This is a small minority that just needs 51% of voter turnout in a particular state (or not even that in a heavily gerrymandered one), and they can control the lives of anyone living in or even traveling through an entire region of the US with apparently very little federal protection (and certainly no representation for the travelers)

This ruling is disastrous and shows the capriciousness of the current court in interpreting precedent to mean whatever is popular with their party. The 14th can amendment be limited but the second cannot, the first can mean infinite money in politics but the 5th does not mean Miranda warnings are required anymore.

Edit -[0] this link is not hypothetical, Thomas’s solo concurring opinion calls these cases out by name to be reconsidered by the court in light of this recent decision, and shows members of the court are absolutely interested in returning these to the realm of the states.

Earlier this month in Egbert v Boule, the Supreme Court said you have no right to sue a federal employee or the agency for which they they work over violations of your 4th amendment rights, as long as the agency has a complaint procedure (operated by that same agency). Yesterday in Vega v. Tekoh they decided that you don't have a cause of action against a police officer who doesn't read you your rights (although such testimony remains inadmissible).

In the months and years to co come, ultra-conservatives aim to eliminate birth control and install an overbearing theocratic government. They are not shy about saying so, nor are they a marginal fringe lacking influence. There was already one serious (albeit poorly executed) effort to interfere with the constitutional transfer of power. Conventional politics are very much over in the US.

I think that would affect a lot of people.. they might be shy to speak out, but if suddenly it's not available they might vote.

I do wonder if those trends actually deliver more turnout or less. I suspect less actually, as non-results are actually pretty demotivating in altering behavior.

I’m not a historian but hopefully someone here is, and is able to make an educated guess of what the actual trends are.

Russia didn’t really regress, did it? It experimented with 8 years of democracy after a thousand years of authoritarianism and went back to its comfort zone. Poland and Hungary as part of that soviet bloc once is affected by those old soviet ghosts still driving some of the culture. The US doesn’t have that long authoritarian past and is still pretty rebellious

India…well it’s an enigma anyway with such ancient traditions and culture, it’s going to be an outlier anyway.

But then again, I’m not a historian. So this is just some guys on the internet’s interpretation.

My fear is with the recent increase in wealth inequality democracy in America may no longer be the stable phase

Sadly, in the US, we have a terrible system where schools are locally funded, and poor people get poor schools. Under this system, socioeconomic class self-perpetuates.

I think you've just described racism.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

My point is that the resulting behaviors and discrimination can still be racist, even if they don't have their ultimate roots in racism itself.

From your link:

> also : behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief : racial discrimination or prejudice

> : the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

Edit: Anyway, I do recognize that the distinction you're pointing out does have implications for the best way to address the problems.

I hope our discrimination problems fall more along class lines, because that's much easier to solve by implementing economic policies to reduce economic inequalities. Government programs won't change people's races (well, non-terrifying government programs, at least), but policies can change people's economic class.

It's also entirely possible that different areas of the country have different mixes of classism and racism. My wife is of a different race, and our son is mixed race, and my wife and I both went to top-tier schools, so my social group is almost certainly less racist and more classist than the US median. It's very difficult and dangerous to extrapolate my lived truth to the whole nation.

Every class tranche uses fashion to differentiate themselves from the tranche just below, while imitating the tranches above. The upper class used to wear fancy clothes to differentiate themselves from the middle class; the middle class started wearing the clothes of the upper class to try and join them; boom, ghetto chic becomes popular among ivy-leaguers. (They don't have to worry about being mistaken for actual lower-class people; the cultural differences are big enough that that isn't a concern).

This helps maintain in-group selection with all the wonderful effects it has.

But that’s not what I’m interested in though. False analogs and convenient distinctions are easy to come by. What I’m looking for is a historical trend of voting behavior during a democratic regression.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/15/1857976/--The-Only-...

US democracy, at least from an European POV, is completely and fundamentally broken, to the point that it will need a civil war to reset it to at least somewhat sane levels:

- The GOP as a party is so far gone off the rails, so many actual Conservatives have left that there is barely any intra-party resistance left to the Tea Party, Trump and QAnon ideologues.

- A large enough part of the GOP voter base is similarly radicalized after decades of brainwashing. Seriously, the kind of stuff that Fox "News" airs daily is scary. They will keep preventing reasonable politicians to challenge people like MTG.

- The Democrat Party, which is center-right in its actual political doings from an European POV, has other issues: gerontocratic people like Feinstein or Biden who have long ago lost touch with the 99%, corruption, incompetence, and most importantly the lack of backbone. There have been many chances to codify access to abortions, everyone knew how thin the ice was, and the Democrats let many chances pass to permanently close that risk - only because they were scared of losing one of their major selling points.

- Wealth disparity. The US is just plain shocking - you have people like Musk and Bezos worth hundreds of billions of dollars, money they can't ever truly spend even if they have a dozen children... and at the same time people die because they have to stretch out their expensive insulin or can't afford an epi-pen. Or they freeze to death because even while employed they cannot afford a home.

- Climate change, assuming that the US will be able / willing to do anything past November, will need an awful lot of investments to handle. The Republicans won't grant any money (either because of "financial stability" or because "electric cars are for woke softies"), and the young people see the clock ticking. Some of them will radicalize, up to and including terrorism - why else were there snipers on the Supreme Court?

Add on top of that the aftermath of covid - which still isn't over! - and the costs of the Ukraine war... and there's a perfect storm scenario of enormously destructive potential.

It is difficult combining low population areas with high population areas when they got completely different culture, wealth, and natural resources. Mistrust, suspicions, polarization, alienation and otherism abound.

The trend is however not impossible to break, and there is scientific understanding of those forces if people were willing to take them in. A key finding is to not shove culture symbols into peoples face, a proposition that scarce few want to agree in the name of cooperation. When people feel that their culture is threatened the natural repose seems to be the opposite and display as much of cultural symbols as possible.

Oh I do. And I know the reason behind that headline - the fact is we absolutely need gas infrastructure to allow diversifying from Russia in the short term while preventing dozens of millions of people from freezing in winter or to allow gas peaker plants to assist solar and wind so we can shut down coal and the decades-old nuclear clunkers.

Si vis pacem para bellum, and there will be war. I honestly am unable to think of a scenario that will prevent a collapse of at least the US democracy, if not the rest of the world with it (because let's face it, the US picked up the tab to ensure the freedom of democracies while us Europeans stood aside). The only thing capable of stopping the spiral towards death is if the Democrats win a solid majority in November... but that is completely unrealistic.

I used to be a pro-American when I was a child blinded by US propaganda and television. Americans are heroes are what I always thought.!

Then the Iraq, Afghanistan wars, the coups in Libya and the Syrian War - encouraged via Obama's so-called 'moderate rapist rebels' completely changed my mind. What CNN said was completely different from what my Libyan and Syrian colleagues said. So Much Lying. It was around that time I did extensive reading of American history and realised I was a moron.

> US picked up the tab to ensure the freedom of democracies while us Europeans stood aside

Cite! The US does anything it wants to keep corporate power corporate. We topple lots of democracies. US is squarely imperialist.

See my comment about Smedley Butler from earlier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31469671

Sure, the US was somewhat imperialist a century ago, but that's long gone.

I have less than zero sympathy.

I mean, specifically there has been no national law mandating Covid vaccine use. There were some restrictions applied differently to vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

2. https://law.stanford.edu/2022/01/20/a-look-at-the-supreme-co....

A human right for bodily autonomy would include the right to decide what and what not to wear on their own bodies.

it's a slippery slope and out of scope of what government should be regulating if one views bodily autonomy as important.

There are a number of technical reasons why the mRNA vaccines should be safer than existing vaccines. In any case, there were non mRNA alternatives. I believe that most life-scientists are just curious and trying to do good work. I don't really trust corporate big (whatever), but pharma in this case. I do trust the individual scientists I know to be caring and empathetic people and to do their best to save lives.

This is the exact argument the conservatives have against abortion.

Non-Contagious Things that that kill people = bodily autonomy.

Sounds arbitrary.

My body my choice right?

It only seems arbitrary to me if I look at it from a narcissistic perspective.

Killing a baby is an effect on someone around(technically inside) a person.

So while it's not contagious, the effect of killing someone is the same.

And therefore no bodily autonomy should be allowed in this case.

It's the exact same logic used for covid restrictions.

You don't have bodily autonomy in cases where you can hurt others.

That said, the fundamental disagreement w.r.t abortion is whether or when a fetus is a person with the same legal protections as a born child, and to what extent to weigh this question, or these potential rights against the rights of the mother.

Abortion necessarily involves the killing of an organism. Anyone arguing otherwise is not basing their argument in reality. However, many commonly accepted and legal actions almost inevitably involve the killing of organisms: walking, driving, excavation, building. Our legal systems typically even allows for the killing of complex, almost-surely sentient creatures for food, and other purposes. This extends as far as the killing of humans under certain very limited circumstances. The essential disagreement on abortion is whether and when the killing that is an inescapable part of abortion is permissible, justified, lawful, and generally not murder.

The bill has however an explicit exception for abortions, saying that regardless if a fetuses are a person, it doesn't mean abortions should be illegal.

fetuses aren't citizens but they are considered people... in some states.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to ask you about this multiple times already. We ban accounts that keep doing it, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31873367

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31872895

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31871515

Well know if I'm right in November.

I live in europe and US dems are pretty much in line with our right leaning parties. Except for a handful of extremes.

The US republicans are very unique to US in that their opinions are very close knitted to US specific laws. So I cant really think of a similar party anywhere else.

But yea. A swedish left and US dems are very very far from achother politically.

Democrats are a right party with authoritarian tendencies. Not left at all.

Maybe your views have been distorted by right wing news calling Biden “far left” which is an objective falsehood.

I’ve seen over half the nations on earth and I stand behind the OP assessment of the US Dem party as center right. Do investigate a bit before knee jerk responding from a position of falsehood

The primary constituency of both parties is corporate America, whom they rely on for donations.

As far as I understand it, the fundamental and (seemingly) globally agreed upon divide is that Far Left = The State is in [presumably benevolent] control, and Far Right = The State is in [presumably malicious] control, while regular Left = The State knows what's best for The People (because it is derived from pure democracy) while regular Right = The People know what's best for themselves (and choose representatives for situations where multiple individuals are involved).

How far off am I, from a global perspective?

All of those are things that even the far right in Europe wouldn't dare suggest, yet the leftmost party in the US stands behind them, or is at least willing to accept them.

Voter ID is a non controversial issue in many countries. In the US I've seen arguments against it from both sides. Disparate impact concerns from the left, privacy and freedom from the feds on the right.

The Left does not criticize voter ID per se, the Left criticizes that many people are effectively locked out from voting because obtaining ID cards can be an utter pain in the ass.

I think this view of right/left as an axis of government optimizing for freedom/control is only very prevalent in particularly right-wing commonwealth discourse.

The law and construction of social systems in the common-law English tradition stem from a position that one can do anything unless barred by law, including in situations where it hurts others. The law of equity, largely derived from religious canon law, existed as a separate system layered upon the common law court system of 'hard rules' to fix situations wherein the application of common-law would lead to morally suspect outcomes. The situation in civilian countries, by contrast, generally define a sphere of acceptable behavior which explicitly excludes abusive and intentionally harmful behavior - the restrictions on behavior are baked in. Civilian-derived systems are far more common than those from the commonwealth, and accordingly the types of discussions had in each are very different on this point.

The result is it's very rare to conceive of left and right in terms of freedom, because most other nations derive from systems in which freedom is already viewed as one element to be balanced against other considerations rather than the unmitigated chief virtue upon which all analysis is founded.

Even in the commonwealth, progressive discourse is not driven in terms of de-jure freedoms, it's driven by de-facto freedoms, largely economic and social freedoms. The government only needs to be restrained when it restricts social rights or maintain economic systems that strip dignity from individuals. Generally, however, these aren't discussed in terms of the degree of freedoms afforded, but rather in terms of rights and equality before the law.

What?

I lived in America for over a decade before I could say that I begun to understand it. I have seen people like you who visit my home country and claim to understand it. All they do is project their faulty models onto our values and culture.

I literally spent most of my rhetorical time abroad trying to convince folks that there was any difference at all between our two main parties.

You can scoff at me, but you will encounter this conclusion over and over again. The world sees our two parties as beholden to corporate interests, as are centrist parties all over the globe. Money apparently makes the world go around

You sound like you didn't even go outside Europe.

There are two scales, nationalism-globalism, and capitalism-intervention.

Most countries have very little difference between their capitalism-intervention side, because there's only one country where someone who supports free markets and capitalism could move to, this results in the right wing of all the countries becoming purely nationalist supporting govt intervention facing globalist left wing supporting their kind of govt intervention.

For example my dad in my home country has very little opinion on capitalism/intervention scale. But on the nationalism/globalism scale he has a strong opinion. If I were to describe the economic policies of the Democratic party, he wouldn't truly form an opinion, but the moment I will start describing the social policies he would immediately understand it and call it 'the leftist party'.

From the perspective of a country that is to the left of the Democrats, yes, they appear centre-right.

I'm not sure you've can offer a truly global perspective from which to accurately determine whether the US Gov is left or right leaning, but if I had to predict such an answer I'd say it would tip right.

Edit: okay, did some hunting and found this: https://archive.ph/PjNEF

Check the bubble chart. The Dems are in fact globally left-leaning, according to the Manifesto Project described in the article. But check the relative positions from e.g. a British perspective (since that happens to be shown in the chart). The Dems are to the right of the UK's left-wing Labour Party, while the Republicans are right of the right-wing Conservatives. The overall British perspective of the US would be of a right-leaning country.

I've not looked at other perspectives since I'm in mobile and I've not going to deep-dive the Manifesto Project just now. But I wonder which are the nations which have an "overall" perspective of the US as left-leaning?

Meanwhile, the US reaches as far right as the EU does, but in the other direction, it barely reaches the middle of the EU (i.e. total) spectrum.

So it's not that Democrats are adjacent to the far right. It's just that they're more right wing than left wing. They're obviously still much closer to the centre-left than they are to the far-right, but they are also further from the left extreme than they are from the right extreme

The most sensible minimal extension (to 2d) that I know of is to distinguish between how much you value personal freedom on one axis and economic freedom on the other. That still leaves out a lot, but is the best indicator of which side you'll likely to end up on regarding most political contentions, given the simplicity of the model.

There are actually two popular models of that kind, the Nolan Chart (example quiz [1], your spectrum is the vertical axis) and the Political Compass (example quiz [2], your spectrum is the secondary diagonal).

[1] https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/

[2] https://www.politicalcompass.org/

Also, btw, the fascist movement recruited much of it's ideological and political concepts and initial core activist base from syndicalist/corporatist socialist circles and was strongly anti-capitalist/pro-socialist and anti-conservative. Benito Mussolini was for a time chief editor of the Italian Socialist Party's newspaper "Avanti!" and member of the party's National Directorate.

In Europe there is a plethora of parties all throughout the political spectrum.

How are they beholden to people if they can disenfranchise people via gerrymandering? The primary check against arbitrary action of an elected official is to vote them out, but gerrymandering allows them to significantly lower the responsiveness of voting to their benefit.

You can't argue that you should support gerrymandering on the basis of democratic representation given that gerrymandering DIRECTLY MITIGATES the effectiveness of democratic representation.

Redistricting also ENFRANCHISES people by putting heavily democratic counties together into voting blocks and conservatives into their voting blocks. YOU DONT WANT 50/50 splits, you want 90/10 splits. That’s maximizing enfranchisement.

But this democratic lever is an impediment to power to the left. So the result is endless propaganda when the right is using it to contain the influence of the cities from suburban and rural areas.

The msm and leftist governments use redistricting (gerrymandering) to their advantage ALL THE TIME. When the left does it is called sex (redistricting). When the right does it is called rape (gerrymandering).

The leftist media is perfectly happy to celebrate any gain by the left to disenfranchise any conservative county by moving its boundaries into a city voting block.

The writers of the constitution new this. That’s why they built the resistricting laws right into the constitution.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/03/...

You're claiming gerrymandering is used to create the situation in option 1. I haven't seen any indication that this is the case from any reputable source. Most mathematical analysis of gerrymandering shows that option 3 is what's occurring, which does NOT enfranchise people.

Almost every piece mathematically quantifying gerrymandering efforts in the states has indicated that it substantially favors the GOP. Here's one example centered on the 2016 election:

https://apnews.com/article/elections-race-and-ethnicity-voti...

Some of the discussion is regarding how much of the bias is intentional (due to intentionally gerrymandered districts) vs. unintentional (due to the geographic clustering of democratic voters in urban areas), but I haven't ever seen an analysis that attributes an overall advantage to democrats as a result of districting at the state or national level.

Of course they are going to report that gerrymandering hurts democracy and conservatives are to blame.

Why don’t you ask Russia Today about whether Russia is a strong and prosperous country that’s good for the world?

Same tier of propaganda.

You should diversify and be more inclusive of your news sources.

Here's an article about gerrymandering in NC in the journal of Statistics and Public Policy: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2330443X.2020.1...

The NC2012 and NC2016 plots in comparison with the neutral districting is almost cartoonish in how much packing was performed.

As an aside, I don't understand why you're claiming that the AP, of all news sources, is a propaganda outlet (let alone one favoring democrats?). Do you have some reason to believe that their take regarding district policy is suspect? Or do you just have an nebulous distrust of news media in general?

You're more than welcome to post a reputable source that provides an analysis claiming that gerrymandering enfranchises people so that we'd have some subject matter disagreement to dig into.

There’s no way to take this as a good faith statement, it’s just a lie.

> mRNA vaccine […] which is causing more damage than Covid19 itself

Seek help!

Same blind eye to crime is happening in New York and Chicago.

Same for same sex marriage, there is just not enough moderate political people against it. Repealing it won’t have the legs.

Pro life support spanned the political spectrum, I think you can even fairly argue that despite her rhetoric to the contrary, Speaker Pelosi’s deliberate inaction may have been due to her faith and passive action against something she wanted to publicly appear to be “for” for wholly political reasons.

And yet, here we are.

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

The same political party then proceeded to rely on a court case about a physician’s privacy to practice medicine as a substitute for women’s body rights instead of creating legislation that could have at least guaranteed access to abortion in the first trimester, which would have received enough bi-partisan support to make Roe v. Wade a non-issue and relied on the 10th amendment and states to expand abortion access beyond the minimum guarantee.

But instead, they did nothing but talk, and here we are…

Huge asterisk on this. Can you point to any moment when doing what you suggest would have been politicially viable? Especially considering the fervor with which GOP are racing to pass bans that don’t include exceptions for rape and incest.

Say what you will about Roe but auto until Thursday it did strike a balance that worked for a vast majority of the country (60%). There were limits, there were restrictions. Why do you presume there were none?

Yeah, you hear consternation about the availability of late term abortions, but if you explain those happen in fewer than 1% of cases and often are medically necessary this concern often is ameliorated.

But now that’s all been blown up. Now there will be two Americas: safe haven America where women are free, and Gilead where women are forced to give birth to their rapists babies.

At multiple points in the last 50 years we have been in a place where our executive branch and congress has been controlled by the Democratic Party, and after presidential elections that were pretty solidly decided. At those points federal legislation could have been introduced that if crafted in a bi-partisan way—limited to first trimester, avoiding tax payer funding, limits on fetal tissue use, etc… the Democrats could have passed legislation with some basic bi-partisan support that could have provided access to abortion at a minimal level federally that would account for about 90% of the performed abortions out there. However, because the democrats either chose to die on that remaining 10% hill, or intentionally didn’t fight at all they lost the whole battle. People seem to believe that they were fighting all this time, in reality, they enabled yesterday to happen. I would argue, intentionally, because the only other explanation is that for 50 years the Democratic Party has been incompetent.

Roe never really struck a balance of anything, it was always weak and was always going to fall. It managed to simply pause the illegality question for a time, during which our congress could have and should have acted to affirm the rights.

Even RBG felt it was the wrong case for abortion rights because it didn’t focus on women’s rights, but rather physician privacy. If the most arguably liberal justice in the last 50 years is warning you that Roe is bad and going to fall, you might want to believe them.

> Now there will be two Americas: safe haven America where women are free, and Gilead where women are forced to give birth to their rapists babies.

Actually there will be 50 Americas—-which is really no different today than it was yesterday.

Hard to fault Democrats in the 105th for what Republicans wouldn’t do.

That leaves one congress in 50 years’ time with even a shot. Could they have done it, maybe, but we saw how even when Democrats bent over backwards to accommodate Republican ideas into the ACA (inviting and incorporating over 100 amendments, basing it off of a heritage foundation plan implemented by Republican Mitt Romney in MA), they still got 0 Republican support.

