For obvious reasons, this new ban that will be going into effect in July in South Dakota has caught my eye – that isn’t to say it won’t be splashed all over the news by tomorrow (or it should be, in a sane world!). While of course most of us knew that this ban and others like it would become common place in the near future, it never really prepares us for the reality. Or it doesn’t prepare me, at the very least. So here it is, the first fairly comprehensive ban signed into law by Governor Mike Rounds, signed Monday aimed at challenging the 1973 Supreme court decision.
In defense of his position, CNN quoted Governor Rounds as saying:
“In the history of the world, the true test of a civilization is how well people treat the most vulnerable and most helpless in their society,” said a statement released by Rounds, a Republican.
“The sponsors and supporters of this bill believe that abortion is wrong because unborn children are the most vulnerable and most helpless persons in our society. I agree with them.”
The ban itself can only be described as extremist, going so far as to ban abortions in all cases except for medical necessities. Cases of incest and rape are not included in the exceptions:
The bill signed by Rounds allows doctors to perform abortions only to save the lives of pregnant women, but even then encourages them to exercise “reasonable medical efforts” to both save mothers and continue pregnancies.
Anyone who performs an abortion under any other circumstance — even in a case of rape or incest — can be charged with a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. The mother cannot be charged.
As can be expected, both Naral and Planned Parenthood have spoken out quick and harsh against this new law, and are rallying for support to keep this from happening in other states. Nancy Keenan, president of Naral had this to say earlier:
“Governor Rounds’ signing of this bill should spur all Americans to let their governors know that they oppose egregious actions that threaten a woman’s reproductive freedom. This law is a monumental setback for women in South Dakota and across the country. This ban contains no exceptions for women who are rape or incest victims, or whose health is threatened, and has an inadequate exception to protect a woman’s life.”
“Since the South Dakota Legislature first passed this abortion ban, pro-choice Americans have reacted with a renewed commitment to protect a woman’s right to choose. They are right to be concerned because this is not an isolated case. Anti-choice politicians in 11 other states are pushing similar bans. President Bush has created a climate with his judicial appointments in which anti-choice lawmakers feel emboldened to attack Roe v. Wade. Americans don’t want to see this landmark decision overturned, and President Bush and his anti-choice allies will pay a political price for advancing such an out-of-the mainstream agenda.”
This strikes me as a really quandary for South Dakota doctors. Say you have a patient with eclampsia complicated by other factors (a heart condition, diabetes, etc.) How much can you cover your ass in terms of risking a felony conviction? On the other hand, if you wait it out and your patient dies when you could have intervened, can’t you still be sued by the woman’s parents or husband for malpractice? I predict that SD obstetricians will be leaving their practices in droves.
Well, yes and no. People who are pro-choice certainly see it as extreme, and perhaps people who want to see some sort of government regulation of abortion, but from the point of view of someone who says that life begins at conception, I don’t think it is extreme at all. It is the logical, in fact the only logical conclusion of that position. A friend whose was raised as an evangelical Christian–she is no longer Christisn–told me once about her father’s conflict over this issue. He pointed out that if one takes seriously the notion that life begins at conception, then, logically speaking, there should be no exceptions except to save the life of the mother, because the way in which conception took place should not have any bearing on the independent existence of the life that was conceived. He did not perceive this as an extreme position, but as the logical conclusion of the anti-choice position. At the same time, however, he wanted there to be exceptions for incest and rape; he just saw that desire more as a matter of human weakness, a lack of resolve, than as legitimate within his world view.
The fact that South Dakota has dressed this up in secular language, relying on a metaphorical and rather idiosyncratic reading of what biology has to say about the beginning of any organism’s life, is also very frightening. It’s yet one more step in the theocratizing of US society.
Well, yes and no. People who are pro-choice certainly see it as extreme, and perhaps people who want to see some sort of government regulation of abortion, but from the point of view of someone who says that life begins at conception, I don’t think it is extreme at all.
extremists don’t usually see themselves as extreme. that ‘life’ begins at conception is a religious belief. the belief that an embryo is a person is not supported in any way by medical science. legislating what is nothing more than a religious belief to limit the medical care of people who don’t share that religious belief is an extremist, theocratic agenda that violates freedom of religion. i fully support the right of anyone who believes an embyro is a person not to be forced to have an abortion. i don’t support their desire to interfere with the medical care of those who don’t share your beliefs.
oops. ‘your’ should be replaced with ‘their’. thank you.
