If you like these cartoons, then support them on Patreon, where every day is hat day!
Obviously abortion rights are on everybody’s mind this week. The Supreme Court’s upcoming decision overturning Roe is horrifying but not surprising.
One argument that’s touched on in the draft opinion – an argument many anti-choice activists and politicians have been making for decades – is that abortion’s legality should be decided by the legislature of each state, not by the federal government. “Let each state decide.”
Their bad faith is as subtle as a herd of elephants. Republicans in Congress have never hesitated to use federal law to limit abortion access nationwide – such as when they passed the so-called “partial birth” abortion ban. Every member of the Supreme Court, and every Republican in Congress, knows that without Roe in their way they’re going to propose more nationwide bans.
But no matter what they do – and they will do enormous harm – this is not the end of abortion access in America.
…People who want to end a pregnancy [won’t] be completely without options. Abortion funds around the country would continue their work, in some cases helping patients travel to blue states to get the procedure. Community-based providers, who perform abortions outside the official medical system, would likely continue to operate. And self-managed abortion, in which people perform their own abortions with pills, would take a bigger role.
Preparing for that reality will require a lot from advocates and providers, from raising money to campaigning against laws that can send people to jail for self-managing an abortion. But people have been ending their pregnancies in America since long before Roe v. Wade or even abortion clinics existed, and a court decision isn’t going to stop them. It’s just going to change what their options — and the risks involved — look like.
In pragmatic terms, abortion bans can never truly ban abortion; but they can make abortion less available and more dangerous. That’s something anti-abortion activists seem perfectly comfortable with.
UPDATE: FromThe Washington Post, 9/7/2022:
Many Republican foes of abortion celebrated the ruling as a victory for states’ rights. Yet since Alito’s draft opinion was leaked on May 2, 28 lawmakers have also signed onto a proposed nationwide ban — one that would impose abortion restrictions even in Democrat-led, pro-abortion rights states.
This would seem to be a direct contradiction to the idea that states could chart their own course. Blue states that have less restrictive laws in place suddenly would find those laws overridden by a federal law.
Abortion is way too large an issue to cover in one cartoon, and this cartoon is obviously narrowly focused on one specific wrinkle. I’m sure I’ll be producing more cartoons about abortion rights in the months ahead.
No promises (I’m not very good at controlling where my inspiration goes), but if there’s a particular facet of abortion rights you’d like to see a cartoon about, feel free to let me know in comments.
I’m not at all sure it comes across, but attempting to draw 1980s hair in panel one was so much fun. And yes, Reagan’s campaign did use the slogan “Let’s make America great again.” (The only thing Republicans believe in recycling is ideas.)
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. Each panel shows a different scene, with a different person or group of people talking to the viewer.
PANEL 1
A man with a “Reagan ’80: Make American Great Again” t-shirt and blonde hair in a mullet is talking with a somewhat angry expression, raising a forefinger to make his point. Next to him, a concerned-looking woman with a leather jacket and ENORMOUS hair is speaking with her hands clasped together.
CAPTION: 40 years before Roe v Wade is overturned.
MAN: Roe is wrong! Abortion is too important for the federal government to decide for everyone.
WOMAN: We should leave it to the states.
PANEL 2
A woman stands alone in front of a sidewalk; behind her is a patch of grass, a couple of trees, and a stone wall. She’s wearing a red skirt with a pattern of circles, and a t-shirt that says “GORE is a BORE.” She’s smiling and talking with her palms out.
CAPTION: 20 years before Roe is overturned.
WOMAN: Without Roe, every state could make its own abortion policies.
WOMAN: Which is how it should be!
PANEL 3
This panel shows a crowd of white men. All of the men are wearing dress shirts, jackets, and neckties, except for one man who is in “Tea Party” cosplay, including a tricorn hat, although I’m not sure that anyone can tell it’s a tricorn hat because it turns out that tricorn hats are hard to draw.
In the center of the panel, one man is grinning big and speaking to the readers. He has glasses and parted blonde hair.
CAPTION: 10 years before Roe is overturned.
MAN: Let the states decide. That’s all we’re saying.
PANEL 4
A man and a women, both dressed in gender-typical business wear, are speaking to reporters; the reporters aren’t in panel, but we can see their hands holding microphones, which are pointed at the speakers. We can see in the background that we’re on the steps of some sort of fancy, large building with pillars and arches (I’m hoping people will see that and assume it’s a government building of some sort).
The man is smiling big and holding a little stack of papers. The woman is clasping her hands and speaking with an earnest expression.
CAPTION: Ten minutes after Roe is overturned.
MAN: Our new law bans abortion nationwide.
WOMAN: Abortion’s too important to be left to the states!
I should think that there is no more unanimity of thought on the issue of a nationwide ban on abortion in the pro-life faction than there is on the issue of how late in a woman’s term abortions should be permissible in the pro-choice crowd. I don’t think the people who say “Put the issue of abortion back into the States where it belongs” are the same people who say “Let’s have a Federal law to ban abortion nationwide.”
Should the GOP take the House and Senate in the upcoming elections I would not at all be surprised to see a bill for a nationwide ban on abortions be introduced. I would be surprised to see it win a majority in the House and even more surprised to see it survive a filibuster in the Senate – even if the GOP ended up with 60 seats, which is pretty unlikely.
Tea Party cosplay? I thought that was someone dressed up like Napoleon! And upon looking at it again I still do. Especially with the sash and the epaulets. The hat looks like a bicorne to me. Sorry.
No, you’re right. Google image search failure on my part. Aaargh.
I do. These are the same people who told us SCOTUS would never overturn Roe. They were lying about that just the same as they’re lying about not wanting a Federal abortion ban.
The bad faith argument about “states’ rights” (for this issue as well as interracial and gay marriage) seems very similar to me to Republicans’ bad-faith claim about supporting “parental rights.” Republicans SAY they believe parents have an inalienable right to
a)Completely control what medical care their kids get (no vaccine ‘mandates!’)
b)Completely control what information their kids have access to (no Cathode Ray Tubes!)
c)Control their kids’ sexuality and gender
d)Force their kids to practice their religion
…until they find out there are parents less bigoted than Republicans. They abruptly change their professed stance on parental rights as soon as they hear about parents who
a)Want their kids to have the best health care possible
b)Want their kids to get the best education possible
c)Accept whatever their kids’ sexuality and gender are
d)Aren’t Christian
Republicans then suddenly think it’s the government’s job to decide all of those things, not the parents they pretend to support.
That figure’s been redrawn. :-) Thanks for catching that!
The filibuster is an artefact of Senate rules. It can be changed with the support of a bare majority of senators – which is in fact what happened the other times it was changed. As for your disbelief that such a bill could pass the House, surely you realise that similar bills have passed State legislatures and each such bill further emboldens radical Republicans and silences their opposition. Of course it would pass the House, assuming Republicans win.
I am definitely in the minority here, but I don’t think Republicans would get rid of the legislative filibuster even for something they really believe in like restricting abortion. Probably some would! But probably not 50.
I can’t remember who convinced me of this (maybe Ezra Klein?), but the filibuster is an inherently conservative doctrine, because (1) the Senate and electoral college are rigged to make large majorities easier for Republicans and (2) Democrats are more likely than Republicans to want to make big changes through positive legislation, whereas conservatives typically stand athwart history yelling stop.
Yes, a lot fewer Republicans are conservative in the Burkean sense than used to be and a lot fewer are smart enough to act in their own self-interest. But I still think there would be less than 50 who support getting rid of the filibuster even with a large Republican majority.
We’ll see how it goes. There’s definitely an argument that it’s to their advantage to keep the filibuster, at least for new legislation. But part of the question is how badly they want to repeal the ACA and scale back other programs like Social Security.
A few random thoughts related to the comments so far:
1. The Republicans are unquestionably going to win seats in Congress in the midterms. There have only been 3 or 4 times when the party in the White House has gained seats in Congress in the midterms and at least one of those was a technicality (the number of seats had increased, I think.) The question is whether they will gain enough seats to carry out their agenda. That I’m less sure of, but they might well. People are pissed at Biden for all sorts of things, including both those under and not under his control.
2. The filibuster has not actually been used in decades. The Republicans threaten to filibuster and the Dems back down. I personally think they should make the jerks talk. The current set of Reps are whiny privileged little craps who may fold when they realize how uncomfortable it is to have to stand there and actually say something for hours at a time.
3. No one, absolutely NO ONE, who is in favor of forced pregnancy is doing it out of anything but malice. It is a way to play out their desire to rape and murder and nothing else. They don’t care about the fetus (or embryo). They only want to control and harm. Sometimes I really wish there were a hell because they deserve to go to it.