Do you think a partisan abortion law would have solved anything? Do you think that wouldn’t have been appealed immediately after the 115th Congress? They failed to repeal the ACA by 1 vote. I can’t imagine how they could have failed repealing an abortion law.

And btw, impeaching Trump in 2021 for orchestrating an insurrection and coup was absolutely necessary. Unfortunately Republicans refused to convict, because as we now know, many of them were complicit in the coup and sought pardons for their roles (read: crimes). Had they convicted him, he would have been barred from holding future office and a huge problem would have been solved for the country. It was worth a shot. Unfortunately, now a man who sought to overthrow the US government is running for President again, and might win.

even when Democrats bent over backwards to accommodate Republican ideas into the ACA

That's what I mean, the Democrats keep trying to appeal to the middle by saying 'look how bipartisan we are' and getting kicked int he gut. As a party, they want to appeal to the moral authority of a teacher or moderate voters' consciences, and so they continually aspire to good stewardship. The reality is that while that does appeal to some, American people in general don't respect weakness and reflexively distance themselves from losers. Culturally speaking, winning is more important than being right to many Americans, and even people who believe it ought to be otherwise have to balance their idealism with the logic of survival.

The GOP has been shifting toward a win-at-all-costs mentality since 1994 when Gingrich took Congress (after a long, long period of Democratic dominance) with the 'contract with America.' Despite many of these 'contractual' provisions not being serious (eg the commitment to balanced budgets has only ever been a talking/negotiating point for the GOP, when holding power they max out on debt), they provided a unifying agenda for conservatives whose object is power for its own sake, and such conservatives now dominate the GOP.

Democrats worry that whenever they drift too far 'left' the GOP will attack them mercilessly, and so they tend to huddle in the middle, where the GOP attack them mercilessly anyway. Centrist Democrats literally lose seats and console themselves that if they had put up more of a fight their margin of defeat would have been even more painful.

> Do you think a partisan abortion law would have solved anything?

I never said “partisan”, I said bi-partisan and yes I do. Polling within the electorate showed support across parties for first trimester access.

In any event, you seem to have missed the point of my post, which was that we can't assume that things like contraception, gay marriage, and interracial marriage are safe from being overturned just because a plurality support them. You said banning contraception is a "scratch issue" with evangelicals, and I'm pointing out, so is banning abortion, and yet, here we are.

Yes, I am definitely blaming them. Judge Ginsburg warned them, told them it was not going to survive certain challenges. The dems did nothing. If the smartest legal mind on your side (and she was not the only one BTW) is warning you that something you hold claim to hold sacred is in danger and you choose to do nothing to protect it, that is a dumb shit move. However, I’d argue that it may have been intentional—that to the democratic leadership abortion rights were not sacred, but only valuable to them for the political division it caused.

>You said banning contraception is a "scratch issue" with evangelicals

Contraception is simply different. There isn’t the “innocent third party without a voice” factor there that will motivate the activism and financial investment in that activism the same way. Same sex marriage is kind of the same, there is no third party component to it to protect.

I'm sure it's satisfying but I don't think it adds a lot to the conversation. Maybe the Ds don't play hard enough (blocking nominees, lying under oath, etc) but you shouldn't have to cheat to protect a popular long-standing precedent.

> Contraception [and same sex marriage] is simply different.

The belief that there's an "innocent third party" involved in abortion is a religious belief; I don't see why the court would enforce that but not other religious beliefs, like women submitting to their husbands and so forth. Your stance that D's were dupes for believing R's about Roe v Wade would appear to suggest that we shouldn't believe you about this either.

The theocrats on the court are young, they probably have 30+ years ahead of them, and the only sensible prediction is to assume that anything disliked by Fundamentalist Christians is in danger. That means not just contraception and gay marriage, but Obamacare, social security, trans rights, owning sex toys, gay adoption, domestic violence laws, spousal protective orders, womens' rights generally, Miranda and anything else predicated on Due Process, any gun restriction, and I'm not feeling super confident about the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, or interracial marriage.

Surely your "what a bunch of dumbshits, why didn't they see this coming" applies to those too?

That is mostly false. If a pregnant mother get harmed to the degree that it harms the unborn or kills it, the legal system (and "popular opinion" in my view) see it as being more than just harming the mother. In feticide, there is an third party involved. The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 is very explicit about that and it also gives an explicit exception for abortions.

If we view child in utero as similar to a cancer growth off the womans body then feticide does not exist. There would be physical assault, but not homicide, because no Homo sapiens would be killed. That view point conflict with how a lot of people feel in those situations.

Edit: also, if you're going to wade in to an ongoing discussion, it's nice to respond to the thing we're generally arguing about; don't just pluck one sentence fragment out and start a new discussion over it. When someone says, "I think X, therefore Y", they're arguing that X is true enough in this context to support a belief in Y, not that X is always true in all contexts, which is a much larger (and therefore, easier to argue against) claim.

My guess is that for popular belief, if a unborn dies because of violence to the woman then people emotionally see it as murder of an other human being. If the woman choose to abort then for social reason many/most people do not view it as a human being that died. This is however a conflict of views which has nothing to do with religion.

With contraception, even if it was done through force, no one outside of religious belief would see it as killing a human. How would even The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 be applied? Should each sperm count as a half human?

Similar with same-sex there isn't any direct situations where non-religious people suddenly would be in favor of outlawing it.

As for the exception written in the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004, what is say is that the legality of abortion is not effected by the definition of the that law. Nothing more, nothing less. We can have laws allowing abortion for social reasons regardless if we view the bunch of cells as being more than just a bunch of cells.

I think you missed my point on this, i was speaking in terms of things that drive they activist attitudes, not any specific legal distinction.

as belorn said in their comment to you, in certain legal cases we consider the unborn child as a person. You don’t have this sort of strange legal dichotomy with a innocent third party with contraception or gay marriage

edit to add: and most of the bible verses they quote to support that view also condemn divorce and sex outside of wedlock, so forgive us for not knowing what is and isn't in danger. You make a persuasive argument that we should be more concerned than we think we should.

Sure, but taking a position to prevent something from becoming legally recognized requires far less effort and commitment than taking something presently legal and making it illegal. Abortion was an outlier because there was a tangible victim to rally around in the pro-life activist’s eyes.

There simply isn’t a tangible victim they can point to for gay marriage and contraception. Those issues center around behavior they might regard as sinful, but in their eyes the sinner is the only one to suffer.

People may not approve…but will they care enough to work against them? I don’t think so. I know a lot of folks who are loudly pro-life, but I can only think of perhaps one that might actively work against gay marriage, and none that would have a strong opinion at all regarding contraception

As for the "victim," the most effective way we know of to reduce the number of abortions is giving young people easy access to contraception, and AFAICT very few pro-lifers are in favor of that. I think it's a mistake to think this is only or even primarily about the fetus.

I didn’t dispute that. I said specifically that it’s easier to work against something that is currently not legal becoming legal.

> It certainly seems to have died down since then

Because…it’s now legal.

> is giving young people easy access to contraception, and AFAICT very few pro-lifers are in favor of that

They may not be in favor of it, but it’s legal for young people to use contraceptives, and has been for a long time and there is no where near the passion against it as there was for abortion. However, when you say “easy access” do you mean “free and government supplied”? That is wholly a different argument that has a more “taxpayer support of discretionary human behavior” driver against it.

I don't think you've internalized the thing that started this conversation. This is not a victory for the pro-life movement! The pro-life movement has never been less popular, even among evangelicals. In the battle to convince Americans of their cause, they have lost by any measure.

Roe was overturned not by "passion" but by a handful of ethically flexible judges. If they can do that with one unpopular thing, they can do it with a second and a third.

> However, when you say “easy access” do you mean “free and government supplied”?

Yes, but not as an ideological matter, just because that's the most straightforward way to implement policies. In general, "I support policy X" means "I want tax money to be spent on X". That's how governments do things, by spending money.

If you don't want to be involved I'm sure we can fund it privately, it's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. But it's not clear why would you be against spending tax money to prevent abortions, but okay with spending money to jail the women who've had them. If this were actually about preventing abortions and not punishing sin, it wouldn't matter.

You are applying utilitarian considerations of outcomes to religious dogmatists. Such consider sexual immorality (as defined by them) to be a corrupting influence on everyone peripherally connected to it, and an affront to God.

Hence the current moral panic of denouncing all LGBT people as 'groomers' and insinuating or openly accusing people who disagree as pedophiles, which is considered sufficient reason to kill in some peoples' eyes. Now while this moral panic is by no means universal among religious Christians, if you're not aware of it then you just aren't paying attention.

I find it kind of strange that you are conflating marriage equality and concerns over sexualizing young children together. I don’t see people using this sexualization of children as an argument against gay marriage, I see it pretty hyper-focused on the sexualization of young children.

I am wondering why you are tying them together if the folks doing it don’t seem to be.

Among religious persons and societies, doctrinal considerations outweigh all others. If you are under the impression that the abortion issue is different because large numbers of non-religious folk are sufficiently motivated by the ethical issue to engage in activism and donate funding, I think you're quite mistaken.

Birth control might be a big deal to some devout Catholics and some primitive/fundamentalist Baptists, but virtually every other denomination and congregation is literally not going to care.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/14/5891765/millennials-incoherent...

[2]: https://www.vox.com/2014/7/8/5878293/lets-stop-using-the-wor...

Guess other researchers think differently. Vox isn't extremely left.

And surprise surprise, this was founded by an ex-GOP consultant. There’s no need to consume fascist propaganda as part of a balanced media diet. Most of the outlets on the far right don’t qualify as news, and CNN isn’t hard left no matter how much it makes Republicans shriek.

This is like a food chart and on the left we see fruits and veggies and on the right we see various animals droppings.

Try joining a conservative discussion board and you’ll notice that they call Democrats Fascists/Totalitarian!

I would recommend looking up American history, in the 70s, 50s, 20s, 1800s etc. Today is a milder form of the political polarization that is endemic to America, and ironically America’s strength.

If there was a betting market on a theocracy, I would bet the house in the opposite direction, but frankly so would everyone.

Relax and enjoy the weekend, America is going to remain America for a long, long time.

Not a great look for the US by any means, but the whole chapter is a joke compared to past election turmoil, especially during reconstruction era post Civil War. In those years, you often had large armed militias battling it out with occupying federal troops over which election results.

Since you were kind enough to provide references to your other statements of fact, would you mind doing the same for this one? Because I've been seeing that exact sentiment repeated ad nauseum for a long while now and yet every attempt I've made to figure out where it came from, so far, has been from the claimant imputing intent upon a nebulous Other, with all such claims assuming the most malicious version of a strawman possible... and we all know that's against the rules, here. The sole argument I've seen sourced, in this specific case, hinges upon a very uneducated misinterpretation of a (relatively unimportant) concurrent opinion by Justice Thomas in which the hyperbolic clearly don't understand the concepts of "substantive due process" and are mixing it up with something else entirely.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/6/4/1411/pdf#:~:text=Abstract....

very uneducated misinterpretation of a (relatively unimportant) concurrent opinion by Justice Thomas in which the hyperbolic clearly don't understand

Dude, when you're trying to shoehorn 5 dismissals into one sentence it's not conducive to discussion.

Time will tell who will be left standing, the theocrats or the reactionaries.

There are many exposés, books, articles, etc. Here are two of the more recent:

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

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

Your argument is foolish.

What measure of proof do you require?

Democracy in Chains' primary source are a cache of documents from economist James Buchanan's think tank, architects of the reactionary movement's strategy. By their own words and actions, they intend to end democracy and protect the rich. Disagree with the author's analysis, fine. But the thesis is not circumstantial, inferred, or speculated.

Whereas Dark Money is a standard whodunnit. Investigative journalism, following the money, ferret out the criminal conspiracy. If you have a different interpretation of the evidence, please share.

In his concurrence with today's Dobbs ruling, Justice Thomas wrote: '[...] in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.'

(For non legal nerds, those cases are concerned with birth control, sexual privacy, and gay marriage respectively.)

You're surely also aware of legislative and electoral pitches to substantially restrict birth control. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic by simply mentioning the existence of ultra-conservatives and observing that they have some political influence. When one of the nine Supreme Court justices indicates a willingness to revisit multiple landmark cases only a foolish person would ignore the possibility.

Mind, I also thing the Democrats are at fault for not erecting a legislative framework to put privacy and other rights on a more solid footing when they've had the legislative initiative.

If that is the case there needs to be some motivated and deep pockets out there to craft up a law that is designed to challenge those norms, then it needs to get passed in some legislative body and signed into law within a state. The law will need to read in such a way that would motivate an aggressive attack from a party with deep pockets and get it all the way up to the SCOTUS where it might get picked up or might not.

I honestly think that those issues simply do not have the same levels of passion behind them that abortion did. The general populace just doesn’t care enough to make them worth the effort. Abortion beyond the first trimester of pregnancy had significant opposition across the political spectrum and that opposition grew week over week beyond that first trimester. Birth control, gay marriage, sexual privacy…they simply do not evoke the same levels of passion beyond a few fringe ultra religious right-wing groups.

Consider for example the recent wave of prophylactic legislation forbidding the teaching of 'critical race theory' in k-12 schools, although CRT as such is a kind of structural analysis that has gained adherents among legal sociologists, mostly at the post-grad level. The anti-CRT laws are mostly an attempt to shape school curriculums that mention race by legislative fiat, and provide a cause of action to fire teachers who indoctrinate students with (or perhaps merely expose them to) opinions that are out of step with the popular consensus.

Certainly, this is no overnight process. But a few years ago, people who said Roe was likely to be overturned were dismissed as alarmist. Fringe positions become mainstream by degrees, and those who don't pay attention to them often underestimate the intensity and speed of such changes.

Consider Mark Burns, an ultra-conservative pastor and regular candidate in South Carolina who recently came in second in the Congressional House primary, with 11,000 votes (about 25% of the total). He holds some rather extreme views, and while he lost this time he might continue to improve his electoral standings in future.

https://www.advocate.com/news/2022/6/14/pro-trump-sc-candida...

It’s not a hyperbolic comparison. I’m simply observing that other highly educated people (like the folks who thought I was about to be dragged to an internment camp) have built up conservatives as such a boogeyman, they don’t have a solid grasp on what’s within the realm of political reality and what isn’t. I detected the same hyperbole in your post.

The abrogation of Roe makes the Constitutional law of the US the same as Italy and still more liberal than Germany. Even if some states ban abortion, that just makes them like Ireland until a few years ago, or Poland now. The EU has some very religious places with extremely restricted abortion rights, and others with more liberal rights, and most in a mushy middle. Why isn’t that situation workable in the US?

Some of the other privacy cases might be on the chopping block too. You don’t have to be an “ultra conservative” to think substantive due process is a bunch of malarkey. That was my first reaction when I learned about it in law school a decade ago.

But say Griswold goes away. So what? Most European countries don’t have a similar right to contraception, yet contraception is legal there. 90% of Republicans support legalized contraception. Obergefell and Bostock are on firmer footing. But even then half of Republicans support same-sex marriage. Almost 80% support employment rights for LGBT people. The politics isn’t the same for those other issues.

Abortion is different because Roe was both legally infirm, and drew the Constitutional line in the wrong place. I’m not aware of any country that recognizes a right to abort an 20 week fetus without a medical reason, even if some countries like Canada allow it. Roe drew the line 10 weeks past where most civilized nations draw the line, and that made it a political target in the way contraception isn’t. Almost 30% of Republicans disagree with their party that abortion should be generally illegal at all stages. But even among most of those people it’s difficult to muster up a defense of Roe.

Just 15 months ago, you wrote 'Of course, overturning Roe isn’t really in the cards. There are just 3 votes for it.' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311034

I don't know whether your analytic powers are less good than you imagine them to be, or you're being strategic; but given that you now write as if such an outcome had been obvious and inevitable all along, I'm not inclined to rely on your estimates.

And that justice comes from a different generation than the other 5 who voted to overturn, so there's even less reason to assume the others share his views.

Also, as an aside, we have internment camp like settings for brown asylum seekers and have mistakenly deported American citizens to them on multiple occasions, but this is an ongoing issue that Trump did not fix, rather than one caused by Trump.

I think it's worth keeping in mind that either you were disingenuous years ago, or you yourself have moved to the right over time as well, as not only do you badly mispredict the court (and even mispredict how extreme Thomas would be [5]!), assuming it would have a stronger respect for precedent than it did, but also you yourself seem to have changed from a supporter of roe[4] to, well, whatever you are now which seems to be someone who is willing to quote contradictory statistics in order to claim that Roe's 24 week line has less support than it does (per [6] and [7], both sources you've quoted to claim that most Americans want more restrictions than Roe show that >60% overall and 30% of conservatives support the line Roe defines).

If the conservative majority on the court is willing to overturn a ruling supported by 60-65% of the population, what's to say they won't revert a much weaker precedent with only 70% popular support? You seem to be highly content to be a boiled frog.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24525637

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12994309

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311034

[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5801204

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30980056

[6]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/13/about-six-i...

[7]: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730183531/poll-majority-want-...

In the 9 year old post you cite, I said Roe was wrongly decided, but I didn’t think it was necessary to overturn it. Nothing I said today is inconsistent with that.

As to your point about Thomas, you cite a comment correcting a misreading of Thomas’s concurrence in the Kim Davis case. I said nothing about how “extreme” he is or wasn’t. Also, that has no bearing on Roe. Anyone could have told you Thomas would vote to overturn Roe.

You say I’m wrong about support for second trimester abortions, but neither of your sources actually asks about second trimester abortions.

In this poll, only 34% support elective abortions in the second trimester: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/06/24/how-ame...

Same thing in this poll, 65% oppose in second trimester: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort...

Same in this poll, only 28% support in second trimester: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-americans-stand-o...

You can’t rely on polling of “Roe” because most people don’t know the precise contours of the precedent.

Most recently you said there were three votes (acb, Thomas, alito), and before that you said kav was "probably" not going to overturn. I don't think it's wrong to hold you to that. Either you were downplaying compared to what you really thought, or you're creating a justification now. I'm really just asking that you take a minute to reflect on that.

From the npr link:

> Allows abortions, but only up to the time there is viability outside the womb, at about 24 weeks

Has support from 30% of republicans and 40% of democrats. The remaining Democrats generally want less restrictions. That's consistent with 60%+ support for second trimester abortions.

Your Forbes link also mentions 47% support (and only ~40 percent against) elective abortion until viability, which may be well into the third trimester!

And I have a difficult time believing that "all or most of the time" doesn't include the second trimester.

I'm not relying on polling of roe. I'm relying on your polls! I agree that there's inconsistency here, but it's not cut and dry like you claim.

> As to your point about Thomas, you cite a comment correcting a misreading of Thomas’s concurrence in the Kim Davis case. I said nothing about how “extreme” he is or wasn’t. Also, that has no bearing on Roe. Anyone could have told you Thomas would vote to overturn Roe

My mistake, I thought that thread was about the draft opinion. But I'm not talking about roe, but revisiting Obgerfell, which between Thomas, alito, barret, and one of the others probably does get cert! And I can see Roberts ruling against it now since dobbs splits the precedent (I'm not saying thats likely, I'm just saying it's believable).

> In my opinion that was a tactical error.

For whom? Like it's obviously harmful, but it's correct jurisprudence and supports the federalist strategy of dismantling as much federal civil rights law as possible. Like I have a very hard time finding the consistent values you work from, since apparently this was an error despite you agreeing with the ruling in a technical sense and in a meta-political sense (in that whatever your opinion on abortion, you believe abortion law being defederalized is good for the social fabric). And it's obviously what Republicans, if not conservatives, want. Who is it a tactical error for, and why?

For what it's worth (mostly in response to other comments), I don't think he's being disingenuous here, I think there's just a deep disagreement about values. In another thread, he says:

> As a foreigner, what I admire most about Americans is their ability to dispassionately accept the results of legal procedures. I truly think that’s what is responsible for the success of America and England before it. We have people who have high minded principles and notions of justice in Bangladesh. That’s not special. What we lack is a populace that will accept even monumental decisions contrary to what they wanted and move on. And that’s what I fear is being eroded.

Charitably, I think, this is "Americans are willing to accept the rule of law", which is perhaps true. Uncharitably, it's something like "Americans are privileged and/or apathetic enough that even as the law wildly vacillates, they don't care to act when their rights are impugned."

