It isn’t about religion. It’s about power and control. We need to stop pretending it has anything to do with Jesus and everything to do with power over others. Nietzsche is more relevant here than Jesus.

We, as a society, need to stop constantly creating straw men like this.

Opposition to abortion is certainly about religion, or at least morality. Sure some politician can exploit morality to cynically gain power to accomplish other things, but that doesn't mean the voters are doing that. The voters are just caught in (many) moral dilemmas, and are therefore forced to make bad choices.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/less-than-half-of-us-evan...

It's not a "religious issue" when the members of the religion are split along party lines just like everyone else.

It is absolutely religious.

I'm not here to argue semantics. The point I'm here to make is that the people who call it a religious issue are trying to claim legal protection that is undeserved. "That law violates my religion!" is not a compelling argument when half of your religion supports it.

What now? Has "science" become a nonsense word that only used to lend authority to nonscientific policy?

> The point I'm here to make is that the people who call it a religious issue are trying to claim legal protection that is undeserved.

That's not what's going on at all.

What's actually happening is something along the lines of "my religion says X is morally wrong, therefore I support making X illegal" (or more accurately "my religion teaches Y, which I understand makes X morally wrong, therefore I support making X illegal").

Separate from that, there are issues where the religious people are pretty much all on the same side. My point is, the pro-life side frames abortion as the latter, when it is actually the former. And they do this not out of confusion or misunderstanding, but as a politically useful act. It helps their cause to frame abortion as a religious issue, because if it weren't that, it would be a medical issue or a rights issue or a privacy issue, and virtually any other framing hurts their case.

Like I said, I'm not here to argue semantics. I just thought it was worth pointing out how divided the religious are on this issue, mainly because I wasn't aware until I looked it up.

I think it is convenient to point to the importance of the lives of unborn children but until the same protection is applied to children post-birth it seems like a convenient cover for controlling women.

This is a straw man argument. No one is arguing children need no societal protection. Look at the push for Head Start under Bush, for example.

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/earlychi...

1. A block that also skews religious, and socially conservative - that could totally work. There's only one problem with that in the present day.

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/14/texas-special-electi...

Legal basis? With enough mastery, it can be whatever you want it to be.

This is could be a reason that religious folks and conservatives donate much more to charity, even though their income is less [1].

For cases like childcare, they believe that burdened families are best served by a close community coming together to help each other, rather than government programs.

[1] https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/resource/statistics-o...

They get out of bed for denying care that empirically has a massive effect of reducing suicide for trans people, too.

That is essentially the same argument, just applied to somebody who is very much human.

I don't support this ruling, but I don't believe that argument is any good.

Btw, I agree with you. I believe women should be free to choose until the fetus is able to live independently of the mom.

This is because I don't think a 3 month old fetus is equivalent to a person.

But IF you agree with the premise that a fetus is a person, it follows that they should have the same negative rights as other people (freedom from being killed, for instance), that does NOT mean that the person has to think that every person should have a large set of positive rights (ie rights imply that tax-payers should provide welfare for all people).

That is one way to frame it. Usually, though, abortion requires someone to actively kill the fetus.

And there is another problem with this argument. The sacrifice it takes for the woman to carry the baby for 9 months may not be the real reson people have abortions. Rather, I imagine, the real reason is that they don't want what happens AFTER the child is born.

Let's consider a similar argument: A ship crew on an oil tanker going from Saudi Arabia to Huston discovers an uninvited "passenger" hiding in the ship. A 5 year old girl, let's say. Do they have an obligation to feed this girl until they reach LA, or can they throw her overboard?

Now, from a purely postive rights argument, one could say they're not allowed to throw her overboard, but they also are not required to feed her. But we all know that's not going to happen.

This is what solves the dillemma for me, others may differ.

Maybe you really do not care. After all, neonaticide has been a common practice for poor mothers all over the world, in places where there were no welfare states or orphanages to take children that nobody could or would care for.

And neonaticide doesn't evern require an active act. You can just leave the child in the forest, to be taken by frost or animals.

But for a lot of people, it makes a big difference whether they consider the fetus an actual person, or just a lump of cells.

For an abortion, you turn this on its head. If no action is performed, the fetus will most likely surivive in the womb until it's born.

Now, you may claim that fetus is somehow commiting a crime by extracting resources from the mother's body. The problem with this argument, is that this crime is first of all not voluntary. The fetus doesn't have a way to stop doing so by an act of will. Second, the fetus is not developed enough that we would assign moral agency to it (just like we would not do that to a baby after birth).

Now, if you believe (like me, especially in the first trimester) that the fetus is not a person, and doesn't have the legal rights of a person, it is still probably ok to abort it.

But if you think that the fetus IS a person, it also follows that it deserves the same protections as a person. In other words, the passive right of the fetus to not be "murdered" is in conflict with the passive right of the mother to not have its resources extracted. The fact that the passive right to not be murdered may be considered a stronger right than the mothers right to bodily autonomy.

Also, in this situation, there are two more factors to take into account:

1) This conflict between the two subjects involved was not caused by any actions of the fetus. Unless she was raped, though, the mother most likely played a part in the conception of the fetus, so bears some responsibility for being in such a situation.

2) Even though there is a real conflict of interests, the MOST passive approach is to not abort, while aborting requires active intervention.

So, I would argue, IF the baby is to be considered 100% a person, with exactly the same protections by the law as the mother, it is logical that abortion is banned.

Now, personally, I don't agree with this premise. In fact, I see the fetus as becoming a person gradually, and I'm not even sure if it reaches fully 100% at birth (though close enough for practial purposes, at least as long as the mother is not starving). Personally, I think the fetus at conception should have 0 person-rights. After 2-3 months, maybe similar to a farm animal, and during the 2nd trimester, probably similiar to your favourite pet.

Only during the 3rd trimester, once the baby would be able to survive outside the womb, would I consider it to get close to deserve the same protectino as a baby after birth.

> I wasn't clear then: I don't care in the context of this question. We already don't require you to donate bone marrow to save a specific person.

And with all due respect, I think perhaps what you're really saying is not that you disagree with the reasoning above, but rather that you refuse to seriously consider the premise of the Christian fundamentalists. In other words, I think you refuse to really imagine that you see the fetus as a 100% full person.

Now, I'm not meaning to imply malice on your part. To understand another person's perspective when they disagree with you about something fundamental is hard It requires a lot of empathy to do so, and it is not easy to find this kind of empathy for a perspective or group of people that one has negative emotions for.

As for it being an active action or not: if we instead were to leave the foetus in place, but remove all the connection to the uterus only, it would still die due to lack of nutrients.

You are right that the woman might have been involved with an activity that can cause babies, but then you can get into the weird arguments about liability to third-parties that do not exist at the time of the action, and the feotus in the end is no different (it does not live) as it would have if the woman had choosen to use other means, such as condoms or not had sex at all.

If you listen to the pro-forced-birth side, they claim to be speaking for and defending the most vulnerable “people” (if we are to admit their premise) in our society. They are advocates for the innocent, and abortion needs to be illegal to protect their vulnerable rights. You can see them all over TV today and the internet saying just this.

In fact fetuses are not the most vulnerable “people”; they have significantly more protections than newborn children. Aside from guaranteed food and shelter, fetuses also have the full support of a political party and religious institutions.

Newborn children are guaranteed neither food nor shelter. In America, we even separate newborns from their mothers depending on their immigration status. We’ve even jailed children and put them on trial. Gun deaths are the leading cause of death for children and that’s a problem the pro-forced-birth party doesn’t want to fix.

So all this talk about “protecting the vulnerable children” is clearly just disingenuous. It’s not about protecting the vulnerable at all. It’s about a religious conservative powergrab and we know this by how quickly Clarence Thomas invites challenges to contraception and gay marriage, on the basis of the Dobbs decision.

I'm not American, so I don't know these things. Can you document a single newborn child that, with the knowledge of the government, is starving to death outdoors?

Yes.

(Actually, the latter obligation attaches whether or not you have the former belief, but if you don’t believe that the entity involved actually is a “person” whose life has value, it explains, but does not justify, why you would not also feel the latter obligation.)

If anything, it's more important to me that I refute misinformation in support of things I believe as opposed to argue against positions I disagree with.

edit: fixed typo

This is just a dishonest argument.

1: https://wisqars.cdc.gov/fatal-reports

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_Uni...

Here's how to set up WISQARS for that report:

  2020, United States
  Firearm Deaths and Rates per 100,000
  All Races, Both Sexes, Ages 0 to 18
  ICD-10 Codes: W32-W34,X72-X74,X93-X95,Y22-Y24, Y35.0,\*U01.4

It’s a pill that basically forces a woman to have a period regardless of whether there’s an embryo in the lining or not. You can only do it before an embryo even resembles a human being.

And yet, it’s as at risk as anything else.

Moreover, guns may have outpaced automotive deaths, but they have not outpaced "accidents" writ large.

How many "accidents" cause school shootings? The US is literally the only country where this happens.

> ... until the same protection is applied to children post-birth ...

The same protection is applied to children post-birth. It's still illegal to kill those children after they're born.

---

Edit to respond to comments, because I'm "posting too fast":

Yes, the conservative position on social programs seems inconsistent with being pro-life to someone who believes that government benefit programs are not only helpful, but are the primary mechanism to help the needy.

But not to people who believe, like Reagan, that "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'"

They don't look to the government for help for themselves and they don't see it as a mechanism for helping others. For that, they prefer family, church, charity, and community.

They also generally believe, contrary to some extreme positions that have been exaggerated by their opponents, that:

"we would not consider it immoral for a woman to accept treatment that is necessary to save her life, but which may end the life of her preborn child."

https://www.focusonthefamily.com/family-qa/abortion-and-heal...

The law may protect kids from being directly killed consequence free. However, indirectly, these good Christians support everything right up to that (spare the rod, spoil the child).

Edit: To respond to your edit, since you don't want to take the time to actually respond.

Reagan was good with the short quips, yet hardly someone you should look to for a "pro-life" attitude. He actively impeded AIDs research because "ewe, gay people". He has blood on his hands and invoking him in an argument about the sanctity of life is ridiculous.

Further, saying "Oh, let the churches feed the hungry". What would you do for the child of an atheist parent? What would you do if the church (like many of them do!) imposes strict morality clauses before aid is given. What if there is no church giving such aid in a community?