Spacebaby, when does “medical science” say that an embryo becomes a person?
Oh, that’s right. It doesn’t. Science doesn’t address the issue of personhood, although it often informs the debate, because personhood is a cultural construct, not a scientific fact.
So cultural values have to then enter the equation as we try to decide where personhood begins. People draw on their religious, spiritual, humanistic values as a resource in making this determination for themselves. I’m not aware of any reason to draw an arbitrary line around one particular iteration of these value sets and label it “extreme”.
Unless, of course, I just want to use the word “extreme” as a club to smack people who believe differently than I do.
spacebaby – you might want to review as well the report of the SD task force on abortion. There are plenty of scientists and doctors who support the notion that the unborn are persons. Coupled with federal and state laws which say the same, there is significant traction behind this notion.
(BTW – Kim, where have you been hiding. This has been huge news for going on two weeks now.)
prochoiceamerica has a great list state by state of pending anti-choice legislation. We are also tracking it on christianforums.com. If you think SD is the only one, think again. The following states have current active bills or proposed constitutional amendments that would ban all abortions (with various exceptions like rape, incest, and mother’s life): MS, GA, SC, TN, IN, MO, OH, KY, RI. In addition, several more have bills banning abortion after 12 weeks. Several others have bans that will take effect if Roe is overturned. Several others have proposed fetal “personhood” legislation including hard to overturn constitutional amendments.
It isn’t the belief that’s extreme, Robert. It’s the attempt to force that belief onto other people who don’t share it that is extreme. And yes, I think a reasonable person, using that as a gauge, can call this bill very extreme, even extremely extreme.
It’s the attempt to force that belief onto other people who don’t share it that is extreme.
But that’s the basis for most law. Mayor Bloomberg believes that secondhand smoke is bad – so bad that it must be banned. Millions of other people disagree, but the people who share the belief outnumber them. Is it “extreme” that this democratic preference is enacted into law?
Mike Bloomberg does not “believe” that secondhand smoke is bad – science has PROVED that secondhand smoke is bad. It is a given fact that secondhand smoke harms people. Now, when science has PROVED that human life begins at conception, we can talk about whether it is moral to ban all abortion, but as long as that idea remains a “belief,” and a belief about which there is no general consensus amoung reasonable people, then it remains extreme to force that BELIEF on all other people legislatively.
Robert,
So, obviously, nothing is actually extreme by your claim. If SD passed a law saying that all blue-eyed people within the state should be hung, drawn and quartered, that would merely be the democratic process enacting a law. To call such a law extreme would merely be drawing an arbitrary line around one of the infinite relativistic morass of competing cultural values, in order to use the word as a club to beat up on the poor South Dakotan anti-blue-eyed majority.
‘Extreme’ in a political context is always used as a club to smack people who believe sufficiently differently from what I and my community (however defined) that I perceive their values being enacted into law as a direct threat to myself or my values. This is the legitimate use of the word. Objecting to the word being used in this manner (freeing you from needing to comment on the content of the law, and on whether it meshes with your own views on what should be made law) is simply a silly distraction.
Robert, are you honestly saying that if a majority supports something, then it can’t be extreme?
So if a majority of Germans supported the Holocaust, was the final solution not extreme? If the majority of Americans supported interment camps, were they not extreme? Etc, etc.
I think that using the law to force a woman to give birth against her will is extreme. Even if you think it’s necessary and moral, it’s inane – not to mention extremely disrespectful of all the women you’re hoping to force to give birth against their wills – to pretend that forced birth is at all comparable to forced step-outside-to-smoke-a-cig. When you’ve been forced to give birth against your will, maybe your claim that it’s not an extreme step will have some credibility.
[Cross-posted with Charles.]
Lots of things are extreme, Charles. But your death-to-the-blue-eyed law is extreme because it involves killing lots of people, not because it involves “the attempt to force [a] belief onto other people”.
Robert, are you honestly saying that if a majority supports something, then it can’t be extreme?
Depends on what you mean by extreme. If you mean “will have very large effects”, then no, no matter how many people support the Bill to Kill Blonde People, it’s extreme.
But if by “extreme” you mean “reflective of the viewpoint of only a small minority”, then democracy has a lot to do with it. A bill to kill all the Jews would be very extreme in the US, using this meaning of “extreme” – only a handful of people want to do that. A bill to ban abortion in a particular state may or not be extreme in that sense, depending on the political context in the state. In South Dakota, I bet dollars there’s a big-ass plurality, if not a straight majority, that support the bill. In Massachusetts, no way – there, it would be extreme.
