Another devil's advocate here...the people advocating for outlawing abortion are also convinced it's a rights issue: the rights of the unborn child. This isn't an open and shut case.

Granted, I think Roe v Wade struck a fairly nuanced balance and I also think this is a disastrous decision. It's unfortunate RBG didn't quit when she had the chance and also unfortunate the dems ran Abuela in 2016. This could have been avoided, along with 4 years of complete buffoonery and international embarassment. It sucks our one-party-with-two-factions system has one faction that's consistently spineless and lacking foresight.

----------------------------------------

"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

----------------------------------------

It has come to my attention recently that the abortion of unwanted fetuses is likely to become illegal in large parts of the United States.

Fortunately, there is another alternative, which I am sure members of the Republican Party will hearty approve of.

Have the unwanted baby. Shortly after birth, drive to the middle of nowhere. Place the baby on the ground, naked, look at it sternly, and say

"Listen here, you whining little brat! You think I'm just going to support you for 18 years because I'm some sort of bleeding heart liberal? You got another thing coming you stupid welfare queen! This ain't socialist Europe! There ain't no leftist safety net here! You're just going to have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps!"

Then just leave it there, crying itself to death.:)

This is a nice fiction but it doesn't hold up to any level of scrutiny most of the time. Largely the "pro-life" people also believe in things like self-defense laws and the castle doctrine, which require that you not believe anyone has a real right to life.

Unless you think they'd all be ok with a squatter coming into their house and demanding food and that they wouldn't use their guns on them. But they think a mother should be required to literally risk her life in order to support a being she may not have chosen to create.

You don't need to give the benefit of the doubt here. You don't need to believe disingenuous arguments just because people say they're what they mean. Dig a little deeper and understand what they really believe: women with unwanted pregnancies deserve to have it carried out against their will because they think they've sinned.

That said what I said holds: this is not a clear-cut case of rights, because the rights of two entities are in question and they are in conflict. Is a handful of cells with human DNA a person? Of course not, it's less biologically developed than an ant. Is a fetus that's developed for 8 months a person? Yeah, at that point it could exit the mother and be a (somewhat) functioning being. Where do we draw the line? At what point is a fetus a person? And from there, we can determine where its rights to not die at the hand of another person begin. And yes, we have to factor in the health of the mother, the health of the fetus, etc into these decisions.

This is, and always has been, a nuanced issue.

My mom marched with Operation Rescue during the summer that culminated in the bombing of an abortion clinic, and later the execution of the Dr that ran the clinic, in his own church, during service, while he was collecting offerings as an usher.

I know in painful depth every detail of how these people think.

It is not nuanced on their side. They outright reject empirical facts. They believe the earth is only 6000 years old, that the dinosaurs died in Noah's flood, and that evolution is a myth, not the central mechanism of all biology.

They do not care about the facts other than pattern matching them as rhetorical thought ending cliches.

They believe because they had an imaginary conversation in their head once, they are now born again, and have a private telepathic phone line to absolute truth. When they feel certain about something, it's the will of god revealed to them through the holy spirit. When other people express opposing certainty, it's because they have been tricked by the devil.

There is no good faith debate on the basis of facts or nuance with these people. You could spend years refuting every single thing they believe on a factual basis beyond any nuance or doubt, and they will blink, look at you, and then say something like "I know what's true in my heart of hearts."

Every single detail of how they talk about this and the actions they take make clear their actual grievance is regulating women's sexual behavior outside of their theocratic conception of marriage.

There is no need to defend these people as some sort of morally principled people confused by the underlying nuances. They are no where near that intellectually honest on the subject.

So you would support an abortion procedure on a fetus after 8 months and two weeks of pregnancy? If you believe this to not be a nuanced issue, then are you in opposition to the original Roe vs Wade ruling that determined personhood for a fetus once it reaches a viable age for survival, and you instead support the ability to abort a fetus all the way up to the moments before birth?

> There is no need to defend these people as some sort of morally principled people confused by the underlying nuances.

I'm confused which one of my comments leads you to believe I'm defending the anti-abortion crowd. I was responding to a comment saying that this is an issue of bodily autonomy rights only. It's not. There are the rights of the unborn child at play as well, hence the nuance.

Most pro-lifers in the upper echelons of intellectual and professional life are probably silent, fearing reprisal.

Go read and learn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rescue_(Kansas)

Wichita is stuck in Kansas, a conservative state yes, but the average person you'll meet there is very similar to who you'd meet in any of the major metro areas. They are captive to a conservative rural minority in a microcosm of the same effect at national scale. "Go to crazy places" is a completely inadequate deflection. You know it.

My family's church went into schism in response to the Tiller murder. The strongest condemnation on the anti murder side was basically "they shouldn't have done that in a church." I cannot recall a single person out of hundreds that condemned the murder (or bombing) itself directly. The closest is my father, who maintains a "abortion should be outlawed except if rape" perspective. Additional useful information here is he failed to know my older brother was sexually abusing me in his own house.