@9 – 2 is inaccurate; the democrats dont back down, but rather the filibuster rules have been revised multiple times so that it’s not actually possible to force a party to act on filibuster threats except in niche conditions. The current senate rules mean that a threat to filibuster is enough to block a law and the opposing party can’t do anything about it if they can’t muster 60 votes.
As for 3, I don’t think that’s right either. When I was a teenager, I was pretty anti-abortion, because I believed I was pro-fetus, but really because I was just ignorant about what either position actually meant. I became strongly pro-abortion when I became educated. Not that I’m denying that the malice you describe exists, especially among the people in actual positions of power. But don’t underestimate how many people take terrible positions on any issue simply because they are uneducated, uninformed, or simply being controlled by others who tell them what to believe.
@10:
How does that work (the threat of filibuster being enough to block the law, I mean)? I’m not doubting your statement, but apparently I don’t know the current law and would like to correct that, if you’ve got time/energy to explain and/or point me to the information.
Eh, I see your point. If you’ve heard nothing but MURDERED BABIES! your whole life it does seem reasonable to be against the thing you’re told, without any opposing view allowed, is murdering babies. I mean, who is for murdering babies? (Well, the “pro-life” movement is, but that’s another story.) That being said, I’ve asked multiple “pro-life” people how they feel about redirecting the NIH’s funding to be basically only about prevention of miscarriage, since if the single celled entity that comes into existence due to fusion of oocyte and sperm is a baby then miscarriage is the horrific plague killing 80% of the population, most within the first two weeks of life. They’re uniformly against it. Makes it hard for me to take the claim that they want to save babies seriously.
The reason that the threat of filibuster is enough to block the law is twofold. The first is that cloture requires 60 votes. This replaced the earlier rule of 2/3 of the senators present. What that means is that a party wants to filibuster, they don’t all have to sit and listen. They can all go and leave 2-3 senators in place taking shifts talking, while the others have naps, meals, do whatever they feel like, and then 2-3 hours later swap out the filibustering senators. So, in essence, a talking filibuster is really easy to sustain.
The second issue is the 2-track rule instituted in 1970. This rule means that if there’s a filibuster on a bill, the senate majority leader can suspend that discussion without officially ending the filibuster and move on to discuss a different bill. Without this rule, a filibuster would suspend all senate business, so this is essential to allow the senate majority to get some business done. However, the side effect is that the other party can essentailly maintain a virtual filibuster, stopping the law they want from going on without any effort at all.
It’s a lose-lose situation for the Democratic party, because if they require a talking filibuster then they basically allow the Republicans to stop *everything*, and without it actually being difficult for the Republicans. Or they can use the two track method to do other things, but that’s essentially giving the Republicans a free indefinite filibuster on whatever bill it wants to block.
To put it another way, when faced with a filibuster threat, unless they have 60 votes, the three options the senate majority has are A – allow the senate minority to entirely stop all senate activity without most of them actually needing to be present in the room, B – put the filibustered bill on hold indefinitely, or C – just not bring up the filibustered bill at all. Since A is an even worse outcome, and B and C are functually identical, they just go for C, because that way there’s at least a chance that a revised version of the bill will later get 60 votes.
Following up from Eytan’s comment to add: these rules are set by the Senate itself and could be modified with a bare majority of those voting. And in fact they previously have been modified when the filibuster was found to be too obstructive. At present the Democratic Party has a nominal majority and in theory could just dump the filibuster and pass any legislation and approve any nominees it pleased.
Unfortunately the Democratic majority is merely a nominal one, and there are at least two senators who refuse to pass most legislation against Republican opposition: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. And I say “at least” because it’s very likely that there are more Democratic senators who would also refuse to pass that legislation but who are presently shielded by those other senators’ intransigence.
Joe in Australia @13: It’s my impression that when the Republicans aren’t in power nationally they use the opportunity to push even harder for voter suppression measures and other restrictions on democracy to try to keep the power that they do have. They have flat out admitted that they know they can’t win a fair election and are doing what they can to ensure only the “right” people can vote. (See Amp’s cartoon above.)
If Sens. Sinema and Manchin won’t vote to kill the filibuster in this situation I rather doubt they’ll do so if the GOP gains a majority. I also think there’s GOP Senators who wouldn’t vote for that because they are well aware that a Senate majority is ephemeral. Don’t forget that in 2019-2020 the GOP held a majority – and the Democrats used the filibuster quite a bit themselves, which Sinema and Manchin are well aware of, as well as other Democrat Senators.
Schroeder4214:
While that may be their current effect, they were not rigged to do so – the GOP didn’t even exist until 65 years after the Constitution went into effect.
Dianne:
This is the functional equivalent of people in the anti-abortion camp claiming that pro-abortion peoples’ motivation is that they love to kill babies. Which I have heard some claim, for sure – but I treat with the same level of creditability.
Jacqueline Onassis
Hm. Who told you that? I’m not doubting that someone did. But whoever they were it was a foolish statement. Plessy v. Ferguson was precedent and settled law that multiple States and municipalities based laws and ordinances on until it was overturned 58 years later by Brown v. Board of Education.
This is the functional equivalent of people in the anti-abortion camp claiming that pro-abortion peoples’ motivation is that they love to kill babies.
Sure it is. If you ignore what the “pro-life” movement actually says. Have you read their propaganda? Not to mention their actions: they’re happy to let a pregnant person die of a ruptured ectopic pregnancy rather than allow her to be saved by an abortion, even though they themselves acknowledge that the embryo is doomed. What can that be except a desire to murder? And they practically salivate over the thought of denying a pregnant person the right to control their uterus. Quite a number are in favor of forcing all births to be “natural” and without pain medication. What is that except rape?
Don’t forget about how they’ve bombed abortion clinics and assassinated doctors for decades to the cheers and they deserved it’s and other tacit approvals of the less personally violent anti-abortion ghouls.
@Jacqueline: Exactly. Also the gawdawful torture porn they make about “abortionists” going to hell and the detailed descriptions of the tortures they suffer there.
The crazy thing about “letting the states decide” is that some states don’t just want to control what happens within their borders. They want to control what happens to people who live in the state (which is nuts). I would hope this would be struck down as unconstitutional, since Federal law has jurisdiction over interstate commerce, but one never knows since apparently abortion is so special and different that we can ignore precedent (both the SC decisions, and the law of the land in 1789, which was abortion is legal until the quickening). This will lead to state vs state battles over the various state laws. This isn’t even conjecture – what happens when the law in Missouri (can sue anyone anywhere that helps a Missouri resident get an abortion) collides with the law in Connecticut (Connecticut residents can’t be sued for providing abortion and can countersue to get back legal costs)?
I won’t even go to the insane legal issues that will erupt when pregnant people (or people who claim to be pregnant) start trying to get tax deductions for the unborn, since Louisiana is trying to define life as starting at fertilization (so much for IVF). Which is in principle against the establishment clause, since various religions have their own definitions of when life begins, but who knows what this court will think of on this issue.
Think they might call your bluff on this one. The Senate has already put forward a bill to allow taxpayers to claim fetuses as dependents. Personally, while some of the language would need to be changed (excise references to “unborn children”), I think this should be bipartisan, because it is expensive just getting ready for a baby.
Ha, ha, ha, hahahahaha! In the US?
I think paid parental leave would be far more useful to parents than a tax deduction for a fetus. And how exactly would that be enforced? What would stop an unscrupulous person from claiming to be pregnant and having a miscarriage?
It is unquestionably Orthodox and, I believe, Conservative Jewish law that a Jewish doctor is required to perform an abortion when the pregnancy constitutes a danger to the mother’s life. There’a decent write up of it here: What does Jewish law say about abortion?
I can already tell you what the courts will think of on this issue: they will pretend, just as they do when it comes to other areas of unquestioned Christian supremacy, that abortion laws are a civil and not a religious matter.
Louisiana is trying to define life as starting at fertilization (so much for IVF).
Also so much for IUDs, which usually work by preventing fertilization, but also make implantation harder. IUDs are one of the most popular and a highly effective form of contraception. They are not being banned by accident.
“I can already tell you what the courts will think of on this issue: they will pretend, just as they do when it comes to other areas of unquestioned Christian supremacy, that abortion laws are a civil and not a religious matter.”
Unquestioned Catholic-Protestant superiority (since Orthodox are also Christians).