Why do you think there is child starvation in the united states? Because not enough kids know about their local churches and community centers?

It's also laughable that the same people who cheer on dumping 800 billion dollars into the most powerful military in the world are somehow afraid of the consequences of what happens when that money goes into a program to feed children. So what, the government is only scary when the money DOESN'T go towards guns? What kind of backwards thinking is that?

It's legal to force a raped child to carry a pregnancy to term even if they will suffer lifetime damage or fatal injuries.

It's legal to force a raped child or woman to carry to term a child that is the result of incest and may suffer a lifetime of genetic damage and disability.

It's a nonsense argument that is premised of the falsity that a fertilized ovum is somehow a "child". It is not.

> smaller proportions of women in 2004 than in 1987 said that having a baby would interfere with their job or career (38% vs. 50%), that they were not mature enough (22% vs. 27%), that their husband or partner wanted them to have an abortion (14% vs. 24%), and that they and their partner could not or did not want to get married (12% vs. 30%). In both surveys, 1% indicated that they had been victims of rape, and less than half a percent said they became pregnant as a result of incest. [1]

The large number of unborn children that have been killed because of them being perceived as an economical burden, or other personal reasons cannot be ignored. But you ignore all this injustice and make it seem like abortion is all about dealing with rape and incest, while these in reality only account for ca 1% of all abortion cases.

I’m saying killed because we still have a large portion of abortions happening in the second (10-15% worldwide [2]) and third trimesters.

The point here is that a woman’s freedom does not override her child’s right to live. But you seem to think otherwise.

[1] https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2005/reasons-us-wom...

[2] https://www.uptodate.com/contents/overview-of-second-trimest...

If the Pro Choice movement starts a campaign aimed specifically at changing federal law to allow abortions in the situations above, I believe they have a fair chance of getting 60% within 1-2 election cycles.

Anyway, I think that's mostly irrelevant. Say conservatives decided that abortion would be banned nationwide but there would be comprehensive social programs to care for pregnant women and children. The banning of abortion would still be a terrible idea.

Obviously absurd and far beneath the level of rigor I'd expect on HN.

Because, if protecting life was truly the goal you are after, then you'd do a whole lot more to actually, you know, protect life, long after the child is born.

People understand that murder is illegal - but life isn't just two states. Alive or Dead. If we were living in 20,000 BCE then maybe we could be forgiven for thinking this way, but we live in an advanced, modern, (presumably) ethical civilization where life is about flourishing and giving everyone opportunities to thrive.

Focusing on the fetus's rights, yet condemning children to a life that's designed from the start to prevent flourishing is the conundrum people are referring to and pointing out the hypocrisy of.

So where is the child who is raped and impregnated by her uncle, priest, or coach supposed to turn?

Is the government really doing all that much for those victims? Our justice and foster care systems are pretty badly run. Democrats want to throw more money at the broken systems. Republicans want to tear them down. I'd support reforming them, but that is much easier said than done.

I’ve never heard this stance put forward.

All data shows that outlawing abortion does nothing to reduce abortion. It only makes it occur later in pregnancy and makes it more dangerous.

It’s time we just call religious fascism what it is because this month has shown the scorched earth approach it takes in this country to its demand of power.

The abortion rate in the US was far lower pre-Roe. It went up 5x in the decade after it was nationally legalized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_Uni...

Wrong because Roe v Wade was decided in 1973, the rate went from roughly 14 to 23 (a 64% increase).

Naive because as Jim said, the article clearly states the numbers are voluntarily given and therefore would not include illegal abortions. And the recording started in 1969, so it wouldn’t be surprising for it to take time before clinics even began reporting. In other words, abortions in states where it was legal probably didn’t DOUBLE between 1970 and 1971, but rather reporting of them improved.

It doesn't mean that fewer of them were doing it before it became legal. They were doing it and hiding it.

It's the same as when gay people finally started coming out of the closet, once the laws and stigmas against being gay were reduced. Now they could finally admit what they were doing all along, with less fear of being stigmatized, arrested, imprisoned, or killed.

That doesn’t stop this falsehood from being repeated and it is one of many points of intellectual dishonesty that characterize the anti abortion movement.

Assuming you brought this to the discussion in good faith I would encourage you to reflect on your information sources because one side of this debate has shown a willingness to lie, mislead, cheat, and commit violence in support of their ideology. Personally I have found that ideologies that behave like that do so consistently and will choose to mislead to get what they want. That is a helpful heuristic for guiding how I interpret their arguments and attempts to support them with data.

The full quoted sentence, emphasis mine:

"This is correct and illustrative of why the power centric version of Christianity in this country needs to be actively removed from all positions of influence."

They're not saying that all religion is bad. However, religions have their place, and it is not in positions of power. Historically, the religiously-motivated have used their power to enforce their brand of religious belief above others. All religion should be banned from government, period.

Do you think that religious people should be denied the right to vote or hold office? Because if you want "all religion should be banned from government, period," that's what you'll need to do. Otherwise, only actions can be controlled, not motivations.

> If that’s what it takes, so be it (regarding holding office, at least - voting is not something I would restrict in that way).

Shades of "you can vote for whoever you want to represent you, so long as they're a Communist who will govern according to the will of the party."

> This government is not supposed to let religion dictate policy.

I think you have a serious misunderstanding of the establishment clause.

I don't follow. Removing people from the pool of eligible candidates because they want this nation to be a theocracy is not quite the same. We don't keep murder criminalized because God said so (although that was undoubtedly the reason murder laws were first codified in human history), we keep it criminalized because we understand that murder removes the agency of another person to remain alive.

> I think you have a serious misunderstanding of the establishment clause.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

If the only justifiable reason for a policy is religious, then it is on the face of it prohibiting the free exercise of religion (as the result of that policy should be a personal decision consistent with each individual's religious belief or lack thereof).

The Court is likely to revisit several precedents derived from Roe v Wade. Many of these precedents will likely be sexual or marriage related in nature. Griswold v Connecticut (the right to buy and use contraceptives), Lawrence v Texas (the right to be private in consensual sexual activity between adults), Obergefell v Hodges (the right of same-sex couples to marry) have been explicitly mentioned by Justice Thomas as decisions that should be revisited. This means that in the future, there will likely be a case related to each of those that ends up making its way to the Court.

Taken broadly, this decision basically guts the right to privacy. I expect this to get really bad and cast a much wider net than anyone expects, before it's over with.

This is just incorrect. Before the 14th amendment the bill of rights did not apply to states.

>Also, the term "separation of church and state" did in fact start with the founders.

It started with a single founder not founders. Have you read Jefferson's letter? I would imagine you haven't if you think it meant a state couldn't have a state religion or that they couldn't push religious laws (not that abortion is strictly a religious thing).

>Who were mostly deists, not at all like today's Evangelical Christians.

Do you have a list? I am not sure that mostly is accurate. Episcopalianism (is that how you spell it?) was quite popular.

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

I forgot about that brief time before the civil war when states felt like they could pick and choose which parts of the Constitution applied to them. Why do you think it only applies to the bill of rights, though?

I find it darkly humorous that it took an amendment to the Constitution to really drive home that the Constitution actually applies to everyone in the US. That seems like a bit of circular logic, but at the point of a gun it worked.

Imagine if states could just choose that the second amendment did not apply to them today. Ha!

Quoting the Constitution is pointless since it doesn't prove anything. If the federal government has the authority to do something then it is the law of the land. What you are missing is that the Constitution only allows like 10 things (I made up 10, but it is close to that). Anything other than those 10 things were left to the states (10th amendment).

Barron v. Baltimore was a Supreme Court case (that was decided unanimously) that made it clear that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States. After the 14th amendment (though not immediately) something called the Incorporation Doctrine became the mainstream opinion. This was the process of applying the amendments to the states which only could happened due to the 14th amendment.

Prior to the 14th amendment states could ban guns though several of states had similar provisions to the 2nd amendment in their constitutions. Assuming they either amended their state constitution or never had the right in their constitution they could ban guns.

That was the entire purpose of the the way the US was set up. The federal government has a basic setup mostly to ensure defense of the nation (and a few other things like weights and measures) and the States deal with everything else. If a state wanted to ban guns they could. If you wanted to own guns you could move to a state that allowed gun ownership.

The US was intended to be closer to 50 distinct countries than one nation with 50 administrative regions like we have today.

Your job is to argue that abortion is not murder. Any argument that sidesteps the morality of abortion is not going to convince anyone.

Let’s start with the belief that life starts at conception. With this belief, a fetus is equivalent in protection to a newborn. Following this, voluntarily ending it is murder.

Then what about miscarriage? If a newborn were to die under unknown circumstances, there should be an investigation. Should then all pregnant people be investigated for potential negligence or abuse for this already traumatizing situation? 1/3 to 1/2 of all fertilized eggs never implant. Should these be scrutinized? I cannot see how one can say a fetus and newborn deserve equivalent protections and then fail to give them.

Further, what about support for abortion exceptions for incest or rape? If the pregnancy in this scenario went to term and the child was born, one wouldn’t then support that murdering the newborn was OK.

If you don’t believe these things, then you don’t believe newborns and fetuses deserve equal protection. You only happen to believe specific fetuses deserve one specific protection.

Also looking up the definition of abortion in this case is important:

https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/abortion.h...

    For the purpose of surveillance, a legal induced abortion is defined as an intervention performed by a licensed clinician (e.g., a physician, nurse-midwife, nurse practitioner, physician assistant) within the limits of state regulations, that is intended to terminate a suspected or known ongoing intrauterine pregnancy and that does not result in a live birth. Most states and reporting areas that collect abortion data report if an abortion was medical or surgical. Medical abortions are legal procedures that use medications instead of surgery.

Adding exceptions is antithetical to the belief it is murder. One does not get to murder another person because they were a child of incest. On the other hand, not adding an exception for abortion is monstrous.

If you agree that forcing a woman to give birth to a child of rape or incest is monstrous, then maybe you’ll agree abortion isn’t murder. If you think it’s not monstrous, I hope it never happens to you or someone you love just to be taught a hard lesson in empathy for others.

I’m unsure why you’re quoting the definition of a legally induced abortion and why you feel it important to your argument.

Most states have laws regarding causing miscarriage via assault, even California so there are investigations already.

To draw the parallel to a newborn, some pass away from SIDS, some from abuse, some from malnutrition. Investigations are performed in suspicious circumstances. Sometimes it truly happens to be random or unknown or unpreventable.