I know "what if" style contrarian takes are an addiction on this forum, but please, do not engage in hypotheticals on this issue if you are not actually familiar and plugged in. You are doing evil purely in the service of some forum warrior "what if I actually have the smart take here" nonsense. These people know they're hypocrites drowning in dissonance. It's central to their mindset. Not only do they not care, they will double down on it every time.

That is irrelevant. At most, where you draw the line could affect what type of abortive procedure doctors would be allowed to employ - if you believe that the fetus is a person, you could mandate that the doctors must remove it from the mother's body without harming it.

But just as you have no obligation to allow someone into your home (and are in fact perfectly within your rights to murder them if they refuse to leave), you have no obligation to grow another person inside your own body.

There is no nuance here. There are only fallacies employed by people who desperately want to uphold some perceived status quo from time immemorial.

It's also important to note that there isn't even any reason to believe ancient Christians considered abortion forbidden or immoral. This is a much more modern invention, one given steam by the desire to oppose sexual liberation.

I find this an interesting argument, but I have to note the difference: the person in your home is willingly violating your space. The fetus is not willingly in your body, and is given no chance whatsoever to leave without being harmed.

So I don't find personhood irrelevant here, and I think the nuance still applies.

> There are only fallacies employed by people who desperately want to uphold some perceived status quo from time immemorial.

So for you, rights begin at birth? I'm not judging, I'm trying to assess your solid position.

> It's also important to note that there isn't even any reason to believe ancient Christians considered abortion forbidden or immoral. This is a much more modern invention, one given steam by the desire to oppose sexual liberation.

I believe this to be irrelevant to the discussion. I think we've already determined that modern anti-abortion Christians are, as a group, often hypocritical. But the discussion has diverged from them and is now about when rights are assigned.

This is an interesting point, but I believe the castle doctrine doesn't make this distinction: if you find someone on your property who you didn't give prior permission to enter, you may murder them, regardless of whether they were there willingly (or even knowingly). For example, if you wake up in the middle of the night to a loud bang and find someone jutting out from your broken front door and shoot before asking questions, you will not be accused of murder or even manslaughter if that person was actually thrown into your house by someone outside.

> So for you, rights begin at birth? I'm not judging, I'm trying to assess your solid position.

I think a compromise where rights begin at viability makes enough sense. I would also be OK with allowing women to request a fetus be removed from their body even after it becomes viable, but not through procedures that are intended to kill it - for example, I could see an argument where a woman should be allowed to have an elective C-section to remove an 8 month fetus/baby from her body, who she could then abandon in the care of the hospital. But, I don't think it would be OK to request a procedure where an 8 month fetus is killed in utero and removed.

For non-elective procedures (where the life of the mother is at stake) the discussion is more open-ended, I believe.

Essentially, the right of the mother to her own body is quite obviously separate from the fetus' right to life. People who seek to conflate them are typically doing so with ulterior motives.

As someone else was pointing out, taking the extreme view of fetal personhood, while still correctly recognizing a woman's right to her own body, one should seek to (a) prevent any procedure that outright kills the foetus, (b) demand the mother carry the pregnancy until it is viable, (c) allow only late term "abortions" where the fetus is removed from the mother's body and kept alive on life support.

I think the difference here is that there's no "a wild fetus appeared" but rather something intentional happened (intercourse of some kind). There's some level of acceptance/invitation here. If you invite someone into your house and they accept, that doesn't give you license to immediately kill them.

Granted, there are things like rape which need to be part of the equation.

I've said it a number of times in the comments but I will say it again: I think the original Roe vs Wade ruling had a great stance on the issue: once a fetus is old enough to survive, it receives personhood. I still think this is the most acceptable of all outcomes.

> I think a compromise where rights begin at viability makes enough sense. I would also be OK with allowing women to request a fetus be removed from their body even after it becomes viable, but not through procedures that are intended to kill it - for example, I could see an argument where a woman should be allowed to have an elective C-section to remove an 8 month fetus/baby from her body, who she could then abandon in the care of the hospital. But, I don't think it would be OK to request a procedure where an 8 month fetus is killed in utero and removed.

I think we see eye to eye here.

> For non-elective procedures (where the life of the mother is at stake) the discussion is more open-ended, I believe.

Right: which life is more important? Difficult questions, and survivability factors have to come into play here.

> Essentially, the right of the mother to her own body is quite obviously separate from the fetus' right to life. People who seek to conflate them are typically doing so with ulterior motives.

Separate rights with intersection at a point of conflict (assuming the fetus wants to live, which of course cannot be reasonably determined). I don't know if you're considering acknowledging of this conflict a "conflation" but if so, then I have to disagree.

> As someone else was pointing out, taking the extreme view of fetal personhood, while still correctly recognizing a woman's right to her own body, one should seek to (a) prevent any procedure that outright kills the foetus, (b) demand the mother carry the pregnancy until it is viable, (c) allow only late term "abortions" where the fetus is removed from the mother's body and kept alive on life support.