[snort] The S.D. ban, whether it stands or not, will have “no large effects.”
You all heard it here first.
So killing lots of people is extreme, but violating the privacy rights of lots of people and killing some people is not extreme, but this isn’t an attempt by you to force your own definitions of what is legitimately extreme, and what is merely a relativistic club for beating up decent Dakotans, on others. No, no, this is you pointing out a fundamental truth about language and meaning, where your arbitrary line around certain behaviours is true while Kim’s is just those damn fuzzy minded liberals trying to score points.
What is that thing Alsis says to you so often? Oh right, -Yawn.
And, since this is Kim’s thread, I’d suggest that she might want to add to that: Plonk!
Oh, I guess “Snort” also works.
As someone whose life would have been extremely different had I been living under a South Dakota-esque regime, I think this law is extreme. It has extreme consequences for women, their husbands or partners and their entire family. Especially women who are ill, or for whom continuing to carry a pregnancy could cause or aggravate illness or injury. Imagine being told that you must donate bone marrow or part of your liver to save someone else’s life, even if it threatens your health: this is a concept that has been considered unconscionable, and yes, extreme, and is extremely foreign to Anglo-American jurisprudence. But then again, for most of history women have been, literally, chattel, so in that sense of our history it is not extreme.
OK, easy turnaround scenario to see if we can come to a common definition of extreme.
Was the legislation to enact Clinton’s health care reform plan “extreme”, in the same sense that the SD legislation is “extreme”?
Let me fill in a bit more detail on my question.
In South Dakota in 2000 (last year that AGI has information), there were 870 abortions performed. Nearly 80% of those abortions were to women who had to travel a long distance to have them performed, because the state only has abortion available in one place. Abortion is starkly discouraged, with a variety of onerous restrictions. The most serious of those restrictions is a 24-hour waiting period, requiring two clinic visits.
So of the 870 women who abort each year, this law in effect changes an outcome for only about 170 of them – the ones who happen to live near the state’s functioning clinic. All the other women already are traveling a long distance to get abortion coverage – what they had to do last year, they still have to do this year. In fact, those women who have to travel might actually be better off if they have to go out of state, because the out of state clinics don’t have the 24-hour waiting period.
So the net effect of this law to South Dakotans – the only people the law directly affects – are limited to increasing the inconvenience suffered by 170 people, and (perhaps slightly) increasing the inconvenience suffered by 700 people, and closing down one privately-owned business. There are 775,000 people in South Dakota; the law directly impacts about one person in 1000.
I don’t view this as being an enormous impact on the people of SD. It might well be a major impact on some individual lives – but by that standard, nearly any law above the level of changing the timing of streetlights has an enormous impact.
I suspect that there is a very strong reaction to this law because it seems that Roe is imperiled by it. But this isn’t really true. Roe is imperiled by its own weakness as case law, and by changing political climates around the country, but any state can pass a law that puts Roe up to a challenge. This law cannot effect anyone outside of South Dakota; even if they win before the SC (unlikely), it doesn’t change anything outside of South Dakota. If Oregon is likely to pass a law banning abortion, Charles, then they can do it regardless of what South Dakota does.
So, if South Dakota were to pass a law requiring the hanging, drawing and quartering of blue eyed people, that law would not be extreme because it would be found unconstitutional?
Oh wait, sorry, Plonk.
So, if South Dakota were to pass a law requiring the hanging, drawing and quartering of blue eyed people, that law would not be extreme because it would be found unconstitutional?
No, it would be extreme because it involved killing a bunch of innocent people. As I keep saying.
I’m honestly not sure what the difficulty is with this example.
I recently heard a snippet on a news bulletin, which I haven’t seen or heard mentioned since, but it goes like this: Six well-known persons, Salman Rushdie being one of them, have published a joint statement that what the world is currently dealing with is not a clash of either religions or civilisations, but a clash between theocracy and democracy.
From where I sit, the progress of anti-choice abortion legislation in the US represents a victory for theocracy. These are dark times.
You know, if I was that way inclined, I would say that this is a time for women in America to take up arms, I am so enraged. Don’t take that seriously, but maybe there’s *something* American women could do that would kill two birds with one stone. Why not refuse to participate in sexual intercourse altogether? It won’t help the rape victims in SD, or any number of other women in certain circumstances, but it’s one way to make a loud unified statement and to guarantee no unwanted pregnancies in the immediate future for other women. The other thing it might achieve is putting a spotlight on the ‘importance’ or otherwise of sexual intercourse, from the perspective of women’s sexual pleasure, since it may well be that almost half of the female population don’t want it or enjoy it at all anyway. You can take that seriously.