I also don't think it's true, given the long history of protest and sometimes violence in response to legal proceedings (Shay's Rebellion, the Civil War, anti-Abortion violence and murders in the '90s and today, etc.). But even taking it as true, I think there's a requirement that to respect the (appellate) judiciary we need to respect that the system is at least somewhat apolitical. I don't mean that judges aren't conservative or liberal, they obviously will be, but the actions of the Federalist Society, which preaches and advocates for a very particular judicial philosophy is, to many, a violation of the social contract that allows us to respect the court.

I think it's easy for someone who is a lawyer, especially an appellate lawyer to have "the institution" go to their head, to an extent. And I think that's what I'm seeing here: what the court is doing must be justified not in particular because rayiner agrees with it (though he does), but because the court cannot be questioned. He takes it as a given that the institution must be respected by virtue of what it is. I don't buy that, I think the institution needs to earn its legitimacy, and when you have justices doing what is charitably described as misleading Congress and the American people, and uncharitably described as perjury, well, it's difficult to see why the office remains deserving of respect.

Yes, that’s what I mean.

> I also don't think it's true, given the long history of protest and sometimes violence in response to legal proceedings (Shay's Rebellion, the Civil War, anti-Abortion violence and murders in the '90s and today, etc.).

It’s relative. Americans are incredibly orderly compared to say Bangladeshis, where there are violent protests after every election.

> I don't mean that judges aren't conservative or liberal, they obviously will be, but the actions of the Federalist Society, which preaches and advocates for a very particular judicial philosophy is, to many, a violation of the social contract that allows us to respect the court.

How is it a violation of the social contract to advocate for reading the Constitution the same way we read any other written document?

How is that worse than say law schools, which vigorously advocate reading the Constitution as loose guidelines to guide elite lawyers in dispensing Justice according to their own world views. That’s exactly what Roe was, seven highly educated white men overturning the will of the people based not on law, but on their personal notions of justice.

> I think it's easy for someone who is a lawyer, especially an appellate lawyer to have "the institution" go to their head, to an extent.

I respect the institution because I’m a foreigner who comes from a country where respect for institutions is conditional. I have a deep veneration for societies where people reflexively trust institution even when they’re in the losing end of a decision. A court could order a British person to jump off a bridge and they’d do it!

And I’m terrified of what I’m seeing in the US. There’s always been unruly mobs, but now elites are egging them on. Your accusations of “perjury” are exactly the problem I’m highlighting. Nobody perjured themselves. They said Roe was precedent, which it is. Precedent can be overruled—and there are clear guidelines for when to do so and Roe fit the bill on a lot of the factors. To say otherwise is to rely on the ignorance of the general public in an effort to delegitimize the institution in their eyes, and that’s irresponsible.

That's not an authoritarian stance, it's a rational, observant one.

This is the wrong question. The constitution doesn't matter. It's deeply flawed (whatever your opinion on the second amendment, that what exactly it means is so deeply up for debate, and has been for 100+ years, goes to show that the document is flawed as a legal instrument!), but not going to change without bloodshed.

People respect the rule of law, have faith in their institutions, because they feel represented and respected and empowered. But the reasons for that faith is eroding as we see that so many of our institutions are biased towards conservatives or conservative demographics. It is increasingly difficult to have faith in a democratic institution that doesn't provide equal representation.

Respect for an institution is conditional! It must be! We should not respect a president who does illegal things just because they are the president, we should impeach them! The same is true of a court, it is not reasonable to to respect it if it fails to act consistently and, to many, the courts rulings are inconsistent. Perhaps they make sense to you, a constitutional lawyer who has two or three degrees and decade of ~indoctrination~ education on this particular subject, but to those normal people out here, a group of 9 (or well 6) of the most elite of the elites (lifetime appointments!) sit in their ivory tower and say "you need private guns to deal with unelected tyrants" (to quote a tweet I saw earlier), while rolling back life-saving policies and threatening others.

On the left, you have to do a huge amount of work to get people to vote, not because they don't care, but because they're so disillusioned by their vote mattering, and that sentiment grows truer and truer!

So why is it a violation of the social contract? Because the social contract is a fair and representative government. It is democracy with checks and balances. The less the government does that, the less people are going to want it. And the problem is that the SC is, or was, in a pretty crappy position: the constitution is flawed and encourages this inequality, but no one's going to change it because people (and here I'll absolutely call you out as an example!) venerate it far too much. And the next amendment will be written in blood. So the court can either let constitutional interpretation live and follow the will of the people, and make them feel represented, or it can not make any attempt to represent the people and only represent the law, and there's some merit in that too, but it's going to foment unrest. So the issue you're facing is that the way you want the court to work fails to respect the people, and so they fail to respect it.

It can be really difficult to pin down a consistent Gish galloper, but you did great!

If you legally obtained permission to reside here, nobody except for the KKK has qualms with you.

Are you sure it's just propaganda? https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1540852015693037568

The ugly truth here is that the democrats own this defeat. All talk and ZERO action. They were content to let this be a flashpoint issue and did not take advantage of federal legislative opportunities to create some legislation to fix the issue. There has probably been enough bi-partisan support and the right political mix in at least 6 congresses over the last 50 years for a federal law to be introduced that would have reaffirmed the base intent of Roe v. Wade (basically allowing access to legal abortion in the first trimester) and would have invalidated the court case entirely as the definition of the issue. Blue states could have create state law to expand beyond the first trimester if desired. It would be a non issue, but instead…we get this. Shame.

>It’s a decision that enshrines as a right elective second trimester abortions

>State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. [0]

>This means, on the other hand, that, for the period of pregnancy prior to this "compelling" point, the attending physician, in consultation with his patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the State, that, in his medical judgment, the patient's pregnancy should be terminated. If that decision is reached, the judgment may be effectuated by an abortion free of interference by the State. [1]

>something that’s illegal in nearly every other developed nation

>second trimester starts at week 13

france allows abortions for the first 14 weeks (into the second trimester) and allows for medical exceptions even later same with spain

>Current Norwegian legislation and public health policy provides for abortion on request in the first 12 weeks of gestation, by application up to the 18th week, and thereafter only under special circumstances until the fetus is viable

sweden allows abortions through 18 weeks and allows for medical exceptions even later

denmark allows abortions after 12 weeks due to various conditions including poor socioeconomic status of the mother

>In Great Britain, abortion is generally allowed for socio-economic reasons during the first twenty-four weeks of the pregnancy germany seems the most severe of the large EU countries which allows for abortions in the first trimester and only after that in cases of unlawful sexual acts.

the US state of Ohio, for example, made abortions illegal at ~6 weeks today, so I feel your comparison to "other developed nations" leads the uninformed to believe that the US states are enacting similar laws to other developed nations, which is not the case.

also the overwhelming majority (>90%) of abortions in the US are during the first trimester

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113 [1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/

As to the country laws, you’re ignoring my qualifier about “elective” abortions. Abortions based on health exceptions aren’t elective abortions. Roe requires elective abortions up to viability. Thus, the laws in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden wouldn’t be upheld under Roe. Also, you’re misleadingly suggesting that Denmark has some sort of permissive loophole for “socioeconomic conditions.” It’s actually a pretty standard that requires unanimous approval from a local abortion committee. Many applications are rejected: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2024321/. The rate of second trimester abortions in Denmark is much lower than the US.

You’re also being imprecise about the definition of trimester. A pregnancy is actually 40 weeks long, and depending on source the first trimester is 12 or 13 weeks long: https://www.ucsfhealth.org/conditions/pregnancy/trimesters. Regardless, “first trimester” is a developmental milestone. It’s the point at which a fetus has all its internal organs and looks lot like a baby: https://3dultrasoundatlas.com/13-weeks.

All but 3 European countries draw the line at 12-14 weeks: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268439/legal-abortion-t.... They’re all aiming at this “end of first trimester” milestone. Note that the Mississippi law at issue in this case was even longer 15 weeks.

Also, your second to last paragraph misrepresents my point completely. I didn’t say that US states are passing laws similar to European countries. I said that Roe, which requires elective abortion until viability, bans the roughly first trimester line that most of the first world has drawn. The only EU abortion laws that would be acceptable under Roe would be the UK’s and the Netherlands’.

Put differently, you’re correct that there’s a big gap between Ohio or Texas at 6 weeks, and the 12-14 weeks in France or Germany. But it’s also true that there’s a big difference between those countries, and the 22-24 weeks mandated by Roe. Roe draw the line at a place that makes even the French and Norwegians uncomfortable.

The point about “90% of abortions being in the first trimester” doesn’t carry the water you think it does. That’s over 60,000 abortions annually at a stage of development that most developed countries have decided is advanced enough that the fetus should be protected.

In states where there is a majority for abortion, abortition is legalised by law, not by court, i.e. the way it should be. It is in states where there is no majority for abortion that it is not. How is it not democratic?

For things to be done at the federal level, it needs a broad consensus across the country, not a 51% majority where the 49% is dead against. The EU has similar safeguards where you need effectively 3 keys to enable a law (European parliament, European commission, and the Council), not a simple 51% majority. Nothing prevents you from legislatating at a state level, but if you want to impose your views on other states, it needs to be a broad consensus. What you seem to complain about is that voters in California cannot impose their social view on the inhabitants of Utah.

More generally problematic, your view would let any state persecute a minority of voters in that state and bind the federal government from guaranteeing equal protection to all Americans. We’ve run this experiment and found a long history of enforcing slavery, segregation, and persecution of gay people. Minority rights need special protections from the local majorities in states, and the 14th amendment is in no small part representing the will of the majority recognizing the rights of minorities are vulnerable here. Restricting a women’s ability to get a medical procedure a heavily gerrymandered state legislature finds distasteful is the latest in the long line of states rights consequences here.

And abortion is not just a medical procedure, there is a third party involved: the baby. Now I find the religious view that a baby exists as soon the sperm touches the egg ridiculous. But I find equally ridiculous the dismissal of a viable baby's life implied by calling it just a "medial procedure".

The reality is that there is likely a broad consensus in the US for legalising abortion up to 12 weeks, the way it is in most of europe.

Yeah, that's true, but there's also been a broad consensus in the US for federally legalizing (or even just decriminalizing) cannabis for well over a decade, and we haven't even managed to get that done due to the minority party overwhelmingly blocking even the most popular legislation if it goes even remotely against their moneyed interests.

Just because there's broad support doesn't mean that it will happen. At this point the Rs are going to have to be thoroughly crushed in congressional elections for a while, like what happened in the 30s through 60s, if any popular legislation is going to be passed.

There is no federally enumerated power to ban substances. That should be a state issue according the the 10th ammendment.

Both abortion and schedule I drug prohibition/anti-prohibition require Constitutional ammendments legally.

""" hold thatRoe andCasey must be overruled. The Con-stitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such rightis implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, in-cluding the one on which the defenders ofRoe andCaseynow chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. ... is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue ofabortion to the people’s elected representatives. “The per-missibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are tobe resolved like most important questions in our democ-racy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and thenvoting. """ https://www.scribd.com/document/579588941/19-1392-6j37

That it's rooted in the court's idea that there is no inherent constitutional protection against abortion bans, and therefore lower tiers of law (including federal US code) instituting arbitrary bans. Currently it looks like a states' rights issue because the bans are only in state code at the moment. The door is left open for federal code to fully ban abortion however, and Republican leaders have been messaging that this is their next step. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/05/mitch-mcconnell-ackn...

I don’t think they went so far as to definitely say there is no federal right to an abortion under any circumstances. I think they’ve left open the possibility that the due process right to life entails a right to an abortion when necessary to save the life of the mother (and possibly even when necessary to prevent severe long-term harm to her health-such as if continuing with the pregnancy was highly likely to cause her to go blind, for example). I could certainly see a future ruling (even by the current SCOTUS majority) upholding a federal right to an abortion in those very restrictive circumstances. All it might (sadly) take, is for America to have its own Savita Halappanavar

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar

Additionally, regarding left or right federal legislation: this would very likely be struck down by the same court under the reasoning that the constitution does not grant the federal government the power to regulate abortion.

Any federal legislation would have to come in the form of an ammendment.

I think, if Congress enacted a narrow federal right to an abortion – such as the right to an abortion to save the life of the mother – the current SCOTUS majority would be likely to uphold it - the right to life (including that of the mother) is arguably "deeply rooted in the nation's history" – and "life" is even explicitly mentioned in the text – and so such Congressional legislation would arguably be a legitimate exercise of the Section 5 power to enforce Section 1. Plausibly, they might even uphold a statutory federal right to an abortion to save the mother's health, since the right to health has an obvious connection to the right to life.

[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commerce_clause

Where's the common sense stuff? Where's the stuff most people would vote for?

On a closer reread I can’t tel what your actual point was. Though it’s not what I thought.

The point was that since carrying a pregnancy to term has a higher risk profile than having an organ removed, a pregnancy should be voluntary in the same way we wouldn't coerce someone into giving up their kidney for someone else.

That being said, I think it is perhaps noteworthy to say if women lose the bodily autonomy for carrying children, it is outrageous that dead people should retain the bodily autonomy to not be organ donors.

So? You wouldn't mandate mandatory kidney removals if we could mitigate the long term risk of not having one because that risk isn't the reason we don't unilaterally harvest organs from people against their will.

Regardless of where the risk is clustered (at the event or in the long tail following it), it is the harm to an individual via a non-consensually driven medical event.

I think it's fine. The cancer is not able to survive in it's own and has a significant negative impact on the person carrying it. To make medical removal illegal even in cases where continuing to carry the cancer threatens the life of the one carrying it displays reckless disregard for their safety.

Alas, none of that is true, and your remark can only win you a comfortable position in the mental gymnastics Olympics. And a 1st place in the moral bankruptcy competition, for comparing infants to a disease.

Yes.

>So, I should be forced to give blood if someone’s life is at risk and they need my blood (or, kidney)?

If that someone being in risk was the inevitable biological result of your actions, then yes. You should be forced to save him/her. Because you put him/her there.

Should men be required to donate organs to women they got pregnant, if indicated?

This is obviously very silly and not thought out. Banning abortion is just as silly.

Yes, if you can

1- Prove that I infected them

And,

2- Prove that no other solution would save the infected person, and organ donation would

>Should men be required to donate organs to women they got pregnant

Not if the impregnation was consensual. The person infected with Covid or hit by a car didn't consent to those actions, but a pregnant woman consented to impregnation unless she's raped, therefore she should accept responsibility for the associated risks. Rape is one of the very few reasons where abortion should be allowed. But it's something like 0.1% or so of abortion reasons, the vast majority of abortions are morally indefensible.

You know people can be raped right?

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/19/republican-tod...

until just now, the courts have repeatedly confirmed for several decades that abortion was protected at a federal level through the constitution.

In many cases, like abortion until today, under the Supreme Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence, and in some cases building at least in part on Roe which was just overturned.

Slavery and segregation were a sui generis issue because Black people are not only a minority, they are a discrete and insular minority. That is not true of gender and sexual orientation. Women and gay people are born into all families at predictable percentages. That drives social change as to those groups in a way that does not apply to a racial minority group.

The U.S. has a unique history with respect to slavery and segregation, but it does not with respect to women's rights or gay rights. Nearly every other developed country has left those issues to the democratic process. The European Court of Human Rights came to the exact opposite conclusion as Obergefell a year after that case, finding that the EU Convention on Human Right's marriage article did not apply to same-sex couples. Switzerland did not allow same-sex marriage nationwide until this year, and Italy still does not. Yet the EU continues to stand.

The European Court of Human Rights, and the Council of Europe under which it operates, are actually not EU institutions.

Your thesis seems to be "countries and states can oppress people and society won't totally collapse", which seems like a very weak position to take. I'd hope you don't think "not collapsing" should be our goal. We want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, right? Not life, liberty, and happiness for some, and well, at least the government remains standing, for the rest.

Like, in some sense, an oppressive government standing is worse than it failing, right?

In the long run, it jeopardizes the possibility of ordered progress because people perceive it as a serious intrusion into society and culture by elites—which judges are—and will resist and eventually revolt. That’s exactly what you see happening in the US right now.

No, with the January 6 riots? we see a minority no longer interested in the democratic process now that they don’t feel they are winning anymore.

How can you look at this Supreme Court, where multiple appointments were the result of heavy lobbying by large wealthy conservative faith groups to a president who lost the popular vote, and parliamentary tricks to keep the seat open, and see it representing a return to majority rule from rule by elites.

Never mind the fact that not a single abortion will be stopped on account of this. What will change is that there won't be any safe abortions, essentially this will cause the same number of fetuses to be aborted, it will also result in the death or in complications with a fairly large percentage of the mothers. It may (will?) even result in suicides.

This is in my opinion the real tragedy, the 'pro life' (I use their moniker but I disagree with it) groups are essentially 'anti mom'.

That minority is now in jail, and according to the laws in the US, those people have also lost their ability to vote. The people who active participated in the riot is no longer even an minority vote, but outside the voting process altogether.

Time to abolish the states, perhaps, and move to a loose confederation of city-states + regional rump-states that encompass former rural areas, bound together by a Common Economic Protocol. Let the blue areas in Austin, downtown Houston, Miami, Pittsburgh & Philadelphia, etc. be blue, and the red areas surrounding them be red. Conversely, let the red areas in Jefferson (northern California + southern Oregon), eastern Washington, upstate NY, etc. be red, and the dominant metro areas in those states be blue.

It's reasonable to say that the purpose of the judiciary is to protect rights, even when doing so is unpopular. If the judiciary was consistent in how it did that (for example: providing equal deference to the rights created by Roe and Heller) we might see less revolt. The issue is not "elite intrusion" but inconsistency.

Society's "right to decide" does not impugn my right to life and liberty. And the court is deeply inconsistent about whose rights, lives, and liberties it protects.

> Taking away a society’s right to decide the scope of social institutions like marriage

What gives El Paso residents the right to decide what the scope of marriage is in Austin? Indeed, what gives the government the right to regulate the "scope of marriage" at all?

There is no way this can be upheld, right? How on earth can citizens of state 1 go after citizens of state 2 for something that's legal in state 2?

> More generally problematic, your view would let any state persecute a minority of voters in that state and bind the federal government from guaranteeing equal protection to all Americans.

Who decides when the will of a state's majority is "democracy at work" and when it's "persecution of the minority violating equal protection"?

I'd suggest reading about the run up to the civil war. "State's rights" in that context was the slave states demanding that the free states capture and return escaped slaves outside of the slave states. Put simply, they wanted to enforce their fugitive slave laws on states that were completely uninterested in enforcing those laws.

The idea that "state's rights" in US political discourse reflects some principled division, rather than just being another lever people in power used to fight other people in power, is fiction. This has and remains fundamentally about a minority asserting their views over the majority, including outside the borders of their state.

I think you and cm2187 above are making similar arguments, but to my thinking it doesn't really matter: with the time and money it takes to rectify the situation, unconstitutional laws do serious damage regardless. I'm not a lawyer, but oh what I would give for legal review on the constitutionality of laws as a precursor to implementation rather than post-mortem.

As another person suggests below - these states don't care anyway, they are following the same game plan as 1859.

Yes, it’s insane. But I don’t have faith in our courts to not split this hair and allow it for abortion specifically because they are so clearly partisan on social issues here.

Even without the insanity of the Texas law though, it’s still a huge issue for poor women in red states.

> Who decides when the will of a state's majority is "democracy at work" and when it's "persecution of the minority violating equal protection"?

The federal government passes laws, or a constitutional convention passes amendments, and federal courts interpret them. The 14th amendment was interpreted to apply this protection before but now it is not.

I'm pretty sure it will be seen as a violation of the constitution's interstate commerce clause, which gives that authority exclusively to the federal government. However, it is possible that a pro-life administration would institute an order that does make it illegal to cross state lines for an abortion, similar to how sex tourism is illegal.

States have no jurisdiction outside their borders. Just like, say, Wisconsin having a law on the books that makes it illegal to leave the state (while "intending" to continue living in the state) to get married elsewhere, where the marriage wouldn't be legal in Wisconsin (https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/document/statutes/765.04) is ridiculous, likewise claiming that you get to apply your law somewhere else that you have no legal jurisdiction is insane.

...not that that stops the US government from doing the same thing if a US citizen travels to another country with a lower age of consent to bang some 16-year-old. It's this magic "intent" which we don't know how they can possibly know - were you over 21 and did you go to France to fuck that 15-year-old you've been playing video games with, or did you just go to France and happen to fall for that 15-year-old that you've been playing video games with hard after they showed you the tourist sights you've always wanted to see, ...then fuck them?

Does it get prosecuted often? No. Is it another bullshit law, waiting to conveniently be used to make you guilty when the powers-that-be need a reason to make you guilty? Yes. Oh-so-yes.