Dianne:
Those are a couple of pretty extreme claims. I have never heard any anti-abortion proponent state such. Anti-abortion laws have exclusions to save the mother’s life. What exceptions to such laws are you aware of? Please support those statements.
JaneDoh:
Yeah, it is nuts, and I also think it would be struck down. While a person who commits a crime in State A and then travels to State B must be surrendered to A by B if B seeks an extradition, I am not aware of any laws that allows State A to prosecute a person for committing an action in B that is legal there but prohibited in A. Can anyone provide an example of this?
That’s presuming that such a belief can only be based on religion. But one need not base such a belief on religion. A philosophical stance based on biology will serve quite nicely.
Firstly, the new anti-abortion laws that allow private prosecutions were specifically designed to prevent legal behaviour. Old style laws worked by making actions illegal. These new ones don’t criminalise it: they just allow private prosecutions of people participating in or assisting with an abortion. They’re meant to make this impossibly risky, and the cost of being prosecuted is so high that the threat will work even if most of those prosecutions fail. In fact, IIRC, Texas’ law even makes it hard or impossible for the party sued to recover fees even if they win. It’s private punishment, not anything approximating justice.
Secondly, even if states can’t prosecute extra-territorial behaviour – something which I doubt is correct – they can certainly prosecute in-state actions that lead to an out-of-state abortion. States already prosecute people for an association with crimes they didn’t commit, or for conspiring to commit a crime that didn’t even take place. I can’t see why they couldn’t prosecute someone who (e.g.) lent money to a person seeking an out-of-state abortion, or drove them to the border, or counselled them about the safest way to terminate a pregnancy. And before anyone raises the First Amendment, note that many states already require doctors to say or do things that discourage abortion; and that the Federal government has made health services’ receipt of government funds contingent on not providing information about abortion.
Finally, and very regrettably, the rights of US citizens are effectively determined by what the US Supreme Court says they are, and the present Court has been remarkably willing to indulge the worst impulses of State legislatures. I don’t think this Court will strike down anti-abortion legislation even if it infringes on States’ rights; that’s not why those justices were appointed.
@Ron But philosophy is similar to religion – you have yours and I have mine, and you can’t impose yours on me. I don’t think that most scientists would agree that life begins at fertilization, given just how many zygotes never properly implant (and how much early spontaneous abortion there is). Given that most people are OK with using brain death as a definition for the end of life, it should not be surprising that many people don’t consider a clump of cells that has the potential to develop into a person as the same thing as a person.
I don’t see how this isn’t a religious matter. My religion defines life as beginning at birth, which requires me to prioritize the mother, since she is a living person at the expense of the fetus, which is not. Calling your belief that life begins at fertilization a philosophy based on science doesn’t make it different than a religious definition, since it is still your belief.
” I have never heard any anti-abortion proponent state such.”
https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/is-abortion-really-necessary-for-treating-ectopic-pregnancies/
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article259664605.html
Found these in 5 minutes of googling.
A philosophical stance based on biology will serve quite nicely.
Only if by “A philosophical stance based on biology” you mean completely ignoring actual biology. The sperm and oocyte are both alive. Life does not begin at fertilization. It began in the precambrian.
That being said, if you choose to make the argument that an individual’s distinct life begins at fertilization, you need to address several issues:
1. What do you mean by “fertilization”? Fusion of the sperm and oocyte membranes? The cortical reaction? The fusion of the pronuclei?
2. If a human life is said to start at fertilization–any part of fertilization–then we need to address the pandemic that is killing as many as 80% of people in the first two weeks of life. Namely, failed implantation. Until I see anti-abortion advocates calling for massive tax increases to fund an investment in basic and applied research into the mechanisms by which fertilizations fail to implant, I am not going to believe that they really believe that a newly fertilized egg is really a baby. Although I suppose an alternative hypothesis is that they don’t really care if 80% of babies die as long as they can torture pregnant people. Whichever.
Görkem has already provided references for the “pro-life” position on ectopic pregnancies, but I would like to point out that it’s also literally the Catholic church’s position. And it’s part of some bills that propose bans on abortion. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is literally something the “pro-life” movement brags about.
The anti-abortion movement is simply made up of horrible, evil people. There’s no way around that. Yes, there are good people who get sucked into the movement due to ignorance or lack of consideration of the overall situation, but the leaders, the people making the policies, know that they are advocating rape, murder, and slavery. And that’s what they want to do.
Anti-abortion laws have exclusions to save the mother’s life.
Tell it to Savita Halappanavar’s family.
Görkem @ 30:
The first link you give has this:
So it would appear she has recanted.
The second link requires a subscription, which I do not have.
Dianne @31:
There is a significant difference between deaths caused by some natural process and deaths caused by deliberate human intervention. The former are classified as “natural causes”. The latter are classified as “homicide”. Or in 38 States including some quite deep blue ones such as Massachusetts and Illinois or under Federal law (which only applies to Federal personnel or on Federal property, not the country at large), “feticide” when it concerns the killing of a child in a womb. Now, those laws exclude abortion. But shoot a pregnant woman to death in most States and you will stand trial for two counts of homicide, not one.
And yet, we don’t devote all our attention to preventing and punishing homicides while ignoring trying to reduce deaths from things like cancer and heart disease and covid. We spend enormous amounts of money – both as a society and through the government – trying to prevent natural deaths among people.
So the question is fair. Why isn’t the pro-life movement spending huge amounts of money, or at least of political capital, trying to increase research into preventing the millions of deaths of zygotes through natural causes?
There is a significant difference between deaths caused by some natural process and deaths caused by deliberate human intervention. The former are classified as “natural causes”. The latter are classified as “homicide”.
So we should only worry about deaths from homicide and not from “natural causes”? Is that why we have been completely ignoring covid and have no vaccines, prophylaxis, or treatment for it while we’ve really vigorously dealt with the problem of mass shootings and they are a thing of the past? (Do I really need a sarcasm tag here or is it clear enough?)
Let’s say every fertilized egg is a person. Maybe a soul is inserted at fertilization or maybe…well, actually, I can’t think of a single biological excuse so I’m going to go to physics babble: Maybe fertilization collapses enough wave forms to make the fertilized egg but not the unfertilized a person. Now, let’s consider the current situation:
IIRC, about 1 in 3 women (or transmen or non-binary people with cycling uteri–though I’m not sure if the 1 in 3 holds for these populations, it could be higher or lower) will have an abortion in their lifetime. If we assume an average of 3 pregnancies per person who can get pregnant, that’s about 1 in 9 pregnancies ending in abortion. That means 11% of the population is dying by homicide before birth. Pretty bad. Worse even than the numbers for the real, actually living people killed in our approximately biweekly gun massacres. Sounds like a problem.
But the 1 in 9 is just the rate for clinical pregnancies (pregnancies where the pregnant person knows that they are pregnant.) 80% of pregnancies end before that point. So actually 80% of people are dying from a highly fatal disease in the first two weeks of life and approximately 2-3% (11% of the 20% remaining) are dying by homicide. Which sounds like the greater public health issue? If you still think it’s the “homicides”, may I assume that you are in favor of banning guns absolutely?
The pro-life movement is not spending massive amounts of money on research into miscarriages because a) it doesn’t have massive amounts of money and, more importantly, b) its ambit is not public health. As Amp points out, we can do multiple things simultaneously. As Dianne sarcastically alluded to, there is already a public health infrastructure that spends billions of dollars to deal with the prevention and treatment of disease processes and deaths due to natural causes. There is no such public infrastructure to deal with the deaths caused by the deliberate human action of abortion – quite the opposite, it seems, at least in some States – so the pro-life movement focuses on that and leaves the public health issue to the public health infrastructure.
Considering who the backers of the anti-abortion movement are, I would love to see any support for this claim, RonF.
Surely if they actually believed each miscarriage is the same as a three year old dying, they could do things like lobby heavily for the US government and for the state governments to fund more research and to create economic incentives for private companies to do more research into this, write proposed laws increasing awareness and subsidizing research, etc.. This is all stuff the pro-life movement has been doing for decades to try and institute government-enforced childbirth, so you can’t claim it’s beyond their means or their abilities.
a) it doesn’t have massive amounts of money
Massive money from private citizens isn’t either needed or likely to be enough to be helpful, unless said citizen is one of the super-rich. It’s about political will and, in particular, where the federal research money is spent. Why are all of the extremely politically connected anti-abortion people not screaming for the NIH to spend money on miscarriage? Where’s the demand for a National Miscarriage Institute?
and, more importantly, b) its ambit is not public health
A public health crisis of this level is everyone’s problem. Again, no one’s asking them to personally devote their lives to researching miscarriage, just to call for more support for research into miscarriage.
