enough and that makes them fair game to do whatever you want. It’s your choice to pick and choose the features you think are necessary to treat a growing group of human cells as human or not. I just think it’s pretty regressive to exclude someone because they aren’t developed to your standard of worth.
The reason it’s not an issue in Europe is because opposing sides all get a say in this and arrive at a compromise, namely abortion allowed up to 12 weeks which is fairly standard in most European countries.
But because row v wade basically said abortion has to be allowed in the US, the issue has had no real democratic debate just massively polarized arguing.
I’d argue the current situation will be better for almost everyone a few years down the line. Democracy works in resolving these issues. And why not have stricter laws in more Christian states? And free for all in California, if that’s what democracy decides?
The 1st and 14th Amendments of the constitution, for starters.
My guess is these don't inconvenience people enough to make it to the Supreme Court. And there's also the fig leaf of "crime reduction".
> as is the state philosophy on criminal justice
Can you give some examples? I'm not familiar with this.
> religion created a culture which we have inherited
Which of these restrict individual freedoms by law?
> even the official work week being seven days long.
You'll be surprised to learn that pre-Christian and non-Christian cultures have also had 7-day weeks, likely because they divide a lunar month so well.[1]
Though the federal government did coerce every state into moving their drinking age from 18 to 21 under threat of withholding federal highway funding to states that had drinking ages set lower than 21.
That case went to the Supreme Court and is also in dire need of overruling in my opinion.
Not alcohol specifically, but any law that appears to promote a state religion. Like I said, alcohol sale restrictions are hard to prove as being motivated solely by religion. There are crime reduction, public health and safety, labor safety considerations too. I imagine the bar/restaurant lobby is also influential.
The point of the 10th ammendment was to allow people to self govern from the bottom up, realizing that not all solutions are universal because people have different preferences.
With regards specifically to abortion, abortion bans are not necessarily motivated by religion. Many people believe life begins at conception, regardless of religion.
Certainly.
The Pledge of Allegiance. [1]
There's no non-religious basis for finding gay marriage objectionable. But it was not legal everywhere in the US until only 7 years ago. And appears to be in jeopardy again.
These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance#Addition_...
Yes there is. You can easily argue that marriage is a cultural or legal system based on making it easier for families with children in a society. Giving them tax benefits, beaurocratic benefits (so one person can represent an entire family for example). Because whatever the fashion in 2022, societies need children to survive and want to incentivise it.
Now there might be edge cases in terms of children + gay couples in 2022, historically you can easily make a non religious case for marriage being between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreating.
And families headed by a non-hetero or non-couple can't raise children? What about other non-traditional family types? (E.g. a grandparent and a parent, two or three adult siblings raising their younger siblings without parents, a couple raising their nieces/nephews/godchildren, the family in Full House etc.) You gonna make those illegal too?
> for the purpose of procreating
If that were really the case, what about couples who can't have children due to age or infertility? Should their marriages be illegal too? Should hetero couples divorce the minute the woman hits menopause, if they don't already have kids? Are widows over 50 not allowed to remarry? Seems like a heartless society to me, and also contrary to "tradition" (whatever that means).
Maybe we can admit that marriage in today's society is also about love, companionship, and deep emotional bonds. Not just raising children.
There is raising children and there is the creation of children. The argument was that the government incentivized marriage because it led to both the creation of children as well as their raising in a stable home.
Non-traditional guardians (homos, grandparents, etc.) can obviously raise children, but they cannot make them.
That is likely how marriage ended up governed by the state. You are correct that it was rooted in religion, so thanks for the example.
Imo, marriage should not be regulated by the government. It is a derived of and should remain in religious institutions.
Instead, the government can come up with a private partnership, which would easily do everything marriage does without the underlying religious debate and exclusions.
Except this part is false. Because, as I mentioned previously, not every hetero marriage could lead to creating children. There have never been any strong religious restrictions on old people, or people with known infertility getting married in Western society.
> the government can come up with a private partnership, which would easily do everything marriage does without the underlying religious debate and exclusions.
So...marriage? In US law at least, there aren't any religious components to marriage. No religious body needs to be involved to have a marriage be legally valid. You go down to city hall, get a marriage license, and you're done. There's no legal requirement that a religious institution that objects to a marriage, for any reason, has to perform that marriage. Can divorced Catholics remarry in a Catholic church now, without getting a dispensation?