As such, Texas is overstepping its jurisdiction. And sidestepping the law by making it civil cases... Which they can adjudicate.

So, states can get into their mess by staying civil cases, when do we see an escalation?

Just like how the US federal government can go after non-US citizens for something that is legal in their non-US country? Perhaps?

Interstate travel is specifically protected federally and incorporated against the states. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion specifically says this is an easy question to answer and it would be presumably unconstitutional to prevent people from having abortions in other states. Suggesting otherwise at this point is fear-mongering in very bad faith.

> who decides

More like, what laws decide. If the majority is infringing on protections from federal or state constitutions or federal or state legislation, the majority doesn’t win. Otherwise they do. Majorities can affect the laws given enough time and sustained effort.

Sure, but if they throw someone seeking an abortion in jail or tie them up in the court system, it may be irrelevant whether is is legal because that person still can't travel. That of course assumes they have the money and resources to travel, and that the health care systems in those neighboring states is accessible.

I don't have the stats in front of me, but we already know there is going to be a flood of people from Idaho into WA seeking services and we have very few clinics east of the Cascades as it is.

My understanding is that the number of US citizens who believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances is less than 15%.[0] Indeed, looking at this poll more than 75% of the people fell short of believing abortion should be illegal ("legal in only a few circumstances").

With the percentage so low, I find it hard to believe that the people in _any_ US state would like abortion to be banned. Again, it would be interesting if you had any data to back up this statement.

[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/393104/pro-choice-identificatio...

I'd understand if "the left" was trying to take away some other person's right, but this is the opposite. They're trying to preserve rights.

A tyranny of the majority in conservative states is now restricting rights, it's going to cause death / suffering.

The thing that makes these discussions so frustrating is that people often seem to be completely deer-in-the-headlights ignorant of the other side's arguments.

The argument of pro-life people is that there are two human beings involved in the abortion: the mother, and the child. Making abortion legal gives the mother the right over her body by removing the right of the child to not have her life taken away. In the eyes of pro-life people, "taking away some other person's right" is exactly what "the left" are doing.

Now you might not agree that there is a child in this case; you might think that children begin existing and having rights once they pass through the birth canal and not before. Or you might think that even if there is a child that has rights, the mother's right to bodily autonomy trumps the child's right to life. But you can't say "I don't understand where they're coming from; 'the left' isn't trying to take away some other person's right" without being profoundly ignorant of the basic views of the people you're arguing against.

I think people want to make it about that, and that's fine. But should we force people to donate their livers, kidneys, bone marrow because someone will die otherwise? Oh, and the person you are donating to has Alzheimer's and you have to take care of them until either one of you die.

Forced birth is kinda/sorta/almost the same thing. The woman is forced to donate aspects of themselves that will affect them forever (more than just 'organs' in some ways), they may not even live through the event, and then take care of it for the rest of each others lives.

Long ago, I dated a woman who had broken her hip in such a way she could not have a child without losing the ability to walk for the rest of her life. She couldn't get her 'tubes tied' because she was too young. Think about that for a minute and the position she was in and now think about a position she might be in if she were in her early twenties today. She wouldn't be able to have a normal life and even back then, she never wanted to be unable to run with her child. IIRC, she's "tied" her tubes and her and her husband have adopted a child. But damn, it isn't always so black and white.

Well, from a moral perspective, it is about that. I'm not sure which of those two positions you take (not a person / mother's rights supersede children's rights), but if you're going to be honest you've got to figure out which it is and why.

And for the vast majority of people who vote pro-life (at least, all the ones that I know), that's what it's about too. And I note that you haven't really challenged the core logic I've put forward there, but rather on some of the sticky implications.

> Oh, and the person you are donating to has Alzheimer's and you have to take care of them until either one of you die. ...The woman is forced to... take care of it for the rest of each others lives.

And, here's again where there's a basic ignorance that a five-minute conversation with someone who's pro-life would clear up. Nobody who's pro-life would say that women should be forced to raise the children; they can be put up for adoption.

> But should we force people to donate their livers, kidneys, bone marrow because someone will die otherwise?

There's a difference between causing someone to die by action, and allowing someone to die by inaction. Pushing someone into a raging river is different than failing to dive in to rescue them.

> Forced birth is kinda/sorta/almost the same thing. The woman is forced to donate aspects of themselves that will affect them forever (more than just 'organs' in some ways), they may not even live through the event...

This is your strongest point. I mean, yeah, birth is crazy. And it would totally suck to go through it if it wasn't something you'd chosen to do. But it's not like the child was able to choose this either. It's a terrible situation for both people.

> Long ago, I dated a woman who had broken her hip in such a way she could not have a child without losing the ability to walk for the rest of her life.

So first of all, this sort of situation is quite uncommon; and while there are zealots who would take a hard line, lots of people would be willing to compromise in this sort of a case. Secondly, there are lots of people worldwide who are OK with abortion in the first trimester, but not the second and third. I think there are reasonable justifications for this.

But thinking about it from a moral perspective, let's try this scenario.

You're taking a tour of some tall factory with a bunch of people you don't know. While you're on a catwalk 4 stories up, something catastrophic happens, and at the end of it you're holding for dear life to a railing, and a stranger is dangling over the factory floor, holding for dear life to your legs.

You're not afraid of falling yourself; your arms are wrapped firmly around the railing, which you're pretty sure isn't going anywhere. But you have some sort of a degenerative joint disorder in your hips. You can already feel the tendons stretching from the stranger dangling below you; you're pretty sure that by the time help arrives to pull him up that enough damage will be done that you'll never walk again. You're also pretty sure that if you kick him hard enough right now, he'll let go and fall to his death, leaving your legs intact.

Is it moral for you to kill the stranger to save your legs? Should it be legal to kill the stranger to save your legs?

> Is it moral for you to kill the stranger to save your legs?

Is it moral? I think you might be mixing morality with ethics. Whether it is moral or not is highly dependent upon my culture and upbringing, whether it is ethical or not ... see the speeding trolley problem, because it is remarkably similar, where instead of "saving a bunch of people" I'm saving my future.

> Should it be legal to kill the stranger to save your legs?

How would a police officer know the difference between slipping and me kicking? I'd have to admit that it ever happened. Even if there are witnesses, it would be unreliable accounts. This gets into how Roe vs. Wade came about in the first place. I have some right to some privacy: the ability to keep my mouth shut, for one. You can say it is illegal all you want, but you also have to enforce it. Are police officers going to come give my wife random pregnancy tests to see if she stops being pregnant? How will they know the difference between a miscarriage and an abortion?

> I mean, yeah, birth is crazy. And it would totally suck to go through it if it wasn't something you'd chosen to do.

I venture you don't have at least one child? There is no way to explain having a child, and raising a child to someone who hasn't done so. There is life before ... and then there is life after. It is hard. I've been to boot camp, I've been to war, I've saved lives and ended them. And you know what ... having a child was initially, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. It is quite sudden, even though you have some 7-8 months to prepare. I wouldn't wish those first few months on my worst enemy. If I were a single mom/dad, it would have devastated my career, especially because as a father, I had TWO DAYS of vacation after the birth. Hell, it did negatively affect my performance for years.

It was worth every second because I loved my child, especially because my first one died during childbirth. But if I resented my child, I can't imagine the psychological torture that child would have to live through.

> Nobody who's pro-life would say that women should be forced to raise the children; they can be put up for adoption.

And who the fuck is going to adopt them? The foster care system is already overrun and under-funded. So, good luck with that...

On the contrary, I do have a child, which I adopted. I know a little bit about the birth mother's situation; I'm pretty sure a lot of people would have recommended to her to have had an abortion. I'm very thankful that she didn't -- she chose to take a risk, and there's a beautiful precious life as a result.

I don't know the situation in the US at the moment, but I can tell you that in my country, there is absolutely no problem finding adoptive parents for healthy newborns. Obviously if there's significant risk of damage due to alcohol or drugs, or significant health issues or genetic abnormalities, it's more difficult; but the last time I looked into it, those cases represented a very small fraction of the total number of abortions done in the US.

Regarding raising children: apparently all 50 states in the US have "Safe-haven" laws [1], which allow parents to drop off infants at designated locations. There is absolutely no reason for anyone in the US to feel trapped into raising children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law

None of that change the fact that pregnancy itself can be terrifying and even dangerous, of course.

> The foster care system is already overrun and under-funded.

Let's expand this argument a bit: "The foster care system is overrun and under-funded; we can help reduce pressure on the system by killing children who might go into it." I mean, if you're OK with killing children to reduce pressure on the foster care system, wouldn't it make more sense to kill the older children? Say, those who haven't been adopted by the age of 5?

If you're shocked / disgusted / horrified at the idea of killing innocent 5-year-olds, then you know how genuine pro-life people feel about the argument that we should use abortions to reduce pressure on the care system. You should 1) reflect on what moral justification you have for not feeling the same way; 2) have more respect for people who do feel that way.

So they only kinda sorta care about the child in the womb but not about the mother or the child when they are born.

If folks are going to ban abortions they should at least expand child and mother care, in my opinion.

On the other hand, pre-Roe, the maximum tax rate was 70%, with 25 different tax brackets. I'm guessing that folks that support today's decision are probably okay with the tax increases and big government that will follow.

Put another way, the case several days ago that allows child school credit to be used for Catholic school ALSO allows the same credit to be used for the Church of Satan School of the Gifted. The unintended consequences of all the rulings during the past week are going to be an interesting things to observe.

Suppose for the sake of argument that you're a person who thinks health services for children and paid family leave are important; but you also think that abortion is the moral equivalent of murder. You can vote for:

* Team Blue, who will increase children's health services and advocate for paid family leave, but slaughter millions of innocent children [Remember, I'm not claiming this is true, I'm trying to put you in the mind of a hypothetical person who believes this way]

* Team Red, who will decrease children's health services and family leave, but restrict the slaughter of innocent children.

I mean, if that's what you actually believe, then it really has to be Team Red, doesn't it?

I don't pretend to know what politicians think; it seems pretty likely that a lot of them are cynically using abortion as a ploy to get people to vote for policies that favor their rich donors. But I can tell you that an awful lot of people who actually vote are genuine in their opposition to it. If you want people to vote differently, you have to understand where the voters are coming from, not where their politicians are coming from.

Personally, I believe anti-abortion is a double edged sword that I don’t know how to traverse. I respect everyone’s right to choose but I also understand how politicizing the issue is favorable for politicians as they can yank at the heart strings and at the same time effect specific class of citizens more than others. And that last part bothers me.

It’s not so much the belief but the use of that as a belief to disenfranchise communities who are most vulnerable. I don’t know how to reconcile that fact, internally.

Team Red is only opposed to abortions for other people.

"The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion": https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-...

However, the Red politicians are tugging at those heart strings for the votes but have interest of expanding child or maternal care.

The problem aren't the people, it's the POS politicians, in my opinion. Since 2008 or so, politicians have been driving a divide between the voters of the different teams, getting re-elected by showcasing their wedge, and constantly screwing the people on both teams. I believe empathy for voters is the path forward.

I still think about Ted Cruz waving good bye at the dude who was pissed that kids got killed and he's dining at a restaurant. That's the issue. That dude is probably Team Red, probably doesn't agree with me, but fuck me if I don't support him going after a POS politician for not doing their job.

Empathy for voters; Re-examination of our politicians. It's not Team Red or Team Blue. It's the politicians of both sides that failed everyone.

...and states run by Team Blue tend to have fewer abortions, in part because of easier availability of contraception, but also in part because people are less desperate and feel more able to cope with unplanned pregnancies. (And the country as a whole has fewer abortions after seasons where Team Blue is in control than Team Red.) Many pro-life people who saw what a danger Trump was made exactly this case to their peers, both in 2016 and 2020.

Additionally, most Team Red people I talk to actually do believe in a social safety net; they just want to make sure it's not wasted on "lazy people". They don't have an accurate picture of exactly what it is that Team Blue and Team Red are both doing with the social safety net. (They don't even tend to have an accurate picture of what Team Blue and Team Red are doing in terms of abortion.)

Rather than slagging these people as regressive hateful backwards bigoted hypocrites, it's better to engage with them: Take their preferences into account, make sure they're informed of the actual situation on the ground. (Again, I'm talking about the individual voters, not politicians, who may well be hateful backwards bigoted hypocrites.)

Or they’re more capitalist in their thinking and expect people to take care of themselves as opposed to leaving it up to the government.

Who is right and who is wrong comes down to opinion. But I don’t believe it’s as simple as “the other side doesn’t care as much as we do”

My proposal is as follows: Take the GDP, per capita, per state and compare expansion/contraction of before Roe and after Roe. We can measure % change in the 10 years pre Roe to 10 years post Roe. The hypothesis is that states never cared about children and as such, post Roe, GDP expansion in states that had abortion abolished experienced a much higher GDP, per capita growth than before.

Information can be sourced from St. Luis FED.

If you have another idea, please let me know. I'm personally curious about this and would like to explore so feel free to pick apart my post as it will just render a more thought out experiment.

Thanks.

edit: If someone is a data scientist that can comment on what is the correct methodology to take or what pitfalls to consider, I would highly appreciate it.

Do they count in the census? Can I say they're a dependent?

Heck, why don't we make periods and ejaculation illegal. After all, those eggs and sperm are viable! Men shouldn't be allowed to pull out, wear condoms, or masturbate. Won't someone think of the children?! Oh, I almost forgot to ban sodomy too! Good heavens!

And what about contraception? That's coming next. What is your argument then?

The thing is, we have evidence based ways to reduce the need for unnecessary abortions, but the "right" isn't concerned about that. We know, for a fact, that access to contraception and sex education dramatically reduce abortion levels.

We know for a fact that making it illegal does not, it merely causes dangerous abortions to increase.

How do you square that? The "facts don't care about your feelings" crowd somehow can't grasp, or refuse to grasp, the consequences of their actions.

I'm also interested in how you feel about the rights of rape victims. Perhaps you'd like to carry the baby for them?

> For that reason, in future fases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold[1], Lawrence[2], and Obergefell[3].

The decision advocates for re-ruling on each of these cases. If these should be decided against their current status, expect states to outlaw contraception, gay relations, and same-sex marriage.

1. Ruled that contraception bans are unconstitutional https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/griswold_v_connecticut_%2819...

2. Ruled that sodomy bans are unconstitutional https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/lawrence_v._texas

3. Ruled that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/14-556

In other words, Thomas has always been crazy about this sort of thing but no one else on the court agrees.

Hence why nobody else signed on to this concurrence.

What needs to be fixed is the cap on the House. Remove that and the larger states get more power in the House. For example the Democrats could get a majority to push legislation to protect abortion at the national level.

People need to fix the issues in the system rather than relying on the courts to legislate for Congress.

Did the slave States like this compromise, yes. Is that the only reason for it? No.

"To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a "necessary fence" against the "fickleness and passion" that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives." - https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_C...

Texas, like most "conservative" states is gerrymandered to all hell. So it's very very simple how conservative minorities are enforcing their social views on the majority.

It only takes the support of 5.1% of US voters to filibuster a bill, 8.1% to appoint/block a supreme court nominee and 12% to defeat a filibuster:

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/2jnmbe/i_did_the_...

It's even more than that. In the council (where the governments of the member countries are present) you need majority based on number of citizens in the countries and also votes from a number of countries, so that few big countries can't overrule the small ones, but you always need support from small and big countries.

What nonsense. This is not about state's rights.

Just yesterday the Court decided that no, California doesn't have the right to restrict guns. That's the inhabitants of Utah imposing their social view on the acceptability of guns on the residents of California.

It's about states rights when it comes to things you don't support, like abortion, and it's about the constitution and the rights it gives everyone, when it comes to things that you support, like the right for every nutjob to kill children with AR-15s.

There is no logical reasoning behind these decisions aside from a vindictive, right-wing court, imposing its social will onto the entire country.

But ignores Heller 2008 and McDonald 2010 which both, for a long time, have ruled that this word argument is complete nonsense. That regardless of what you want to believe, 2A is an individual right.

Heller v DC - It's an individual right to own a firearm. You can't ban handguns or anything else just because you say so.

McDonald v Chicago - You can't just not issue permits to carry. 2A includes the right to carry outside the home.

NYPRA v Bruen - You can't say you MIGHT issue a permit, you will if they meet the legal requirements established by your state.

Please stop with the intellectually void argument that 2A is how you see it because you think the first few words invalidate "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed".

It's weak, and more importantly, it's over. It has been nail in the coffin settled for 12 years now.

The court's analysis that 'keep and bear arms' implies an individual right to carry a handgun (or a weapon 'in common use') for self defense purposes is exactly the kind of drawing of 'legislative-style' boundaries that the court railed against in today's ruling overturning Roe and Casey.

Can you point to a scotus case that has clarified or determined the text of the abortion amendment?

Basically, if the court had been told (i.e. someone had actually been present to argue, which your attorney won't do if you disappear and stuff) that an NFA weapon was of the kind used by the militia/military it should've come out differently. The court said:

"The Court cannot take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon."

Judicial notice is messy but given it was a criminal case, with a right to argue about everything that might be used to convict, a competent lawyer - hell, even an incompetent lawyer - should have challenged everything, and by that time "trench guns" from WW1 would have certainly, easily been identifiable as the kind of weapon suitable for militia use.

So whatever it is you are talking about does not apply like it does to CA, NY, NJ, HI, MD, and others being MAY ISSUE states.

In TN now, you need no permission to concealed carry, so unless prohibited by other laws or statutes anyone is free to do so, regardless of religion or what the local police think your rights should be.

IIRC, you need private gun ownership to have a militia (as the founders understood them). I believe the idea was regular citizens would organize when needed and bring their own guns.

Lots of ways to wring hands about a very badly written amendment.

>The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State) and its operative clause (the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed).

Here's the first Google result for your entertainment:

You Can Purchase a Fully Functional Army Tank Online Because This Is America

https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2015/09/armslist-sells-f...

I'm aware and my point was explicitly about being able to drive them around wherever I like, under the guise of it being the rough equivalent of concealed carry for an MLRS.

You can't; there's restrictions. At the minimum, it's likely that people would argue they're heavy and would harm infrastructure (or outright destroy it in the case of some tanks).

Separately, explosives are also tightly controlled, but are still a key part of armaments.

The government owns the roads, ergo can sidestep a lot of the what might otherwise be mandated under strict scrutiny for their usage with rational basis tests. E.g., "the roads are rated for <x> class of vehicles, and a tank is <y> class."

But you're wrong, while I couldn't drive my tank around, I could certainly load it onto a tractor trailor and show it off around town. I would argue that's functionally the same thing.

A multi rocket system, is not a gun. It's ordnance. So this argument is weak and I don't need to extend into that except for.... ALSO LEGAL. Again, you are going to need to follow the rules of the NFA, and ATF's explosives requirements. The larger issue will be to get Lockhead Martin to sell you one! Which they will not. But you come up with the cash for 1000 of them, and I bet they do.

Explosives are regulated because they have no defensive purpose. I mean, they do, but it's tough to use them defensively and accurately. If you cite Heller vs DC, they are dangerous AND unusual, key point to use "AND" there.

Arms do actually mean arms. Arms meant cannons too. But bombs were never really arms.

The line in this case is drawn rather inconsistently by the federal government agencies, and more fairly but even increasingly restrictive by congress.

Any other questions?

Legally, how is:

> You can purchase a tank but not operate it anywhere off your own property.

functionally different than:

> You can purchase a handgun but may not carry it concealed on your person off your own property.

Emphasis on Legally. In both cases these are allowed weapons for people to own, which, while not exact parallels (Tanks can cause infrastructure damage and such) at their core seem very similar from a legal perspective, especially because of the NFA requirement for tanks. That latter is important to consider because the NFA largely deals with guns of varying sorts in its rules.

Also context: I'm an ignorant Canuck who occasionally lives stateside.

There is no NFA requirement for the tank itself. Only for the cannon, and the ammunition if it has an explosive payload. The tank is just a vehicle. If you can make it street legal, you are free to drive it anywhere you like.

The more interesting thing you bring up inadvertently is "on your own property". If that's the case, I should be able to own all the machine guns I like without NFA stamps on my own property right?

The NFA is an unconstitutional law that sought to put a tax on rights. Then extra double unconstitutional when in 1986 they said "Oh, we longer accept the tax for certain still legal things". We specifically deny behavior that elsewhere, like voting. All handguns were supposed to be included, and all rifles with barrels shorter than 18". 18" stuck for shotguns, but rifles were moved to 16" for silly reason I can't recall exactly. Pistols got dropped because even in 1934 the public reaction wasn't going to fly.