Seriously, what am I supposed to think of people who are saying, simultaneously, “A fertilized egg is a baby” and “80% of fertilized eggs fail within the first 2 weeks of pregnancy, eh, not my problem?” I find the idea that people can believe that 80% of babies are dying in the first two weeks of life is not everyone’s problem extremely disturbing. Really, they look like nicer, better people if they only want to commit rape and slavery. If they really believe that these are babies, they are dooming 80% of babies to an early death because they just don’t care. That’s even worse.
there is already a public health infrastructure that spends billions of dollars to deal with the prevention and treatment of disease processes and deaths due to natural causes. There is no such public infrastructure to deal with the deaths caused by the deliberate human action of abortion –
There is no public health infrastructure devoted to dealing with deaths caused by miscarriage. Conversely, there is a highly funded–indeed, overfunded–public infrastructure devoted, at least in principle, to protecting humans from violent death. If you think the NIH is already doing enough to prevent miscarriage, surely you believe that the police are already doing enough to prevent abortion in states where it is restricted (i.e. all of them). An illegal abortion is–just that. An illegal act. Which we have a public infrastructure to deal with.
This argument about miscarriages is a bit of a red herring, because likely there is no real way to “help” embryos implant. If there were, IVF would be easier. There is almost certainly research in that direction already.
I would be more likely to believe that the pro-life movement actually believes that human life begins at conception if so many people involved in that movement weren’t also working to decrease access to birth control. Even if you believe that sex outside of procreation is a sin, surely it is better to enable such a sin than it is to increase the number of abortions by restricting access to birth control if you really think that every abortion is murder? Yet almost all of people I know IRL who REALLY want abortion to be illegal also oppose increased access to birth control.
This argument about miscarriages is a bit of a red herring,
I disagree.
because likely there is no real way to “help” embryos implant.
Why? Is implantation magic and impossible to alter with improvements in technology.
If there were, IVF would be easier. There is almost certainly research in that direction already.
There is. And it does, indeed, help IVF. IVF success rates have gone up over the past decade or so. However, there isn’t nearly enough research if failure to implant is the cause of death of 80% of the population at age <2 weeks. I find it unthinkable that anyone would look at the death of 80% of babies and not want to throw money and brain power at the problem. Certainly, we've spent a huge amount of money on childhood cancer, which kills only a small number of children–with the result that childhood cancers are now frequently survivable. I'm sure that in 1922, that goal seemed impossible. But people went for it anyway. So why not miscarriage–if you (the person making the decision, not you personally) believe that a fertilized egg is really a baby. If you don't, covid, cancer, heart disease, poverty, etc are higher priorities. And, indeed, these are highly funded by the NIH. Almost as though no one in our society really believes the nonsense about single cells being people.
JaneDoh@41: I agree with your second paragraph. There isn’t any consistent way to believe a fertilized egg is a baby and oppose birth control. Unless you believe that every unfertilized oocyte and sperm are also babies, an argument that dissolves into absurdity very rapidly.
” it doesn’t have massive amounts of money ”
Amp, I know you don’t like dismissive comments, so I will just say, this statement runs counter to the evidence.
“its ambit is not public health”
Pro-lifers constantly use arguments based on public health. They perceive what they’re doing as saving lives. That’s a public health argument.
re: the recanter, you’ve moved the goalposts – you said you’ve never heard this opinion. You have now heard it. The fact that she changed her mind based on widespread condemnation doesn’t mean she never said it.
Promoting the saving of lives by improving sanitation, setting up health clinics, etc. such that people do not die from accidents or infectious disease is a public health argument. Promoting the saving of lives by stopping one human being from killing another is opposing murder and preserving civil rights; it’s not public health. There’s a difference between impersonal acts of God and/or nature and deliberate acts of human beings.
O.K., fair enough. I must say I’m surprised, as it is not an opinion I had encountered before. I will say, though, that as in the case of the link you provided any people who give such an opinion do so out of ignorance. I figure that such people, as the person you linked to did, would change their mind once they actually had explained to them what an ectopic pregnancy is and what the consequences are. I’m going to guess that a lot of people couldn’t define what an ectopic pregnancy is.
Murder, suicide, and accidental death. Since these are major causes of death in young and middle aged people, these issues are public health problems. As the doctors who have been desperately advocating for gun control will tell you. If gun violence is a public health issue, why not miscarriage and abortion–if you really believe that a single celled organism is a person in need of civil rights.
You might think that. I certainly would like to think that. And yet…https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21353977/
Also, not an ectopic pregnancy, but a non-viable pregnancy where appropriate care was not offered, despite the doctors’ and other providers’ clear understanding that this was a non-viable pregnancy that was likely to end in the death of the pregnant person if not treated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar
If there is a hell, I hope (and expect) the people who denied Halappanavar care and tortured her physically and psychologically while she was dying go to it.
My God, Dianne, the incompetence surrounding Ms. Halappanavar’s death is gruesomely tragic.
Part of the incompetence in the Irish case is medical incompetence, which is not the product of anti-abortion laws. However, part of it was -legal- incompetence, e.g. the doctors weren’t confident that they were legally allowed to treat her, because understanding the exact parameters of when the “protect the life of the mother” exception came in relied on interpretations of a then-20 year old court case. I won’t go so far as to say doctors and nurses don’t need any knowledge of the legal framework of their profession, but they shouldn’t have to know that much. E.g. if the law had been different, she would probably have lived. In Ireland, this case was a major impetus for the law being overturned.
However, I am going to assume Ron feels that this case has no relevance to debate in the USA, since as he’s often said, the USA is a unique country and comparisons to how things go/don’t go in Europe are not useful due to American culture, geography, economics etc being different.
@RonF At least one person in Texas with an ectopic pregnancy did a 10-12 hour drive to NM because her local doctor was too nervous to end the pregnancy and she couldn’t find anyone else: https://www.thelily.com/the-texas-abortion-ban-has-a-medical-exception-but-some-doctors-worry-its-too-narrow-to-use/
If it had ruptured during the drive, she could have died. In another thread, you mentioned the chilling effect in speech when someone was prohibited from texting with someone else. Without extremely clear guidance (which is unlikely unless the law is written by medical personnel), exceptions to save the life of the mother leave women at the mercy of how their health care providers interpret about the law, which can definitely kill them.
And again, all of this is predicated on a (some flavors of) Christian definition that life begins at conception. For a long time, most Christians belived life began at the quickening, which is ~20 weeks into a pregnancy. In other religions, life begins at birth. It is hard to reconcile putting all fertile women at risk to enshrine into law a religious philosophy.
” In other religions, life begins at birth.”
I hate to be contrarian, but you are giving non-christian religions too big a break here. It’s not generally relevant to the public debate in the USA, but several Islamic jurists have specifically argued that life begins at conception, and several Islamic majority countries ban abortions where the mother’s life isn’t threatened. Many Thai Buddhist leaders have also said that abortion is equivalent to murder, and abortion remains illegal in Thailand.
Of course there are Islamic and Buddhist religious thinkers who explicitly accept abortion or have some kind of middle stance. But the idea that abortion is murder is definitely not exclusive to christianity.
The thing is, I can easily see panel #4 as being quite true. That’s because I don’t recall the first 3 panels as being the main anti-Roe v. Wade position all these years. Pretty much ever since Roe v. Wade was decided (while I was an undergrad in college) the argument that opponents put forward that I heard over and over was not “Abortion should be decided by the States” but “The reasoning in Roe v Wade is convoluted and was fashioned in order to achieve a pre-determined outcome; there’s actually nothing in the Constitution that establishes a right to abortion”. I would imagine that there were some people advancing “It should be left to the States”, but I don’t remember it being much in play, never mind the dominant one. It would be hypocritical for people advancing the former argument to turn around and pass a Federal law to take the decision out of their hands. But while you might not agree with the latter argument, it would not be hypocritical for people advancing it to press for a Federal law banning abortion nationwide.
I’ll bet my paycheck that a GOP Congresscritter will put forward a bill banning abortion nationwide immediately should the Supremes put out an opinion that strikes down Roe v. Wade entirely. I doubt that it will a) pass both the House and Senate and b) get signed by the President. At least, not until after 2024. That’s forever in politics so I won’t predict past that date. Heck, in 2016 the smart money had Pres. Clinton halfway through her 2nd term right now ….
JaneDoh:
Agreed.
I realize you were paraphrasing a position, not arguing it, but I can’t help proposing answers anyway…
The prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the 8th?
The 9th, which no one apparently has ever used?