If one were to treat fetuses the same, wouldn’t one want to verify there was no abuse or neglect? I.E. the causes are unknown, it could be a random natural event, it could be due to someone’s actions, the only way to know is to investigate. To my knowledge, nobody currently gets investigated for a miscarriage of unknown cause. One can only hope it stays that way.

If you’ve been paying attention, exceptions for incest and rape are being thrown out of the window in most red states. That was a pre supermajority compromise. Now that the supreme court is a conservative supermajority, the compromise position is no longer desirable for conservatives. They have the power and they are using it.

But they elect extremists to govern.

I’d like to believe being more aware of the extremism would temper voters towards moderation, but I fear instead history proves the voters are more likely to have their views shift towards extremism.

This argument has always struck me as odd. A miscarriage is, for lack of a better word, a random natural event. People die from random natural events all the time.

Now hopefully in the future the argument won’t strike you as odd.

Yes, we do. All kinds of things are viewed as immoral and not criminally punished, or punished less than things viewed as equally or more immoral, because of the perceived social cost/benefit of the alternative.

It is murderously insane to consider only the problem addressed and not the impacts of the policy response in setting government policy.

Morally however, I also do think it's wrong to not give the blood transfusion because the burden is small and the cost of not doing so is large. Whether it rises to the level of murder is a tougher question that I think would depend on intent.

Do you think a suicidal pilot has the right to stop flying a plane mid-flight even if she knows that no one else on the plane will be capable of landing it?

But we haven't decided that saving the life of someone who's been endangered by your actions is an appropriate reason to violate bodily autonomy. That's the whole point, society has decided that you can refuse to give the transfusion, even it leads to a death you essentially caused.

Interesting example, but I don't think such a pilot whould cares about rights.

The better question might be - what could you do to force such a pilot to fly the plane, and it appears that you could only plead - they would not be afraid of being shot (which is illegal anyway), and torture is very clearly illegal.

On the contrary, I think it would be very popular to say that someone who directly caused the crash out of negligence should be required to give blood to save the victim.

You're referring to a version of the violinist argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion#The_viol...

Your version is actually pretty similar to a normal pregnancy (the woman brought about the pregnancy through her actions and now has to decide whether its morally okay to stop the babies' use of her body).

I think it's very hard to justify abortion along these lines and might be easier just to try to show that the fetus is non-human and doesn't have rights.

This is an interesting comment. It is not your job to do anything unless you are actually paid by an entity that has a vested interest in an outcome. Your argument structure does not have to follow predetermined steps ordained by the high priests. All these arguments are not going to convince anyone. For better or worse, most have already made up their minds a long time ago. Just to make it all more confusing, GPT-chan showed clearly you simply cannot trust online fora ( or, frankly, based on Amazon's raise the dead skill, phone conversations ) to have real humans anymore ( although you could argue, this was clear during last net neutrality debate and how comments there were not written by individuals).

But going back to the crux of your argument, I disagree. This is HN. Morality will not impress people here. Rational discourse is a path forward if it is intended to sway anyone.

Sure, and your job is to argue that abortion causes the death of a viable human life.

Murder is defined as "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another."

Abortion isn't that.

By this definition we couldn't consider any killing sanctioned by the state to be murder.

I would imagine they believe the point of sex is to conceive. Both those things prevent conception.

Therefore it's okay to use racially-targeted methods of enforcement and arrest poor, ethnic minorities, etc. as long as we get at least a little drug reduction out of it.

Hmmmm....

And that’s not even getting what is “good” and “bad” and if a laws purpose is to outright outlaw them without thinking of other measures and consequences.

My own surprise (but very wanted!) pregnancy was easy the first few months - I even skied up through week 16, but around week 30 I started developing back pain and intermittent numbness in some of my toes that is still around, after nearly two years and lots of physical therapy.

And I was always considered to be having a “healthy” pregnancy, and was pretty healthy beforehand. Only unusual thing is that I was 40.

For a more extreme but still realistic hypothetical, I have a severely physically disabled friend who weighs about 60 lbs and requires regular mechanical breathing assistance. She is, as far as she knows, just as capable of getting pregnant as I am. She also knows that she would not survive more than a few weeks of pregnancy.

There are many people capable of becoming pregnant who live somewhere between these two extremes.

The horror is already starting. A nurse sent this message to a nurse on TikTok who has a large platform:

I don't have a platform so I can't reach people like you can, but please share this! I work in ** on a small niku/l&d floor. Our trigger laws went into effect immediately after the decision. ofc we had a woman walk in with an ectopic at 11:30pm 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 because 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 and she almost died. I am so scared of how often we as nurses are going to see things like this now and not be able to do a damn thing about it. We're all livid at huddle tonight, several of my coworkers were in tears.

The only alternative I can think of is that a women should carry the non viable fetus into term for 9 whole months instead of getting it out of her as soon as she can.

Should you end up pregnant, it’s illegal to fire you for any reason, and you must either be accommodated or put on paid leave. During that first year of Covid, any nurse or doctor or other employee that had to work with the public was put on paid leave if pregnant if something non-public-facing couldn’t be found for them.

We also get 2/3 of our previous net salary for up to a year after the birth to stay home with our babies, and that was as a mother with a well-employed husband. There is further assistance for women in harder circumstances.

Granted, abortion is (was?) more strictly controlled here. You have to go for “conflict counseling,” but it’s available from both of the major churches (the Lutheran church’s organization aims to help you if you want to go through with the pregnancy, but will give you information on the costs and logistics of termination), other religious associations, as well as secular organizations with a pro-choice point of view (e.g.: ProFamilia). After the 12th week, however, you can only get an abortion if your life or health is in danger, or the fetus has a serious abnormality. Yes, Down Syndrome is an accepted ground for termination, but social support services for mentally-handicapped children and adults are far more comprehensive and reliable here than in the US.

Result? One of the lowest abortion rates in the world among countries where women (mostly) have bodily autonomy.

Why is it that people that want to outlaw abortion, and are willing to pay for the policing and prosecution resources necessary to enforce that law aren't willing to invest the same amount into contraception that would have a similar effect.

Is it better to clean up after an oil spill, or ensure that the spill doesn't happen in the first place?

Once you accept a fetus is a person, this same logic can also be extended to argue that life starts at ejaculation; impeding sperm from fertilizing an egg prevents the birth of a person, and is therefore tantamount to murder the same way abortion is.

It’s much more a tenuous an argument, which is why it’s only made by the most extreme people. But I guess that explains why Clarence Thomas is pushing to make contraception illegal today.

Because it's more exciting to punish Bad People for doing Bad Things than it is to create systems where the Bad People don't want or need to do Bad Things as much.

would rather a productive person today then a who knows what 20 years in the future.

Specifically, Numbers 5:20-27 prescribes ritualistic abortion if a woman has cheated on her husband. A thorough reading of the Bible gives one the understanding doesn't care about fetuses or children. He cares about the subjugation of women and everyone in their "proper" place in His hierarchy.

It's a perfect replacement subject for income inequality, debate about guns, foreign policy like isolationist movement.

Because of the electoral system, Republicans in Texas had a big issue with immigrations from "blue states" - they could loose it forever. This is an existential threat for them - first fight was Heartbeat bill. Now they have a perfect tool to slow down the process or even reverse it.

most people don't care, they won't move for that. But Covid/Remote work/housing is pushing them, hence Rep. went all-in.

That would help the children these voters are so concerned about!

No. It is old people wanting to stop young people having sex. It is about increased the biological risks associated with sex. It is about people who believe that sex should only ever be for procreation. It is about the oldest issue in history: old people not wanting young people to enjoy life.

1. Innocent people ought not be killed. Children are innocent people. Therefore, children ought not be killed.

2. What is conceived in a woman is an innocent young human being. Young human beings are children. Therefore (given syllogism #1) children in utero ought not be killed.

Those syllogisms can lead to emotion, but they are not based on it.

- At what point do you believe it becomes a person? Viable to survive outside of the womb, heartbeat, insemination?

- How do you define innocent, as one who does not have actions that cause harm to another, one who does not have intent to harm another, or something else?

- If defined as one who does not have intent to harm another, how do we know what the unborn child's intent is? Do you assume that the child is not developed enough to have intent? At which point does the child develop intent?

- What if you would consider the child already dead from other causes and needs to be extracted, should the mother be allowed to have it removed? What if the baby is an ectopic pregnancy, growing outside of the womb and likely to cause significant harm or death to the mother, is the assumption that the mother is not as innocent as the unborn child and therefore we should prioritize the child?

I'm ok and even excited to take a reason-based approach (ironically stating how I have have feelings about taking a reason-based approach), I just hope if you want to go down that path, that you will go deeper down it with me.

Or is it about wanting the mother to also go to heaven, and believing that if she did this, she would not go?

I appreciate you pointing out there may be a deep existential fear and doubt of the existence of heaven that drives people to this and oh how I wish we people talked more about our doubts, especially as they relate to religion. One of my favorite TED talks was about how doubt is essential to faith: https://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazleton_the_doubt_essentia...

According to a lot of American Christian doctrine, yes. The Bible teaches that humans are sinful beings not because of what they do, but because sin is an immutable part of human nature. There's no such thing as an "innocent" baby where the doctrine of original sin is concerned - all humans deserve hell by default. So unless the baby is born, baptized and saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ (which can only happen through their consent and free will, you can't "save" an unborn baby as a loophole) it will burn in Hell for eternity like any other unsaved soul.

Although I'd suspect most Christians simply believe life, in terms of a divine soul and part in God's plan, begins at conception. To accept that a fetus is simply a "clump of cells" would be too close to accepting a naturalistic (non-theistic) view of biology. To interfere with procreation and birth is to commit murder for the same reason that shooting someone in the head is committing murder - only God has the right to decide when and how life can be taken.

> The Bible teaches that humans are sinful beings not because of what they do, but because sin is an immutable part of human nature. There's no such thing as an "innocent" baby where the doctrine of original sin is concerned - all humans deserve hell by default. So unless the baby is born, baptized and saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ (which can only happen through their consent and free will, you can't "save" an unborn baby as a loophole) it will burn in Hell for eternity like any other unsaved soul.

As someone not born into or raised by a Christian family, I sometimes struggle to understand how deep some of these beliefs are.