It doesn't matter though. The point of all of this is 2A is an individual right, enumerated, and verified with previous and recent court decisions. Abortion is not, so people using the BUT STATES RIGHTS comments about the NYRPA decision vs Roe overturn are being completely ignorant of the realities here.

It's very silly to compare them.

Since you seem to know a lot about "arms," is a sword an "arm?"

> functionally different than:

I believe you can take your tank off your property, assuming you went to the DMV and got license plates and a VIN number for it.

Knives and swords are arms, yes. This was most recently seen in states that tried to ban switchblades outright. Switchblades are pretty poor fighting knives, but have the same public reaction fueled by media as pitbulls.

I talked with a lobbyist responsible for the switchblade deregulation in my state. After her research it came to "What makes a weapon will always be up to the judge, but the easy test is can you swing it?". Which is fair I think. That said... I also trained with my state's swat unit for a class and they talked about their justification for getting their gun out according to dept policy being "Any time a weapon is involved", which can mean gun, knife, sword, folding chair, sharp pencil or really big box of hot dogs depending on intent.

You're right about the tank. So long as you have the right markers, mirrors, vision, licensing, etc. You're good to go. Although you won't enjoy it as a daily driver after the initial buzz wears off.

Unclear on explosives.

As far as "arms," the line is drawn at being able to be operated by a single person. So it would appear unconstitutional to prohibit keeping and bearing cannons and tactical nukes, though Congress can prohibit sale and interstate transfer.

"As the quotations earlier in this opinion demonstrate, the inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right. The handgun ban amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of “arms” that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose.

The prohibition extends, moreover, to the home, where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute. Under any of the standards of scrutiny that we have applied to enumerated constitutional rights, banning from the home “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family,”, would fail constitutional muster."

If people had commonly used cannons to protect their homes, maybe tanks would be protected under the 2nd Amendment by their logic.

Edit: to pull context from another comment here.

"The 'militia' was the entire adult male citizenry, who were not simply allowed to keep their own arms, but affirmatively required to do so.… With slight variations, the different colonies imposed a duty to keep arms and to muster occasionally for drill upon virtually every able-bodied white man between the age of majority and a designated cut-off age. Moreover, the duty to keep arms applied to every household, not just to those containing persons subject to militia service. Thus the over-aged and seamen, who were exempt from militia service, were required to keep arms for law enforcement and for the defense of their homes."

This issue is that the States became lazy once the Feds got their standing military. All States should require citizens to muster for arms and disaster training at least twice a year.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246

You can argue that the previous decision was wrong all you want (I personally think it was), but you can't allow the states to just ignore the supreme court and do whatever they want or all constitutional protections are meaningless.

I mean it obviously can, as the law at issue in Dobbs did that, and it was allowed.

It's effectively saying 'the existence of state laws that attempt to restrict a right, even ones which have been rule unconstitutional, is itself evidence that it's okay for states to impose restrictions on constitutional rights.'

Which seems like a very odd argument to make the day after striking down a 100 year old NY State law restricting gun carry rights on the basis that there's no evidence of a long tradition of such restrictions being passed by states.

tl;dr we have a really dogshit system that essentially puts 9 people in charge of everything

It's not a stretch. They are literally "on a whim law makers." They decide what issues they want to take up and change the way they interpret the constitution depending on how they want to rule on an issue. In theory, they could be held in check by congress, but in practice that is impossible. Especially since the justice's are political weapons of congress. There's a reason the supreme court nominations have been huge campaign points for the last few elections. They have basically unchecked power.

> The constitution still somehow works in the U.S, and supreme judges doing a great job at keeping it honored.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. They choose how they want to interpret it depending on how they want to rule. There's no consistency and it's frankly a disgrace. Has been for a while too, this isn't something new to this current court.

If the supreme court cannot respect precedent or at least provide a very good reason why precedent should be overruled, then what we have is a country ruled by a set of god kings with zero accountability. When faith in the system crumbles as a result of extreme partisan decision making, what you get is balkanization.

Pages 47 through 74 of the court's decision, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf, provide their reasons for why precedent should be overruled.

Yet what we recently learned is what the supreme court decides is of little consequence. It's just the temporary whim of whatever political party happens to be in power. In 10, 20 or whatever years it takes to get a liberal court back, then roe v wade comes back and the court reinterprets a "well regulated militia" to mean, ah, a "well regulated militia".

First of all, what do you think a militia even is? It is a group of CITIZENS that form an ad-hoc fighting force.

Secondly, the amendment says "the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms".

It doesn't say "the right of the military". It doesn't say "the right of the militia". And it doesn't say "the right of peace officers."

When the Declaration of Independence was drafted, "We the People" did not mean "military".

Thirdly, the Bill of Rights explicitly grants rights to people, NOT the government and NOT the military. Yet somehow, conveniently, that is different for the 2A?

You might not like the 2A, but the meaning is clear and supported by history. This "well-regulated militia" nonsense is the climate-change-denial of the 2A.

I'm always surprised by how few people realize that the SCOTUS doesn't make laws for states. I'm also surprised at how deeply convinced the notion of "the federal government and SCOTUS supersede state laws" is ingrained into our culture.

The SCOTUS only provides opinions and jurisprudence on matters. They don't "make laws" and can't command anything with any sort of enforceable power. Abortion could have been abolished yesterday, last month or even last decade if any state wanted it to.

Any state level Supreme Court can run contrary to the judgements of the SCOTUS without having to fear enforceable retribution. We've seen this recently with the case of interstate "travel bans" during COVID, "Sanctuary Cities" during Trump's first couple months of presidency and the spotty legalization of marijuana in certain states.

"The 'militia' was the entire adult male citizenry, who were not simply allowed to keep their own arms, but affirmatively required to do so.… With slight variations, the different colonies imposed a duty to keep arms and to muster occasionally for drill upon virtually every able-bodied white man between the age of majority and a designated cut-off age. Moreover, the duty to keep arms applied to every household, not just to those containing persons subject to militia service. Thus the over-aged and seamen, who were exempt from militia service, were required to keep arms for law enforcement and for the defense of their homes."

This issue is that the States became lazy once the Feds got their standing military. All States should require citizens to muster for arms and disaster training at least twice a year.

Or how about, since we banded together in order to create a more perfect union, and so that I, as a citizen, can focus my time on pursuing happiness, rather than mustering every six months, we agree, through our democratically elected representatives, to just pay some money into a kitty and out of that fund a professional police force, fire department, and a state national guard. That way we get sufficient people trained in the use of arms to secure our liberty, and we don't have to act like we're a bunch of 18th century farmers any more.

Also, we've seen all the institutions you mention collapse in the face of disaster. It would be far better for the citizens to be responsible for themselves in a collation with larger bodies than be dependent upon those larger organizations. For example, in Florida it makes sense to have the community trained on preparation and local response. People need to know what to materials to gather and what is already stockpiled locally. In the face of a hurricane, the community guard, i.e. the people, would be responsible for triaging the situation until reinforcements arrive. As it stands, the people huddle together en-mass hoping that the Federal government, or even the State will come to their rescue.

In a plain reading, it makes sense in context for this to mean "well trained". It would be rather odd for it to both say, in a supporting clause, that it's subject to arbitrary Government control, and also in the main clause that the right "shall not be infringed".

Who has the right to food? A well balanced breakfast or the people?

To what end?

That's not a rhetorical question. How far do you want to go? P90s? RPGs? Stinger missiles?

What would the societal benefit be there?

To get some long lost rights back.

>How far do you want to go? P90s? RPGs? Stinger missiles?

Silencers/supressors are currently banned in the US (requires a tax stamp and long waiting period) but legal in other highly restrictive countries like England/UK. They're basically mufflers for guns and not like in the movies. Short barreled rifles would be nice too; we have those now but it's a "technicality," where anyone who owns them for recreational shooting can, on a whim of a bureaucrat, become a felon sentenced to decades of prison. That's not how a free society based on laws should work. Pot falls under the same category. It's still not legal at the federal level and if the DEA decides it wants to start raiding people's homes looking for pot, it certainly can, and people can be prosecuted for it.

>What would the societal benefit be there?

We're a society of individuals, not a society of Borg. Freedoms of the individual are the greatest benefit a society can have.

Which specific rights? Don't wax on the pseudo-libertarian bullshit, as you're communicating with an actual libertarian.

Please, do tell.

Reread what I wrote, I put them in there.

>pseudo-libertarian bullshit

Dunno where this came from, maybe time to tone it down a notch. You sound a little emotional.

Not emotional. I just don't suffer fools gladly. That'd be you, in case that escapes you.

Toodles!

It's pretty obvious you are trying to sound intelligent by claiming to be an "actual libertarian," (is there a certification for that by chance? Social or economic?) and using a cliché, but the content of your dialog is pretty thin.

Here's the summary: you asked a question, I answered, you went into a mindless rant and starting name calling. I'll bet you even started to type "LINO" then thought better of it. I don't even know what your position is, your dialog was so thin. Maybe take a deep breath and take time to collect your thoughts. Who's the one suffering fools again?

I'll give you the last word, make it count.

Those aren't rights.

Those are (whether you agree with them or not) laws.

Those are different things.

What you advocate is license (definition 3)[0], not liberty.

Those are wildly different concepts.

>We're a society of individuals, not a society of Borg. Freedoms of the individual are the greatest benefit a society can have.

That we are, but we still all need to live together. Unless, of course you want to move to the middle of the desert or atop a mountain, the rights of others must also be respected.

I'd point out that you never did answer my question: "To what end?"

I'll clarify, since a good faith reading of your response would make me think you didn't understand the question rather than ignoring it in favor of your trained-in prejudices.

What would be served (other than you being able to kill people with impunity) by removing restrictions on, say P90s or RPGs?

If your intent is to have the means (and the desire?) to kill lots of people, then I get your point.

But if you wish to live in a free, peaceful society based on the rule of law (rather than the rule of the gun), I don't see your point at all.

As a (small 'l') libertarian, I note that I can only exercise my liberties freely in a society governed by the rule of law.

Having folks around with the means and will to kill anyone they feel like in large numbers isn't a libertarian principle.

Rather, it's a delusional state fed by this idea that your whole life is only the result of your actions, when 200,000+ years of human existence shows us that liberty comes from collective action to protect those liberties.

Having a bazooka doesn't make you more free. Nor is it a "right" per se.

What gives us liberty is the actual work required to maintain a free society.

"I've got guns, so back off asshole!" isn't a libertarian idea. Rather, it's a backward, "might makes right" authoritarian idea.

If you want to be completely isolated from other humans, go ahead and do whatever you want. But if you're going to live in a society, you need to work with your fellow members of that society to maximize individual rights and liberty.

What you propose does none of those things and are more appropriate to a street gang or mafia. Or is that your desire?

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/license

The constitution is short and vague on many things. People read between the lines. That's just as true of abortion as it if of gun rights.

If you read the constitutions as written, there is no right for individuals to have guns. It's very clear, this is for organized militias. If you read the constitution as written most of what the federal government does today isn't allowed, it's all mostly approved by an incredibly wide reading of the commerce clause.

The Court is picking and choosing rights. They force Maine to give priority to their religion, they force California/NY/MA to give priority to their gun rights, they force everyone to abandon reproductive rights. That's a choice in how to interpret a very vague document.

>The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State) and its operative clause (the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed).

"Many historians agree that the primary reason for passing the Second Amendment was to prevent the need for the United States to have a professional standing army. At the time it was passed, it seems it was not intended to grant a right for private individuals to keep weapons for self-defense."

So no. Your quote is not what the 2nd amendment means at all! It is a modern twist reinterpreting it.

They force Maine to not discriminate against religious schools. Maine can choose to not pay private schools at all or Maine can choose to pay all private schools.

Maine is not allowed to say that the local Catholic school is bad but a non religious local school is good. That is, in effect government choosing that religion is bad.

> they force California/NY/MA to give priority to their gun rights They force CA/NY/MA to follow the guidelines the court has set around the 2nd amendment. Notably in this case, you can not require someone to prove they have a need to exercise a right.

The NY law stated that you had to prove you needed a gun in order to get a license. That is opposite of how a right works. Let's re-frame this as a 1st amendment issue.

There is a large amount of misinformation in the world, this is causing civil unrest and issues(i.e. vaccine, elections). When the constitution was written, the founders could not conceive the internet, radio and TV or even large scale printing presses. Therefor, in order for you to publish a book or post a comment on a site that has to possibility of receiving over 200 views, you need to submit an application to your city hall in order to do so.

We would call any such law absurd on it's face.

>they force everyone to abandon reproductive rights. They are doing the opposite of forcing. They are saying that each state has the ability to decide what rights their citizens have.

This is not in conflict with the earlier gun control decision as the 2nd amendment defines the gun rights at the federal level. The supreme court has not found any text that defines reproductive rights at the federal level.

As has been pointed out by others the NY law was arbitrary. The local law man decided if you were worthy of getting a concealed permit. This would be like if the local law man decided if area women were worthy to be allowed an abortion.

The US would be better with fewer guns, but this was a badly written law.

New York* I believe.

I'd also note that the Sullivan Act[0] was put into law 111 years ago, and was perfectly fine until last week.

What has changed to make it unconstitutional now?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Act

You might disagree with the court, but that doesn't matter since any law similar to SB-8 related to guns would be handled by that court.

That said, I think CA/NY and others should absolutely do it. They should be super aggressive and start using the tactic created in SB-8 on all kinds of issues if for no other reason than the ridiculousness of relying on civilian enforcement of laws.

You know they won't just magically disappear right? They will still exist en masse. Guns are mostly banned in Mexico, but the cartels use them to control the government. Careful what you wish for.

States rights? Ha. Hypocrisy and blatant power grabs by the Federalist Society .

Shameful and likely the downfall of America.

Such extreme power grabs continue to be railroaded through by an extreme right wing unconcerned with the 300 million living Americans whose rights they are stomping upon.

1) we must eliminate the filibuster.

2) we must eliminate the electoral college

3) we must impeach the seditious conspiracy and cut the head off the snake that spawned it. The federalist society must be investigated for installing Supreme Court judges and we must impeach every last one of these criminals. Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh are also both subject to serious sexual crimes accusations that were steamrolled right over by the Republican juggernaut.

We cannot allow this theocracy-in-waiting gain absolute power, and to ignore their machinations to this end is no longer possible.

Edit: Since HN is rate-limiting me. There have been proposals that try to either give a Red State advantage, in particular, the electoral college. However, California could reasonably be split into 7 states (2 Red, 5 Blue) that would still have greater populations than Utah, netting +3 sets of Senators.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_st...

Jefferson will never ever happen because there's no mechanism for it to happen, and because it would be by far the poorest state with the absolute worst economy in the nation, so I'm not even sure why we should discuss it.

Oh and by the way the Jefferson plan specifically excludes the Emerald Triangle.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-4/#ar...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Californias

Would the federal government carpet bomb a state that tried? No. But there are other means to exert force and stop secession. Besides, the U.S. Government has no reason to ever willingly let California (or Texas, or really any state) leave the union, so why would they ever sit down at the negotiating table?

It depends on how you define "this." Polls that ask "do you support Roe v. Wade are useless because it's a legal decision and the public doesn't necessarily understand its legal effect. More granular polls show that the public is on both sides of Roe. Most Americans support some sort of abortion right, but most Americans also think that right should be narrower than Roe: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort.... In particular, 2/3s of Americans think that second trimester abortions should be generally illegal, but under Roe's trimester framework, there is a nationwide right to elective abortions in the second trimester.

> This ruling is disastrous and shows the capriciousness of the current court in interpreting precedent to mean whatever is popular with their party. The 14th can amendment be limited but the second cannot

The difference is not the Court's "capriciousness" but instead the text of the Second Amendment, which specifically addresses the "right to bear arms," versus the text of the 14th amendment, which says absolutely nothing about "privacy" or "abortion" or anything of the sort.

It's disingenuous beyond belief to try and make a false equivalency between an expressly enumerated right written into the Constitution 233 years ago, with one divined from "penumbras" and "emanations" of the Constitutional text in the mid-20th century.

None of this supports that the 14th amendment’s right to privacy under the due process clause doesn’t exist though?

> It's disingenuous beyond belief to try and make a false equivalency between an expressly enumerated right written into the Constitution 233 years ago, with one divined from "penumbras" and "emanations" of the Constitutional text in the mid-20th century.

Sure, we can ignore the well regulated militia clause as meaningless, everyone seems to. Then, to pick another example of capriciousness, my understanding is that this court ruled in Egbert v. Boule and that the explicit right against unreasonable search and seizure in the 4th amendment should actually be interpreted that there is no right to sue the government for redress of these violations, only the complaint processes that government agencies provide to decide the unreasonableness for themselves. There is another 233 year old amendment being so narrowly interpreted to slowly defang it while another “shall not be infringed”

Dobbs overturns both Roe and Casey, which replaced Roe's trimester framework with the undue burden standard [1]. Trimesters are completely irrelevant. Please learn this; I feel like half of your abortion comments push this in order to setup your 2/3s Gallup stat, which is also problematic.

> and something 2/3s of Americans oppose

We've also talked about this before. Here are some countervailing stats from the same poll [2]:

- Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision concerning abortion, or not?: 53% No, not overturn

- If the Supreme Court were to overturn its 1973 Roe versus Wade decision concerning abortion, it would mean there is no constitutional protection for abortion rights and each state could set its own laws to allow, restrict or ban abortions. Do you think overturning Roe versus Wade would be a good thing or a bad thing?: 63% bad thing

- Do you favor or oppose [A ban on abortions after the 18th week of a pregnancy]?: 56% oppose

18 weeks is well into the 2nd trimester. Again as we've discussed before, polling on abortion is very difficult. Mostly they show Americans' ignorance of the issue, which you even acknowledge.

In particular, most Americans don't know that providing elective abortion access is crucial as so many things can go wrong--especially in the 2nd and 3rd trimesters [3]--and you really can't enumerate them all.

Why do people have second trimester abortions? Ironically, it's mostly an access issue [4], but there are other reasons [5] [6]:

- microcephaly and other fetal anomalies are typically only detectable in the 2nd trimester

- many people can't get the time off or can't get the funds (abortion is expensive for many people)

- waiting periods can force people into the 2nd trimester

- delayed recognition of pregnancy and delayed confirmation of pregnancy with a pregnancy test

- logistical delays occurred in arranging insurance to pay for the abortion

- problems locating a provider and time lost due to an inappropriate initial referral (abortion clinics are busy)

Your argument is that Dobbs moves the US closer to what Americans want by making "that right... narrower than Roe." But in truth, we already mostly have what Americans want [7]:

- 79.3% of abortions were performed at ≤9 weeks’ gestation

- nearly all (92.7%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation

And the other 7.3% aren't due to evil or cruelty, they're the result of the US' restrictive abortion regime and intense tragedy.

And what Dobbs does is not to preserve the right to abortion in the first trimester, but to give States the power to proscribe it. Here's what the dissent says [8]:

"Today, the Court discards that balance. It says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A State can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs."

This is plainly not what Americans want. If your argument against Roe is that it was out of step with public opinion, mustn't you also level that argument against Dobbs?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_Parenthood_v._Casey

[2]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

[3]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10426234/

[4]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22176796/

[5]: https://www.self.com/story/why-people-get-second-trimester-a...

[6]: https://journals.openedition.org/eces/248

[7]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm

[8]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

One odd thing about this is that there is another case with the same 14th amendment reasoning which no one seems to be discussing: Loving v. Virginia (https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/395).

I wonder if that's because Clarence and Ginni Thomas have been committing miscegenation for years?

So I think he would be wholly unbothered making that distinction, knowing that _his_ rights are protected under a different clause. I guess it does show some of the fragility of judicial precedent, you could imagine an even more conservative justice who was not Thomas restricting the interpretation of this clause to mean only the narrow rights the majority of people in 1868 would have liked and not include miscegenation through some horribly tortured logic. But Thomas can draw the line before that and after himself.

Please, I'm eating. Besides, there's no evidence of this.

If you have a digesting problem with this, we may just call it nature but your comment is what could put many not at ease. That being said, I would at least guess we agree on the ruling that it gets us closer to nature and some commonly accepted ethic with regards to human life and procreation.

It's a reddit-level comment that doesn't add anything to the discussion.

That still makes it a rhetorical step up from Thomas's concurrence.

Also, non-discrimination in public schooling, with mandatory integration (Brown) but even before integration was understood to be essential (Plessy, permitting “separate but equal” education.) Without substantive due process, state public education which is separate by race and makes no pretense of equality would be fine. Also, the incorporation of much of the Bill of Rights as applicable against the states, as a whole.