If you’re not buying either of those, the 13th is still clearly applicable.
Maybe the constitution doesn’t establish this right, but to me that is secondary.
The right to abortion is a basic human right. If the constitution doesn’t explicitly provide it (and it may not, it is missing a lot of other necessary stuff), then it should be changed or ignored.
Congratulations, Ron. It’s a great day for you.
Another one
You might say, “That’s not going to happen here.” And if you did, I’d agree. It’s not going to happen. I’m practically certain that the tense should be past: it has happened here, probably to someone poor who can’t make a fuss. It will happen again. Probably to someone too poor to make a fuss and get evacuated to someplace where they can get medical care.
Re: Gorkem @ 55:
All members of the House of Representatives and the Senate take this oath as a condition of taking office:
The President takes this oath as a condition of taking office:
All Federal employees take the following oath as a condition of taking office – this includes all Federal judges (why this applies to Article III judges but not Congressmen I don’t know, but that’s how the law is set up):
Every Federal judge (including the members of the Supreme Court) also takes the following oath as a condition of taking office:
Any of these people who would ignore the Constitution to do what was right in their opinion instead should be impeached and removed from office. If your personal morality is in such conflict with the requirements of your office then your only honorable or moral recourse is to resign.
Dianne @ 54:
Having a child is not a punishment. If anything, killing someone before they are born is a cruel and unusual punishment of them. In fact, in a great many States injuring a pregnant woman such that either the fetus dies within her womb or that she miscarries is considered a homicide and killing a pregnant woman is considered a double homicide.
Invoking Amendment IX, OTOH, is an interesting proposition. I haven’t researched what court cases or legislation has considered it. But it seems to me to be absurd that it means that the Court is bound to hold that anything a plaintiff asserts is a Constitutionally protected right is in fact such. At the least there would have to be other considerations. It seems to me that it makes more sense that it means that if Congress by legislation states that “x” is a right the Court cannot revoke such legislation solely because it names something not enumerated in the Constitution.
“Any of these people who would ignore the Constitution to do what was right in their opinion instead should be impeached and removed from office.”
To me, human rights matter more than oaths. If the only way to deliver human rights is to break oaths, we should break oaths.
I am sure you, as a proud conservative, are enough of a student of history that I don’t need to tell you about the various immoral oaths that have been taken throughout history, and how great it would have been if the people who took those oaths hadn’t followed them.
Ron @ 59
The 9th amendment is…. Weird. It has never in the history of American jurisprudence actually been used in a majority SCOTUS opinion (although it has been mentioned in concurrences or dissents). As an example – In 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut, Justice Goldberg wrote in his concurrence:
That concurrence was specifically dissented by Justice Potter:
Frankly, it would be a really novel and destructive argument to say that American governments could not legislate in any way not explicitly allowed by other parts of the constitution… I mean, Article 1, Section 8, clause 1 of the constitution says –
What would that do to state taxes? Municipal taxes? School taxes?
My interpretation, take it for what it is, is that the 9th in practice gives you the right to do things so long as there is no law disallowing that practice…. Which might be the plain language of the US v. Darby citation ([The 9th]”states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered”).
I’m not happy with the outcome of Dobbs, but the 9th isn’t the answer.
Nope. But Griswold was the correct answer and that’s been effectively nullified. All there is now is waiting for the formal procedure to get rid a boatload of rights that are weighing down American citizens. Probably with a majority opinion that reads, almost in its entirety, “Fuck you. There’s not a thing you can do about it.” That seems to be the current GOP majority’s attitude – “No need for any kind of supportable legal reasoning since we control the horizontal and we control the vertical.”
Being forced to allow your body to be used to incubate tissue against your will is torture. It’s forcing a person to take a risk approximately 10x as likely to result in death than bone marrow donation, similar to the risk of kidney donation. (Actually, it might be more risky now since I think kidney donation is getting safer over time. Pregnancy, in the US at least, is getting more dangerous.)
I suppose it’s technically not punishment since there is no requirement that anything illegal be done before it is implemented against a person. So I think I’ll go back to the 13th as the constitutional grounds.
Which is why I really hope that Trump never gets back into office. Because then my ultimate boss would be one of the domestic and foreign supported enemies of the constitution who I’ve sworn to protect the country and constitution against. Awkward! (Yeah, I’m planning to forget it and quit if it comes to that, particularly given how things went last time–and that was before Trump had committed treason.)
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-24-2022
That is assuming that someone considers an embryo or fetus to be a person, which many people don’t. I think we can expect a lot more of this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/even-exceptions-to-abortion-bans-pit-a-mothers-life-against-doctors-fears/
That sounds pretty horrifying to me. I have enough money that even if I lived in a state that banned abortion (which I don’t, since I don’t live in the US) I would be able to travel to get one, but it would be terrifying to be pregnant in such a state and maybe need a treatment that is incompatible with pregnancy for something. I think I should be the one who makes that kind of choice, not the state. I do wonder if this will impact specialty employment recruiting in abortion-restricted states.
If killing someone before they are born is cruel and unusual punishment, then surely so is ignoring their medical needs…and thus are we back to the issue of miscarriage and the lack of funding into research to prevent miscarriage. Or even funding into maternal health care that would prevent some miscarriages.
“That is assuming that someone considers an embryo or fetus to be a person”
One of the amusing things about Ron is that he very often seems to be operating under the assumption that he is talking here to a group of convicted ideological conservatives, for whom statements like “a foetus is a person” are just common sense and don’t even have to be debated.
It must be weird.
I’d like to offer my condolences to Ron. The 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio was not actually forced to give birth – she was able to receive an abortion in Indiana. Disappointing, I know.
I’m sure you will find it a great comfort that Indiana is set to restrict abortion, so soon, 10 year old girls in her position will be forced to carry their rapists baby to term.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/07/01/ohio-girl-10-among-patients-going-indiana-abortion/7788415001/
Don’t worry, Celeste, Ron and his fellows will have plenty of opportunities to celebrate 10 year-old rape victims being forced to give birth just as they’ll have plenty of opportunities to celebrate the many unnecessary deaths due to ectopic pregnancy in the very near future. It is, truly, a great day to be a Republican.
Not a moderator here, but I think the attacks on Ron are getting a little personal. I think the comments about the 10 year old rape victim are over the line. I disagree with him and most political subjects, but I definitely don’t think he would be happy that a 10 year old would have to give birth.
TBH, I think most anti-abortion folks don’t think much about the edge cases much (like a child who will require a C-section to give birth or people who need an emergency abortion for non-ectopic pregnancy medical reasons) — it is human nature to avoid thinking about unpleasant things, especially if they undermine your existing beliefs. Just like most wealthy people will be like “meh” at the polls, since they figure they can always use pills or travel to get an abortion forgetting that it might be an emergency where they medically are too unstable to travel, or that the line to get an abortion is too long in places where it is still legal or whatever.
But they tell us they think about edge cases all the time. What else would explain their obsession with 8th month abortions that they talk about constantly? What else would explain the repetition of their stated position in favor of child victims of incest and rape carrying the embryo to term? They’ve used edge cases to push their agenda for 50 years and I don’t think they’ve stopped ruminating over them just because an illegitimate and anti-democratic institution gave them the victory they’ve worked so hard to achieve.
Even if we grant that your assumption is right, why should we let them continue not to think of the cruelty their victory is imposing? This is exactly the outcome they’ve fought for and they should be reminded of that at every opportunity.
FWIW, I think it is definitely OK to highlight cases like the 10 year old and bring them to Ron’s attention, but I think it goes too far to make it personal and suggest the Ron would rejoice in the suffering of a child.
Agreed with Jane about that.
FWIW, remember that it’s not just making Ron uncomfortable (if it makes him uncomfortable at all, which it’s not clear to me it does). It makes ME uncomfortable.
I apologize for the times I’ve gone too far and made unjust accusations or otherwise made people uncomfortable. I am going to point out, though, that this is a very difficult issue to keep one’s composure on. As has been pointed out, the issues at stake include bodily integrity, freedom, and life itself. Pregnant people have died and more will die due to lack of access to safe abortion, fear of being accused of an abortion while having a miscarriage, and lack of OB care due to abortion restrictions scaring OBs out of areas with restrictions. In the best case, if abortion is allowed then all pregnancies, even desired pregnancies, are essentially enslavement of the pregnant person.
Given all this, it’s hard to keep one’s composure. Or, at least, it’s hard for me to keep my composure. This is not an excuse for my bad behavior and I will try to do better in the future. It’s more in the nature of a warning that I might not always succeed in doing better. And that I don’t necessarily expect others to be able to consistently do so either.