So is the idea that one does not receive unconditional love from God unless one first consents to believe in God? And babies don't have the ability to consent?

Maybe this is too off topic for HN but I'm quite curious.

Of course that said, there have been plenty of Christians who believe in infant baptism or a state of grace for infants and all sorts of things - Christianity isn't a monolith. But when it comes to the intersection of religion and pro-life politics in the US, the more hardline strains of faith seem to dominate.

Ah, so do they believe that if and only if one goes through baptism, then they have asked for God's forgiveness and then will be forgiven? I seem a bit confused by that, does it mean that the love is unconditional only after the one specific condition is met? Or maybe it's that unconditional love and forgiveness are separate things?

Also maybe you don't know and that's ok, too, I'm just grateful for you helping me reflect on this more.

Actually believing something and thinking you believe something are two wildly different things.

If there were 500,000 five-year-old kids being murdered every year, with the explicit approval of the government, there would be a civil war.

The fact that the overwhelming majority do not do anything is proof positive that they do not believe abortion is equivalent to murder.

You can't simply claim, oh, I believe in democracy, or I believe in the rule of law in the face of a government that actively murders hundreds of thousands of children. No one has such a deep attachment to the rule of law for its sake as to tolerate 500,000 explicitly-legal child murders.

By that argument, no abolitionist except for John Brown actually believed that chattel slavery was wrong. No suffragettes except the anarchists actually believed that women should have the right to vote. No blacks in the USA in the 1960s actually believed they were equal in dignity with their white brothers.

Non-violent responses to violent outrages are a very Christian approach to the problems of evil. That doesn't mean there's no suffering involved. Pro-life activists are regularly arrested, assaulted, battered, and insulted. Pro-life organizations spend millions of dollars (gifted in charity by hundreds of thousands of pro-life people) every year helping woman who find themselves in difficult positions choose life and give their children a better life after birth. Time and treasure poured out for a cause are a better measure of the importance of a cause that the total weight of bullets expended in overcoming the other side.

The side that triggered the Civil War was the side that was in the wrong, so I'm not sure what truth you are pointing to there.

However, their rhetoric goes much further than that. Their rhetoric says that abortion is equivalent to murder, and thus justifies curtailing inalienable rights held by women.

The right of self-defense of others is something very close to universally accepted. If there were an equivalent number of five year old kids being aborted, we would not see milquetoast efforts like sit-ins and prayer vigils, actions with both little consequence and impact.

I believe Eric Rudolph believed abortion is murder. But all those people at prayer vigils, sit-ins, Red Rose Rescue, and pregnancy centers do not. They see it as something bad, but less than murder.

If a half million five year old kids are being murdered, you can't just go about your life and attend an annual March for Life protest. What kind of a person doesn't do more? This is systematic, legal, mass-scale child murder we're talking about.

Precisely this -> It is a common technique that someone believes in Position A because of reason X, but reason X is unacceptable to the wider society and won't win debates. You make up reason Y to rationalise your Position A.

Peole will debate you on reason Y and be wondering why they can't convince you despite demonstrating that reason Y is wrong. They can;t convince you because you don't care about Reason Y, it's just a ruse. Often your followers also know that reason Y is a ruse, at least the ones who are not totally stupid.

In the Brexit debate, you would have people claiming that it's about national sovereignty and 'all them bloody EU laws', but they wouldn't be able to name a single EU law. They never knew and cared about EU law, they had a problem with immigration.

If at least the country was discussing immigration, maybe they could discuss if it's cheaper to give some extra money to people who are affected by immigration or suffer the collateral damage of Brexit.

If this belief of theirs isn't real, none of them are. Which I think is actually true. They believe in nothing.

That's where you are wrong. What action exactly are you looking for that would make you respect their beliefs? Apparently its outside the law.

What they do believe, however, is that any woman who may need an abortion was being promiscuous, and should be punished for her actions. They absolutely believe that.

Any argument otherwise could equally justify any genocide.

This is seen very Authoritative Governments and Dictatorships because it allows for the exploit of self-identity. People often create their self-identity around a religion and if you try to talk about any logical flaws with their statements or show them whole evident of facts proving them wrong they will still stick with their religion because they then would destroy their self-identity. When religion becomes self-identity then the person stops living reality and in a religious dream-like state.

Look at Benjamin Franklin, US Founding Father, was a Christian but didn't self-identity and also wrote a section in a book, Every Man His Own Doctor: The Poor Planter's Physician, how to perform an abortion.

He is an example of self-identity that goes beyond religion. But also the self-identity factor can also be tie not to religion but political parties or other extreme identities leading to group think.

With high confidence, and hopefully a good study is done, a high percentage of people that gave power to the anti-abortion / anti-liberty movements are self-identified with religion over other aspects.

> "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship."

If your counterargument is "the word privacy isn't in the Constitution", my rejoinder is "neither is 'assault rifle'".

The legal theory on which the right to privacy mostly stands is called "substantive due process", which more or less says the state can't abridge your liberties without trying pretty hard not to. So liberties here can be contraception use, or drug use. Indeed United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative had the coop arguing that the Controlled Substances Act "violates the substantive due process rights of patients, and offends the fundamental liberties of the people under the Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments". This has generally (and maybe oddly) been at odds with the Commerce Clause, pretty well typified by Wickard v. Filburn where the Court held that even though Filburn was only growing wheat on his own land for his own use, the US could impose a quota on him because it was regulating the price of wheat federally. This extends interpretation of the Commerce Clause from mere interstate commerce to production and consumption. Here's a good quote:

"Hence, marketing quotas not only embrace all that may be sold without penalty, but also what may be consumed on the premises."

I'm not an expert, but I believe this is the constitutional leg on which the CSA stands: the gov't can regulate what you consume. I'm personally sympathetic to the substantive due process challenge argument, but probably still too young to be on the Supreme Court. Call your senator! :)

You should honestly just read Griswold [0]. It is a strikingly conservative opinion if, for example, you think privacy is also about "the government has to show a compelling governmental interest to regulate firearms". Here are some gems:

"The association of people is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights. The right to educate a child in a school of the parents' choice -- whether public or private or parochial -- is also not mentioned. Nor is the right to study any particular subject or any foreign language. Yet the First Amendment has been construed to include certain of those rights."

"In NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U. S. 449, 357 U. S. 462 we protected the 'freedom to associate and privacy in one's associations,' noting that freedom of association was a peripheral First Amendment right. Disclosure of membership lists of a constitutionally valid association, we held, was invalid 'as entailing the likelihood of a substantial restraint upon the exercise by petitioner's members of their right to freedom of association.' Ibid. In other words, the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion."

"The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516—522, 81 S.Ct. 1752, 6 L.Ed.2d 989 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers 'in any house' in time of peace without the consent of the owner is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the 'right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.' The Fifth Amendment in its Self-Incrimination Clause enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: 'The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.'"

"In presenting the proposed Amendment, Madison said:

'It has been objected also against a bill of rights that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration, and it might follow, by implication, that those rights which were not singled out were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard urged against the admission of a bill of rights into this system, but I conceive that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the

Page 381 U. S. 490

last clause of the fourth resolution [the Ninth Amendment]."

"Madison himself had previously pointed out the dangers of inaccuracy resulting from the fact that 'no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea.' The Federalist, No. 37 (Cooke ed.1961) at 236."

I could go on. I urge you to read it.

[0]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/

You want to disarm yourself in light of that news?

- Javelin missile launchers

- aerosolized bioagents

- jet fighters

- land mines

but not sniper rifles.

Again, if you're going to extrapolate what "arms" meant in the late 18th century, you have some choices:

- personal arms of the day (muskets, cannons, bayonets)

- personal arms of the current day (missile launchers [0])

- weirdo arms of the current day (drones, gases and bioagents, dirty bombs, white phosphorous)

Originalism isn't helpful to us here, it turns out.

[0]: https://www.militaryfactory.com/smallarms/rocket-launchers.p...

Can you buy Carl Gustaf 8.4 cm recoilless rifle? M114 155 mm howitzer? Mortars? They are all firearms.

Where do you see abortion rights there?

4A is pretty good at this. People have a right against unreasonable searches and seizures without probable cause. While the state's interest is implicit here, it's obviously law enforcement. This balances the state's interest in enforcing laws with the individual right against unreasonable searches and seizures.

In Griswold, the Court couldn't justify the state's interest in enforcing anti-contraception laws given its necessary invasion of privacy. Other concurrences found the right to privacy in other Amendments (the 9th and the 14th), but regardless of where you look, all of these Amendments lay out an individual liberty vs. a state interest.

Courts are faced with the unenviable task of taking a > 200 year old document and applying its precepts to a world that would bewilder its authors. Different philosophies try to do this in different ways; Scalia famously pushed originalism, but even he essentially writes out slavery, Native American disenfranchisement, and the chattel status of women in the 18th century, and other originalists are even less consistent.

Other justices look for the core liberties ineffably and imperfectly silhouetted by the Constitution--a document defining the most free nation ever yet made--in order to keep the flame of liberty burning. What originalists miss about the Constitution was that it was an extremely radical document. If we are to be consistent with the spirit of the US at its founding, we have to preserve that dedication to liberty and human rights.

Should what was once the beacon of liberty be tethered to what liberty meant 250 years ago? Is that a fitting destiny? Would Madison or Jefferson be proud of such an outcome?

I am no legal scholar by any means, but wasn't Scalia's argument that if the people don't like the social contract (i.e. the constitution), the people should change it via amendments vs having judges change it? I think he would say he did not "essentially writes out slavery..." but rather the 13th, the 19th amendments etc. wrote those out of the constitution.

> if the people don't like the social contract (i.e. the constitution), the people should change it via amendments vs having judges change it.

This only makes sense when you dovetail it with originalism. The Bill of Rights isn't supposed to grow infinitely. Madison didn't even want it (if you're into appeal to authority to Founders). But when you make the dual arguments of:

- the Constitution only means what it literally says, according to its time period

- the only way to expand interpretation is to literally change it with Amendments

you completely ignore the 9th and 10th Amendments.

Originalism is largely a smoke-screen to roll back rights. Dobbs is a great example of this, it heavily relies on "eminent common-law authorities" (only eminent as the result of conservative opinions pushing them into the catalog):

"We begin with the common law, under which abortion was a crime at least after “quickening”—i.e., the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy."