Dunno, outside of arguing semantics here I can’t really see the point in explaining why it’s extreme. It just is. I’m a woman, I’ve faced these choices from both ends of the choice spectrum and have a clear understanding of how my life would be different had I not had the choice when I terminated a pregnancy so many years ago. I look into the faces of my spouse and children and understand that the ability to choose gave me this life and family that I do cherish, over one that I likely would have been miserable in. Taking that away from other women is as extreme as it is cruel and controlling. And that’s for pregnancies not conceived in incest or rape. Once we travel down that road, we’re talking about flat out inhumanity.
Screwing in a manner not vetted for purity by the nearest passing religious jaggoff = Not innocent enough to deserve life, liberty, etc.
…
You’re right, Charles. There’s always room for more Plonk.
Going on the people I know in South Dakota, I kind of suspect Robert is right – outlawing abortion in South Dakota probably isn’t extreme both in the sense that most people there think it should be done and that its impact will be pretty muffled for the average person. Most people there are used to traveling hundreds of miles for stuff – kids will drive an hour and a half there and back just to go “cruising” on Friday nights.
I’ll offer an example of “extreme” related to the South Dakota abortion law. On being asked to provide a scenario for someone who “needs” abortion (as opposed to those who abort for “convenience), this was Bill Napoli’s suggestion:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/law/jan-june06/abortion_3-03.html
I tend toward the pro-life position myself (although I vacillate when it comes to making abortion illegal), and I have read a good deal of pro-life stuff. I have never run across anything this crazed before. Most pro-lifers I know either argue that rape doesn’t excuse abortion (because it still involves a loss of life), or that any rape excuses abortion (without sweating what type of rape). Napoli’s view is extreme in the sense of “a position very few people hold” even if you’re talking the subcategory of pro-lifers.
And I surely do hope that his attitude about rape is in the extreme minority, but the fact that he’ll articulate it to a reporter pure terrifies me.
I will repeat my statement, Robert: forcing a religious belief about which there is no general consensus among reasonable people onto an entire population, legislatively, is extreme.
In more specific cases, forcing a rape victim to carry her rapist’s child to term against her will is so extreme and morally repugnant as to make me feel ill. Forcing a woman to carry a Tay Sachs fetus to term only to watch it suffer a slow, painful, agonizing death, when almost every Rabbi in this country will tell you that the proper thing to do is abort the pregnancy, is extreme. It does not matter if the law only affects one woman in a million this way every year: it remains extreme. Extremism is not determined by how many people it affects: it is determined by its affect on people. A law that requires that a rape victim be stoned to death for adultery is still extreme, even if only one woman a year out of a million is actually stoned to death. The LAW is extreme, because it stands on religious belief that is not shared generally by reasonable people.
There is no average woman. The SD law does not affect “women on average.” It singles out specific women, pregnant women, and curtails their liberties even when they demonstrably bore zero responsibility for becoming pregnant, and even where they could not have anticipated the health consequences of being pregnant. For these women, alone among all people in the state, they are required to come to the assistance of another being against their will and if necessary to the detriment of their own health. That’s extreme.
ADS – Very O’Connor like reasoning. I believe that is the tack she took in Casey regarding Undue Burden.
alsis39.5 wrote:
Maybe I’m staring too hard at this because it’s not making sense to me. Can you explain it, alsis? I’m thinking it might be a response to my post because you’re thinking I mean something different to what I actually mean. At the risk of making an idiot of myself I’ll clarify anyway….
I’m saying to women – as a form of protest against anti -choice abortion legislation – don’t have the kind of sex that produces babies unless you’re actually wanting to have a baby. This is also both your best protection from unwanted preganancy and a side benefit for the many women who apparently don’t enjoy that particular sex act anyway is that their partners will have to be more imaginative and more considerate about what they *do* enjoy if they want to have sex with them at all.
Maybe this is just silly – born out of a kind of impotent rage – but I bet I’m not the only one who’s thought of it…
This SD law is just straight out brutal and fuck the semantics. I don’t know what else to say.
cicely – interesting approach to reducing unwanted pregnancy. I whole heartedly agree.