This seems to tip the scales in favor of fetal personhood over female bodily autonomy. I'm not a woman, but I think I would find it horribly painful to carry the child of someone who raped me and I'd likely want to get it out of me as soon as possible.

Are you saying this is a hypothetical position that anti-abortion people should support, assuming they were being logically consistent? If so, then yeah, that would seem to make sense.

Yes, that would be at least logically consistent of them.

I could argue that ability of an organism to survive on its own is not a requirement nor a sufficient criteria for neither personhood (a legal construct) or anything in lines of sentience, self-awareness and sapience (philosophical constructs commonly associated with a person, although it's not a clear cut - e.g. a person may become incapacitated and is still considered a person).

You're misunderstanding me here (and I think this is the crux of a lot of "liberal" misfire on this and other issues): I don't think they're hypocrites, I think they're operating on different axioms from me (and probably you) and their views are entirely self-consistent. Absolutely reprehensible axioms to me, but they're not idiots.

There is a minor hypocrisy in framing, but it's not really important and you never have to talk long before the real axioms come along. Just look at this subthread's dissenting views and find the cases where people subtly or overtly admit that "life" is relative, and the innocence of the child is key. Then consider: innocent compared to who?

They do not believe that people have a right to life. They believe innocent people have a right to life. Once you understand that, what they say makes more sense. The mother who has a child out of wedlock (rarely will they consider the possibility a married person might need or want an abortion) and the man in your house demanding food have a thing in common: they both broke a rule considered sacrosanct and they both "knew what they were doing had consequences" (never mind broken condoms, hormonal birth control not working for medical reasons, let alone more obvious things like rape).

It's not hypocrisy. Most people who fall on the side of "pro-life" arguments believe these things for reasons that make sense to them, and not always for religious reasons.

If a single mother struggles it's because she deserves it. If her child suffers for that struggle it's her fault. So long as there's something or someone to blame, you can ignore the question of how you could have prevented the problem in the first place.

In fact, if you provide her support, you might be rewarding her infidelity. And then people will perceive that as a reasonable thing to do and more people will do it and then and then and then....

But the important thing is that she didn't "sin" by "killing the baby". If the baby dies after it's born, it's also her fault.

Like I said, there's no hypocrisy there. Being a hypocrite isn't the worst thing someone can be. It's entirely possible to have a perfectly (or as perfectly as humans are capable of) self-consistent worldview that is also incredibly cruel. I think a lot of people have lost sight of that.

At some point people started to believe that conservativism was about "preserving the past" but that's subtly wrong. It's about "preserving hierarchies". Recognizing that all people are worthy of life is contrary to the idea that some people deserve what's coming to them.

> This is a nice fiction but it doesn't hold up to any level of scrutiny most of the time. Largely the "pro-life" people also believe in things like self-defense laws and the castle doctrine, which require that you not believe anyone has a real right to life.

Huh? I know people are really tempted to construct straw-men to make their opponents look like hypocrites, but this one is especially weak.

> You don't need to give the benefit of the doubt here.

Eh, no. You do, otherwise you end up with nonsense like what you wrote next.

> Dig a little deeper and understand what they really believe: women with unwanted pregnancies deserve to have it carried out against their will because they think they've sinned.

You may be able to find an example of that, but I really doubt that's the motivating idea for the vast majority of the pro-life movement. I would bet money what most of them "really believe" is that a fetus is a baby and that baby should be protected from harm.

This is a shallow read. Why do they believe the baby should be protected from harm and not the mother who wants to or needs to end the pregnancy? Or the person who broke into your home?

I've literally never had or seen a conversation about abortion with a pro-lifer that when it went down this rabbit hole didn't eventually get to the idea that the innocence of the child matters more than the life of the child (and thus the lack of innocence of the mother).

Yet when my friend lost a child to a miscarriage, they grieved.

It's interesting to note when people latch on to starkly dehumanizing rhetoric such as you've displayed. It's not just in the abortion debate.

A lot of people really want this question to be black and white, and struggle to make it so, but it really isn't and never will be.

Why do you want other women who did not choose this way to go over the potentially even more terrible thing of birthing a child at significant health risks she half-loves (as hormones are powerful things), half-hates? That just kills 2 people mentally.

Parasites are organisms that reduce the host's fitness while giving nothing in return. Babies are the exact polar opposite of parasites. They are literally the entire reason you're alive as far as evolution is concerned.

I'm sure any reasonably intelligent and good faith person would parse "Evolution is concerned" as a metaphor, just like they parse "The computer looks up the ip address in the DNS server" or "The atom shares some of its outer electrons".

>not all pro-social behaviors are directly reproductive

How is this relevant ?

And it's relevant because even if you assume that there's some magical driving force to persist a species, there are ways individuals contribute to it other than having offspring. Thus, it is not their sole purpose.

This is trivially true, a computer's entire reason for existence is to be used by a user, and looking up DNS servers is a crucial part of what makes that happens.

Similarly, a living organism entire reason for existence is to manufacture copies of itself, and, for female mammals, that means carrying babies.