Dianne @ 63
Jane @ 70
Jaqueline @ 73
The abortion debate, more than any other I can think of, is emotionally fraught. Even saying it like that feels insufficient, like the understatement of my life, because of how high the temperature is. And I think that it’s like that because both sides have an understanding, even if only subliminally, that if they took the time to take a step back and examine the best arguments from the other side, that those arguments aren’t easy or simple to dismiss… And that’s uncomfortable.
Both sides (I know…. I know…. “both sides”, but really….) are having a discussion about a set of competing Rights. The right to self determination against the right to life. And both sides see the issue as exceptionally high stakes… And so they invariably discount the arguments of the other side to the strawmanniest of caricatures. “You just want to kill babies” No… She doesn’t. “You just want to control women’s bodies!” No… He doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong… Some people are stupid. Some people don’t have the words to properly state their opinions, some people don’t understand their opinions, and say some egregiously dumb things…. I’m sure you could find quotes. I’m talking about the best arguments…. Because they exist.
The problem is, that whether we want to admit it or not, my impression is that both sides are being honest…. That the pro-lifers really believe that life starts at conception, and that abortion is killing. There are secular arguments for that. Similarly, pro-choicers really do believe that the choice is fundamental, that there is a window somewhere between conception and birth where the prenatal life* just doesn’t have the equipment to be aware, and so an abortion is a victimless act. More, if women can’t get legal abortions, they’ll get illegal ones, and that’s just dangerous. Women will die.
Cards on the table… I believe life starts at conception. It’s not a religious belief, I don’t know if anyone cares, but I’d be willing to explain it if someone wanted to try to understand it. But I’m also a realist, and a libertarian, and at the end of the day, this boils down to an exceptionally nuanced trolley car problem, and while I accept that some people will disagree we me on this, bitterly, I’d pull the lever in favor of choice every time and feel really bad about it. Because sometimes, having a principled position feels bad, but it’s still the right thing to have.
*I struggled with that term longer than I should have…. It’s all semantics, but I tried to be an uncontroversial as possible, if you have a preferred term, please mentally ad-lib it in.
Corso,
I find your position interesting, and, respectfully, it’s the only one that I don’t really understand.
If you don’t believe that a prenatal being is a person, the pro-choice position naturally follows. Of course the government shouldn’t tell you what to do with your own body. It’s obvious. (For this reason, I bet the Venn diagram of “people who do not believe a fetus is a person” and “people who are anti-abortion” is just two, completely separate circles.)
But if you do believe that a prenatal being is a person, it creates an extremely difficult, impossible-to-completely-reconcile conflict of rights. From their perspective, the unborn child has a fundamental right to life that necessarily comes into conflict with the pregnant person’s right to bodily autonomy.
Many of them think that the right to life has to be more fundamental than the right to bodily autonomy, because the right to life encompasses the right to bodily autonomy (after all, if you kill me, you’re, by definition, keeping me from doing what I want with my body).
But it gets really complicated, especially when you start thinking about how to enforce the law and about the edge cases that others have mentioned.
I understand both of these positions, but I don’t really understand either of the other positions, including yours, Corso.
The most famous argument in favor of your position is Judith Thomson’s violinist argument. But I’ve always thought that that argument–even if you accept the analogy, which has issues–only tends to support abortion in the case of rape. You said that you’d “pull the lever in favor of choice every time.”
If you don’t mind my asking, why?
Well, I also don’t understand the position of someone who doesn’t believe the prenatal being is a person and is anti-abortion. But my impression is that that person doesn’t really exist.
(Probably the closest is someone who thinks that, as a matter of law, the Constitution does not contain a right to abortion. But that’s opposing Roe v. Wade, not opposing abortion.)
Schroeder @ 76
I’ll try…. If at some point this veers too much for the moderators, we might take it off forum. I suppose to oversimplify, it boils down to: “Not every bad thing is the worst thing possible. Not every homicide is a murder.” That problem isn’t “impossible to reconcile”. It’s not even that hard. But that doesn’t mean that we have to like the answer. Life often lacks moral certainty, and even when that clarity exists, sometimes the right thing to do still sucks.
A couple years back, there was a week or two where the Twitter pro-choice lobby en masse discovered trolley car problems. They coached it as “The Problem Pro-Lifers Can’t Deal With” and the base outline was:
This was a misfire. Today as I search this, the references are mostly pro-lifers dunking on the argument. The lobbyists thought that this proved that pro-life people really didn’t think that embryos were analogous with babies. Problem was that that wasn’t a serious argument from the pro-life side: No one was confused by this. You save the kid 100% of the time, it doesn’t matter if there were five embryos in the cooler or five million. Regardless of how that pans out it’s a tragedy: Those embryos could have developed into some really great people, their parents put a lot of effort into getting them there, and they would have been loved…. But you save the kid because there is a difference between those embryos and the child. The person in front of you is in a different category than the prospective person. This isn’t even confusing to most religious folks, your average denomination has scripture that explicitly allows abortion when the mother’s health is mortally threatened.
But just because they’re different doesn’t mean the prospective person is a tumor, or a cluster of cells, or some other morally neutral non-entity. It has value. It is precious. It could have been you. And I don’t believe that the average person from the pro-choice lobby is really confused by that either…. All you have to do is look at the way we treat wanted pregnancies and miscarriages. I’m not sure exactly what goes on in the mind of every pro-choice person, whether they’re saying making the “cluster of cells” argument because they actually believe that, because they think it’s necessary for the movement, or whether it’s personal to them… But in order: I think they’re wrong, callous, or tragic.
And so… More directly to the question: We have a competing rights problem: The right to bodily autonomy against the right to life. This, in my opinion, is not that hard a question either: Just like you save the kid over the cooler 100% of the time, the mother’s right really should take precedence. Because she is different than the life she carries.
It’s still tragic. It’s still a waste. It still carries moral and ethical baggage. But people have the right to do all kinds of things that end in tragedy, waste, and ethical baggage, it’s not my place to make that decision.
Corso,
That’s interesting.
How I read your answer, though, is that you don’t actually view the prenatal entity to be a full person but as something between a clump of cells and a person. When you said @75 that you believe “life begins at conception,” I understood you to mean “personhood begins at conception,” but, in @78, you describe prenatal life as a “prospective person.”
I think I was just confused about what you were saying, correct?
It sounds like you fall into the category of people who don’t believe that a fetus is a person and who are pro-choice, with the caveat that you don’t believe that a fetus has no moral worth at all.
Most people with that position believe that a fetus becomes a full person at some point in the pregnancy. Does that change your “pro-choice, every time” position for some late-term abortions?
@79
Probably…. “Life” obviously begins at conception. Whatever we decide to call the immediate product of sperm and egg, it’s obviously alive. It has a unique DNA combination. Give it nine months, and chances are that the newest member of the human race will scream the proof of their existence at you. I believe that that life, at that time, is closer to a person than most other things, but you’re right… Different in scope if not kind than the person carrying it.
I don’t think that’s controversial, really… Let’s go back to the trolley car exercise for a second… What if, instead of a five year old boy, it was a dog? A goldfish? A bonsai tree? A turnip! How many people save the turnip over the embryos? We obviously confer some level of value on the unborn more than “clump of cells” seems to confer, even in the context of an unwanted pregnancy.
But does that life have rights? Is it a person? These are moral questions more than functional ones, because that violinist argument, I think, gets it close to right…. It doesn’t really matter.
I mean, Ron is calling everybody who has ever had an abortion, which I am going to guess includes quite a few people here, murderers.
The only difference is that Ron is hiding this assertion behind nonconfrontational language, but this is only a conversational trick – it flows very directly and logically from the views he has expressed.
I am going to question to what degree we owe Ron civility. He can walk away at any time if it is too much.
@Corso: Sure it is “alive” in that it is made of living tissue. It’s “alive” in the same way my tonsils are alive, but when I decided to have a surgeon rip out and incinerate my tonsils in order to make my life easier, nobody told me that the tonsils had rights.
Görkem @81 – you don’t owe Ron any more civility than you want to offer him, but we all owe Barry the respect of following his wishes for the platform he offers us. Be as rude to Ron as you feel comfortable to when you interact with him elsewhere, but here we should all be civil to everyone.
Not for everybody.
Whether or not I believe an embrio is a person with all the rights a human being should have or not is not the central question when it comes to my views on the legality of abortion.
No human being has the right to use another person’s body to sustain their own life without that person’s ongoing consent.