Regarding the last sentence, keep in mind yours is a point of view from only one extreem. A anti-abortion proponent could with equal conviction utter the same phrase only changing the beginning:
“Abortion is just straight out brutal and fuck the semantics.”
Certainly no one would force said anti-abortion proponent to have an abortion against her will. And everyone knows (wink wink) that said anti-abortion proponent would, of course, never, ever, ever have an abortion of her own volition — except that she would. That’s the lie of the anti-choice movement: that they even believe what they are really saying. I believe anyone who says that they would never kill a newborn baby. But lots and lots of people who equate unborn five cell beings to babies go on to kill those cellular beingsw when they have many more than five cells — a good sign that they don’t really believe that they are equivalent to a baby.
I was responding to Robert, cicely. Not you. That is, Robert insists that damage inflicted on pregnant women by the S.D. law doesn’t matter;It’s not “extreme” because pregnant women seeking abortions have had sex. They are not innocent in the manner that say, a room full of people rounded up and shot for having blue eyes would be. IOW, once again the veneer of the compassionate pro-lifer slips and we find out that once you’ve had the wrong kind of sex, you’re not an innocent and thus should just shut up for your proper medicine.
By this standard, we really ought to just let drunken drivers in accidents or wounded war vets die, too. After all, they’re not really innocent, are they ?
Robert insists that damage inflicted on pregnant women by the S.D. law doesn’t matter
No I don’t.
By this standard, we really ought to just let drunken drivers in accidents or wounded war vets die, too.
Pretty much that seems to be the case. It also seems to me to be the case that the anti-choice crowd keeps attempting to defend their position as reasonable with each more extreme step towards the right. The deliberate side-step of a theocratic minority forcing theocratic laws in our nation is both frightening and infuriating to me.
No, it would be extreme because it involved killing a bunch of innocent people. As I keep saying.
And it is not extreme to pass a law that is guaranteed to inflict psychological and physical harm onto women, because their actions don’t fit into one’s religious beliefs?
To answer your earlier question, Robert: there is not scientific definition of “conception”, because scientifically, there is no such thing. If one were to argue, at the very loosest terms, when “life” begins, the earliest scientific explanation could be at implantation. This is not the moment when the egg unites with the sperm, but the moment when the egg attaches itself to the side of the womb and begins to multiply. This takes at least a couple of days, which is how the morning-after pill works: it makes the womb inhospitable for implantation.
In any case, the SD law only has an exception for the DEATH of the mother. Not for the HEALTH of the mother. So if, for instance, giving birth to the baby might cause damage to the woman’s body–as long as it’s not fatal–then she has to give birth. To me, that’s a bit like saying “As long as the pain the enemy combatant feels does not exceed the pain of organ failure, then it’s not torture”.
Besides, what happened to all the pro-lifers who used to say “Of course abortion will be legal in the cases of rape, incest, or the health of the mother?” It seems that, once they got an anti-choice SCOTUS stacked up, all those exceptions disappeared.
Whatever, Robert.
Yeah, Kim, especially when you know that most of these fuckwits would run out in secret to get an abortion or procure one in a hearbeat if their own life or loved one’s life were in peril. Then they’d lie about it the next day, or conveniently repent once the abortion was safely accomplished– so they could stay in their deity’s good graces.
alsis, mostly, however, I think women who do manage to persuade themselves that their circumstances are special and unique and that they are not like “other women” who seek abortion.
Robert, you’re still ignoring my content. Care to take a crack at it?
In any case, the SD law only has an exception for the DEATH of the mother. Not for the HEALTH of the mother.
This, by the way, is a higher standard than murder laws applying to born people. Self-defense means you are allowed to use deadly force against another person to protect yourself from death or great bodily harm. Unless, apparently, the other human being is a fetus, and then you just have to suck up the ‘great bodily harm’.
ADS, religious belief is not the only basis for considering abortion a moral wrong in and of itself.
No, but the belief that it is wrong is nowhere near universal, nor is it scientifically upheld. Hence, the law forcing everyone to comply with that belief is still extreme. Which is still the central point of my argument, which you have still not addressed.
Are secondhand smoke laws extreme? They aren’t scientifically upheld (opinions to the contrary are wrong).
Okay, Robert: you think that secondhand smoke hasn’t been scientifically proven to be harmful to people? Is that what you’re saying?
From the American Lung Association:
Secondhand smoke has been classified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a known cause of cancer in humans (Group A carcinogen). (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking: Lung Cancer and Other Disorders. December 1992.)