>People don't have an "evolutionary purpose,"

This is just semantic hair-splitting. Planets don't have a 'purpose' either, but every single one of them finds a star and goes around it, and the ones that don't just can't find a star close enough. It's fair to say that, in a very real sense, planets only exist to revolve around stars, their very being necessitates it. This doesn't mean they are "aware" of it.

People are similarly machines made and remade by evolution to do a single thing : spread copies of themselves. It doesn't matter that evolution "didn't mean" to make them that way, they are that way anyhow. And they will behave that way.

>there's some magical driving force to persist a species

It's not magical, it's all the hormones and electricity flowing inside every part of you. You can see it on a screen and measure its concentration.

>Thus, it is not their sole purpose.

Yes it is, Evolution doesn't care that you founded a startup or worked for SpaceX, unless those things increase your genetic copies somehow.

You can write something like "if we look at it from a lens other than biology" before your statement to make it more correct, but I was replying to a person who compared pregnancy to a parasitic relationship, therefore they were invoking biology. Biology, in no uncertain terms, makes it quite clear that this is bullshit. Every living organism, in biology's book, is a self replicating machine made for nothing but spreading copies of itself.

The other meaning you want to use necessarily require intelligent design - there is no higher level goal to a human’s life in itself, as that would require something designing it for such. Though sure it depends on religious interpretation as well, but then higher level goals are usually claimed - so decide whether you mean the biological cause for our existence which is simply a side effect of a population that grows and is fit to their environment, or some chosen Deity’s higher level goals for an individual. None of those makes us primitive replica generators.

You said that babies are parasites, this is just factually false (aside from being dehumanizing and disgusting, but that's typical for most mainstream pro abortion arguments, so I will just ignore that aspect). A parasite isn't just "any organism that lives inside me and makes me feel pain", by that definition, your own immune cells would be parasites in some cases.

Outside of popular movies and video games, parasites are organisms that are

(1) typically of a different species than their host(s), and

(2) depend on 1 or more host for their entire life and reproduction cycle, and

(3) manipulate the host(s), usually maliciously, for their benefit while giving no benefit in return.

You can also add a (4)th point about the host(s) usually not "knowing" they are being manipulated, but maybe that will get too philosophical, I can't be sure if parasitised animals realize anything is wrong with them, but the safe thing to say is that

(4) the host(s) don't host the parasite willingly or deliberately, and usually fight a constant arms race of anti-parasite adaptations followed by counter adaptations from the parasite. It is said that sexual reproduction itself is an anti-parasite countermeasure: the 2-way genetic mixing serves as a "jammer" to make life hard for parasites.

Points (1) and (2) are trivially false for babies. Point (3) is also false, but more subtly : the baby isn't "manipulating" the mother's body, it is itself a piece of the mother's body that gained independence, and the mother's body is adapted to willingly give it whatever it needs to survive and thrive. Point (4) is trivially false as long as the mother's impregnation wasn't due to rape.

I don't understand where all the philosophical baggage about "Design" and "Purpose" came from, I'm just correcting your sloppy use of "Parasite". A female human’s body is a machine perfectly adapted to having babies. This isn't a normative statement about that body's 'higher' purpose or what it 'should' do, just an empirical observation that refutes any similarity between babies and parasites, because parasites are invading entities that exploit "bugs" and "vulnerabilities" in the bodies they inhabit and control, while babies are first-class entities that have dedicated machinery and full, intentional support from any healthy female body that hosts them.

It would be like opening a python interpreter and being shocked that you can do Arbitrary Code Execution at the prompt, *that's literally what an interpreter is*, that's what it does, why it's designed and implemented. You haven't discovered a vulnerability, you just discovered an interpreter. Hosting babies is why the female primate body is adapted the way it is, there is nothing parasitic (read as: 'incidental', 'invading', 'foreign') to it, parasitism is when you exploit a body against its own fitness, just like a security vulnerability is exploiting a program against its own purpose. A python interpreter executing arbitrary python code isn't a security vulnerability, and a female human hosting a human embryo isn't parasitism.

So I really have no idea where you got these ridiculous made-up requirements, but just to clear things up, Oxford’s dictionary only has this as a “requirement”: “an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense.”

And this is absolutely true of human babies, technically, no matter how disgusting the notion is. Technically true is still true.

And no, the female body is not made for bearing children. Women usually have the ability otherwise evolution would select against them, but babies are not “first-class” in any way, otherwise there would be no such thing as Rh disease (where the mother’s body literally attacks the fetus). There is no design in evolution, it is a spaghetti code where the vulnerability of a vulnerability happened to be a feature over time and everything seems to be working statistically good enough in extant species, just enough so that they can reproduce enough to not go extint.

Off course there is plenty of any thing in biology, I was describing every single parasite I know of or read about.

You can remove that requirement from the list if you want.

>I sure hope you don’t mean manipulation in a sci-fi brain controll way,

That would be ridiculous. I meant 'manipulate' as in "cause something to happen for your own benefit" which is an extremely boring way of saying that the parasite has all the agency, the host body is not cooperating with it. Unlike a baby, which the host body is bending over backward to host and nurture, the parasite is 'making its own living'.