This is a legal question that has been settled for a long time when it comes to humans who are unquestionably persons. Nobody has the right to compell nother person to donate an organ, nor even to donate blood, against their will. Even if that donation is the only thing that will safe another person’s life. We might morally judge someone who refuses to consent to a blood transfusion to safe somebodies life, but we still can not legally force them to do it.
Now, there are people who claim that the situation with an embryo or fetus is different. After all, that person – if you believe an unborn to be a person – is not asking for a donation. The pregnant person is already sharing their body with the unborn. An abortion kills them. But that shouldn’t affect the question of legality.
Even if I am the only person on earth with the right bone marrow to save a cancer patient’s life and I have already been part of one transplant – if that person needs another one for whatever reason, I am not obligated to agree again. Even if I have donated my blood – which has some rare component that makes it life-saving for people with a specific illness – for years, nobody can legally force me to continue donating.
Another argument that gets made is that the pregnant person is responsible for the unborn being there and needing their body to survive in the first place. But (aside from ignoring all cases of coerced or forced sexual contact resulting in pregnancy), this doesn’t really matter when it comes to the question of whether being the cause of a life depending on you gives that person the legal right to demand use of your body. If I drive recklessly and cause an accident which results in somebody needing a blood transfusion, I still can not be legally compelled to donate that blood.
The question of fetal personhood might influence where somedy stands from a morality standpoint on the question of abortion. It shouldn’t affect the question of legality.
The question is not whether an unborn should have all the same legal rights as any other person. Outlawing abortion affords the unborn rights that no other person has. Outlawing abortion means legalizing the use of a pregnant person’s body by another against their will. It means ignoring the bodily autonomy of somebody who is definitely a person, not because there is another person with equal rights that also have to be considered but because the unborn, whether considered a person or not, is granted a legal status no other person has.
All the other issues – edge cases, the incongrousness of advocating against abortions but also against comprehensive sex ed or other policies that would reduce the need for abortion like parental leave, free childcare, better financial support etc. – make for interesting discussion points when it comes to morality. But they don’t change this fact.
Outlawing abortion is not the consequence of considering an unborn life a person from the moment of conception. It is the consequence of believing that pregnancy is the one and only situation in which it is legally acceptable to violate the bodily autonomy of one person to keep somebody else alive.
It doesn’t mean giving equal rights to the unborn. It means elevating their rights above those of everybody else.
Lauren @83,
We do require parents to care for their children. If I stopped feeding my two-year-old or didn’t change his diapers and he died, I would be charged with negligent homicide.
Assuming you think that law is just, what do you think is the distinction?
The easy answer, I guess, is that requiring me to feed my kid does not violate my bodily autonomy. But it does require me to physically use my body, so in that limited sense it does restrict what I can do with my body.
What about vaccine requirements? (To be clear, I support vaccine requirements; I just don’t know if you do.) That seems also to be an intrusion on bodily autonomy, albeit a much milder one than pregnancy. But on the other hand, the connection with saving a life is also more attenuated (again, assuming the fetus is a person).
I’m not asking these questions as “gotchas.” I’m just trying to understand your position better. Arguing on the Internet always seems futile to me, but the Internet does help me to understand other people’s positions better.
So are the egg (technically the oocyte) and sperm. Dead gametes produce no conceptions.
So do the gametes. Unless you’re going to argue that humans are usually haploid.
Ah, but there it is. Give it nine months. That implies that it is not now, but may be in 9 months, under the right conditions.
Two questions for you:
First, as you are likely aware, most conceptions fail within the first two weeks after conception. in fact, “chemical pregnancies” (pregnancies that are evident only on a pregnancy test and which never produce clinical signs of a pregnancy, much less a baby) account for up to 80% of conceptions. If you believe that life begins at conception, what do you think we ought to be doing, as public health measures, to prevent this massive pandemic?
Second, what point in conception do you consider the clinical point at which life begins? For example, would a drug that allowed fusion of the sperm and oocyte but prevented second mitosis (and therefore production of an actual egg and completion of fertilization) abortion or birth control? What about something that interfered with the changes in the oocyte that prevent further sperm from fusing, resulting in a hyperdiploid and nonviable conception? Other scenarios available if you would like more.
Honestly, I’d probably save the turnip because the chances that I could actually get cells frozen in liquid nitrogen out of the freezer before the building collapsed are low and the chances that I could find an appropriate cooler that could keep them at -80 for long enough to be of any use are close to non-existent.
That being said, if the conditions did exist (say, the cells were packed up for transport already), I’d take the cells before the turnip, but only after the 5 year old and the dog were out of the picture. Why? Not because I value the cells, but because someone does. Someone went through a lot of pain and risk to make these embryos and they value them. I’d save frozen sperm or oocytes for the same reason: because they belong to someone who values them. If the same cells were labeled “medical waste” (i.e. were no longer needed for whatever reason), I’d leave them to be sterilized in the makeshift autoclave. Cells kept in a medical facility, whether gametes, blastulocytes, umbilical cells, or hematopoietic stem cells have value only insofar as they are useful to actual living humans.
Also, regarding the original “trolley car” problem: Would you say that you should throw the switch and kill the one person to save the seven or ten or however many? Would you still say it if we were speaking in person and I were a transplant surgeon who, just prior to asking, remarked on what a healthy young person* you appeared to be? Are you still up for killing one person to save, let’s see (heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, maybe pancreas or digestive tract), 6-8 people**?
*If “young” cannot be plausibly applied to you, pretend the conversation happened an appropriate amount of time in the past.
**A transplant surgeon who actually used organs of a person who did not give clear, uncoerced permission would be barred from practice forever and in prison. So why is forced use of a uterus okay?
I’m not aware that there’s anything we could do. But if there was, I think it would be a breakthrough…. It’s 2022, the mysticism of reproduction is by and large dispelled… We know where babies come from, and we know how to prevent pregnancies with an exceptional success rate. Conception to term is a different story… We generally know the mechanics, but we don’t have nearly the success rate with outcomes. If such a measure was possible, then I would expect the women flocking to fertility clinics desperate to conceive would throw scads of money at anyone who could supply it. But universally? Nothing.
This seems like rabitholery… Why on Earth would you develop a drug that allowed fusion but prevented mitosis when we have drugs that prevent fusion? Just to squick the Catholics? As to where life actually begins… That’s probably about the timeframe, isn’t it? Fusion at the earliest, fertilization at the latest?
Two years ago there was nothing we could do about covid. We spent a bunch of money and came up with a lot of things. It is now less lethal. Why are we not doing the same for miscarriage, including failure of implantation, if we believe that a single celled organism is a baby? I would be very concerned if I believed that 80% of babies died in the first two weeks of life. I’ve never seen an anti-choicer be anything more than mildly interested.
Nor are we starting from nothing. The success rate of IVF is much higher now than it was 20 or 30 or even 10 years ago. Because money was spent to work on ways to improve the success rate. So why not do that for natural conceptions? If you really believe that 80% of babies are dying in the first two weeks of life.
You didn’t realize how the drug worked until late in the development. It has fewer side effects. It has a more convenient method of administration. It is more effective. It can be given to people with sperm, allowing them more control over their reproductive life. It is effective as a post-exposure prophylaxis. In short, there are a lot of potential reasons.
Also, what drug do we have that prevents fusion of the membranes? Or do you mean barrier protection, which prevents fusion by physical separation?
So, when is it? If you’re saying that the humanity starts at conception, presumably you think it starts quantally due to a single event. Which one?
“Should” is too much. I think the point of trolley car exercises is to demonstrate the subjective nature of situations, there’s no “right” answer. But would I? I hope I never have that much power over who loves or dies, but if I did, I’d like to think I would, and would feel awful afterwards.
I didn’t say that. And I’m not sure why you’re so invested in my answer.
Personally, I seriously doubt that I would know how to move a trolley from one track to the other. The original problem is really just not something that comes up. That being said, does that mean you’re okay with the surgeon slicing you up for spare parts to save 7 or 8 others who are in danger due to failing organs. Actually, let’s move it out of the personal: The person in danger of being recycled is not you or anyone you know. Does that make the surgeon correct to use that random person for organs? They’re saving lives by doing so.
Because we’re having a discussion on the internet and I’m interested in what your thought process is–including what questions you dodge. And if my understanding of your thought process went wrong, I’d appreciate it if you would clarify. I do not want to misrepresent your position and it seems that I have, so would like to know what it actually is.
Yes, absolutely. Bodily autonomy is the key here.