Secondhand smoke causes approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths and 35,000 heart disease deaths in adult nonsmokers in the United States each year. (California Environmental Protection Agency. Health Effects of Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke. September 1997.)
A study found that nonsmokers exposed to environmental smoke were 25 percent more likely to have coronary heart diseases compared to nonsmokers not exposed to smoke. (He, J.; Vupputuri, S.; Allen, K.; et al. Passive Smoking and the Risk of Coronary Heart Disease-A Meta-Analysis of Epidemiologic Studies. New England Journal of Medicine 1999; 340: 920-6.)
Nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke at work are at increased risk for adverse health effects. Levels of ETS in restaurants and bars were found to be 2 to 5 times higher than in residences with smokers and 2 to 6 times higher than in office workplaces. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Report on Carcinogens, Tenth Edition 2002. National Toxicology Program.)
Secondhand smoke is especially harmful to young children. Secondhand smoke is responsible for between 150,000 and 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections in infants and children under 18 months of age, resulting in between 7,500 and 15,000 hospitalizations each year, and causes 1,900 to 2,700 sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) deaths in the United States annually. (California Environmental Protection Agency. Health Effects of Exposure to Environmental Tobacco Smoke. September 1997.)
Secondhand smoke exposure may cause buildup of fluid in the middle ear, resulting in 700,000 to 1.6 million physician office visits per year. Secondhand smoke can also aggravate symptoms in 200,000 to 1,000,000 children with asthma. (Ibid)
In the United States, 21 million, or 35 percent of, children live in homes where residents or visitors smoke in the home on a regular basis. Approximately 50-75 percent of children in the United States have detectable levels of cotinine, the breakdown product of nicotine in the blood. (Schuster, MA, Franke T, Pham CB. Smoking Patterns of Household Members and Visitors in Homes with Children in United States. Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine. Vol. 156, 2002: 1094-1100 and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. America’s Children and the Environment: Measures of Contaminants, Body Burdens, and Illnesses. Second Edition. February 2003)
New research indicates that secret research conducted by cigarette company Philip Morris in the 1980s showed that secondhand smoke was highly toxic, yet the company suppressed the finding during the next two decades. (Diethelm PA, Rielle JC, McKee M. The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth? The Research Philip Morris Did Not Want You to See. Lancet. Vol. 364 No. 9446, 2004)
Are all of those “opinions?”
Are secondhand smoke laws extreme? They aren’t scientifically upheld (opinions to the contrary are wrong).
second-hand smoke aggravates asthma and allergies. we can leave aside the cancer claims if you want, but there are legitimate reasons for limiting where people can smoke in public places.
Why not refuse to participate in sexual intercourse altogether? It won’t help the rape victims in SD, or any number of other women in certain circumstances, but it’s one way to make a loud unified statement and to guarantee no unwanted pregnancies in the immediate future for other women.
women often have only the most tenuous power over when and how they have sex. poor women and women in troubled relationships face a whole bugaboo of problems related to ‘consent’. for many women, sex is what they trade for the security of a roof over their heads. many women are in relationships that are not healthy. even if their partners are not physically abusive, they are often manipulative and controlling.
for women to do what you suggest, they must have the power to withhold sex or make demands on their partners regarding how they have sex. that is sorely lacking for a depressingly large number of women, especially young teenagers. it is very very very common for young teenage girls to have ‘boyfriends’ who are much older than they are. think about all this for a second while you consider the SD law.
an embyro cannot think. it cannot feel. it cannot suffer. it cannot experience joy. it cannot, in fact, have any meaningful experience of existence *at all*. to speak of ‘rights’, there must be a subject who is endowed with those rights. we normally refer to this subject as a ‘person.’ no born human being has a recognized ‘right’ to the use of the body parts of another person for life-support. not only does the SD law grant ‘rights’ to an embryo that no legal person currently possesses, it does so by infringing on the rights of a legal person.
forcing women to *make* embryos into babies is a form of indentured servitude. the belief that an embryo is a person is a *religious* belief. forcing women to make embryos into babies in observance of this *religious* belief violates their consitutional right to freedom of religion. it also neatly dovetails with a lot of other *religious* beliefs about sexuality and gender roles, and i have every reason to suspect that these beliefs actually motivate many anti-choice activists and the ‘pro-life’ rhetoric is just a marketing strategy.
Are all of those “opinions?”
No, just junk science.