Substantive due process is enormous, and Thomas has explicitly stated that the entire jurisprudence in that domain should be uprooted in his concurrence on Dobbs.

(Ironically, this includes the applicability of the 2nd Amendment to the State.)

I'm unclear what definition of "minority" you are using here. That sounds like a majority to me.

Comparing with poll numbers is not an apples-to-apples comparison. A lot of polls are highly motivated to support a particular outcome, but when you look into the details and ask questions a number of different ways, you get a more complex picture.

For instance, if you ask "how long should elective abortions be legal?" you may get an answer that seems to contradict "do you support Roe?". And then if you start to define "elective" (or even use different words) you might get a different answer still. I'm not saying which one is the "right" question to ask, but I am saying that it's not reasonable to reject actual vote totals in a free and fair election.

It is a majority of a smaller area but the minority of the larger area. Majority of a gerrymandered district for state representation. Majority of a purple state senate race, or one that has winner take all electoral vote allocation, as most do.

And of course, majority in Texas when the views held there are a minority for the overall country but they still pass laws letting people bring charges in Texas courts for abortions, even performed outside of Texas by people without representation in Texas state legislature, though I have some hope that this is a bridge too far even for the current partisan 6-3 court. No reason they wouldn’t allow it here while saying it couldn’t be used as precedent as many members for the current court argued in Bush v Gore.

That's not true, only 26% of Americans support abortion in almost all cases. Most support some sort of restriction. This ruling forces the States to determine what those restrictions are.

This is an extremely complicated and nuanced cultural issue. The debate that's happening now is one that was cut short by Roe—one that the rest of the West has had. Few other countries allow abortion with "no restrictions". States should be allowed to decide, individually, where they want to draw the line.

I'll add that this is in no way an endorsement of an anti-choice position. But there's no way to view this as "a minority enforcing social views on the majority."

The primary civic problem in this country is the neutering of our State and Federal legislatures. The Courts should not be legislating. The Executive should not be legislating. Force our Representatives to do their damn jobs.

This is just another symptom of the disease of the disproportional representation everywhere in our systems, most importantly the senate. The senate confirmed (or in the case of Garland, refused to confirm) these justices, and the senate refuses to pass laws the majority of Americans want.

> But there's no way to view this as "a minority enforcing social views on the majority."

How can you interpret the Texas law as anything but? This decision and those laws are all the product of concerted and focused lobbying and maneuvering by conservative Christian groups that make up a minority of Americans.

Hard disagree. Those issues have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Legislators have learned that the best way to guarantee re-election is to loudly wring your hands and ask "won't somebody do something" every election season. If they actually do their jobs, people might hold them accountable. It has zero to do with "disproportional representation".

> ...the senate refuses to pass laws the majority of Americans want.

This is by design. That's literally what a Senate is designed to do. Preventing the mob from ruling the country by popular decree.

> How can you interpret the Texas law... that make up a minority of Americans.

Because a majority of TEXANS support it: only 28% of the state thinks abortion should be legal in all or most cases [1]. You can't look at nationwide polls and make statements about local politics.

1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/355034/texas-aligned-red-states...

The 2014 election shouldn't be ignored, because it explains why Garland wasn't confirmed and Trump's appointments were. That year, Republicans won the popular vote by a margin of almost 6%, and won 9 seats in the Senate.

That election gave them control of the Senate until 2020, and that outcome was representative of the popular vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_United_States_elections

The real tragedy here is that it took 50 years for this egregiously bad ruling to be thrown out. And despite your fear mongering, today's decision went out of it's way to say that it is not meant to apply to any of those other issues that you mentioned.

The Supreme Court's job is to interpret the Constitution, not to invent rights.

Bodily autonomy is not a constitutional right, but self defense is?

> Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg was on record saying that the decision was flawed!

A misrepresentation of what RBG was getting at. She was very much of the opinion that legislatively it should have been codified as a right. She's right, but it's pie in the sky, as much as her desire to be replaced by a woman President.

> today's decision went out of it's way to say that it is not meant to apply to any of those other issues that you mentioned.

Thomas specifically called out those decisions as being up for review. Alito mentioned it in his leaked opinion. (it may have been bargained out of the opinion, or maybe he chose not to be explicit as to not raise pressure in the political sphere, which seems likely given the nature of this court) Four of the justices who voted against Roe today within the past decade are on the record as saying that this was settled law. They are liars, and people are right to mistrust the court.

> She was very much of the opinion that legislatively it should have been codified as a right.

These positions are not in conflict, and seem to be supported with quotes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/05/06/ruth-bader...

I have my own personal feelings on abortion, but as far as laws on it go I honestly don't care one way or another. So if all of these Congresspeople want to come out and say that the majority of the country wants abortion to be legal nationwide, then they need to DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS and pass a law to make it so.

To get enough Senate votes to pass a constitutional amendment, you're looking at 75% of the country voting for Democrats. Not going to happen. The Senate imbalance is ridiculous.

A constitutional amendment ought to have support from more than one party, not just Democrats. You might be able to get that if you took a more oblique approach, for example with an amendment explicitly upholding the natural right to control over one's own body, as opposed to one narrowly focused on allowing abortion.

[0] Assuming fetuses had rights, of course, which is obviously absurd. That requires the capability for deliberate action and the ability and willingness to take responsibility for the effects of your actions on others. Without that you may be alive and biologically "human" but you're still more an animal than a person--at any age.

These are lines of arguments they already use. A constitutional right to bodily autonomy doesn't change the math at all.

The whole point of the amendment is to make it explicit that they don't. That isn't how rights work anyway; it's never a matter of priority, one right vs. another. Any positive action which would infringe on someone else's rights is forbidden, including in particular using someone else's property, including their body, without their consent. But merely not doing anything for them--non-action--is always an option. The fetus is the one taking from the mother--that's the action. The mother merely wants this to stop. There is no conflict of rights. The fetus's rights, such as they are, are not being infringed.

> even though the mother has a right to bodily autonomy she would be committing murder

This line of argumentation would prove far too much. Refusing to serve as someone else's life support system is not murder. And again, the point of the amendment would be to make that explicit.

This is exactly how rights work, how they're debated and how the supreme court rules. Like the constitution says you have freedom of speech, but you don't have an absolute right to freedom of speech. You cannot go on someone else's property and start yelling because they have the right to kick you off, violating your right to freedom of speech.

What you're trying to do is frame it in a way that makes sense to yourself, which is great, but is not how things are decided by the judiciary. Which is my entire point: It doesn't matter if you explicitly say bodily autonomy is sacred in a constitutional amendment because ultimately the supreme court is whom interprets that. The only way you could in theory do something like this would be to have an amendment that outright says abortion is legal, but that wouldn't pass for obvious reasons.

You really need to go and try to debate more pro-life individuals because these are all things I've encountered while debating them. The idea that this line of thinking is 'too much' when that's literally what's happening in places like my current state of Texas means you really need to experience what's actually going on.

No, that does not in any way violate your right to freedom of speech. You aren't being punished for the speech. It doesn't even matter whether you were speaking. You were violating their rights with respect to their property by trespassing, which is exactly why they can kick you out. As I said before—any action which infringes on another's rights is forbidden. That includes actions which involve speech, when they also infringe on others' rights. It's not a right to speak, it's simply recognition that speaking, per se, does not infringe on others' rights and consequently is not a just basis for punishment.

That's the natural right to freedom of speech. The 1st Amendment, of course, adds extra constraints against the government interfering with speech, which shouldn't even be necessary in the first place but that's what happens when you grant some privileged entity the power to "legitimately" infringe on people's rights with impunity–natural rights just aren't enough any more, you have to spell out when you're going to respect them and when you're going to ignore them. That's not something you have to worry about when you just do the right thing and respect natural rights all the time without making special exceptions.

> Which is my entire point: It doesn't matter if you explicitly say bodily autonomy is sacred in a constitutional amendment because ultimately the supreme court is whom interprets that.

If you assume from the start that the court will ignore the text of the law and the intent of those who ratified it and simply rule whichever way they want based on their personal feelings then I don't see any point in even having a Constitution. Or a legislature, for that matter. Or this discussion. So let's assume the court at least pretends to do its job and take the text and intent of the amendment into account. Anything less is just defeatism.

> The only way you could in theory do something like this would be to have an amendment that outright says abortion is legal, but that wouldn't pass for obvious reasons.

No, it doesn't need to mention abortion at all. An amendment stating that no person can be compelled to provide life-saving medical support to another against their will would have that effect without being specialized to just abortion. Sure, motivated individuals would try to argue their way around it, but there is no way to reconcile forcing a mother to continue a pregnancy with the mother not being compelled to serve as involuntary life support. Would the SCOTUS do their job and enforce it? Who knows. I don't have that much faith in them, to be honest. But if not, an amendment explicitly stating that abortion is a legal right wouldn't fare any better.

What's happening in Texas is equally absurd, of course. I fully expect it to get struck down eventually, if only because it involves interstate commerce and threatens the federal government's exclusive prerogatives, but it hasn't been in effect long enough yet to work through the system.

Of course she wouldn't have voted to overturn it, but I never said or meant to imply that she would have.

I'm talking about the government forcing a corporation to fire certain employees, not a corporation making that decision on it's own.

If you'd consider for a second, you can come up with some of your own to debunk your own previous hypothesis.

There are _countless_ examples where when you want to exist within society, you must act in order to prevent harms to others.

I accept your apology, though.

You can when the two ways have different contexts.

> force you to take injections of experimental immunotherapies

Leaving aside the misleading "experimental" part, the bodily rights context here was "being part of a society" - this was a huge public health crisis - people not having the vaccine impacted on a greater part of society than just themselves.

The bodily rights context for abortion is "a single person".

Two clearly different situations, no?

No. You either have bodily autonomy (My body, my choice!) or you don't. For the record I happen to support abortion (and in fact think society would be better off if many of the people in Washington DC had been aborted), but I oppose hypocrisy and logical fallacies.

You don't think there's any situations where the state (in its role of protecting society) might be ok overriding someone's bodily autonomy? That would preclude any vaccinations, prisons, etc., no?

This is using the power of the state to compel women to give birth to a child after having carried it for 9 years. Your right to alcohol and other risky behaviors is also revoked as that is child endangerment. Now what about the child for the next 18 years? That is truly constitutionally problematic.

Those women can simply get their abortion done in another state, they're not "forced" to give birth to a child in much the same way a person threatened with losing their job wasn't "forced" to get a vaccine. Hey, you said it.

And you're telling me that a vaccine which is obscenely safe, you are more likely to die from tripping down the stairs in your own home than you are to die from the vaccine, is totally the same as childbirth? Where nearly 1000 women die every year, many are left with serious conditions, where women are left in poverty where they can't care for those children.

Come on. Your position is beyond absurd.

It’s a matter of double standards here. People get all up in arms when you point out that you can still get an abortion if you just travel out of state. But if you point out that your only way to avoid taking a vaccine you don’t want is to lose your job, well no one is “forcing” you to take it! Likewise, I say it’s disingenuous to claim you’re forced to have an unwanted child. You just have to travel to another state. That’s a helluva lot easier to swallow than losing your job.

Just drop the phrase “forced to” around abortion is all I’m saying.

This is a disingenous line of argument and you demean yourself with it to support an absolutely brainwormed kind of conspiracism.

First, are you aware that the right for individuals to bear arms was not considered a right by judicial opinion for most of US history until 2008? For instance, in US v Miller 1939 it was decided one didn’t have a right to own sawed off shotguns because it bore no “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” You see, many read the amendment as the right for states to have a militia, not the right for individuals to bear arms for self defense. In fact, I believe most founding father documents support that interpretation. Interpretation matters as much as the document itself.

Second, the US government hasn’t tried to force injections of experimental immunotherapies. It was no longer experimental after it achieved approval. No US government mandated the vaccine besides in situations where vaccines are already mandated. They strongly encouraged through rewards, but they always provided alternatives to requiring vaccination. For example, masking and testing have been at times adequate alternatives. The government has required vaccines for public school and the military for decades (centuries?), and it has been widely regarded as saving millions of lives, so it’s very weird that it’s an issue now. Oh right, culture war.

I don't see what antivax has to do with anything

Actual that’s what all these cases were about. Roe v Wade- some states wanted to treat abortion as murder and control women’s bodily autonomy. Lawrence was about keeping sodomy laws which could be used to legally discriminate against gay people. Griselwald is clearly about social views on contraception.

> egregiously bad ruling to be thrown out. And despite your fear mongering, today's decision went out of it's way to say that it is not meant to apply to any of those other issues that you mentioned.

The main opinion did not rule this out, or if I did I absolutely missed it. Thomas’ solo concurring opinion calls these cases out by name as worthy of reconsideration by the court - “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”

It’s hard to take this argument seriously at all. It feels like you are not paying attention, saying everything is fine while the 14th amendment is on fire.

He went further than that, he explicitly called them out as "errors in need of correction".

Thomas's opinion pretty specifically cited some of those other cases. It wasn't joined by all the others who voted with him, but then again, Kavanaugh claimed that Roe v. Wade was "settled law" during his confirmation hearing, which clearly doesn't seem to be what he's saying now. I'm not surprised that this is his real view, and I won't be in a few years if suddenly he also votes against some of those other rulings.

There isn’t any actual legal teeth there anymore as far as I can tell. Countless examples of presidents, justices, etc walking past perjury charges.

"The right to abortion is not explicitly defined in the Constitution, and therefore does not exist."

"The right to _purchase_ firearms is not explicitly defined in the Constitution, but somehow must also exist, because how could you bear arms without it?"

The sad reality is that this shit is all just twisted to convenience.

Why did Thomas exclude interracial marriage as a state decision, while calling out same-sex marriage as being a state decision?

Why do several Supreme Court Justices state that they are originalists, and the Constitution is sacrosanct, when the people who wrote it said that it wasn't, and was to be "reviewed and updated to the needs of the times as a living document"?

Roe was a "creative" interpretation. Upholding the 2nd Amendment is far from that.

But not "interpret in lieu of meaningful review". Look at 4A. It's gone to SCOTUS a huge number of times. But no review has ever taken place of it.

So did the ninth amendment, FWIW: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Appelate courts decide on what a "right" is. That's arguably their most important function. Huge, huge chunks of modern constitutional law are based on subjects not enumerated in the constitution. The constitution doesn't speak about miscegenation laws, or miranda rights, etc... Yet those are still "rights" that you'd be awfully horrified to have destroyed, right?

This argument doesn't really work, basically. The argument you're making is, if you really think about it, not what you actually want.

I have some bad news for you. SCOTUS blew that one up yesterday. <sad trombone>

And there is, as of yesterday, no remedy for violations of your right to remain silent. So, you better hope your lawyer can have anything you say suppressed before trial.

Explain this, please. You still have the right to remain silent, you still have the right to an attorney. The police still have to stop questioning you when you invoke these rights. Literally the only thing that changed was the notification requirement. That's it.

Basically, the Court removed any remedy against state actors who fail to uphold your right to remain silent.

Prior to Vega, if the state ignored your right to remain silent, you could seek redress with the courts.

Post Vega, that right to seek redress no longer exists.

On paper we still have the right. But, we have to no way to hold the state accountable when it fails to uphold that right. Is a right really a right if the state can ignore it with impunity?

You can still sue a cop who continues questioning you after you have invoked your right to remain silent. Literally nothing about that has changed. The one specific thing that has changed is that you can't sue a cop simply for failing to read you your rights.

That does not impact your right to remain silent, or any remedies available in case of violation of it, in any way.

And my response: I have some bad news for you. SCOTUS blew that one up yesterday.

There is no longer a right to be Mirandized. That's what I said.

Officer Vega locked Tekoh in a room and threaten him and his family in order to coerce a confession.

That confession was used in the trial.

Are you saying there is some other way to recover damages from Vega? At best, had Tekoh been found guilty, he was looking at years of appeals. He still wouldn't have been able to sue Vega under the current ruling.

As I said above, yes, you still have the right to remain silence. But you no longer have a way to seek redress against a LEO who ignores that right.

Oh you read the whole judgement?

Perhaps you missed this nugget on page 118

> For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell.

Are you going to amend your comment now?

what thomas did is a little gauche, the court generally avoids opining on cases that aren't actually in front of them because the facts and specifics of the case matter, but, yeah, the votes are probably there, thomas just likes to say the quiet part out loud.

who do you think is going to vote against it? thomas, who has outright stated he's a yes? kavanaugh, who said roe was "settled law"? Barrett, the actual handmaiden cultist? Alito?

"Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Bodily autonomy is more complex than just womb to birth. So, at what age is a mother no longer required to use their body to provide life for a child? ie. If a 4 year old needs a blood transfusion, can the state force the mother to provide their blood for their child? What about a kidney transplant? When does the states interest in the potential life of a child end?

Bodily autonomy aside, since Rowe v. Wade was primarily a decision about medical privacy, and was part of the foundations of many other precedents and laws, is HIPA still valid? What is the new line between medical privacy rights and free speech rights.

.

And it got thrown out for precisely this reason. Although cocaine can be prescribed in very limited circumstances, my doctor cannot just write me a prescription for cocaine. That's a "medical privacy" issue too, right?

> is HIPA still valid?

Don't be absurd.

Second, I think you have a very deep misunderstanding of how all of this works. HIPAA is not in any danger whatsoever, and really has nothing to do with Roe.

You realize that this goes against the right of the federal government to regulate the states re abortion?

Historically, yes, they can. The BoR didn't initially restrict state action, only federal action.

Simply going "Oh, there are more rights" isn't a good answer. I'm pro-choice myself, but Roe vs Wade was terrible legislation, and is a fantastic example of tactical victory, strategic defeat.

This.

All this controversy could end right now by simple having congress... pass a law.

That's what they are supposed (and paid) to do. Maybe if they spent less time trading stocks...

Really, why is the ninth amendment even there if it's supposed to be ignored?

The court explained in great detail why the right to abortion is not an unenumerated right.

What we actually saw was the end of stare decisis. Any excuse is good enough now. For almost three hundred years, the court only overruled itself in areas of overwhelming public consensus. Now? It's just politics, man.

I genuinely don't understand all the HN libertarians lining up on the site of Government Power here. This is absolutely a libertarian issue. Is it just knee-jerk tribalism? Have you guys all decided you don't really care so much about individual rights? Or is it just that you don't have a uterus and are disinclined to align yourself with those who do?

Abortion is murder, life in prison for violators, no exceptions.

There's nothing in the ruling that I'm aware of that would prevent Congress from passing a law on it. But I haven't read the whole ruling, and I'm certainly not an expert. So I'm open to being shown otherwise.

To me (and six Supreme Court Justices) the Constitution says you have the right to keep (own) and bear (carry) arms (firearms) and because of this, laws that put an undue burden on this right are unconstitutional.

Nothing in the constitution says this is a problem.

Literally appointed by minority governments.

That kind of suggests that the states are the right place to handle the issue.

Provide the source and the question that was asked on it. The majority of Americans think it should be up to the states, whether the state is for or against

Gallup puts the number of legal under all cases at 35% of Americans and legal under some conditions at 50%.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

Trigger laws in places like Oklahoma make it illegal in basically all cases after fertilization. Texas law is going to let Texans sue people for providing or getting abortions out of state. Framing this as a states rights issue didn’t work for slavery, segregation, gay rights, etc and it won’t work for women’s reproductive rights either.

the poll said "completely overturned", which is the more radical position. roe v wade being completely overturned is not the same as "delegating to the states" per your original comment, because the federal protection could be weakened to only support specific cases or require an earlier termination which would leave more room for state laws.

You're framing the issue in a way that's misleading, because while the majority of americans oppose completely overturning roe, another majority could support weakening roe or limiting it to specific cases

This is the most polled issue in American politics and has been for half a century. We know with certainty that a large majority of the public supports abortion rights. We don't need to talk about what "another majority could support". That theory has been shot down thousands of times over the last 50 years.

You have those reversed.

98% of black women voted for Clinton.

In 2016, 55% of voters were women, which trump won 47-44. By three points, which is a solid win in a presidential general election.

So Trump won the largest voting race+gender demographic.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/892859/women-support-ove...

For republican-leaning women (which will be white women based on the female black vote numbers), it is basically 50-50 in support/opposition for Roe V Wade. For Dem-leaning it is 85-15 roughly.

Roe V Wade is the most important women's right won in the courts in the last 50 years, and women voted to overturn it effectively.

Finally, this is the culmination of the liberal justices refusing to step down or retire. Ruth Baider Ginsburg is held up as a pinnacle of feminism, and yet her stubbornness to continue serving despite health problems and battles with cancer resulted in Trump getting a crucial third justice.