Now if your objection is to the use of the word "marriage" to refer to partnerships that certain religions don't agree with...I don't really know what to say. That's everyday language at work. You can't stop people from using words the way they want. And it's not a real problem that the government should be involved in.
These can raise children obviously, and do it well. But it’s not called a marriage. Thanks for making my point for me.
Your point was a "marriage" is a requirement for raising children well. And a "marriage" is solely for procreation. I proved that both are false by providing countercases. You didn't even attempt to engage with the second point. And in fact you seem to be agreeing with me on my first point.
I don't think you understand how a debate works. This ain't YouTube, there's no partisan audience that will clap when you say "So then you agree with me" for something completely illogical. I can't help you any further and I wish you luck.
That's an oversimplification of a very nuanced and pragmatic view that is better explained here:
"What Ruth Bader Ginsburg really said about Roe v. Wade", Washington Post https://archive.ph/jJENv
It's not that she felt the rights granted by Roe were wrong to grant, she was worried that it would not be insulated from legal challenges.
and she was right.
“Roe v. Wade, in contrast, invited no dialogue with legislators. Instead, it seemed entirely to remove the ball from the legislators’ court. In 1973, when Roe issued, abortion law was in a state of change across the nation. As the Supreme Court itself noted, there was a marked trend in state legislatures “toward liberalization of abortion statutes.” That movement for legislative change ran parallel to another law revision effort then underway-the change from fault to no-fault divorce regimes, a reform that swept through the state legislatures and captured all of them by the mid-1980s. No measured motion, the Roe decision left virtually no state with laws fully conforming to the Court’s delineation of abortion regulation still permissible. Around that extraordinary decision, a well-organized and vocal right-to-life movement rallied and succeeded, for a considerable time, in turning the legislative tide in the opposite direction.”
This is exactly the point I made.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Catholics haven’t been a major political power in the UK since the Jesuits were expelled.
As for why it’s a “political thing” in the USA? Ironically, that’s largely because of Roe. Roe removed the abortion debate from the elected branches so that instead of working something out in a healthy democratic fashion, we got a naked exercise of judicial fiat.
This next bit is personal. I hope people will read it as a desire to satisfy curiosity rather than an attempt to debate a subject that, frankly, has adequate firebrands. For Catholics and those others who agree with our moral reasoning[1], abortion, the killing of smaller helpless innocent human beings, is an intolerable enormity. It’s completely impossible for us to knowingly condone it without falling from a state of grace. And doing nothing is condoning.
[1]. Premise 1: killing innocent human persons is wrong. Premise 2: pre-born babies are innocent human beings. Conclusion: killing pre-born babies is wrong.
The argument is simple enough to follow. Note that, due to the structure of the argument, adding additional premises like “the father is a rapist” doesn’t change the moral calculus unless we add an additional premise like “at least some offspring of rapists are not innocent merely due to their paternity.” Since the argument is structurally sound, we must challenge the premises. Challenging 1) is possible, but permitting killing innocent human beings opens a big door to all manner of atrocities. Challenging 2) is the more seemingly reasonable approach. Catholics believe that the human person comes into existence at fertilization, when the diploid human organism begins. One can reasonably use some other event like heartbeat, or some more vague concept like viability, and claim the human person doesn’t begin until then. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument though. I personally lean toward the fertilization point, because when getting the call wrong means murdering an innocent person I prefer to err on the side of caution.
The most popular arguments against protecting an innocent and dependent human person though are completely unprincipled and not properly even arguments at all. Rather, they they reduce to some kind of hedonic assertion on the level of “I’ll do what I want!”
Edit: Please don't reply trying to goad me into some low-brow argument. I am not interested in poorly thought out analogies or any other simulated ratiocination. For the purposes of this discussion I am only interested in the ethics. So by all means please provide clear moral reasoning about why it's OK to kill innocent human persons sometimes but not others. Please explain why it's OK to make it a legal requirement to care for some vitally dependent human persons but not others. And please fully think it through and discuss the potentially unintentional consequences of adopting that ethical system.
I assume that being an Established Church makes a difference too. We don't do separation of church and state the same way over here, after all that was one of the things the newly independent states of America decided to make very clear they were going to do differently from Britain, so the UK and USA are very different in this regard.
[1] https://www.churchofengland.org/news-and-media/news-and-stat... (2019)
The USA is very different from the UK because of puritans.