Every law in existence requires people to either do or not do something and in that way, somehow affects their body. Equating general freedom and bodily autony like that is not only a stretch, it renders the very specific meaning of nobody else being allow to control what is done with/ to your body meaningless.
Because ( in a world where reproductive freedom is protected), if you are the person who gave birth to the child, you made a choice to be that childs parent, which let to you being responsible for their care. If you are the other parent, in chosing to take on that role in the child’s life, you also made that choice. Taking on a responsibility means you can be punished for neglecting that responsibility.
I am not as familiar with American law, but I assume surrendering care to the state, giving a child up for adoption etc. is an option? And the people who do are not charged with neglect? (note that I am aware of, but not going to get into right now, the question of the legal obligation to pay child support for a child one wishes the other person had chosen to abort. Again, it boils down to bodily autonomy)
Also, I am reasonably certain that parents can not be legally compelled to donate blood or organs for their children either. Again, bodily autonomy is protected, no matter what we might think about the moral obligation.
Again, more familiar with the debate in Germany, so I am going to stick to that.
Nobody was suggesting that people should be forcibly held down and vaccinated against their will. What was being suggested (and implemented at least in part) was that to protect the bodily autonomy of other people who wanted to reduce their risk of infection as much as possible, people who chose not to take those precautions should not be allowed to endanger the ones who did. The government generally has the right to put restrictions on certain behaviours that pose a risk to others. That’s why we don’t allow drunk people to drive (but do not forcibly pump the stomach of anybody who takes a drink while in posession of car keys).
(Also, I have yet to hear of a case where a person chosing to have an abortion caused a bunch of other people to suffer sudden miscarriages. The decision to have an abortion affects only the person making a decision about their own body and – assuming personhood of the fetus – the person who is unintentionally violating that autonomy. The decision to enter a hospital full of at-risk-people without being vaccinated (and/or tested and/or masked) puts the bodily autonomy of a lot of others at risk – others who were not affecting the person refusing vaccination at all.)
“If you are the other parent, in chosing to take on that role in the child’s life, you also made that choice. ”
I’d rephrase – if you are a penis-having person, whenever you have sex with a vagina-having person, you chose to accept the risk of having a child. You may not have specifically chosen it, but you chose to do something for which the risk of having a child is well known and clearly obvious. So you’re still responsible, even if you didn’t choose “yes, I will have a child”.
I’m leaving aside the case of a penis-having person who was raped, which, unfortunate as it is, is rare enough that I don’t think it contradicts the general rule.
Görkem, I was referring specifically to the question posed by Cosmo of punishing people for child neglect – which I am pretty sure nobody who got another person pregnant and then left, never to be seen again or ever meet that child is being charged with. Child neglect can not happen without first having that child in your custody – and parenting is a choice. Which is why adoptive parents or other people assuming primary care of a child – family, friends ofthe parents, new partners etc. can also be charged with it. The choice to assume the responsibility of caring for a child means abdication of that responsibility can and should be punished when it harms the child.
But yes, having consensual sex that you know can get somebody pregnant does leave you with at least financial responsibility for that child – same as the person who gives birth would have to pay if they left that child with the other parent and took off.
Honestly, I would be OK with parents (overwhelmingly men, but let’s include the ultra-rare female cases and say parents) who choose to abandon their child at birth being charged with neglect if something tragic happens. But that’s just me, and you’re right, I don’t think the current law would permit this in any first world country, although to me that’s potentially a shortcoming of the law.
Görkem @95 – that’s a dangerous line to go down; I think adding a jeopardy to people keeping out of the lives of their children will put more children in contact with abusive parents. I think there’s a good reason why the law makes it easier to impose financial responsibilities on absentee parents than guardianship responsibilites.
I am not arguing these people should be given guardianship responsibilities. Just, if their inability to perform guardianship duties leads to neglect, they’re guilty. Neglect via absence is just as bad as neglect via being present and neglectful.
I realise there’d be plenty of legal complexities around writing this law but I feel the underlying principle is sound.
Corso:
There was no expectation that anyone would be confused by this. If you think there was such an expectation, then you didn’t understand the purpose of the argument from the pro-choice perspective.
Here’s how the dialog went, in much-simplified form, in my view:
PRO-LIFER: A fetus is the same as a born child, morally. There’s zero difference.
PRO-CHOICER: I don’t believe that, and I don’t think you believe that either. Here’s an example of an extreme situation in which you’d acknowledge that there is a moral difference between a zygote and a five-year-old. [Explains 5-year-old versus suitcase of fertilized eggs scenario.]
PRO-LIFER: Of course I’d rescue the 5-year-old in that situation. I’m not a monster.
PRO-CHOICER: Right! You’re not! Of course you’d rescue the 5 year old. But now you’ve acknowledged that there is a difference between a child and a zygote.
PRO-LIFER: No there’s not.
That said, I do think there’s something monstrous about the idea that something which has never thought, is in fact physically incapable of thought, is at all morally the same as a person. I particularly hate the “zygotes = Jews during the Holocaust” argument, which seems to be saying that Jews, all of us, are the moral equals of literally mindless creatures who have never, ever had a single thought or preference.
I know people don’t mean it that way, but it still annoys me. (And I’m not suggesting that you’ve made this argument!)
In my view, there are a couple of ways of thinking about abortion that makes sense.
First, do we as a society legally force people to let others make use of their organs?
We do not, not even in life-or-death situations. I just can’t see any reason to treat pregnant people as less valuable, less deserving of rights, than literally all non-pregnant people. But that’s what forced childbirth does.
Second, before a human’s brain has ever been capable of any thoughts or experiences, should we consider that human a person with independent legal and moral interests? And to me, it just doesn’t make any sense to do so. Having had experiences and thoughts – and having the ability to do so – is the very core of why personhood has moral weight. Without that, there’s no person there to have any interests.
On another subject: You said “Give it nine months, and chances are that the newest member of the human race will scream the proof of their existence at you.”
First of all, that’s factually wrong – most newly fertilized eggs don’t make it to being born humans. (As has already been pointed out.)
But more importantly, perhaps unintentionally, you make it sound like we just leave it alone for nine months and presto – a baby appears!
That’s not how it works. The pregnant person’s body spends nine months putting that baby together, at the cost of many resources, much energy, very possibly future health, and of course there are opportunity costs. At the end, we literally call it “labor.” It’s not just “giving it nine months” as if the pregnant person is a bystander, rather than a crucial and active participant. And framing it as if they are a bystander is particularly bad for our ability to discuss this issue – since part of the issue is whether or not we should legally force the pregnant person to put in all the work for nine months against their will.
P.S. Thanks for having this discussion! I realize you’re the odd one out here, and that’s not always an easy position to be in. Also, I do realize that you’re pro-choice, and I hope it doesn’t seem like I think you’re pro-life.
No problem! I was worried that it was too far off topic, I’m glad you appreciated. I have thick skin, but if it ever gets too much, I’ll just take a break and mow my lawn. I think that what some of the later comments in that exchange lost, particularly from Dianne, is that I’m (grudgingly) pro-choice. I understand the importance of choice and agree with allowing choice both from a moral and functional standpoint. The thing is… I think that we were still talking past the argument I’ve made.
Take this;
I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t people that say that exact thing. You’re right. And I’ll go so far as to say that people who say that might even approach a plurality of the pro-life movement.
But you’re also right here:
The people we’re talking about might not be great at logic, they might not have the words to express themselves, they might be ideologically married to their narrative. But whatever it is that keeps them saying “zygote = baby” is ultimately irrelevant… You’re right, and the issue amounts to a semantic one, because they know, whether they choose to admit it or not, that there is *some* amount of space between that zygote and a person.
My question is “How much?” And my opinion is “Enough that the burning IVF clinic is an easy call, and that abortion should be safe and legal, but not enough to make an abortion anything but a tragedy, and ideally rare.” I’m not going to put words in anyone’s mouths here, but there have been some pretty strong signals that people in this discussion don’t ascribe any human value to a zygote, and I think that that position is every bit as absurd as the zygote = baby assertion.
And similar to the zygote = baby assertion, there could be a whole lot of reasons why people make that argument, but I think that at least in part, it’s a convenient fiction that people struggling with the ethics of abortion tell themselves to help them through a tough question. Pregnant mothers who want children have a very different outlook on their zygotes. Pregnant mothers who want children and have miscarriages don’t generally approach the miscarriage dispassionately. We understand those tragedies, and while the tragedy might be different than saying goodbye to your grandparent in palliative, there are still some pretty obvious parallels. There is loss. And there is loss because there is value. And saying that the unborn don’t have value because their mothers don’t ascribe it to them is… sad.