>how the hell knowledge even come into the picture

Did you just mis-quote me on that? Because I remember quite clearly that this isn't my actual 4th point, it was a philosophical remark that I said could be a 4th point, my actual 4th point was

>>the host(s) don't host the parasite willingly or deliberately, and usually fight a constant arms race of anti-parasite adaptations followed by counter adaptations from the parasite.

Do you have problems with that as a necessary requirement for parasitism?

>So I really have no idea where you got these ridiculous made-up requirements

3 out of 4 of them are true when you take the time to interpret them as I meant them, and the 4th isn't exactly wrong either. I'm curious as to your definition of "made up".

>Oxford’s dictionary

Dictionary definitions are frequently less accurate than domain specific definitions.

>an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species

>this is absolutely true of human babies

Uhm... human babies are another species?

>the female body is not made for bearing children.

The entirety of this statement truth value rests on a semantic game played on 'made'. You define 'made' as necessarily requiring an intelligent design, whereas I define it simply as whatever happens when a process produce behaviourally-consistent artifacts. The vast majority of planets revolve around stars, therefore planets can be said to be 'made' to orbit stars. The vast majority of female bodies are well-equipped to carry babies, therefore female bodies can be said to be 'made' to carry babies.

When I say 'made', I don't necessarily imply a 'purpose' or a 'designer', I'm simply pointing out the sheer consistency of a form to its function, the female body is as suitable to carrying children as a planet is suitable to orbiting stars.

>Rh disease (where the mother’s body literally attacks the fetus)

Well, every program has its bugs :). How common is Rh disease? How many healthy babies are born for every baby attacked by Rh? Your own immune system turns mad sometimes and start killing you from the inside, does that imply that your immune system is not a machine with killing threats as the main purpose?

>good enough

This is underselling it. It's not hit or miss with a 50-50 or 70-30 %, the things you describe are extraordinarily rare, rarer than computer bugs and manufacturing defects in human-made machines.

Your actions didn't cause the squatter to come into the house, while it's the pregnant woman's actions that caused the baby to form inside her. A better analogy would be you advertising free food and residence, then changing your mind after a squatter comes to take you on your word.

I personally believe you shouldn't kill a squatter as long as no credible threat to your life exists, you can always remove by force, non lethal weapons are a thing. I also believe you don't have the right to terminate a being's life when you're the one who started it in the first place, no matter how much you dress it up in colorful language and fanciful thought experiments.

It's a fundamentally treasonous thing to do, to invite someone into life then quash them like a fly at the earliest inconvenience.

Granted, there are deeper problems to our democracy than selecting representatives. At this point, our federal government is a puppet to the financial and corporate worlds: a marriage of industry and state. Hmm, where else did that happen?

Hence Americans regularly vote against there own self-interest because they have been turned into fans.

The US is the oldest and most stable democracy.

It also works more-or-less as intended. On issues where there is broad consensus (e.g. COVID relief) it can move incredibly quickly. On issues where there is broad disagreement (e.g. abortion) it moves very slowly or not at all (requiring compromise).

I wish more countries were like the US (or, alternatively, like Switzerland, which represents the other extreme with their direct democracy).

https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking

We use the world's worst voting method and are heavily gerrymanded.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/

It's already used in Fargo and St. Louis and will be voted on this November in Seattle. If a majority approves it, they'll use it August 2023.

Both Democrats and Republicans are more similar than different on all but a few social issues (these issues can change over time-- for instance, many Republican politicians used to be pro family planning and contraceptives). Both parties use those few social issues to sow all the division they can.

E.g., Clinton finished what Reagan had started with NAFTA (Democrat and Republican parties both support neoliberal policies)[1]. Clinton, continuing Reagan's initiative, dismantled the federal welfare system[2]. Clinton signed into law an expansion of policing, lengthened sentences, and a three strikes-- life imprisonment provision[3]. Clinton also supported deregulation and signed Gramm-Leach-Bliley which effectively repealed Glass-Steagal[4]. Clinton could have been a Republican except for a few social issues such as, his justice picks supported Roe v. Wade[5].

Clinton wasn't an outlier. Obama proposed changes to the CPI calculation to reduce, already low, Social Security (public pension) benefits[6]. He continued with financial deregulation signing the Security Modernization Act into law[7]. He supported privatization of schools[8]. His landmark health insurance legislation, which maintained private insurers and health care providers, was originally proposed by a far right think tank, the Heritage Foundation[9].

[1] https://time.com/5468175/nafta-history/ [2] https://www.history.com/news/clinton-1990s-welfare-reform-fa... [3] https://www.ncjrs.gov/txtfiles/billfs.txt [4] https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/glass-steaga... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_Supreme_Court_can... [6] https://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/articles/2013/04/2... [7] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financial-services-act-... [8] https://blackagendareport.com/obama_legacy_III_privatization... [9] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2010/apr/01/barack-oba...

Then authority shouldn’t be given to the states, right? Presumably those people will be proposing a federal ban soon, right?