I don’t want to fight about secondhand smoke. Change my example to laws against keeping more than three cats in a family residence, if you like. The point is that “the law forcing everyone to comply with that belief is still extreme” is a ridiculous principle to base an objection to a law on; every damn law on the books forces everyone to comply with one belief or another.
You’re right of course, emily. The suggestion is probably not much more useful than my running around the house screaming ‘You bastards, you bastards, you bastards!!!’
The tiniest ‘maybe not’ in the world, Robert. Anyway, it *is* religious belief that’s fueling anti-choice legislation in the US. I’d like to see you try and dispute that.
Look, anti-choice proponents feel absolutely fine about imposing laws based on religious beliefs on the entire population of America – Yes? Therefore you are theocrats, not democrats. Don’t try and weasel out of that bald fact. At least have the gonads to admit it.
Therefore you are theocrats, not democrats.
If you don’t know what words mean, don’t use them in public.
There’s no shame for me in making an error, Robert. Tell me you didn’t know what I meant.
Forgive me. That was snippy. It’s late. Apologies.
Sure, it’s religious belief that largely motivates most pro-life folk. (Not all, but I’ll certainly concede most.)
Yes, many pro-life individuals have no objection to “impose laws based on religious values on the entire population of America”. This was true of the religious lunatics who got the abolition of the slave trade passed in Britain, too. (Except it was Britain, instead of America, natch.) That’s not “theocracy”. That’s “living in a country that’s 90 percent Christian”.
The motivation for a law on the part of its supporters is not at issue in our system of governance. If everybody decides that schools should take off Wednesday and Sunday instead of Saturday and Sunday, you can be darn sure that religious sentiment is part of the move – but that doesn’t make the law unconstitutional, or theocratic. It makes the law a democratic law passed because that’s what people wanted. It’s OK to be opposed to lax liquor laws because you’re a Presbyterian bluenose. It’s OK to be in favor of legalizing polyamory because you’re a Wiccan group marriage fan. It’s OK to be in favor or opposed to anything because of your religious beliefs or lack thereof, and to vote that way to your heart’s content, and anybody who tells you differently is profoundly at odds with the American tradition.
Actual theocracy, in case you’re wondering, is rule by religious leaders. That’s Jerry Falwell and Pope Benedict in the well of the House, having Hillary flogged for wearing a skirt that showed too much ankle. It’s mandatory school prayer and no liquor stores and required tithing. We are so far from a theocracy in this country that it isn’t even funny. Our Constitution, for one thing, makes it utterly legally impossible to have a theocracy without an armed revolution. Our utterly divided churches make it utterly practically impossible. We can’t get straight whether the central figure of human history had brothers and sisters – you think we’re going to get our shit together enough to run the government?
It is fashionable among some liberal/leftists to throw the word “theocrat” and “theocracy” around in pretty much the same way that John Birchers like myself are fond of calling people communists. OK, Amp isn’t literally a communist, he just likes all these broadly left-wing ideas. But it’s fun to call him a commie! And other Birchers know what I mean!
But if I start to think that Amp is what a Marxist revolutionary looks like, I end up being a dumbass, because I’m letting my ironic labels get in the way of my reality perception. (And no, I’m not really a John Bircher. They’re too squishy-soft on the Red Menace for THIS American’s taste!)
Avoiding dumbassery is a good thing. Let’s try.
Apology accepted, Robert.
I don’t have time to address your last post – off to work – but I’ll come back to this. There might be a discussion here about technicalities versus actualities.
Robert, there is a big difference between passing laws that accomodate religion, and passing laws that accomodate religious oppression.
Robert, there is a big difference between passing laws that accomodate religion, and passing laws that accomodate religious oppression.
Abortion is a legitimate ground for judicial and to some degree legislative intervention and lawmaking; the judiciaries and the legislatures have made it so. That a lot of religious people happen to favor one broad set of outcomes more than other groups in society doesn’t make any particular law an instance of religious oppression.
I don’t agree with that, Robert, but regardless, I think you are missing the point I made. Laws of religious accomodation are protecting peoples right to worship as it relates to them. Laws of religious oppression are laws as they relate to the religious morality of a group of people and how that morality is forced on others who do not share their beliefs or convictions.
Abortion is a legitimate ground for judicial and to some degree legislative intervention and lawmaking; the judiciaries and the legislatures have made it so. That a lot of religious people happen to favor one broad set of outcomes more than other groups in society doesn’t make any particular law an instance of religious oppression.