Concluding:

"The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions."

Well, the problem with the originalist take on this is: women. couldn't. vote. End of debate! Haha.

It's probably also worth saying our understanding of medicine, conception, and pregnancy was pretty rudimentary back then. Why in God's name would we look back to that time period for wisdom on this?

Well, it's because in those days "it was a crime". Pretty convenient.

> I think he would say he did not "essentially writes out slavery..." but rather the 13th, the 19th amendments etc. wrote those out of the constitution.

He doesn't incorporate this into his analysis though. Here's what he writes in Heller regarding "Right of the People" in 2A (he quotes a Rehnquist opinion he concurred with to start):

"‘"[T]he people" seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution… . [Its uses] sugges[t] that ‘the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.'

This contrasts markedly with the phrase 'the militia' in the prefatory clause. As we will describe below, the 'militia' in colonial America consisted of a subset of 'the people'—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to 'keep and bear Arms' in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as 'the people.'"

His argument is that "the people" means "everyone", and that "the militia" only meant "male, able bodied, and within a certain age range". But "the people" actually only meant white, land-owning men; it excluded women, free Black Americans (largely denied the franchise), and Native Americans.

I think you would probably argue that, OK sure 1789 wasn't wonderful if you weren't a white guy, but we can extrapolate, now that the franchise and civil rights have been extended and incorporated to the States, that "the people" means everyone.

But this is exactly the opposite of what Scalia's arguing. He's saying because "the people" meant everyone, we must understand 2A as applying to everyone. In doing so, he ignores that 2A allowed white men to be armed, but did not allow women, free Black Americans or Native Americans to be armed. "The people" absolutely did not mean everyone, and the Founders were well aware.

In short, he ignores the fundamentally oppressive construction of the Constitution when it was written, and substitutes an imaginary regime where all enjoyed the right to bear arms. It was never so, and hearkening back to such a non-existent time is a daydream.

Such is the problem with originalism. It idealizes men and a time period that were far from ideal. Looking to this period for wisdom inevitably starts to strip rights away from marginalized groups. And that's what we're seeing here.

By what power does the government enforce the seizure of a person's reproductive system and require it to be used to breed another life?

Why use this sort of rhetoric? The legal backing of Roe v. Wade wasn't about that at all.

They've been banned since 1986, since "assault rifles" are full auto. Presumably you mean "assault weapon" which is fuzzy media-talk for scary weapon.

False.

They didn’t because the argument you are repeating is wrong, as well as made in bad faith to undermine obviously correct legal analysis.

You are a victim of propaganda and it makes me sad.

For example, your second sentence here would have been fine on its own, or as the nucleus of a more thoughtful comment. The other sentences are the ones that break the guidelines. I understand that on a fraught topic like this, it can be next to impossible not to write such things. But then one should edit them out. That's what I do, or try to.

Edit: it looks like your comment history contains a fair bit of ideological battle. Please make sure you're not using HN primarily for that, because that's the line at which we ban accounts (regardless of which ideology is being battled, or battled for).

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Power and control is what organized religions have always been about.

But as a matter of fact, Christians who are Christians in more than name only do everything of import because of Jesus -- or because of biblical teaching more generally. I believe that I should tell the truth because of Jesus. I believe that divorce is wrong because of Jesus. I believe that those who take a life should forfeit their own because of Jesus (Gen 9.6).

Morality and ethics are not the exclusive purview of Christianity, or even religion in general. Atheists and agnostics don't need a bible to tell right from wrong.

In fact, religion is often used as an excuse to subjugate others, which is what they're doing by overturning RvW. They are subjugating women of breeding age as baby factories and unpaid child minders whose life course is decided on whether a man ejaculates in her and fertilizes an egg or not (whether she wanted him to or not.) If she catches, her life is no longer hers. It now belongs to the state as a incubation vessel for a potential citizen, and her wishes are now unimportant.

You may be right; perhaps atheists and agnostics don't need a Bible to tell right from wrong, but that isn't something even atheists themselves have agreed on. The whole angst of the European existentialist movement had to do with the realization that without a god everything and anything was permissible (including abortion, one assumes).

I am not sure Jesus would agree

"Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Cor 10.31).

The difference? Politics and religion are both about controlling the actions of people. It may be done for good or ill, but it is always about control.

I can promise you that this has quite a bit to do with religion. My parents both voted republican because "Billy Graham's son endorsed Trump" and before Trump they voted republican for this issue among others. I fully understand that elected republicans are just paying lip service to religion/abortion but they have their constituents completely fooled (or happy with their cognitive dissonance).

That is misrepresenting the argument. There's a lot of people that believe that abortion is the killing of a human being. And killing another human being is, most definitely, on the list of "bad things" for every flavor of Christianity. For a lot of them, killing one human being (not in self defense) to save another is still on that list; because only God is allowed to end life.

You may not agree that an unborn child is a human life, but the people that are against abortion for actual Catholic religious reasons do believe it. And do believe it is against their religion, and against any reasonable set of morals.

The 'valid Catholic reason' for the a doctrine of ensoulment that prohibits abortion is just papal authority. Different popes, saints, and schools within Catholicism have had different beliefs on ensoulment; it's not like the reasoning has been decisive here.

Fucking up other people's lives for the sake of obeying a series of 'infallible' flip-floppers is in fact embarrassing and not respectable.

And even from a religious perspective, criticizing particular sects of Christianity as unmoored from their own sacred texts and traditions with respect to this issue is a perfectly valid line of critique of those sects and their adherents. That's what the GP is essentially doing, informally asking what the rational connection to the sacred texts and tradition even are on this issue. Just because the Catholic church has an answer to that question doesn't mean it's satisfactory.

As recently as the late 1970s, evangelicals and Southern Baptists were at worst ambivalent about abortion rights. The anti-abortion stance of that particular set of people is tied pretty heavily to opposition to desegregation.

For those who believe that abortion is murder, that's it. They don't need to care whether a state's gun laws are compatible with the US constitution.

>Why are rights to guns more important than life but rights to bodily autonomy aren’t?

This strawman is bandied about a lot, but it deliberately misrepresents what is actually in the Opinions if you so choose to read them.

To be absolutely clear, I'm in favor of stricter gun laws and I don't believe in absolute bans on abortion. I just hate it when people claim that anyone that does want a ban on abortion is a hypocrite or out to control everyone else. There are plenty of people that believe that abortion is murder, and that believe is entirely consistent with their views. They're not all bad people, they just have a different view of the world than us. And anyone that tries to lump them all in the evil bucket IS the problem.

Not gun owners of course, but the victims of gun violence.

We keep balancing stuff like that all the time. The seeming major difference here is that guns are explicitly mentioned in the constitution, while abortion is not ( and was invented from other amendments ).

> situations in which someone’s rights will lead to death

Not all people are utilitarians, especially religious people.

There’s also no indication that people even used to think that life began in utero, and that anything less than a fully formed infant was alive and capable of surviving.

You obviously haven't read a bible to any depth.

God talks about "nations" being in the womb of Rebekah. He opened/close the womb of Rachel and of others in scripture.

Samson was a Nazerite "from the womb".

Job says that God "made him" in his "mother's womb".

I could go on and on. Please read up on this some more, your argument is very ignorant of what scripture actually says about this.

God is omniscient though, so I don’t think that’s a useful standard for the cops to use when deciding who to throw in jail.

So at least at some distance after conception, yes, medical science supports seeing a fetus as a human, with life of its own.

It says no such thing. It says that Adam's life began upon first breath. Adam was also created as a full grown man, so it's clearly not an example for human life as a whole. The Bible doesn’t teach that every man comes to life at first breath any more than it teaches that every woman comes from the rib of a man (from https://www.str.org/w/does-bible-teach-life-begins-first-bre...)

The Bible does say, in multiple places, clearly imply that life begins in the womb. For example, when John leaped for joy in his mother's womb, announcing the coming of the Lord.

“Science”(whatever that means) doesn’t really weigh in on what “personhood” is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31866064

If you understand how the US Government works, then you understand that the Supreme Court cannot establish ANYTHING by removing laws. (ie overturning previous decisions).

What the Supreme court did was allow for the POSSIBILITY of a fully Catholic US State to practice Catholic religion with respect to abortion. It ALSO allows a fully Jewish state to practice Jewish religion however they want with respect to abortion.

They actual problem caused by overturning Roe v Wade is that some states who's laws are already catholic will regain the power to stop abortions in their state. That's it. California, New York, etc, are absolutely and completely unaffected by this decision, for example.

Quite the motte and bailey you've got there. Do you think that this court will make an about-face and suddenly recognize the constitutionality of the Establishment clause? Textualist/originalist, my ass.

Catholic people will make catholic laws. They wont literally be catholic laws.. but common sense would allow you to see them as such. There's nothing wrong with that either. The state does not need to recognize them as catholic laws and requires the laws be articulated and produced independent of the religion.

you cannot make a law that says "You must treat the poor the way Jesus would" but you can make a law that says "You cannot refuse life saving medical treatment to someone for being poor". Under Separation of Church a State can still create their set of laws to be 1:1 with the teachings of their religion. They just have to actually do that.. make the set of laws. they cant say "follow rules in the bible". The laws supersede the bible. Make the laws match the bible if you want people to follow the bible. So that's what these states are doing.

Only, they are saying the quiet part loudly now. And Clarence Thomas has been arguing that individual states can establish religions for at least two decades less three days[1]. Law is semantics.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/00-1751

Right, but that's also the point I was making. People think creating a law based on the beliefs of religious people violates the separation of church and state. It doesnt. the semantic nature of the law is relevant here.

I was highlighting that by saying you could make a state that effectively is a religious state using the current system. since the semantics are still there and must be accounted for, this prevents it from actually being a religious state.

By adhering to the semantics, no amount of religious belief can lead a state to violate the constitution.. even if the state bases every single one of its laws on religion. And if they try to, then the federal government has authority to enforce otherwise.

A lot of them seem to have no problem with killing human beings in war, or in executions, or killing done by police, or the killing of various human beings they hate (from "druggies" to gays to muslims or Mexicans).

As George Carlin said:

"Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to 9 months. After that, they don’t wanna know about you. They don’t wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re fucked."

Horseshit, or the religious conservatives would also abolish the death penalty federally. Instead, the more Republican states tend to be the ones who wish to expand the death penalty. Look at the history of the death penalty in Texas, and who has historically been "eligible" for it.

