> immediate political debate in the U.S. isn't about zygotes

It's not just debate – it's already in law. Oklahoma HB4327[0], signed into law in May, outlaws abortions on "a human fetus or embryo in any stage of gestation from fertilization until birth." (It explicitly permits contraception, Plan B, etc)

The National Right to Life Committee, the largest and most important anti-abortion group in the US, has created a model law that likewise classifies an "unborn child" to mean:

> a living individual organism of the species homo sapiens throughout all stages of the unborn child’s development within a pregnant woman’s uterus from fertilization until birth

[0] https://legiscan.com/OK/text/HB4327/2022

[1] https://www.nrlc.org/wp-content/uploads/NRLC-Post-Roe-Model-...

Oklahoma has less than 4 million people and a bit over 1% of the U.S. population. Roe applied a radical viability standard to the whole country.

Is a state passing a law, and the most influential anti-abortion group in America proposing the same nationwide, not enough to count as "debate?"

A very odd counter. It's worth pointing out that the GOP is beginning to follow the NRLC's playbook on this in Texas: https://www.npr.org/2022/07/15/1111383520/texas-abortion-law...

And there are six states without any term restrictions on abortion whatsoever, and prominent pro-abortion organizations are advocating those positions. But the fact remains that such extreme positions are unlikely to get nationwide traction. The central territory of the debate, and what the Dobbs case actually involved, is second trimester bans (12-15 weeks).

I understand why folks want to focus on the radical position that some parties have advanced, and not the fact that the actual law in the US for the last 50 years was quite radical in the opposite direction.

This should not be a radical position. In fact it is the only moral position. This probably sounds strange, but it comes down to who is getting late term abortions. The people who need these abortions are the ones who have discovered later in the pregnancy that their child has some sort of medical issue so severe that it appears in a sonogram. It might be possible to deliver the child, but that child would suffer from poor quality of life and/or a short lifespan. These are not the people who had an "oops the condom broke" moment, they have a serious moral obligation to avoid personal tragedy, and we are writing laws demanding that no, that child with only one lung and no face must be carried to term and cared for until they die a few weeks later of complications from the constant extreme pain they are in after saddling the parents and their family with enormous unnecessary medical bills.

You might be thinking "but this is one of those emergencies that has an exception right?" But that's not how the bans work. Even when the law allows for emergency procedures there are no doctors in the state qualified to perform them, nor any hospitals or clinics that will allow it due to the legal liabilities. Even with a fully justifiable reason the parents are forced to travel hundreds or thousands of miles on their own dime to get the necessary procedure. Even if the mother's health is on the line and she's not fit to travel you still need to get her across state lines, and if you are in the midwest or the bible belt she may just have to die, just to satisfy an overly simplistic "moral" position.

If your moral position requires you to torture newborns until they die you need to re-evaluate it.

I’ll preface this by saying I am militantly pro choice but, to the anti abortion side, abortion is also “torturing newborns until they die” because they believe the fetus is as much a person as a newborn. Your moral position is just as disturbing to them as theirs is to you.

A fetus is not a newborn by definition.

When a baby is going to be in constant pain for its entire life due to medical complications it is really hard to justify bringing them into the world.

What’s the distinction? Is a a newborn cognitively different from a fetus at 18 weeks? 24? 30? Why is a baby that suffers for its entire “life” of two weeks outside the womb different? Why does its “life” inside the womb not count? When does this fundamental change occur? That’s the debate we should be having, not whatever this current debate politicians are having is. Extreme moral statements like the one you made only serve to be divisive and to distract from the real conversation.

You're creating a false dichotomy. The Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs had an exception for severe fetal abnormalities after the first trimester. So do the abortion laws of every developed country that otherwise bans abortion at 12-14 weeks. Support for such exceptions in the US is vastly higher than for elective later-term abortions.

You're incorrectly assuming that in substance there is no difference because all late-term abortions are the result of medical emergencies or genetic defects. In Germany, which bans abortion after 12 weeks but contains exceptions for fetal and maternal health, only 3% of abortions are performed after 12 weeks:https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/nine-out-of-10-abortion.... In the US that number is more than twice as high, at 7%.

Given the 600,000 abortions in the US each year, getting our number down to the German rate would affect 24,000 abortions of fetuses that most developed countries have deemed to be worth protecting.

The late term abortions may be technically legal in certain circumstances, but since the laws drove out all of the doctors who can perform them and closed all of the facilities it becomes a de-facto ban.

It is not the case that every developed country with a 2nd trimester limit (or any limit) on abortions has an exception for fetal abnormalities.

Wait what made it radical? You said that the general consensus is that the cutoff should be 12-14 weeks and Roe made it 15 weeks (or am I misunderstanding?).

It would seem radical to deviate from your chosen standard to set a limit at 0 weeks. It does not seem radical to enforce a standard that is only one week different from the one you’ve chosen.

No, Roe set the limit for elective abortions at viability, which is 22-24 weeks. Only a single European country allows elective abortions that late, the Netherlands. And that difference isn't inconsequential. In the Netherlands, almost 20% of abortions occur after the first trimester. In Germany, which has a 12-week ban, only 3% do (which reflects exceptions for medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities that are typical in Europe).

The Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs set a 15 week ban, with exceptions after that for medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities. That was consistent with both the consensus view in Europe, and American public opinion: https://www.wsj.com/articles/support-for-15-week-abortion-ba.... But under Roe, the Mississippi law was unconstitutional.

In the US, pre-Dobbs, over 90% of abortions occur before the 13th week. I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence to be found that allowing later-term abortions shifts abortion timelines back. People who get abortions after 22 weeks are generally not doing so on a whim.

Only to the states' interests. People were free to apply their own standards. Roe was only restrictive for people with extremely lax standards in the first place. I don't find these limitations on the state interest radical at all.

It’s a radical view to think that people should be “free to apply their own standards” to when a human life is sufficiently developed to be worthy of protection. The vast majority of the developed world asserts society’s right to draw that line.

Roe is an outgrowth of American libertarianism. In the 1970s, several high courts in developed countries heard abortion cases alongside Roe. The only one to find an affirmative “right” to an abortion was the US. Courts in France and Italy found it to be a matter for the legislature (except Italy found a right to exist when the woman’s life was threatened). Germany’s high court went further and found legalized abortion to violate the Basic Law’s right to life.

This is true, but omits the fact that several states have or are contemplating even more extreme measures - such as 6 weeks or earlier, or total bans.

In a sense, the refusal of most of American media to even give airtime to the discussion of when a fetus should gain rights/protections is why such extreme measures are being on the table. They painted this as a binary issue with no nuance or even discussion as regards the status of an unborn fetus so the reaction has been similarly binary with total lack of nuance.

This is unfortunately every issue in American discourse now though - the media obfuscates and confuses, instead of illuminating and hopefully educating. The media is the biggest cause of conflict in the US system now, because it's just become hyper-partisans shouting at each other and otherizing the other 50%.

I don't think anything disturbs me more than the effects of American public discourse. It's gotten impossible to have reasonable conversations on most things.

Denmark isn't in any way or form "non-religious": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Denmark

It should be noted that even the Bible only seems to recognize the importance of the being inside a pregnant woman after quickening, which is essentially when the mother can start to feel the motions of the fetus, so around 16-20 weeks. The notion that life begins at conception seems to be quite modern.

> The immediate political debate in the U.S. isn't about zygotes, but rather fetuses.

No, it's already law that currently 10 states have bans on all abortions past 6 weeks, restricting women's control over their own body. But feel free to move to Texas where a 12 year old daughter could be raped and forced to carry a baby. Sounds like freedom to me. /s

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