Sure, that'd be a logical next step. The people who argue for states' rights are often doing so as a ruse to eventually exercise federal control.

That said, I think it will end up like marijuana: illegal federally with a bunch of states who just don't give a fuck. In the end, it may only weaken the power the federal government holds, which at this point is a good thing because power has been concentrating more and more the past 100 years.

I feel I have to reiterate though: this is still a disastrous outcome for a lot of people. I'm not happy about it. The conservative morons who "want the government out of their lives" but also continuously try to legislate people's bodies and sexuality have scored a real win, and I'm scared and upset for all the women in red states who have to live under their reign of hypocritical terror.

And don't forget the immense amount of suffering inflicted disproportionately on minority and disadvantaged groups.

It's funny how symmetrical hypocrisy is.

Liberals are hypocrites because they favor states rights when it comes to firearm regulations but not for abortions; and conservatives are hypocrites for exactly the opposite positions.

(I'll point out that in this instance, on a purely logical basis, the conservatives have the upper hand because they can clearly point to the second amendment, whereas the liberals need to try to identify abortion as some kind of implicit natural right that's not written down anywhere. I say this as a pro-choice person.)

In either case, you are right, it is largely a ruse. If abortions and firearms were both illegal nationally, then liberals would fight for states' rights on abortion but not for firearms; and conservatives would again have the opposite positions. Political creatures fight on the battlefield where they can win (or, more often, keep the status quo and stay in office but look like they are fighting to keep the campaign cash rolling in).

It's really a tale as old as time (or at least as old as the United States). "States' rights," outside of theoretical discussions, has always simply been a tool, not a true guiding ideology.

If you can’t steelman any topic, you don’t understand the topic.

I don’t pick begrudge Republicans that actually believe and really feel the abortion has been terminating a human life unfairly.

I’m more begrudge Democrats that refuse to understand this is a nonfalsifiable issue. That we will never understand truly the point of which a thing becomes a human.

There will never be agreement. You need understand and accept that.

So given the choice between federally legal and federally illegal, where there will always be conflict, you could do worse than 50 state rules.

For all the rage that “some number of weeks abortion bans” in the certain state received, that is Germany’s every day. They have a 12 week ban with mandatory counseling. I have difficulty understanding how the same pitched here would get red eyed outrage from most Pro-Choice but Germans seem to be getting along.

I don’t think the issue is abortion, I think it’s just like everything else hyper-polarization.

I think it’s absolutely stupid that if I see you still wearing a mask in a store, that I can pretty much determine your views on abortion. We’re being played.

This fundamentally misunderstands the actual Republican position, and it does so in the way that they are intending to trick you into doing.

If they cared about lives, they would protect schoolchildren. If they cared about lives, they would protect the poor. If they cared about lives, they'd care about death from car accidents, from Covid, from lack of medical care. They don't.

So it's not about caring about lives, trivially.

The right smears the left with similar accusations. Every time an illegal immigrants rapes/murders/etc. you'll see them accusing liberals of the same thing--not caring about children's lives, etc.

Part of that is caused by stupid conspiracy theories and scientific illiteracy, but partially because its pretty obvious the government does lie to use when they think its for our own good.

Though part of it is valuing individual liberty over a slight reduction in risk of death. They are more willing to value sending kids back to school even if it means some 80 years olds die a few years earlier.

If you don’t want an abortion, don’t get one. Can it be simpler?

The prolifers would respond sarcastically and say:

"If you don't want to murder your 8 month old, don't do it? Can it be simpler?"

Natural rights are a terribly shaky concept to begin with—hardly "real".

Your plea is exactly reducible to: “thou shalt support the Right Thing, always”. It’s almost disturbingly naive.

Why do you think your nationality and gender are relevant to your opinion?

Does the decision at all call out the rights of the unborn child? If so why would it be left up to the states and not outright banned? Why are contraception and gay marriage called out as comprable rights?

Your extremist rhetoric will cause more harm than good in the end. Cry wolf enough and people stop listening to you.

I don't disagree with you, it's a complicated moral issue, I do not advocate for using abortion as birth control, but forcing women to birth and raise children when they can't afford them or even do not want them creates a lot of problems for those children down the line.

Mindlessly breeding people into poverty is no more humane than aborting a clump of cells.

Is plan B murder of children? If yes, is contraception, including pulling out murder of children? Let's be real here, there is no 100% effective contraception method and out of 100s of millions of people having sex, probably a few million will get accidentally pregnant.

"People should not have sex" - is not a viable argument, because it's not a thing people will stop doing.

You sound like someone who thinks that women who have sex should be punished for being whores. So how about no uterus, no opinion? And kindly, hope you do not reproduce

(1) That's a silly question. In-virtro fertilization is a series of procedures to help conceive a child. (2) Intent is often the focal point of Criminal Law and is generally shown by circumstantial evidence such as the acts or knowledge of the defendant. And so is ability; an unborn child has no intent or knowledge or ability to resist, so I'd argue no that it's not murder for a twin to consume her sibling in utero. Got any more "hardballs" for me, or are those the best you got?