It's all about control. These people believe America to be a "Christian" nation first and foremost. Their ultimate goal is to push America into that direction.

I believe within the lifetime of my generation's kids, we will see a push to repeal the First Amendment, at least the religious part of it. Although knowing how American Christians have historically handled freedom of speech, more than likely they'll try to gut the whole thing.

That's what I meant— it's not as hard to find regular Catholic believers who are consistent in rejecting both abortion and the death penalty as a matter of their commitment to their religion as it is to find politicians who are the same way.

I wonder what methodist tastes like. I bet it's something saucy like spicy queso.

Did the U.S. Constitution give abortion the slightest mention?

No, the right to abortion was inferred from a right to privacy, which was inferred from several amendments that did not explicitly mention abortion or privacy. The Ninth Amendment does makes allowance for rights that aren't explicitly enumerated, but it doesn't really give any guidance on how to know what those are.

Similarly, many Christian denominations recognize that Jesus didn't need to explicitly mention every single moral issue for the Church to develop doctrine around them. Heck, even the doctrine of the Trinity, a core doctrine of mainstream Christianity, requires some level of inference from Scripture.

So if your argument is that Jesus needed to explicitly mention abortion for there to be any justifiable Christian doctrine about it, you're applying a different standard than the standard that was used to define a constitutional right to abortion in the first place.

As far as the constitution goes, amendments are treated as part of the text, not gotchas. The constitution protects your right to keep the contents of your pockets and your home private. Why not the contents of your uterus?

Just poor women. Rich women will still be able to travel out of state (and out of country, if need be) to get an abortion.

They'll also be able to hire a maid, cook, and nurse to do all their household chores for them.

It's the poor who will be most screwed, as usual.

Religious Americans essentially held their noses to vote for Republicans just to get this issue rammed in.

Now that they have gotten what they wanted, are they still going to vote for Republicans with the same transactional decision process? Or are they now going to say the Republicans can no longer offer them anything additional and now the problems with Republicans being immoral and unchristian become too large?

Once Christians have an abortion ban do they become focused on helping the poor and other issues which were pushed by Jesus and whose teachings more closely align with progressive agendas? Or are they hypocrites and will vote for the Republicans to give the Pharisees & Rich of the world more power?

Yes; that's why Thomas's concurring decision openly threatens the gay marriage, contraception, etc. decisions. (He left Loving v. Virginia off the list, though. For some reason.) There's plenty more red meat to throw to the Republican base as far as SCOTUS is concerned.

I'm sorry, Republicans aren't strongly against gay marriage?

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/23/opinion/23bruni-n...

The 2016 and 2020 platform both said that marriage is between 1 man and 1 women, they didn't mince words. Pretending Republicans won't try to overturn gay marriage is about as stupid as the people who said they would never overturn Roe v Wade.

Southern Baptists largely didn’t care about abortion before the 1970s, even seeing it as a good thing in some cases. From The Baptist Press, who of course now spouts the party line that abortion is terrible and this SCOTUS decision is wonderful: https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/southern-...

Next on the list are LGBTQ+ rights, especially hormone therapy for teenagers, and contraceptives that may destroy or discard a zygote or blastocyst. Overturning Roe means allowing government to invade every healthcare decision and apply any arbitrary religious dogma to it.

The fear of abortion was used as a very effective tool for engagement. The more people sit and listen to people "argue" about an "issue" on Fox News or at church, etc., the more politically active they become.

It should be about the law, not about politics. They're supposed to put that stuff aside when they take a legal office. Trias politica and all.

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsbur...

This is a very misleading reading of that critique.

Ginsburg would've preferred the right to abortion be established a) explicitly a right of women, not a right of doctors to practice and b) via many incremental decisions, making reversal harder.

Practical critique; not "bad law", but "not secure enough to trust". As the recent decision demonstrates quite effectively.

The claim that abortion is forbidden "in all major religions" is false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_abortion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_abortion

Equating abortion to murder is a modern interpretation.

I'm not lying.

* The "ruah" of God is not the breath we take in with our lungs - and even if it were, that says how God created Adam, not how God created their children. Jeremiah 1:5 and Luke 1:44

* Numbers 5:27 - floor dust and burnt grain will not cause a woman to miscarry. Lying about the truth in front of the Truth Himself is grounds for punishment, but from God alone. Acts 5:1-10

To you. But that's your interpretation.

> even if it were, that says how God created Adam, not how God created their children.

When one turns to The Bible for an answer about when conception becomes life, this is the clearest answer given. Arguing that it's not a clear enough answer supports my point.

> Jeremiah 1:5

> > Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart

You can still interpret that as development happening in the womb (not life yet) prior to the event that defines life (birth). I personally find that a clearer reading. Otherwise there is no reason to talk about birth as a second event.

> > As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.

Now The Bible has contradicted itself. Until now, life began at breath, but now we have a fetus leaping for joy.

We still have an unanswered question: when does the soul enter the body? At first breath? When the fetus is developed enough to move? When the heart develops enough to beat? When the blastocyst sticks to the uterine wall? When the zygote starts multiplying? When the DNA from the sperm is copied next to the DNA from the egg?

Was it just this instance that the fetus became a living person (with a soul) early?

None of these questions is answered clearly enough that I would be willing to base the law on it.

> floor dust and burnt grain will not cause a woman to miscarry.

I didn't say it would, the book did.

> Lying about the truth in front of the Truth Himself is grounds for punishment, but from God alone.

Is that a threat? How petty. But wasn't it The Bible itself lying here and not me? So you are using the book to threaten... the book?

Have fun with that. Just don't expect me to play along.

Not a threat - a description of what is going in Numbers. The woman is taking an oath before God that the child she is carrying is hers. If she lies, she is lying to God. I don't believe you are lying, I think you are genuine - which is a very good thing. I hope and pray that "you are not far from the Kingdom of God" could very well be said of you.

As to "life", "breath", "personhood", "ensoulment", and "birth" - how deep do you want to go?

Personally, I hope to get as far away from "The Kingdom of God" as I can.

Why? Because ideas that I don't believe in like "soul" and "sin" are being used to oppress me in the name of that very Kingdom.

Being genuine is not enough. This is about life and death.

Living breathing thinking feeling loving hoping yearning people are going to endure pain and even death because of this ruling.

All because people like you believe so strongly in a modern interpretation of an ancient collection of novels that don't even say what they have interpreted.

> As to "life", "breath", "personhood", "ensoulment", and "birth" - how deep do you want to go?

To me, it's not so much about the distance as the journey. I would rather live a short life in liberty than a long one in oppression.

How far do you, and the rest of the conservative Christians behind this decision, want to push us? How far will be bend to your collective whims?

Today, the answer is clearly, "Too far."

Rights do not necessitate dialogue.

Let me start with this: why should we as rational human beings assume life doesn't begin at conception? Is there a more logical place to ascribe life beginning, whether it be human or otherwise?

However murder is defined as taking the life of a human being. Conception is not a logical place to ascribe the beginning of a human being.

As an example, is the loss of a zygote, or a blastocyte, or an ectopic implantation to be considered the death of a human being?

Birth control actually prevents implantation rather than conception every once in a while [2], would taking birth control be considered manslaughter if proven it prevented implantation rather than conception? This is actually what many are worried about now that Roe v Wade is down, Griswald vs Connecticut could be up next.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage

[2] https://www.guttmacher.org/antiabortion-activists-their-own-...

What about spontaneous abortion (miscarriage)? If the women is found negligent such as taking excessive risks (smoking, drinking, excessive age, some strenuous physical activity) they are also technically committing manslaughter correct? Again regardless of how viable it is to prosecute such a crime, are they committing a crime?

It is both wrong and a crime to forget your child in a hot car to the point where they die. It isn't murder but it would be on your conscience regardless of whether the state prosecuted you or not. As I believe the unborn have an equal right to life as the born children it makes logical sense to enact laws such that crack use resulting in deformed children is a prosecutorial offense tantamount to neglect of born children. Of course, there is also criminal negligence vs. accidental crimes and all of that still applies.

EDIT: miscarriage isn't abortion, I'm not sure about its relevance to the discussion?

What say you on ectopic pregnancies where it will never be viable and poses a threat to the mother?

Of course leaving a baby in a car is potentially manslaughter nobody is arguing that because there is general agreement that child is a person. The question is why you believe a fertilized egg is a person? Why is a separate sperm and egg combination not also considered a person? Why is conception the bright line? Why would you leave something as serious as homicide up to the state to decide?

Naturally in cases where you can only save one life but not both it makes no sense to let mother and baby die, this is logical and provides a terrible ethical dilemma for doctors to figure out where the borderline is - at what point is the risk to the mother so great that it warrants an abortion? These types of dilemmas are common as far as I understand in medical ethics.

I believe an unborn baby is a _person_ with the same intrinsic human rights as you and I, so I see no logical difference except in degree of uncertainty between the baby in the car and an abortifacient killing an unimplanted zygote. Of course the degree of uncertainty is very important legally. If I through an unforeseeable action end up being responsible for the death of an employee of mine, it matters how certain the outcome was based on my negligence. Maybe no one will ever know that I was in some way responsible but it will live on my conscience nonetheless.

Involuntary manslaughter does not require conscious choice to kill, premeditate conscious choice is murder, you brought manslaughter into the argument.

Just as someone drinking and driving does not intend to kill someone they can still be found guilty. A woman older than 35 having unprotected sex which could lead to geriatric pregnancy could be considered to putting an unborn person at risk due to much increased chance of spontaneous abortion.

>These types of dilemmas are common as far as I understand in medical ethics.

These choices will be easy in states that outlaw abortion with no exceptions because there will be no choice.

>I believe an unborn baby is a _person_ with the same intrinsic human rights as you and I

If zygote is a person does that mean freezing embryos that may never be used is homicide? Is embryo selection in IVF also homicide when only picking some of the embryos?

No state as far as I'm aware is outlawing abortion in the case of emergencies in the health of the mother, this is a common misunderstanding people have about anti-abortion legislation.

More on IVF tomorrow if I have time :)

Abortifacient - a substance that induces abortion. How is this different from abortion, that makes no sense logically or grammatically.

If a zygote is a person, then any action by another person which kills it is a homicide. If taking a birth control pill prevents implantation then you have committed homicide.