American Christians are much more puritan than Brits (this is true for abortion, but also for tee-totaller movements, and other things)
A lot of American Christians are anti abortion, for the simple yet totally valid reason that they truly believe that embryos are human lives, and that as such they shouldn't be "murdered".
The question of the threshold is central here. Noone in their right mind is pro abortion past 30 weeks of pregnancy. Similarly, no one is really against the morning-after pill.
This issue has been whipped up by the right wing, but they did it IN ORDER TO get more voters (who deeply cared about that issue), and not the other way around.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A lot of people, including elsewhere in these comments, believe that “life begins at conception” and that therefore any action taken to stop the process post-fertilization is murder. That includes the morning-after pill.
It also includes IUD’s and IVF technology. Ironically, the latter actually enables some couples to have children.
Also, the power of the federal government to impost laws on all states is highly controversial, and its history full of other supreme court cases carving out the definition.
You see the same friction with EU freedom of movement laws and immigration.
Just like I as a meat eater can obviously understand that there are vegetarians that oppose the killing of animals.
All in all, I think you get a nice picture of how something well-intended can end up in a bad place. The righteous fervor to make society better resulted in ending slavery, fighting against tenements, but then they ran out of the most obvious evils and we got prohibition, anti-homosexual laws, and this mobilization of single-issue voters that judge all office holders solely by whether they'll try to abolish abortion and don't care about anything else they do. Tack that onto the naked charlatanism of prosperity gospel and you more or less get everything wrong with 20th-century American evangelicalism.
"Well, now that we have your data, we'll track you since births are public knowledge. If we don't see a birth, we'll turn it over to the police, and make your identity public (no private medical data needed, just that we have reason to believe you had an abortion) so that anyone in a state with a Texas-style law can sue you for $10,000 apiece, making your losses unlimited. Are you sure you want that abortion now?"
So Texas can try all they want, but they have no jurisdiction over what happens in California, so they will never be able to write legislation that makes it illegal to travel to another state for an abortion.
Texas can do whatever the US Supreme Court allows them to do, and if you think well-established Constitutional precedent is a firm guide on that...how do you think they have the ability to ban abortion in Texas in the first place?
But even under established precedent, I don't think it's at all clear that they cannot punish you for anything you do while in Texas with the intent of getting an abortion, even if the actual abortion is performed outside of Texas.
And even if they can't (based on what the courts will eventually decide) punish you, they can arrest you, charge you, try you, convict you, sentence you, and send you to prison, possibly awaiting execution, before your case is even ripe for appeal.
> Texas can do whatever the US Supreme Court allows them to do, and if you think well-established Constitutional precedent is a firm guide on that...how do you think they have the ability to ban abortion in Texas in the first place?
The Constitution is exactly what gives Texas the power to regulate abortion. It does so by not explicitly enumerating that power the the federal government.
States can restrict interstate travel for...well, lots of reasons, and preventing what state law defines as murder is certainly one of them, but there are limits on the burdens they can impose on travel.
> And they cannot punish you for a thought-crime, meaning they cannot arrest you under the supposition that your travel is arranged with intent to get an abortion outside their jurisdiction.
States absolutely can punish for the combination of intent and action.
They can also punish under their laws a crime whose culmination happens outside of their borders when some part of it occurred within their borders.
If a state can define a fetus as a person who can be murdered, they can absolutely make it illegal for someone to transport that person to any place (inside or outside the state) for the purpose of killing them.
States cannot restrict interstate travel as mentioned in the Articles of Confederation.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-14/...
> The second, expressly addressed by the first sentence of Article IV, provides a citizen of one state who is temporarily visiting another state the “Privileges and Immunities” of a citizen of the latter state.
Furthermore, of the abortion is performed in the destination state, the citizen would be covered by the privileges and immunities of that state, and the former would have no recourse.
Edit: it appears Kavanaugh already weighed in on this issue. While obviously not a legal decision, it at least provides one judge's perspective: https://reason.com/2022/06/24/states-cant-ban-out-of-state-t...
Its not all that difficult, there are plenty of specific intent crimes and states prove intention all the time.
> States cannot restrict interstate travel as mentioned in the Articles of Confederation.
Your link supports the existence of the right to travel, but that’s not in dispute; the right to travel is not an absolute; like other fundamental rights, the test applied in the strict scrutiny test, such that state actions impinging on it must be narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest.
No? Sounds like these places are just predatory abuse centers, masquerading as "help"
If you were arguing that a pregnant person can identify as a father/father-to-be then you should probably have stated that.
