Protecting the unborn is very convenient. They make no demands of you.
Edit: WIC: Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) https://www.fns.usda.gov/wic
Or, some kids can be denied access (even temporarily is a shame):
https://www.kold.com/2022/10/01/teen-girl-denied-medication-...
After all, both their politicians and their court nominees insisted that abortion is a long-settled issue, and have not reneged on it the second they had the power to - we can trust them to continue operating in good faith, and in a matter that respects public opinion.
At the risk of hurting the feelings of party members, I do not associate "good faith" with them.
Edit: I missed the sarcasm. Poe's Law, ya know.
Shockingly, I have several classmates who were grandmothers before I became a mother.
The real questions are "At what point does human life begin / become valuable?" and "Should governments provide for their citizens or merely punish those who harm them?".
There are good arguments to be made by decent people on all sides of those debates, so let's not make cheap shots which detract from reaching a better understanding.
They can shield themselves by extremist interpretations of 'word of god' (which takes some mental gymnastics since his are, if at all, only 10 commandments and thats it, rest is just human-made stories). Funnily most of those folks fail with following even those 10 basic rules, but thats another topic.
We went through this decades ago in Europe and largely emerged as better, more democratic and freer societies. Those times are regarded as dark primitive times when looking back, when a lot of trauma was done and a lot of regretful actions happened.
"The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
There is no argument about when a fetus becomes an citizen. Having the government protect its citizens from harm is a radically prochoice stance.
There's no reason abortion should be safe, legal and rare. And there's no reason we should be having such a high rate of preventable maternity related deaths.
Of course, they might not get those issues under control. They might still have died of substance abuse or suicide. But the stress of being a new mother is well known (if not well understood or well supported by society or the American medical system - clearly). If a person is already predisposed to substance abuse and/or self-harm, maybe the additional impacts of post-partum mental conditions would push them further down that road.
Especially as it pertains to the maternal-mortality/abortion discussion, I think its important to remember that the would-be mother's material conditions are not guaranteed to be static over the course of the pregnancy and post-partum period. The decision to conceive might be made in accordance with the best possible medical and financial advice, and still result in a bad situation for mother or child at the end of it all.
My wife had a pretty easy time with both of our kids, but I am constantly haunted by stories from folks who made the same decisions we did, and lost mother, child, or both.
These are women who don’t present with symptoms of mental illness until after birth.
This isn’t an edge case. This is common.
How is abortion going to help here?
Also … you say:
> if the mothers had been allowed to abort the baby, they would be in addition allowed to get the mental health or substance abuse issues under control.
There are lots of social services available to pregnant women and new mothers. Including screening for mental illness. Are similar services available to women undergoing abortions? You seem to imply there are.
In some cases, ending pregnancy is how you eliminate maternal death.
Laws vary between countries, but basically Poland is not Europe. Generally you can get late stage abortion for variety for health issues (abd even social ones). Also, you won't be denied prescribed medicine you need for pregnancy unrelated condition just because you are woman and it might also end pregnancy.
Also, there is no ban on talking about abortion.
Isn't this true in even the most extremely anti abortion states of the US?
As that says "with narrow exceptions for victims of rape or incest, to save the life of the pregnant person and in cases where the fetus is diagnosed with a lethal anomaly. That law took effect on Sept. 15."
There is doubt that she had to travel out of state.
It is crucial that we have lots of programs with distinct eligibility criteria to make sure that poor people are suffering sufficiently.
1 in 6 American kids live in a household that receives SNAP benefits. I don't have the stats handy, but some large plurality of Americans receive SNAP benefits at some point during their lives.
Are you under the assumption that your suggestion hasn't been tried (and subsequently found wanting)?
Just cut out the bloat and give the cash, IMO.
Personally I am against violence imposed welfare (taxation based). But I see cash remuneration as a win-win because we could say give $0.50 more out in welfare for every $1.00 of overhead eliminated, and both recipients and the taxpayers would be better off.
This is a very common tactic used by opponents of the US social safety net. Basically, the idea is to transform something that is broadly sympathetic to voters, like "giving money to poor moms so they can buy food for their kids, who otherwise will suffer from malnutrition" into something with no constituency, like "another Big Government Bureaucracy wasting your tax dollars." You can then attack the Big Government Bureaucracy without talking about the fact that you're effectively advocating for poor kids to go hungry.
The basic flow is you start with objections that sound reasonable to a set of middle-class voters: "we need to drug test the residents of public housing," or "we need to make sure they aren't buying sodas with Food Stamps," or "we need to have enforcers make in-person visits to ensure that they are as poor as they say" or whatever. You add in a bunch of those requirements over time. Eventually, you have created a bloated system that costs more while doing less for poor people (obviously, the money spent on the overhead is not available to buy food for hungry kids). And that bloated system is ripe for calls to be dismantled altogether.