> Is plan B murder of children? If yes, is contraception, including pulling out murder of children?

If a child was conceived, yes. Take a child that is in utero and the mother is 1 day away from delivery and takes a pill that poisons the child. Yes, it absolutely is murder. You think these are hard questions but they are not. The morality on the pro-life side is pretty cut and dry; any attempt to kill an innocent, healthy, viable human child is wrong. Period. Full-stop. Even in cases where the mother is in danger and needs to end the pregnancy; the child could simply be delivered. There is no need to kill the child, that's an extra and unnecessary and evil step you'd have to go out of the way to do.

> Let's be real here, there is no 100% effective contraception method and out of 100s of millions of people having sex, probably a few million will get accidentally pregnant.

Yes, and? Are you trying to say that the killings unwanted children should be OK? Are you saying that the value the life of those children should be hinged on how much they are loved by their parents? What are you trying to argue, exactly? Serious question.

> You sound like someone who thinks that women who have sex should be punished for being whores.

Nice strawman, but I'm right here. I think that women who have sex and conceive children should be held responsible for raising those children. You must think that women in general are pretty infantile and cannot bear any responsibility whatsoever. Are you some kind of misogynist?

> So how about no uterus, no opinion? And kindly, hope you do not reproduce

Why are you assuming my gender? I have 2 children by the way. Let me ask you, do YOU have a uterus? If not, then kindly shut the hell up while the big girls talk.

> (1) That’s a silly question.

No, its not, and analysis of the trigger laws passed in anticipation of Roe falling has found that IVF is at risk under many of them (because they define a “pregnancy” as beginning at fertilization, not implantation) [0], and states with fetal homicide laws in place even before Roe have conducted investigations and even made charges in cases of miscarriages not due to procured abortion on various theories.

It is only a silly question to people not paying any attention.

[0] see, e.g., https://www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/abortion-trigg...

Good. I think that laws that serve to protect defenseless children should be upheld. I do think that IVF should be reconsidered, but it appears that the intent of the law is to prevent children from dying, not to prevent couples who have trouble conceiving, from conceiving because of complications that may arise. I think those two are separate issues with different outcomes. I think a child that is failed to be conceived or dies during the process of being conceived is a fundamentally different issue to a procedure who's express and deliberate purpose is to end the life of the child.

"Asking whether IVF is under threat is a silly question"

to

"Of course IVF is bad"

in the span of one comment?

> the child could simply be delivered What do you think a 2nd or 3rd trimester abortion is?

> Are you saying that the value the life of those children should be hinged on how much they are loved by their parents

Matter of fact it is. Millions of children are abused by their parents, 1900 of them died in 2019 due to direct abuse. Do you think forcing childbirth upon women unfit or unwilling to be mothers will bring this number down?

> I think that women who have sex and conceive children should be held responsible for raising those children.

What about men? Because men get to leave.

And thank you for asking, I do have a uterus. Sorry about your kids though

While innocent is too subjective to argue, the argument is not cut and dry. 1 week old fetuses are not viable and many laws don’t make exceptions on health. In fact isn’t viability one if the leading pro-choice indicators of morality in abortion?

No. That's a tactical argument. The leading, fundamental argument from morality is the value of human life. That's probably why many laws don't make exceptions on health. And as a pro-choicer, I kind of agree. I think there's an argument to be made that viability shouldn't even be a factor.

Do you think women that have been raped and conceive children as a result should be responsible for raising those children?

It can also block implantation. From the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/postmarket-drug-safety-information... I don't personally hold strong opinions on Plan B. I think it should be frowned on because it could kill a conceived child, but I don't think it's as egregious as abortion.

> Do you think women that have been raped and conceive children as a result should be responsible for raising those children?

I think it's a nuanced issue; it's less than 1% of all abortion cases, and any policies crafted on this should be the exception and not the rule. People often want to take this particular marginal case to craft a rule to apply to the non-rape and incest cases.

But to answer your question directly, yes. I think the value of human life is contingent on someone's humanity, not on the circumstances surrounding their birth. Let me explain further. I know someone who was born of a rape and incest. She is an adult now and works as a nurse. To say that her life is somehow less valuable than her co-worker's is, I think, completely antithetical to the idea that all men and women are created equal. I think that being raped is traumatic. I don't think that the solution to that trauma is more trauma by means of abortion. I asked her, and her mother is happy she had her in the end. Having her was the only thing to help her cope. I realize not every woman is like her mother, so I also think that it's understandable if a mother chooses to bring her baby conceived of rape or incest up for adoption.

10 to 20 eggs are extracted, and then an attempt is made to fertilize them with sperm. 70 to 80 percent of those are successfully fertilized. That's (low) 7 to (high) 16 fertilized eggs. Perhaps 2 to 4 are implanted.

When would you say a child is "conceived"? When the egg is fertilized? When the egg is fertilized but only inside a woman's uterus? After the fertilized egg implants, perhaps?

