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.