Further, attempt to stick to those words when consoling someone who lost their wanted pregnancy would come across as needlessly callous. . "I'm so sorry you lost that fetus, that's really tough experience for many formerly-pregnant people"
The choice of words has a tremendous effect both on an individual and on the society. Ignoring this fact only leads to more misunderstandings.
(Isn't everyone doing this?)
Aren't left-wing groups changing relevant laws, then saving the information of right-wingers, then deploying state power against them?
Yes. Enforcing hate speech laws doesn't involve mass surveillance of an entire class of people, because by definition most hate speech laws only apply to public speech. Enforcing anti-abortion laws, on the other hand, does, or at least these anti-abortion groups think it should and are taking that into their own hands.
> Aren't left-wing groups changing relevant laws, then saving the information of right-wingers, then deploying state power against them?
This does not describe an analogous behavior to that discussed in the OP.
This is why young children fail the Smarties test. They now know the tube has a pencil in it, therefore under this simplified model other children know the tube has a pencil in it and that's the assumption they report when asked.
But under this model if I believe something then that's what you believe too, and if you deny it then you are definitely lying. Loads of Americans resolutely believe that all humans know the Christian God is real, and it follows (under the too simple model) that whatever it is they believe about that God is necessarily apparent to everybody in the world, therefore anybody who says otherwise must be lying.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/28/1108107718/instagram-and-face...
- If you live in a state with the ability to report abortions, gather a Republican list and report random names. This creates a lot of noise in the system.
- Do what these clinics are doing. Take pictures of people who work at them, create a page on the location listing all employees, and put it in a searchable database. I'm normally against doxxing or public shaming, but this is actually dangerous and deceptive.
- I am pretty sure what they're doing is also a HIPPA violation.
But please tell me why the GDPR is not important again
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...
I see no problem with depriving fetuses of all human rights.
A pregnancy may not be viable. That's just a fact. A fetus can die inside the womb. Miscarriages happen.
There is also this post on the nursing subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/vm3cau/many_lives_...
"We had a woman with an ectopic walk in at 11:30 pm last night. We had to basically sit on her until the doc could speak with a lawyer. Her ectopic ruptured. She then did not get her procedure done for another 9 hours bc the doc was working with the lawyer for so long trying to work around the laws and not lose his license. By the time she had her procedure she had over 600cc of blood in her abdomen. She almost died."
I cannot imagine myself letting a woman die through no fault of her own because of an abstract principle.
I think arguments that depend on proving that the fetus is less human are fundamentally doomed to fail.
I think much confusion comes from miscommunication and unclear meaning of words.
Embryo -> until the ninth week after conception, inner organs are not yet present.
Fetus -> from the ninth week (heart, hands, feet, brain and other inner organs are present) until birth.
While a nine week old fetus is very small and the size of your big toe, it does grow very fast after that point. Anyway, even a nine month old unborn is still called a fetus.
It also assumes that every catholic is anti-abortion. People and their beliefs are more complex than that.
Justice Roberts is "Catholic" but has voted against his religion every time on this issue, and would have spared Roe in his opinion if possible.
Justice Sotomayor is also "Catholic" but has also voted against her religion every time on this issue.
Justice Barrett is "Catholic" but is a member of "People of Praise," a group which many Catholics find suspicious on both sides, both for not being progressive but also being very charismatic and untraditional in its liturgical style.
Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh are all Catholic, but aren't really voting the way a full-on Catholic-everywhere would. Alito and Kavanaugh have said they aren't interested in revisiting the constitutionality of birth control and same sex marriage at this point, and Kavanaugh voted 6-3 with the rest of SCOTUS that gender orientation was protected by the Civil Rights Act which upset many more devout Catholics.
> No she didn't and no it wasn't. RvW ruled that in order to be free, people have an implicit right to privacy when making personal medical decisions.
Eh, not so much. It's probably an overstatement that she thought it was a "trash decision," but she definitely believed it was a tactical mistake and that its legal reasoning left it vulnerable, which is another way of saying it was weak.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-ro...
> Obviously moral busybodies don't like that so they're calling it "overreach".
I think there's room to be more nuanced and have views about abortion and legal reasoning that are separate and distinct.
As if any of that mattered in the end. The Supreme Court ruled how it did because it's dominated by religious conservatives that don't like abortion.
Or its dominated by legal conservatives who have different ideas about constitutional interpretation than the Warren Court, put there by politicians whose constituents oppose abortion.