The most stalwart feminist justice handed the overturn of Roe V Wade to a president with a known record for sexual impropriety if not outright assault.

Obama sat on Merrick Garland.

The baby boomer generation ushered in sexual freedom when it was their time to be young and free, and then shut the door on it in their old age crapping over all the other generations.

What a world.

That actually makes the problem worse. You can't undo this without changing the court. You can't change the court without the senate and you can't get the senate of team blue continues to isolate it self in a handful of states.

Roe v. Wade was the only thing preventing that.

You're quoting stats for white women only, Trump lost the female vote 54/39.

Which makes this claim factually incorrect:

> Roe V Wade is the most important women's right won in the courts in the last 50 years, and women voted to overturn it effectively.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examinati...

I'd imagine if you combined the age demographic information, the female vote that may actually be able to get pregnant and so be affected by this is going to swing even harder away from Trump.

The combined male and female vote swings 30% to the red between the 18-29 and 65+ demographics.

Also, what happens with rape victims? Or you know, women often know about their pregnancy weeks after the event?

Also, you are literally less likely to die from donating your kidney then a women giving birth. Do you really have no empathy whatsoever? Giving birth is brutal, you have a no matter how disgusting it is to write but technically a parasite growing inside you sucking out every resource you have causing often life altering changes. And we are not even at birthing.

I am also a guy by the way, but that is exactly why I believe that the only opinion we should have on the issue is to listen to women, and the only voice we should have is to shout over old men deciding on a topic not concerning them.

So what? It takes two to tango.

> Also, what happens with rape victims?

They should be able to get an abortion. I'm not anti-abortion in all cases.

> Also, you are literally less likely to die from donating your kidney then a women giving birth. Do you really have no empathy whatsoever? Giving birth is brutal, you have a no matter how disgusting it is to write but technically a parasite growing inside you sucking out every resource you have causing often life altering changes. And we are not even at birthing.

Let me quote a paragraph from [0]:

When a woman is pregnant, the situation is different. In the usual case, where pregnancy did not result from sexual assault, the child himself, and his need for shelter and nourishment in the womb, is a direct result of actions taken voluntarily by both parents. The need to live in the mother’s uterus for approximately forty weeks is also not an extraordinary measure, in the way that the term is generally used. It is a basic human need — every single person who has ever been born required it. Just as the newborn has a specific claim against his parents due to the fact that they created him in all his helplessness, so too did he have a claim against them before he was born, for the same reason. It is true that the heavier burden falls on the mother during the prenatal period. Men simply cannot directly provide what their children need during the first forty weeks of their lives. (I would advocate requiring fathers to indirectly provide as much as they can by compensating mothers for their medical bills, lost work time, and other expenses during pregnancy.) The fact that women must shoulder more of the parental obligation during pregnancy than men is regrettable, but does not negate the obligation. If someone claims that “women will always need abortion,” note the implicit assumptions. The first is that our ability to bear children is, and always will be, a handicap. The second is that we can never hope for our society to adequately adjust to the needs of mothers so that women will not feel the need to abort. The third is that violence against certain of our fellow human beings is an acceptable, even necessary way to solve social problems.

[...] But I find the acceptance of abortion as a response to a sexist society to be inconsistent with humanist ideals. Humanism values the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. It affirms that moral standards should be based on the effect of our actions on our fellow human beings. It embraces the use of reason and repudiates the use of violence to settle disputes. Abortion is an ancient, backwards practice which is not worthy of those ideals. Legal or not, we must progress beyond it.

> I am also a guy by the way, but that is exactly why I believe that the only opinion we should have on the issue is to listen to women, and the only voice we should have is to shout over old men deciding on a topic not concerning them.

Oh please, not this argument again. First of all, there are women who are also against abortion, this has nothing to do with "old men". Second of all, we are all human and are capable of empathy (well, except the psychopaths) and just because you are not a woman doesn't mean that you can't reason about things that affect women.

[0] https://infidels.org/library/modern/debates-secularist-abort...

Just as possibly the most basic human right there can be - bodily autonomy.

There is no monetary help supplied by the father that can even measure up to the health implications of a pregnancy, money can’t buy/fix health.

>> In the usual case, where pregnancy did not result from sexual assault, the child himself, and his need for shelter and nourishment in the womb, is a direct result of actions taken voluntarily by both parents.

> Just as possibly the most basic human right there can be - bodily autonomy.

You have bodily autonomy. You can choose to have or not to have sex (which may or may not lead to pregnancy). Abortion is a medical procedure and is not a human right.

On the other hand, when it came to the COVID vaccine, the Dems were very quick to ignore the bodily autonomy argument based on bogus claims.

An example from the Australian Human Rights Act: > No-one may be subjected to medical or scientific experimentation or treatment without his or her free consent.

Can you clarify what social view is being enforced on the majority?

We want curious conversation here. If you would please review the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and make your substantive points thoughtfully, we'd be grateful.

This court will use its power however it wants. It recognizes absolutely no concept about "overstepping". It will do what it wants. That has been made abundantly clear.

Your assertion is oblivious to the modern sensibilities of "Law and Order." Gay men will be arrested on "reasonable suspicion" of having had gay sex. And even when the suspicion is not found to be reasonable, there will be zero ramifications for the arresting officers.

"reasonable" in this case meaning "visiting the home of another gay man", let alone "living with one".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

2. https://www.history.com/news/stonewall-riots-lgbtq-drag-thre...

Abortion is a case where there is genuine disagreement among the public and at its core exists a genuine moral question. Most partisans talk past each other, but the core of it is about the rights of the unborn and at which point that becomes relevant.

It's different because of this from gay rights and contraception which don't have this other element in question (for contraception specifically those against abortion because of rights of the fetus should be in favor of easier access). It's also why European laws around this are more strict, Denmark allows abortion without cause up to 12 weeks and with cause after.[0]

It's better for these questions to be decided by states and democratic process than SCOTUS - the latter which we've seen cause extreme polarization. If you hold the view that the fetus at some point is a life with rights than the political activism here is consistent. Where this occurs I think is a legitimate question (big difference between zygote and day before birth).

There is a lot of bad faith, sloppy reasoning, and motivated reasoning arguing here from partisans across the board.

There are also real tradeoffs and young women will be the most harmed in states with bans because they have the least autonomy, but I can at least understand the strongest arguments from the other side [1]. Something like the laws in Denmark being passed at the congressional level is probably the desirable compromise outcome. At the moment at least SCOTUS thinks states cannot ban the ability to travel to a different state for abortions, the ability to exit is important.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Denmark

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/3ELrPerFTSo75WnrH/p/PeSzc9JTBxha...

Don't want an abortion? Don't get one. Care about fetus rights? Start help centers for pregnant women, engage in education and activism, provide social nets for new mothers and children. It's not like we have mandatory abortions.

To me, the abortions is similar to the right to chose to end your own life, ultimately, you can't outlaw killing yourself.

If you hold that at some point the fetus has rights of its own then this becomes more difficult.

I think that’s the fundamental question and what makes this issue challenging.

For a provocative example, we don’t allow infanticide to be left up to the individuals moral decision, and then suggest those that care about it engage to help stop infanticide. We decide at that point the infant has rights and we care about suffering.

I think for societal pragmatic reasons women should retain the right to terminate pregnancy even though it does result in ending a life and in some cases suffering of the unborn (depending on stage). But I don’t pretend that tradeoff isn’t a real thing, I just think that’s the best outcome on net.

I also think contraception should be widely and easily available to reduce the likelihood of this happening generally.

I can understand how a reasonable person could disagree and have stronger views about when the fetus’ individual rights should kick in.

Theoretically yeah, but the stats [0] pretty much moot it. Some quick clips:

- 79.3% of abortions were performed at ≤9 weeks’ gestation

- nearly all (92.7%) were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation

The point here is that "nearly all" abortions occur very early in development. It's hard to imagine that something the size of a chocolate chip has "individual rights", especially when balanced against the rights of the pregnant person.

This is important because as you move through the trimesters, cases become crushingly tragic [1]. We're talking things like "we probably thought your fetus was abnormal in the 2nd trimester but you couldn't bring yourself to do it until the 3rd", cancer, fetal death, etc.

There's this myth that it's like Celebrity Deathmatch out there: women vs. babies, but the stats are clear: nearly all abortions happen in the 1st trimester, and then when they don't it's typically scheduling or something very tragic happened.

All of which should force us to ask: what's the urgent need for regulation on this?

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10426234/

I think the position that the zygote is where the rights start is bad. I concede it is where life starts, but life is just not a very good designation for that. If anything it should be about suffering or a nervous system - something beyond just replicating cells.

Since vast majority of abortions happen in the early stages anyway, often the late stage ones are particularly tragic situations where the mother wanted to carry the baby to term, but can't for health reasons. It's why I'm in favor of broad rights and think that despite the fact it is ending a life, we're better off on net for women to retain that capability (the state shouldn't be getting involved).

I can understand a reasonable person disagreeing and thinking at some point the fetus is developed enough and shouldn't be terminated without cause (basically the law in Denmark, France, etc.). I think that's why it's probably healthy to have this fought out democratically rather than legislated via the courts.

There isn't a constitutional right, there's a good-faith disagreement, and the finding of a constitutional right in Roe was always a bit tortured [0] and the blow back from this has been unhealthy for our democracy (imo).

This is a nuanced position that doesn't fit well into partisan politics, it's also a third rail topic - but it's where I've ultimately landed (for now).

[0]: https://overcast.fm/+vpWZx2bsc

- people are forced to give birth against their will

- people are not

Saying this is a State issue or that it should be decided legislatively ignores that this is a fundamental human rights issue for people who can become pregnant. No legislative regime should be able to force someone to give birth against their will.

There's a "but what about the rights of the fetus" argument, but here again you're faced with two unsatisfying possibilities:

- you allow exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the pregnant person, thus subsuming the right of life of the fetus to the rights of the pregnant person to self-determination based on circumstance, which is wildly inconsistent

- you allow no exceptions, which is wildly extreme

So again, granting individual rights to a fetus is a radical position that our society largely won't accept. It moots the conception of "when does life begin", or, I would actually argue that society has pretty much decided this already:

- Society does not support killing children

- Society supports abortion in the case of rape, incest, or to save the life of the pregnant person

- Society agrees abortion does not kill a child

(again see here that deciding that a fetus is a child if it was not the result of rape/incest, or its carrier will survive the pregnancy is wholly irrational)

I'd actually push back on this - I don't think it's that inconsistent. There's obviously a real different between a fetus at various stages of development and a child, but that doesn't mean it has to be binary yes or no. It's possible to try to have policy that understands the tradeoffs here and tries to get the best outcome we can despite them even though it's messy. It's why I think "life" isn't the right determinant.

So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.

That said, again my personal position is it's better on net for society to allow women full discretion here - but I don't think these kinds of casual constraints are irrational or inconsistent.

Oh, I personally believe that and I think most people do. Sorry, maybe we've lost the plot on this a little:

> The critical difference is the individual rights of the fetus.

I argue that society has already decided this. Nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. This is all squarely within what Americans support.

> I think that's why it's probably healthy to have this fought out democratically rather than legislated via the courts.

I argue that the constitutional rights of the embryo/fetus (such as they are) do not outweigh the constitutional rights of the pregnant person. If someone thinks an embryo/fetus has rights, they have to contend with a bunch of unpalatable things [0] (criminalizing many popular forms of birth control, IVF, the morning after pill, miscarriages, stillbirths, etc.). At the most extreme end--personhood--they have to either defend a brutal no exceptions regime, or an inconsistent exceptions regime where you're deciding whether or not an embryo/fetus is alive based on some irrelevant circumstances.

> So it's not about deciding if the fetus is a child or not, it's about considering the utilitarian tradeoffs when you take into account its development, suffering, and the suffering and developments of the mother.

But again, I also argue that society has already decided this. We actually agree with the current regime: nearly all abortions occur in the 1st trimester, and nearly all abortions occurring afterward are in tragic circumstances. Why do we need to punt this to the States? Why are States rushing to put stricter and stricter controls on abortion?

The answer is that Republicans fomented a moral panic in the 70s in order to pull evangelical votes. They proceeded to push misinformation into the public about abortion, the kind of people who get abortions, and why they get abortions. This distorted the public view. Again, in reality the state of abortion is what the vast majority of Americans support. There's no need for this to be an issue anywhere. It's a wedge issue pushed by a craven political party in order to gain power. That's literally the beginning and end of it.

[0]: https://harvardcrcl.org/the-many-problems-of-personhood/

Birth is caused by pregnancy. Pregnancy is caused by sex.

There’s a simple way to avoid being “forced” to carry a pregnancy to term: either don’t have sex, or use one of the many contraceptive methods - use two if you are really worried!

Yes this doesn’t work in all cases, in cases of rape for instance - but that is why abortion laws often make exceptions for rape, fetal abnormality, risk to life of the mother, etc. Abortion is not the binary black-and-white issue that is presented in American politics, most countries have quite some nuance in their law on abortion.

Returning to the case of merely undesired pregnancies, restricting those abortions does not force anybody to do anything, it commits them to the logical consequence of their action that resulted in the creation of a new human.

Balancing the rights of the mother and the rights of the unborn is the responsibility of the law. It is not satisfactory to cede all rights to the mother, nor to cede all rights to the unborn child, as the two extremist positions in the US seem to want to do.

Roe and Casey actually both balanced the state's interest in fetal life with the mothers liberty, Roe with the trimester framework and Casey with the viability line. I urge you to actually read them.

[1]: https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2016/05/sex-gender

[2]: https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-gender

[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19934/

[4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6677266/

[5]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32425587/

>science

What you call "Science^TM", I actually call a bunch of ideologically motivated sophistry with no hard evidence behind it. Science isn't based purely on authority, a bunch of "Science^TM" organisations spouting nonsense on their public facing web page doesn't make the nonsense science, it just reduces the organisations' credibility.

>politeness

Politeness is just what true believers call conformity. Its not a good trait to be polite to delusions.

I also find it amusing you invoke politeness on what is supposedly to be a factual matter. Is it a matter of "politeness" to say the earth is round?

Science has prestige nowadays, so many people (including many actual scientists!) are motivated to associate unrelated ideological positions with it in order to exploit that prestige for the benefit of those other positions. IMHO, when someone says something like "I believe in Science," they're usually talking about that unrelated ideological stuff.

It may surprise you, but women are people.

I hate delusions.

>women are people

I thereby propose that all nouns be cancelled, since everything in the universe is a Lump Of Atoms, we don't need any more nouns to express ourselves.

A Lump Of Atoms sat on a Lump Of Atoms to eat a Lump Of Atoms with a Lump Of Atoms on the side.

Just kidding, I know how language works. It works by assigning names to patterns. If several names are assigned to the same pattern, the most specific and distinct one is used. Women is the most distinguishing name for the pattern "people who spawn people", and refusal to use the name is associated with a lower critical thinking and higher conformity to ideological fashions.

It might also surprise you that these laws tend to be strongly supported by Republicans. For example, this bill cosponsored by all Rs that (failed) to make it enforced Federally: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s3236

Clearly it is not hard for a lot of people in the US to imagine this, since that is what they believe.

Well if they do, they're not acting like it. For example, miscarriages are pretty rampant. If there were a disease that affected people the same way miscarriages affect embryos and fetuses, it would be a bonkers plague that reduced our population to a a fraction of what it is. I imagine people would be acting differently than they are if we really equated humans with fetuses on this level.

Or we can go full personhood. How do we discern the will of a 14 week old fetus? What constitutes child abuse? When do child support payments start? Can fetuses sue for damages? What do their free worship rights look like? Do fetuses have a right to medical care? Can a fetus earn income and pay taxes? Do fetuses count towards population for apportionment?

I don't doubt the sincerity of people's held positions on abortion. What I do doubt is the rationality, and the more I dig into it, the more I find tons of ignorance about women, fetuses, and pregnancy.

I think fossuser got it exactly correct: there is a good-faith disagreement here. The disagreement is "when does a citizen come into existence?". This is what lawmakers are supposed to decide - we elect them to draw a line in the sand. Denmark's line seems extremely reasonable.

Fair! Well, a couple things.

First, many abortions are not chosen. We can go a little further and say many conceptions are not chosen (assault), but it's a little irrelevant, so I'm just noting.

Second I'm not comparing abortions to miscarriages. I'm comparing miscarriage (a thing that affects embryos and fetuses) to a disease that affects born people. In doing so, I note the different reactions people have to miscarriage (it's natural and unavoidable) to the reactions people have to a disease that statistically killed as many born people as miscarriage kills embryos and fetuses (the vast majority of us die, it's very very bad).

To me, this is strong evidence that we value embryos and fetuses differently than born people.

How many? There is a survey floating around the Internet that asked ~2000 women in 2003 about abortion reasons, and about 80% or so said what amounted to "Pregnancy was too inconvenient". Was that updated ?

>many conceptions are not chosen

Again, how many? That same 2003 survey had 0.1% as the percentage of women who reported rape as the reason they aborted. People are arguing against the common case, the common case I'm seeing is celebrities and middle class women writing op-eds about how without abortion they would have never gotten that raise and pregnancy demolished their career.

>I'm comparing miscarriage (a thing that affects embryos and fetuses) to a disease that affects born people.

I think pro abortion folks have this common failure mode where they notice the non-linearity of the brain's moral response on abortion, and think that it points to a deeper hypocrisy or contradiction somewhere in the anti abortion stance.

Here is a couple of examples of things where people believe something but "don't act like it" :

- Vegetarians and Vegans (I'm one of them btw) believe that hundreds of millions of sentient, moral-consideration-worthy persons are murdered in the most brutal and cowardly fashion each year, and that doesn't turn them catastrophically mad or into genocidal terrorists.

- Climate Change believers (I'm one of them btw) believe that our (in)actions now is setting the stage for the death of tens of million and the suffering of hundreds of millions of human and non-human animals, as well as uncountable billions of damage in material resources. They don't seem to be doing much except shouting, just like standard politics.

- Believers in the harm of smoking (I'm... Ah screw it) think that 1.1 billion people are actively killing themselves by poisoning, and slowly poisoning those around them, 7 million people are killed each year due to this mass voluntary poisoning, more than 1/10 of WW2. And yet, I don't see any crusades (except the usual advocacy).

The point is, what you're describing isn't new. It's what I called the brain's "Non Linear Moral Response" above, your brain saturates. One death makes you cry, two deaths make you scream, 3 make you want to gouge your own eyes off, but 10 just make you numb. And beyond 50 or so its just meaningless data. Your brain isn't equipped to respond meaningfully to tragedies at scale. That's probably for your own good.

I'd love it if you can link it, until then I'm gonna ignore it.

> Here is a couple of examples of things where people believe something but "don't act like it" :

I'm actually sympathetic to this! Humans are pretty great at tolerating outrageous things. The effective altruism movement is essentially all about this, or yeah, like your last paragraph.

My point isn't simply "they don't act like it". My point is that there are lots of other, easier things pro-life advocates could do to reduce abortion rates, but they focus on controlling women. My hypothesis here is that the pro-life movement is fundamentally misogynistic, and wholly uninterested in measures that would reduce abortion rates while allowing women to be 1st class Americans. The point is to make women 2nd class Americans again.

I couldn't find what I had in mind, but here's a visualisation of a 1998 meta study[1], where the reasons for abortion are broken down. In the US, abortion due to fears about the mother's health is (eyeballing it) less than 2%, fetus defects? less than 2%, "other" (which presumably include rape)? Less than 1% and that's being generous.

So, the 3 reasons where I support, grudgingly as the lesser evil, abortion account for about 5% of total abortions. 1/20. 19 out of every 20 abortion is because abortion defenders have made baby killing an acceptable contraceptive solution. More than 60% of the cases is one variant or the other of "Baby is too inconvenient", the rest is slightly more defensible versions of it ("mother was too immature", "partner was not ready"). You're, essentially, killing something extremely, dangerously, close to a human, because the very people who brought it to life changed their mind. Why, why did they bring it to life in the first place?

>My point is that there are lots of other, easier things pro-life advocates could do to reduce abortion rates

You don't have the right to tell people how they should fight for their principles. An animal rights activist might choose to educate, or save street animals, or campaign against raising cattle, or blow themselves up in a slaughterhouse. People enact their principles in a variety of ways, you just notice those who choose the methods you find most reprehensible. But this doesn't mean other people aren't doing other things.