My point is you define abortion as a conscious choice, but that is not the definition of abortion, that is specifically induced abortion. You said just like manslaughter is not murder they are different, however manslaughter is a crime as is murder. Are you saying manslaughter should not be punishable or that abortion that comes from non-copious choice is not manslaughter even though a zygote is a person and the law would normally define that as manslaughter?

>No state as far as I'm aware is outlawing abortion in the case of emergencies in the health of the mother, this is a common misunderstanding people have about anti-abortion legislation.

Louisiana had a trigger law on the books since 2006 that did not have exceptions for ectopic pregnancies, luckily a democratic senator helped push a revision in the law very recently to make the exception [1].

The point being the is left up to the states and is also homicide if the fetus is a person. Hopefully it will be a justifiable homicide in all states.

[1] https://gov.louisiana.gov/index.cfm/newsroom/detail/3727

I use manslaughter as an analogy to explain gradations of homicide in terms of intent. I've been very clear that I don't think abortifacients as birth control make sense to be prosecuted at all, they aren't manslaughter in the legal sense because there's no way of knowing if anyone was killed or not!

It looks like your Louisiana case fixed a law that didn't make those important exceptions explicit (probably because it was a useless law anyway, only to signal a pro-life stance with no legal weight to it, but who knows?). This is good, the exceptions mentioned are just and necessary.

Not all homicides are illegal, all weigh on the conscience though - whether they be a soldier in war or a doctor performing euthanasia. Certain classes of homicide should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law to provide a just society and minimize the repercussions of injustice by penalizing perpetrators. In the case of a person making a conscious choice to end the life of an unborn baby they are making a decision that humans have no right to make in a way that leaves clear evidence and can be prosecuted. By the way, I personally think that doctors performing abortions should be prosecuted and not mothers.

Christians believe that all human beings are corrupt to the core. We take every aspect of the technological progress we've made and twist it to evil purposes, that's just what we do as humans. This is related to our dignity, our capacity for doing things gives us a unique capacity for evil. Some evil we do has terrible repercussions on the world at large and abortion is one of these evils. It unnaturally shapes our demographics in this country and in every country where it is allowed unrestricted. For example the black population of America is unnaturally small in proportion to the white population because of Roe, and there are more men than women in India and China because of abortion. Anti-abortion legislation doesn't help get those millions of lives back, it doesn't give them justice either. In my mind its primary purpose is to curb the wrongdoing in the future.

Your stance is a zygote is a person, yet you believe that killing one should not be prosecuted in the same manner as killing a born human it seems. Manslaughter does not require intent and is still a crime, either you believe the zygote is a person or you don't, if a person then the laws regarding killing a person should be the same. If you are ok with different laws between a zygote and born human then you must believe the zygote is less than human.

>This is good, the exceptions mentioned are just and necessary.

Something as serious as homicide should be codified at the federal level right? Why would you leave something like that for interpretations between states?

>Christians believe that all human beings are corrupt to the core.

Christians also believe god created everything including designing humans and their corruption correct? Where did evil come from? Did god create evil or is evil bigger than god and was not created by him? Again where did evil come from?

> Something as serious as homicide should be codified at the federal level right? Why would you leave something like that for interpretations between states?

Believe it or not, the exact opposite is true: https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/state-crimes...

> Christians also believe god created everything including designing humans and their corruption correct?

Genesis 3 describes the origin of sin. God created people with the capacity to sin, He even set up a situation where they had complete agency of choice in the matter which is pretty amazing philosophically with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, we used this agency to choose sin and continue to do so to this day.

'Evil' as it pertains to human sin is a choice to behave contrary to God's will. God gave us the ability to be evil but didn't make us evil. In some sense it's part of the dignity of humankind that we have the capacity to do evil at all, but it is also our fall. With the fall in Genesis 3 we opened a rift between God and humankind, basically we ruined the relationship. We believe Christ gives a way to reconcile the relationship by paying the price for our evil on the cross.

Is that what you call someone not believing the same thing as you and trying to get specific answers to logical questions? I am trying to understand why someone seems so fixated on personhood beginning at conception. I personally believe there is no good good line during pregnancy when someone becomes a person, it is a process that takes time, anything we pick is arbitrary to satisfy human law. For instance a zygote can split and become two people (identical twins) so I would think if you believe in a soul as the basis for personhood, ensoulment can not occur at conception.

Roe was a compromise, an imperfect law for a complicated matter where by it got progressively harder to get an abortion as the pregnancy progresses. Not only did it grant the right to an abortion, it also prevented it later in pregnancy, that is now left to the state.

>If you kill someone and no one ever knew including you then law is kind of irrelevant right?

Getting away with manslaughter does not change the fact whether it is a crime. You seem to be avoiding answering the question, do you believe taking birth control that prevents implantation is a crime? Regardless of the ability to prosecute, is it a crime of manslaughter? If not then obviously you do not think the same law applies to zygotes as people.

>Believe it or not, the exact opposite is true

So you are ok with a state outlawing abortion with no exceptions as Louisiana had for some time and there should be no federal protection for that situation?

Do you believe Griswold vs Connecticut should be overturned as well?

>'Evil' as it pertains to human sin is a choice to behave contrary to God's will.

How can the universe and anything it which was created by god act contrary to his will? That makes no logical sense, it was his will to design it as such in every detail. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the buck stops there. He also is omnipotent and knows everything including the actions we will take, or do you believe he does not in fact know everything?

If god has no control over our actions and is even surprised by them then there must be a source of entropy that did not come from god, who created that?

>we opened a rift between God and humankind, basically we ruined the relationship.

How does one ruin a relationship with their designer unless the designer is schizophrenic? If I design a program I do not blame the program for bugs, that's stupid, it is my failing. Perhaps there was an OS or hardware failure that caused the problem, but as god I designed them too! There is no one else to blame, certainly not my creation.

So what should we do in your opinion? Are the unborn entitled to protection by our laws or not?

>Roe was a compromise, an imperfect law for a complicated matter

Roe wasn't a law, it was a legal precedent dehumanizing a class of people for another class's benefit. Now we do have actual laws that are made by legislatures across the country to try to do justice to a complicated subject as you admit it is.

>So you are ok with a state outlawing abortion with no exceptions

Of course not, this is the opposite of what I said.

>Do you believe Griswold vs Connecticut should be overturned as well?

There is a class of 'living constitution' decisions made by the supreme court during this era that are contrary to rule of law and make the supreme court into some sort of super-legislature. I think people should have access to contraceptives, I'm not sure it's guaranteed by the constitution though. Not all contraceptives are abortificients, even those should be accessible for the reasons I gave above, health concerns primarily.

>How can the universe and anything it which was created by god act contrary to his will?

Yeah, it's crazy! Christians think we have real agency even given the sovereignty of God. It borders on paradoxical. God surely knows the path we will go down and judged it necessary for some reason. Apparently He preferred beings capable of deciding to follow Him of their own free will rather than automatons.

>If I design a program I do not blame the program for bugs, that's stupid, it is my failing.

What's more impressive though? Designing a program that can choose between multiple options and determine its fate or designing a program completely constrained to make the choices I orchestrate? And yet, we would be comfortable saying a programmer would be totally justified if they shut down or even deleted a program erring as you've described!

I think Roe was a good compromise affording choice to the mother up to a point while protecting the unborn later. Again why do you fixate on conception, what turns cells merging and replicating into a person and why is it at the point when the sperm and egg merge, not before and not sometime after? Why did you choose that line to take your stand?

>Roe wasn't a law, it was a legal precedent dehumanizing a class of people for another class's benefit. Now we do have actual laws that are made by legislatures across the country to try to do justice to a complicated subject as you admit it is.

Decisions made by the Supreme Court are law regardless of whether you like them or not, specifically case law. Trying to act like it wasn't a real law is a petty argument, it obviously was until overturned. I am skeptical you believe this should be left to the states since because if you truly believe this murder why would you be ok with letting some state allow it. You seem to think this is very simple reducing a person down to a zygote but not a sperm and egg in a very black and white manner.

>I think people should have access to contraceptives, I'm not sure it's guaranteed by the constitution though.

The constitution does not guarantee the right to assault rifles specifically, are you ok with leaving that decision up to the states? Arms is a very open ended term as is the right to privacy this must be interpreted by the court to have specific meaning, currently allowing assault rifles but not nuclear arms and contraception but wire tapping is allowed with a warrant.

>Apparently He preferred beings capable of deciding to follow Him of their own free will rather than automatons.

The distinction between free will and automatons has no meaning to a being that creates everything including free will itself. To have true free will not predetermined by god would require outside input, it would require a source of entropy that was not created by god. The only way god could not control our actions is if there is uncertainty from some other source otherwise we are doing exactly as we where designed. Either the universe is deterministic as god designed or is non-deterministic due to outside input, simple logic.

>What's more impressive though? Designing a program that can choose between multiple options and determine its fate or designing a program completely constrained to make the choices I orchestrate? And yet, we would be comfortable saying a programmer would be totally justified if they shut down or even deleted a program erring as you've described!

This still make no logical sense, did god create everything including all choices possible or not? God created the constraints unless you believe there is something beyond god a greater universe created by whom?

If a programmer creates a sentient AI that makes its own choices I guarantee it will be getting input not created by the programmer that helps form and drive its choices. A programmer is not god and did not create everything, and if he did I would hope he would not be so stupid as to blame his own program for bad choices based on input he created!

>Decisions made by the Supreme Court are law regardless of whether you like them or not, specifically case law.

This is a fair point. I don't want to equivocate on the word 'law'. I was referring to law as codified by elected legislature but you're right that 'common law' is also law in a different sense :)

>The constitution does not guarantee the right to assault rifles specifically, are you ok with leaving that decision up to the states?

I guess? If we throw out the constitution we'd better have a replacement system with an equal force behind it. Otherwise history can dictate what happens next when a power vacuum forms in a pluralistic society: authoritarianism.

Free will is kind of a paradox. If you design a game, you also design the space of possible games that can be played (the game tree). You can also determine a function on the space of these games to label some as 'good' and others as 'evil'. When you create players of the game and they choose to go down an 'evil' tree was that your fault? I think this is where the paradox comes in. You can make fancy arguments about entropy all you want but for a Christian we believe the players in the game have real agency of choice.

