> 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.
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.