To me at least Roe v. Wade seems to have, in effect, been a constitutional amendment via means that bypassed the normal political process for such things. Unless you're a very "ends justify the means" kind of person, that raises concerns that would introduce a vulnerability into anything accomplished that way.
Exactly, those judges were determined to stop abortions, it didn't matter how strong or weak the legal arguments of RvW were, or whether or not the legislature codified it in law or not. They would have jumped through any number of legal hoops to stop people from getting abortions.
Yeah. The rhetoric on this is so overheated that I'm convinced that some people actually believe Roe v. Wade is the Third Amendment [1] or something like that. IHMO, this debate would be a lot better if people could distinguish between policy and the law/legal reasoning as separate things.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/
It seems that the path of money is from laity to church to dark money group(?) to political campaigns for judges or buying support for judge’s confirmations. However it happens, people should know their tithes are being used against them.
[1] https://www.ncronline.org/news/68-us-catholics-say-roe-shoul...
We've raised a 2-3 generation on popular dogma in which human life is the most sacred thing imaginable and now we have a society full of people do not generally posses the requisite mental faculties to have adult discussion about subjects that involve harm to people (or apparently fetuses). We're reaping what we sowed.
You see this same "arrive at an obviously sub-optimal solution because we can't nut up and cause a little quantifiable harm to get to the better solution" problem across many subjects. Abortion is just one of the most obvious.
Every culture does inflate the value of human life and a society is well served by doing exactly that. Technically this is ideology or religion too, but so is everything you put on a pedestal instead. But that isn't at all a detriment for the argument for abortion even from a purely utilitarian point of view that acknowledges reality that abortions will happen if they are legal or illegal. I do think some societal and cultural problems do increase the number of abortions significantly and there are significantly less arguments against those that want to reduce abortions.
> can't nut up and cause a little quantifiable harm to get to the better solution
This is impotent reasoning. What is sub-optimal? From which perspective and for whom? Acknowledging reality does also mean that there aren't that many people that wish they were aborted. It is a gray decision but "nutting up" is no solution.
(Everything I'm writing about is under Held)
Morality plays in some way. Basically, Roe tried to rewrite and ignore some history, according to the court, in order to establish an implicit privacy principle in the constitution. Where the morality comes in is that the court clearly fears things like hooking and drug use (which they mention explicitly in the ruling) and they tie this to Roe and Casey's arguments about privacy and autonomy while also demonstrating that Casey tried to eschew many of Roes arguments. They kept referring to this as "ordered liberty" which I took for morality.
Therein lies the rub though, as Alito said. Without a right to privacy - or explicitly stated "liberty" the court then has to review what the people want. Half the country is on a spectrum within a spectrum about morality, and the other half is on a different spectrum within a spectrum. He also called out a third group, which wants abortion under certain circumstances. Thus, the court then reverts to history, which abortion has been historically highly illegal.
So, some technical, some historical, some moral.
Would an actual privacy amendment really provide a pathway for abortion is my broader question.
I don't think that's what that meant. I think the meaning was more along the lines of "liberty, but not everything-goes liberty." It's defined in the dictionary as "freedom limited by the need for order in society" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/legal/ordered%20liberty), and appears to be legal/political science jargon with some history behind it.
Perhaps, but you seemed to be saying you took is as synonymous with morality, which doesn't seem like a correct reading. Morality doesn't seem to be very key to the concept, if it's even there at all.
https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/glossary_term/liberty/
> Ordered liberty is the desirable condition in which both public order and personal liberty are maintained. But how can liberty and authority, freedom and power, be combined and balanced so that one does not predominate over the other? This was the basic problem of constitutional government that concerned the founders of the United States, and it has continued to challenge Americans as democracy has evolved and expanded throughout the history of their country. Early on, James Madison noted the challenges of ordered liberty in a 1788 letter to Thomas Jefferson: ‘‘It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the Government has too much or too little power; and that the line which divides these extremes should be so inaccurately defined by experience.’’
Which history? Under English common law, abortion was allowed until 20 weeks, and that persisted in the US until the mid-to-end 19th century. Then a century of bans, then Roe v Wade, and now blanket bans. There is far more "abortion is allowed until X" history than anything else.
Also, this is not a "blanket ban", that would be a misinterpretation of the ruling. Instead, states now choose (aka "the people"). Not that I support it, but words matter.