Christians aren't the only ones who believe in agency - justice (retributive justice specifically) requires agency, otherwise it makes no sense to penalize someone for wrongdoing as it was their environment that caused their behavior _always_ rather than their own conscious choice. If you want to live in a society with no retributive justice that's a fair and even perhaps logically consistent viewpoint but it isn't one that Christians share. Our worldview holds that the economy of justice is fundamentally retributive justice because we have real agency of choice.

Both the sperm and egg are "alive" so no "life" does not begin there. Any sperm and egg combination together is a unique genetic sequence, both before and after conception. This also cannot be a unique "person" because identical twins form after conception into two unique people. Same with clones, the same genetic sequence does not make a unique person, what ever personhood is comes later, it is a potential person just like a sperm and egg is before conception.

There is no single bright line I can find, as I said any line drawn is arbitrary to satisfy law. I believe Roe to be a good multistage compromise based on trimesters, you believe conception to a be a single line for the law, neither has any scientific or religious basis. During biblical times "quickening" was thought to be when ensoulment occurred, first movement.

>If you design a game, you also design the space of possible games that can be played (the game tree). You can also determine a function on the space of these games to label some as 'good' and others as 'evil'. When you create players of the game and they choose to go down an 'evil' tree was that your fault?

As god you didn't just create the game, you created the laws of physics that allows the game to exist and the players themselves. God designed our brains and how we make decisions.

This isn't a fancy argument this is very simple, did god create everything or not (including evil) and does he know everything or not (including what choices we will make)?

Again its seems rather stupid to blame your own designed creation for making choices that you know they will make in a universe you created for them with laws of nature designed by you. This makes no logical sense unless there is outside influence to allow for surprising choices. Either god understands exactly how everything works because he created all of it, or he doesn't and can be surprised by bad choices and blame this "agency" that comes from somewhere outside of himself.

>If you want to live in a society with no retributive justice that's a fair and even perhaps logically consistent viewpoint but it isn't one that Christians share.

Of course I don't, but it's not hard for me, I don't believe in an omnipotent god that designed me just to punish me for making incorrect choices. There seems to be uncertainty baked into all things that creates agency and choices matter, I have personal responsibility for my choices because they affect the world around me, this is logical. I don't believe things are predestined or known ahead of time nor that some super being designed me and is judging me for how I perform in their sandbox, it is a ridiculous illogical notion.

'Life begins at conception' is just a nominally secularized reference to the doctrine of ensoulment, not a concept that is morally relevant to question of whether abortion should be legally permissible (or even interesting).

If we cared about the mere fact of life in the relevant way, we'd be interested in legal restrictions on pulling weeds. If the concern was with living tissue with human DNA, we'd be fretting over amputations. Even in the case of human life, not every end to human life is an equivalent of 'murder' to be categorically prohibited to the exclusion of all other considerations. And even if we grant that abortion is always morally wrong, it still does not automatically follow that categorical legal prohibition is a sound social response to the moral issue.

There's an expansive philosophical literature on the ethics of abortion that actually seeks to identify and address the moral core of the issue and its relation to law. The phrase 'life begins at conception' is just a political slogan for a religious dogma that very, very quickly falls apart when you try to use it ss an actual starting point for reasoning about abortion policy. Trotting it out pretty much represents a refusal to engage in good faith with secular thought on the issue.

If murder is wrong for the born, what about the unborn makes that wrong lesser?

Maybe the most clear case comes in this way:

Christians believe that human beings are chosen by God just as much as they choose God (both must be true to be saved). This is most clear in Romans 8:29-30.

> For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

So God does decide who to save, he "foreknows" them, whatever that means. Now there are several examples of people being called by God, many of which happen before they are born.

Jeremiah is called by God before his birth in Jeremiah 1:5:

> Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

Paul is called by God before his birth in Galatians 1:15:

> But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, ...

These are just some examples, there are more references to unborn in the Bible. The argument goes like this: if it's wrong to kill another being imbued with the image of God, fully capable of being foreknown by Him, called, predestined, justified and glorified, it is equally wrong to kill them before birth as opposed to after birth and the Bible makes no distinction between the two in terms of how this process works, evidenced by the above passages.

Weird Calvinist predestination silliness aside.

> As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.

Quite simply, according to the Bible life begins at conception, our capacity for good and evil begins at conception, God chooses us at conception and our status of being in the 'image of God' starts at conception.

The above verses and doctrine are not 'Calvinist', Calvinism is the belief that God's choice is the primary cause of salvation as opposed to man's choice, but that distinction is irrelevant here.

Maybe so, but apparently it's been condemned from the earliest times in Christianity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christian_thought_o....

I don't really know the Bible, but I'm guessing Jesus probably didn't spend a lot of time condemning literal murder either, so it's probably not safe to assume that means he thought preventing greed is more important than preventing murder.

This doesn't at all support the notion that Christianity has always been concerned with abortion as a corrolary to murder, which is at the center of contemporary conservative religious discourse on the issue.

What I'm saying is, this happens even without fervent support from the religious right.

This also likely isn't the final chapter, as the opinion also gives thoughts to overturning rulings related to contraception and same sex marriage.

That means the lower taxes and less regulations were likely desired for their own sake not as a trade off.

Christians crazily believe Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was God incarnate within the womb. As crazy as that may be, it logically follows they would adamantly be against ending human lives before they’re born.

No, its not.

The use of state power to exterminate trans people is the next chapter, and its already well under way. More broadly, much of the next series of chapters is using selective application of “religious liberty” to establish unique and particular entitlement for favored Christian groups across the board, by dismissing the sincerity of other beliefs and/or judging the burdens imposed on them by a different subjective standard in applying the “substantial burden” test than is applied on favored Christian beliefs.

Viewed even more broadly, the focus is on dismantling substantive anti-discrimination protections for non-favored groups extending beyond religion by similar means (as is the case for the above trends, we’ve already seen some elements of this, such as the judicial dismantling of much of the Voting Rights Act; but that is just the beginning, there is much more to come.)

EDIT: Heck, this isn’t even the end of this chapter, if one considers the way this is part of the integrated campaign against sexual and reproductive freedom and the right of privacy established in the line of cases running (through Roe) back to Griswold v. Connecticut, which are all under attack, and span issues beyond abortion to include contraception, same sex marriage, sodomy laws, etc.

I might agree in an abstract manner it is not a final chapter the same way just imposing red flag laws is not the end goal for gun control activists, but the paragraphs that follow are a little out there.

Then you aren't paying attention to the actual legislation being passed in States, the advocacy of leading members of the Republican Party, and even the things explicitly stated in the writings of Supreme Court justices on this case.

> It is on par with Sirius XM Channel channel reacting to the news by saying, and I am paraphrasing, ‘they are going after all our rights next’.

Thomas literally (to anyone who understands the scope and impact of the Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence) said that in his concurrence.

edit re concurrence:

I am going through SCOTUS blog(1) and the actual text(2) and I am not seeing the same thing you do. Could you elaborate a little?

(1)https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/06/supreme-court-overturns-c... (2)https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

In his defense, Jesus came to fulfill the old law and not abolish it, as directly stated by himself. The old law has the 5th commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," which in the times of Jesus was unanimously interpreted to cover abortion (Psalm 139 being one reason why) and Jesus, by not speaking against this interpretation (unlike other interpretations), left that view unchanged.

The core point was that most of the message and teachings of Jesus were clearly, unambiguously about social justice and charity, and yet modern Christians care way more about Old Testament moral rules than the actual Christian message, what Jesus clearly cared about the most, the last, the meek, the poor.

The modern Christian votes for racist ultra-rich that only profess hate towards everyone that's different from them in order to get abortion and gay marriage banned. That's the worst corruption of the Christian message possible, in my opinion, and makes those people phony believers to my eyes. They use their as an indentitarian way to distinguish them from the others, which is absolutely at odds with the ecumenical message of Jesus Christ.

Care about the young not being able to start families first, about those who are in need and can't make their ends meet, and then take care of the rest.

You could say it is a matter of perspective, as to the Christian, the unborn child is the most last, the most meek, the most poor, and the most helpless compared to any person including the mother, and thus logically requires precedence.

Is the fetus a child or is it not? If it is not, then the mother should take precedence. If it is, in fact, a child, then it must be protected as such.

@timbit42 Not true. https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=31863293&goto=threads%...

Exodus 21:22-23 recounts a story of two men who are fighting and injure a pregnant woman, resulting in her subsequent miscarriage. The verse explains that if the only harm done is the miscarriage, then the perpetrator must pay a fine. However, if the pregnant person is gravely injured, the penalty shall be a life for a life as in homicides.

Jesus was Jewish and fetuses aren't considered persons under Jewish law.

A counterargument would be that the Jewish law does not address whether they are persons, but rather focuses on the fine being the solution to the matter. The law also only addresses if the incident should occur by accident (the miscarriage being a side effect), whereas deliberately inducing a miscarriage was not included.

EDIT: Adding more information (also due to reply timers):

@DangItBobby The verse in question:

"When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life."

A few notes.

1. The law only addresses unintentional injury, and does not address intentional injuries.

2. The law does not specify "injury." It could mean an injury that occurs to the pregnant woman, the unborn child, or both. One way to interpret the passage is that if the woman is caused to have an early delivery, then the penalty is a fine, but any further injury to the child is covered under the lex talionis law of “an eye for an eye.”

3. The law actually calls the fetus a "child," and takes foregranted that the woman "is with child" which pretty clearly shows that the personhood was taken foregranted.

It doesn't say "with child" in the original Hebrew, that's added in your translation.

The way it's translated into English these days directly from the Hebrew is

> If men strive, and wound a pregnant woman so that her fruit be expelled, but no harm befell [her], then shall he be fined as her husband shall assess, and the matter placed before the judges. But if harm befell [her], then shall you give life for life.

And yet... If the woman is harmed, it's treated as if you harmed a human (eye for an eye), but if the fetus is harmed, there's a fine. It's quite clear that the fetus is not anywhere near the same importance in this law, not that this should have anything to do with modern law.

Nope, that's covered. In the verse, accidental damage to the human mother was punishable by death.

Then how do you explain this:

- When the Bible commands abortion: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/02/03/bible-c...

- How to perform an abortion, according to the Bible: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/allsetfree/2021/11/how-to-perf...

Exodus 21:22-23 - Abortion isn't murder. It's property damage.

Numbers 5:11–31 - The biblical version of the "abortion pill", used to test a wife's fidelity.