>My hypothesis here is that the pro-life movement is fundamentally misogynistic

I'm trying to be charitable here but you're making it extremely difficult, so here are some facts

1- I'm not American, but I can be described to have moderately pro life views, in that I think abortion should be always banned, except for the 3 reasons I listed above, which (after proof) would bypass the ban at any moment in the pregnancy.

2- It's not misogyny to hold women accountable for their actions. Pregnancy is the direct result of the women's actions, it is fair for the woman to bear responsibility for it. Indeed, countless contraceptive variants (male variants soon to exist in mass production) have decoupled pregnancy and consequences of women's actions to a very high degree, so it's even less defensible or justifiable to get pregnant then change your mind. As Progressives are extremely fond of saying in other contexts, "Freedom Doesn't Mean Freedom From Consequences", irresponsible women are as free and as first-class as anyone, they are just not allowed to kill babies for their convenience, especially when they had every chance to prevent that baby from being born in the first place, or wait months and abandon it to someone else.

3-50% or so of women are against abortion in the United States, and men are divided roughly equally, so its remarkable that hating women is this diverse of a position, you would think that it would be more male-skewed than this.

4- Abortion is philosophically complex and a morally treacherous. A big part of my pro life bias is as a counter reaction to the obnoxious moral certainty of the progressive variant of abortion defenders, those who find it morally okay to "shout their abortion" and compare babies to cancer and parasites. I, quite frankly, want to punish those people. If I detect any kind of moral uncertainty or recognition of the fundamental evil you're flirting with when you argue for more permissive abortion, I'm usually inclined to show some moral uncertainty of my own.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion#/media/File%3AAGIAb...

Is your pro-life position such that you only allow an exception for the life/health of the pregnant person, even in the 1st trimester? That's pretty radical.

> You don't have the right to tell people how they should fight for their principles.

Society has the right to balance people's interests. People who can become pregnant have (I think obviously) a huge vested interest in bodily autonomy, as does every free person. The state has to balance that interest--indeed that right--against others' pro-life positions. My argument is that there are lots of compromise measures that actually work to reduce abortion bans without doing things like increasing the death rate of pregnant people [0]. 70% of people who have an abortion are within 2x of the poverty line. It seems like a simple thing we could do is to help these people out financially. It seems like a dumb thing we could do is force these people to give birth and try to raise a child in poverty.

> I'm not American, but I can be described to have moderately pro life views, in that I think abortion should be always banned, except for the 3 reasons I listed above, which (after proof) would bypass the ban at any moment in the pregnancy.

Just to be clear, your views are not moderate, they are extreme. The vast majority of people support unrestricted abortion in the 1st trimester. Further your position--again--leaves no room for problems that occur during pregnancy that require an abortion: fetal abnormalities, the pregnant person gets cancer, fetal death, etc.

> Pregnancy is the direct result of the women's actions

Again you are ignoring assault and problems that occur during pregnancy.

> ...irresponsible women...

Ah, here we are. This is misogyny. Birth control fails. People are assaulted. Some people are in abusive relationships where they're unable to use birth control yet forced to have sex. Please learn about this issue before you start impugning others.

> 3-50% or so of women are against abortion in the United States, and men are divided roughly equally...

This is wrong, or at least wildly unnuanced [1].

> A big part of my pro life bias is as a counter reaction to the obnoxious moral certainty of the progressive variant of abortion defenders, those who find it morally okay to "shout their abortion" and compare babies to cancer and parasites.

I get this. But I think you're taking out your frustration on the wrong people here. There were nearly a million abortions in the US in 2020. Practically none of those people are taking to Twitter and doing the kinds of things you're talking about. They're just people trying to do the right thing in incredibly difficult circumstances. People who seek abortion need our help and care, not our scorn.

> I, quite frankly, want to punish those people.

This is misogyny too.

[0]: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/abortion-restrict...

[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/244097/legality-abortion-2018-d...

Plus fetus defects and rape/incest/whatever. Those are the only 3 reasons someone may be allowed to kill the future human they brought in my book.

>That's pretty radical.

And that's okay, radicalism is a good thing when the mainstream is morally bankrupt. I also think people shouldn't kill insects unless harmed by them and that animal cruelty's (by adults) punishment is jail and\or death. Those are radical positions, but they are only so because the mainstream doesn't recognize the fundamental evil they are allowing, not because I'm deliberately being a troll or an extremist who go out of my way to become a radical. The simple principle "If something can feel pain, it deserves not to feel pain" can lead you to astonishing mismatches with people and their accepted morality.

>People who can become pregnant...

Women.

>... have a huge vested interest in bodily autonomy

Which they have, right until it affects another person. Nobody is legislating to force women to be pregnant, just that if they do become pregnant, then that's a life over there, and a life that they brought into existence as a result of their actions on top of that (Rape is an explicit exception, I don't have to say this one more time), they don't get to have "Autonomy" over a body that isn't theirs. "But that body is inside theirs" well my friend they put it there, they have to wait till it get out on its own, or until it threatens their own life. Nothing else is acceptable.

>increasing the death rate of pregnant people

Again, they are called women, and my position above (and the vast majority of others) would make sure that their life is never threatened. And the decision we're discussing never said anything about banning abortion in general.

>70% of [Women] who have an abortion are within 2x of the poverty line. It seems like a simple thing we could do is to help these people out financially

And most violent murders is done by poor people to poor people. What should we do first : criminalize murder or help people out of poverty? I would like if we can do both, and if it was up to me I would try the second as hard as I can for as long as I can before the first. But the first has to be done, and now is as good a time as ever.

>It seems like a dumb thing we could do is force these people to give birth and try to raise a child in poverty

As an anti-natalist, there is nothing I would like more than people to stop having children, especially children they will drag into poverty. But the solution is not to legalize killing proto babies, this argument will lead you to "We should bomb children in Afghanistan and Syria, since they have a vastly lower quality of life waiting for them", and who knows, maybe that's correct, but even I, moral radical as I'm, am not yet ready to accept that.

Acceptable solutions can be

- Widespread popular education and contraceptive availability

- Societal shame around having children when you're poor

- Adoption

>your position leaves no room for problems that occur during pregnancy that require an abortion: fetal abnormalities, the pregnant person gets cancer, fetal death, etc.

>you are ignoring assault and problems that occur during pregnancy.

I don't know why you keep saying that when I have repeatedly said that all those should be exceptions to any abortion ban. Every single one of those things is one of the 3 (and only 3) reasons I think abortion should be allowed, *at any time in the 9 months*.

>This is misogyny.

Very well then, so let it be. I'm a misogynist.

>Birth control fails

Not in 99.9% of the cases when you use it correctly, responsibly and redundantly, and the rest is an acceptable risk that you bear the consequences of when you accept it.

>People are assaulted. >Some people are in abusive relationship

So rape? It's a good thing then that this is one of the very important exceptions, as I said about 3 or 4 times now.

>They're just people trying to do the right thing in incredibly difficult circumstances. People who seek abortion need our help and care, not our scorn.

And we help them by, among countless other things, making it illegal to do the wrong thing. Nobody decent benefits from convenience abortion.

>> I, quite frankly, want to punish those people. >This is misogyny too.

Thank you, I will wear it proudly. It's my utmost pride and pleasure to hate people who don't respect life, life that they're the reason it exists in the first place. If hating the subset of women who are like that is misogyny, then misogyny is a moral duty.

At which point a fetus is a person? We do kind of have an answer to this, when it's viable outside of the mother's body.

If we keep going down the rabbit hole of fetus rights, it gets real ugly. Is contraception murder? Is plan b murder? Does having a miscarriage warrant an investigation? Should we prosecute a fetus that absorbed it's twin in-utero? What about IVF and thousands of embryos that are thrown out? What about stem cells?

That said, I don't think a constitutional right exists and the Roe decision that found one was somewhat tortured (even RBG said as much early in her career iirc).

Given that this should be argued democratically and via policy. I'm in favor of federal protections that raise the minimum bar to what Europe has and prevents states from enacting all-out bans. I also can see reasonable disagreement about later stage abortion rights for the reasons I mentioned above.

It's a messy issue, it's not the job of SCOTUS to legislate these kinds of issues and I think having done so here has ultimately led to a more polarized situation where we're worse off. Fighting this out democratically is probably healthier for our democracy.

For those that don't want to click:

> "Abortion in Denmark was fully legalized on 1 October 1973,[1] allowing the procedure to be done on-demand if a woman's pregnancy has not exceeded its 12th week. Under Danish law, the patient must be over the age of 18 to decide on an abortion alone; parental consent is required for minors, except in special circumstances. An abortion can be performed after 12 weeks if the woman's life or health are in danger. A woman may also be granted an authorization to abort after 12 weeks if certain circumstances are proved to be present (such as poor socioeconomic condition of the woman, risk of birth defects in the baby, the pregnancy being the result of rape, or mental health risk to mother)."

That's a lot more restrictive than the US was prior to this recent decision.

Second, Denmark citizens have universal healthcare making it easier to access procedures, pregnancy testing, etc.

Third, prior to the ruling some states only had 1 abortion center state-wide. As well as rules requiring day long waiting periods, anti-abortion counseling, etc.

Imagine how access looks different when you must save up for months, travel 3 hours to visit a clinic, rent a motel for the night for the waiting period, and all while trying to not miss any days at work.

Hope that helps convey that rather dry comparisons of the weeks of various international statutes is a far cry from determining whether one system is “a lot more restrictive” than another.

There is no right to abortion in the constitution, Roe argued a path to one but it was fairly weak (https://overcast.fm/+vpWZx2bsc).

It was overturned because it's not the court's job to legislate policy beyond that.

Part of the reason for that is it creates policy which cannot be reverted by democratic means (except by the kind of extremes we've seen recently) - that's why it's better on net if it's narrow in scope and tied to constitutional rights (imo).

IANAL so this is at the edge of my knowledge, but that's my understanding. There is a path to adding things to the constitution, but that power lies with congress.

States could impose restrictions on how and when abortion is performed. I agree with you, that third trimester on-demand abortions are ludicrous btw.

I however do not have that rosy of a perspective that this was overturned due to technicality and that in fact women's rights are about to be stripped the fuck away.

If this is your concern, shouldn't you be furious that Roe v Wade stood in the way of 50 years of progress in preventing that? The democratic process could have been improving women's rights for all that time. This is exactly what happened with LGBT rights in that time - much less than that time, in fact. Instead this judicial block was in place which was like clamping down the lid on the democratic pressure cooker, preventing any kind of progress by preventing dialogue.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but what "progress" do we need to be making? Women had access to reproductive care for the past 50 years, and now they won't. Doesn't sound like progress to me

That doesn't sound like facts to me.

When one side of the debate does nothing but spew nonsensical falsehoods, it's really easy to pick a side even when it seemed morally ambiguous before. Even easier when I'm agreeing with RBG.

I think broad access to abortion for women is important, but I think Roe finding that this protection exists as a constitutional right just isn't correct. If we want there to be a constitutional protection there needs to be an amendment. Short of that we need to pass legislation federally.

Otherwise it's up to states and constituents within those states to fight it out democratically.

I was happy with the outcome from Roe because it protected a lot of vulnerable women who will now unfairly suffer consequences, but I still intellectually think it was wrongly decided. Now we're suffering the consequences of that.

Had Roe not been decided this way maybe there wouldn't have been as extreme a push to get Trump in office at all costs? It would reduce the political nature of SCOTUS and allow for relief valves - people can fight out the issues democratically. Obviously this can't happen in cases where constitutional rights are legitimately infringed, but again the finding of a constitutional right to abortion was tenuous at best.

We need to get into law the things we care about - that's how the system is supposed to work.

But I do think that leaving abortion rights up to states will work out terribly. It's kind of like letting states decide if women should be allowed to vote

I never understood this argument. There is no baby that is "viable" (able to survive on their own) (well, to be honest, most adults aren't either), and parents are required to care for them (and criminally liable if they fail to do so).

Babies are viable when they can survive with help from any adult. Before some fetal age, they are completely dependent on the body of the mother - if they are removed from it, no matter how gently, they will die (perhaps there is some way to make a fetal transplant, but that wouldn't necessarily change the equation so much).

Once past some age (and especially after birth), they just need someone to take care of them, it doesn't have to be their mother.

Wouldn't it then make more sense to require the mother to take care for the fetus/baby before the age of viability (as she's the only one who can), not after that (and/or after birth) when anyone can? Right now, it's the reverse.

Now, the viability standard is important because it is very hard to consider a non-viable entity "a person" in any serious sense. If it can't even perform the basic functions of its organism, how can it be considered to have rights, and has never been able to do so, how can it be considered a person?

What I am sayin here is that if there was a process by which we could take an unwanted fetus and implant it into someone else / allow that child to exist outside of the physical body of a person that doesn't want it, then sure, that is possibly a better alternative to abortion. Short of that, people should not be forcing other people to give births against their will.

That is not true, at all. It is a small minority that want abortion to be illegal. And of course it's a moral question. What isn't? Quit legitimatizing these minority political groups, as if they have ever considered a moral position in their life or can even describe what morality is.

The U.S. is not a democracy by definition, and certainly not one in practice. The problem with people hiding behind this as a "democratic process decision" is that that they are ignoring the fact that the Republicans absolutely refuse to participate in democratic proceedings and work to pass a law in Congress giving people the rights they deserve. Republicans, with the support of a minority in this country, are holding the U.S. hostage. What's insane, is that the Republicans make life harder for this very minority and blame it on everyone else.

Abortion is actually not a complex issue. It is a tough issue but not a complex issue.

The U.S. is reaching Middle East versions of extremism.

You're free to argue it's an immoral or unjust opinion, or argue it's an opinion that is not internally consistent with their other political opinions....

But to downplay the size of the cohort to diminish the opinion is unproductive in reaching an amenable outcome.

So, I don't think it's myself who is out of touch. I came from rural America. I went to high school with people and my extended family who all are still there. I would consider rural America out of touch with basically anyone else in the world. They want to drag down America with nostalgia for a dream that never existed while they vote for the very people who put and keep them in the predicaments they are in. They and the Republicans are as un-American as it gets. Nothing they stand for is inline with the constitution or America's principles.

As a result abortion is a very minor political issue. Some people want more or less restrictions, and occasionally rules get adjusted.

If the Supreme Court hadn't suddenly decided to commandeer this issue in 1973, I think the US could also have been like that, and hopefully after a few dramatic years we can get there.

Reproductive rights are fundamental to women's liberty and equality. They should be protected by the courts like many other fundamental rights, not subject to the whims of political majorities.

I know the argument gets overplayed, but there is something to be said about the fact that Roe was decided by nine white men.

But even then, up to 12 weeks, no questions asked, 12 - 18 weeks under very specific circumstances (incest, rape and such) and afterwards pretty much limited to if the mothers life is at risk (altough, preferably a C-section or something similar) seems like a good compromise.

The repeal of RvW allows states to implement no questions asked abortions for up to birth, along with allowing states to ban it altogether, rather than the previous state of the law.

The vast majority (~80%) are within the first 12 weeks anyway, the later ones usually have extenuating circumstances and third trimester was already banned (without cause) in most cases anyway.

I'm pretty sure polling also shows most Americans have some nuanced view on this that sits somewhere in this range.

People, in general, usually have pretty nuanced views. Altough, I personally have seen quite a few cases where people became more hardlined on certain issues after seeing the "oppositions" behaviour on it. (Anti gun people being more hardlined after seeing that pro gun ones go to the range with their kids, for example.)

Germany has roughly the same laws as Denmark, and now after this decision many states will continue to have the same abortion laws they have had for the last 50 years, many will have on par with Europe, and some will outright ban.

There is no making everyone happy, but 50 options that are easier to change seem like a compromise to a binary split that will always be under attack.

We can only guess and hypothesize. But one has to wonder if the pro-choice movement would’ve been better off without row, and with the passage of time.

I disagree with a lot of her positions, but this one seems well reasoned.

The 7 justices that decided Roe really did think they were ending conflict by siding as they did, that I believe did not, at all.

“Ok. We’re telling you what’s up; now play nice.”

Roe was just a bad decision for so many reasons (not discussing the actual rule it created).

The overturning of Roe comes just days after another ruling by the same Supreme Court in which they took away states' rights to regulate the possession of guns. States rights has always been a rhetorical tactic used by conservatives as a convenient ruse to achieve their aims. When the argument from states rights is helpful to their political aims, they rely on it. When it's harmful, they ignore it.

You do not at all seem to understand the NYRPA vs Bruen ruling or topic. It makes me question the rest of your reasoning.

Overturning Roe comes one day after a Supreme Court ruling that ends the process of New York's MAY ISSUE (if you are wealthy, make a donation, are connected) a concealed carry permit practice. It turns out the state doesn't get to require you to prove a need before you have your rights.

There is no right besides 2A that ever faces this level of scrutiny and abuse. It doesn't help that the NYPD has multiple times since that lawsuit initially started been found guilty of corruption by the state's own investigators, when they initially withhold completely appropriate requests but favored "others".

You do not understand the topic you referenced.

Hopefully the arguments in there are correct and this isn't likely to expand.

Speaking as an outsider on American politics, it seems to me that it won't be figured out democratically. If it was done democratically, on a nationwide vote, abortion would easily stay legal.

What will actually happen is that the decision will be referred to states, where government is elected on small turnouts, in gerrymandered divisions, heavily influenced by untrue TV propaganda funded by billionaires, and in many cases elected based on supposed economic reasons, not any moral ones.

The effective result is that vulnerable young women will be forced to carry unwanted babies to term at the cost of great suffering to themselves and the resultant children.

> with all political sides to blame.

I can only see one side to blame here.

> If it was done democratically, on a nationwide vote, abortion would easily stay legal.

Direct democracy is not the only form of democracy. It has many problems.

1. legislative lines for the state and federal areas look like a kindergardner drawing squigglies

2. When many states do everything they can to find reasons to disqualify valid voters

3. When felons are not legally able to vote, even after their time is served

4. When massive amounts of money come in from republican businesses to significantly sway elections

5. When massive lies and half-truths are put out in the media thanks to the massive money

That just doesn't look like a democracy. What it is? I don't know.

This weakening of civil rights at the Federal level allows those Americans who are sexist to enact sexist laws where they have concentrated power within State boundaries.

Welcome to "The Divided States"

Having said that, I think national legislation is probably not the most effective way forward for the pro-choice movement. All that will do is continue to galvanize the pro life side.

Please cite the Constitutional power authorizing this, restricting it to powers that will hold up under the present Court against a state asserting the absence of Constitutional federal authority and infringement of powers reserved under the 10th Amendment.

It can't be the power to enforce the 14th Amendment, because abortion as a right within that has been ruled out.

A hyperexpansive view of the Commerce Clause?

No, codification is a fools errand.

"On the question of abortion, the Constitution is therefore neither pro-life nor pro-choice. The Constitution is neutral and leaves the issue for the people and their elected representatives to resolve through the democratic process in the States or Congress — like the numerous other difficult questions of American social and economic policy that the Constitution does not address".

...

"After today’s decision, the nine Members of this Court will no longer decide the basic legality of pre-viability abortion for all 330 million Americans. That issue will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the States or Congress."

If you think there is a basis in the Constitution for Congressional authority to protect abortion against state prohibition that this Court would uphold against a State challenge, please present the specific Constitutional grant of authority.

80 years ago in Wickard the Court said Congress could regulate a Guy growing an acre of wheat for his family because, if everyone did it, it would affect interstate commerce.

Abortion affects population, which affects interstate commerce.

The problem is we have an electoral system that forces us into a two party system. One of those parties is beholden to religious ideologies. If any republican votes for abortion protection they will get primaried. So we end up in a situation where a healthy majority of the country wants some level of abortion rights, but because we need 60 senate votes it's impossible to implement.

It’s not JUST about means, motive, opportunity. There has to be the desire to spend the political capital. I think it’s interesting no one in 50 years with all the majority make ups have put the effort in.

I don’t speculate a reason other than it seems more expensive than the media might have me believe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111th_United_States_Congress "gave the Senate Democratic caucus sixty votes, enough to defeat a filibuster in a party-line vote."

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/us/politics/01minnesota.h... "providing Democrats with something they had long hoped for: 60 votes, and thus at least the symbolic ability to overcome filibusters."

I believe Roe was the precedent of the land and not something explicitly codified into federal law.

Maybe you're using a fuzzier definition of "law", but there was never any federal legislation that guaranteed access to abortion. That is what we need.

"In law, common law, also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law, is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions.[2][3][4] The defining characteristic of “common law” is that it arises as precedent. In cases where the parties disagree on what the law is, a common law court looks to past precedential decisions of relevant courts, and synthesizes the principles of those past cases as applicable to the current facts."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law