I don't see how you can say that IVF isn't "murder" of all the fertilized eggs that aren't implanted - unless you try to say that suspending the process by freezing them is okay? - but if it's not "when fertilized" that you claim that "a child is conceived" then we start talking about the actual issue: potential and actual.

An egg has the potential to become a human, if fertilized. It isn't one. A fertilized egg has the potential to become a human, if it implants correctly. It still isn't one. An implanted egg that's divided 100 times, and is now 200 cells, has the potential to become a human, if it's fed and nurtured. It isn't one.

"Viability outside the womb" was picked for a reason, but even that permits other people to play the game of "force a woman to provide her body to continue to be used to feed and develop the viable-outside-the-womb baby" or "cut the woman open to remove the viable-outside-the-womb baby" if she doesn't want to continue to feed and develop it.

There's certainly a difference between "legal" and "moral"; a woman who knows she doesn't want to have a child and fails to act to prevent that "potential" from turning into "viable" must still have a legal right to terminate that pregnancy/viable human, but her actions are morally indefensible. By the same token, removing an implanted grouping of 200 cells can't be seen as anything other than cutting off the potential, and doing so as soon as one is aware of the potential and knows that one lacks the desire to end up with a baby is laudable.

The misery in situations where consensual decision-making isn’t the fact of the matter is IMHO tragically under-explored in this framing and in Alito’s opinion. Without respect to the legal and political status of Roe, I still think it was morally right where it limited government intrusion and authority.

Will you feel responsible for this kind of outcome when it occurs in America, as it has in the past and does in the world?

For anyone who honestly feels this way, it would seem that the most obvious next step is to enact very strong laws that prevent that now-born perfectly viable human child from being murdered at school. I can respect such a consistent position.

I've yet to meet anyone who takes this "pro-life" position a single moment beyond birth though. Why is that?

I'm pretty sure there are already pretty strong laws against violence in schools, let alone murder. I think what you're insinuating on are gun laws? Well, sure. I think that every teacher should be armed and trained in the event of a school shooter because they have the responsibility to protect those children.

>"No, not like that!"

Haha. We tried it your way. Turns out criminals don't respect laws. Most gun deaths occur in gun-free zones. But those cities that are most armed also tend to be most polite and least violent. Think carefully about why that is.

> I've yet to meet anyone who takes this "pro-life" position a single moment beyond birth though. Why is that?

Again, pretty strong laws on the books against murder. I think what you're insinuating here is why aren't there government programs to raise children? Well, it's quite simple. The murdering of children is a completely separate issue. One dwells on preventing murder, and the other hinges on who's responsibility it is to raise it. I think it should be illegal to kill the homeless. To have you then turn around on me and tell me I'm obligated to take care of that homeless man is disingenuous. These are two, completely separate issues. I think that in general children are obligated to be taken care of by their parents, and I'm pretty sure we have laws on the books for that too. So, what's your issue with conservatives, really?

That's why I said laws that prevent, not just words on a book.

> they have the responsibility to protect those children

They most certainly don't. Teachers have responsibility to teach and mentor children and they're fairly overworked on those roles already. Pretending they'll moonlight in SWAT school is hardly realistic on any level.

The question was how come nobody who believes in the sanctity of a child's life before birth actually believes in any protection to that child's life post-birth?

Consider a pregnant woman in prison. In a "pro-life" state it is easy for her to get an abortion. It a "pro-choice" state is harder for her to get an abortion.

Consider deeply why this is the case.

Are you suggesting that tumors are people too, and that they have full rights?

The difference is that most Americans would be outraged if the government forbade them from eating meat, because that takes away their freedom and forces them to spend slightly more money on food that doesn't taste quite as good. It astounds me that these same people think the government should have the power to force someone to give birth to a child they don't want and can't afford. The amount of suffering that will cause is unimaginable.

Of course, most people who are against abortion won't hesitate to get one if they or their daughter needs it. It's always different when it's your life and dreams that are about to be destroyed.

So you'd be ok with government agents showing up at your door in the middle of the night and taking you involuntarily to the hospital to donate some of your organs to someone in the ER?

You define "child" based on a religious definition. That's /your/ religion, not mine. Feel free to follow it all you want, you don't need to involve the rest of us. We're not talking about children, we're talking about fetuses.

> Do you really want to be play that game? Because I'll have a field day with you.

Ah, an internet tough guy. Feel free to "have a field day." Your entire argument is premised on the idea that a fetus is a human life, which only has basis in religion.

Fetuses are unborn children. I realize this definition is rather inconvenient to your fragile narrative, but it is THE definition, not just my definition. Please refer to the dictionary, #4: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/child

> a human fetus

Or the Merriam webster dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/child

> 3a : an unborn or recently born person

or the oxford dictionary: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...

> a young human who is not yet an adult

Please, keep talking. I am enjoying this. Next you'll argue categorical definitions and facts are a religion.

What matters is the mechanics of how we're in this situation. They're complicated and thankfully this decision doesn't mean an outright ban for all Americans. Providing access for the rest is what should be discussed, over shaking fists and platitudes.