Robert, the people you refer to as your ‘allies’ have decided to privilege an organism that cannot feel, cannot think, cannot suffer, cannot have an experience *at all* because they believe some great spiritual event takes place when sperm meets egg. not only that, your ‘allies’ are working to limit access to female-controlled contraception, and they’re running around telling people that vaccinating their daughters against HPV will cause them to be sluts. 1/3 of all women obtain abortions and over 90 percent use contraception at some point in their reproductive years. forcing all of these women to make babies and preventing them from protecting themselves from disease and pregnancy in compliance with other people’s religious values is religious oppression.
your ‘allies’ are attempting to limit women’s reproductive health care because of the values and anxieties their religious leaders read into sexual behavior, particularly that of women. even in your utopia you expect women to do the work of changing men. although you say that this is about ‘life’ and disavow an obsession with sexual purity, half of your post focused on ‘hedonistic sexual behavior.’ the sexual behavior of other consenting adults is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. *your* sexual ethics begin and end with *you*. it’s great that you want some sort of spiritual awakening. legislation is not a legitmate means for enacting that goal, and although you state you are not in favor 0f outlawing any abortion procedure, you ally yourself with those who do for reasons completely unrelated to ‘life’. that makes you an enemy of women’s freedom.
if you think men need to change, then men need to change themselves. no one, absolutely NO ONE, is responsible for changing anyone other than themselves. in one breath, you state that men must ‘take responsibility’ and in the next breath, the major burden of bringing about the spiritual awakening falls on women.
All right, fine: let’s assume for a moment that the fact that secondhand smoke causes me to have asthma attacks is “junk science.” Laws banning smoking in public are still based on the fact that medical science (junk or not) shows that secondhand smoke harms people, not on a philosophical belief that smoking is wrong. Laws banning abortion are STILL, no matter how many times you avoid the issue, based ONLY on a religious or philosophical belief that life begins at conception, and that that “life” is more important than the health and beliefs of the woman carryinga fetus. There is NO CONSENSUS that these beliefs, which are ONLY beliefs, and are not backed up by ANYTHING other than religious and philosophical beliefs, are factual. The law in South Dakota is in direct violation of Jewish law on abortion, for example, and even if one does believe in “fetus as human life,” where else in law is a person not allowed to defend herself against somebody attempting to inflict grievous bodily harm?
If a person came at me to try to cut out my uterus, (even if he was, for example, mentally challenged or emotionally disturbed, and didn’t know what he was doing,) I’d be perfectly justified in putting a bullet through his head, or beating him to death, or stopping him in any way necessary. But in South Dakota, if delivering your fetus will render you infertile, you have to just go ahead and deal, because that fetus’s “life” is supposedly more important than protecting a woman’s health. I feel perfectly reasonable saying (again, and again, and again) that a law based SOLELY on a MINORITY of people’s RELIGIOUS AND/OR PHILOSOPHICAL BELIEFS, that forces everyone to comply with those beliefs, in clear violation of their own religious or philosophical beliefs, is extreme.
Now, please explain to me why I’m wrong.
the secondhand smoke comment was irrelevant to this thread. we should stick to the subject.
Well, I suppose I shouldn’t let Robert do all the heavy lifting.
It is certainly beyond argument that the vast majority of anti-abortion folk are religious. It is no great leap to assume their motivation for their position is because they feel God thinks abortion is bad. Both of those points are irrelevant because the legislation being passed, specifically in SD, doesn’t have a religious bone in it’s body. SD came to the legal conclusion that abortion is bad because their task force came to the scientific conclusion that the unborn are persons and are entitled to 14th amendment protection. Now, I know lots of you don’t agree with that conclusion. That is perfectly fine with me. But that is why SD has an abortion ban. God has nothing to do with it (nor should he if our country is to work as the founders intended).
SD came to the legal conclusion that abortion is bad because their task force came to the scientific conclusion that the unborn are persons and are entitled to 14th amendment protection.
no they did not come to the ‘scientific’ conclusion. just because they don’t overtly state that their viewpoint is really couched in religious and philosophical sentiment does not mean that the SD law is:
a) Not about imposing a religious viewpoint
b) Not about limiting women’s sexual autonomy.
if you are going to make a scientific claim, you must present reliable evidence. science is not like magic or religion — you cannot endow something with scientific legitimacy merely by naming it a ‘scientific’ viewpoint. the 14th amendment does not grant any person the right to use the organs of another for life support. granting those rights to an embryo does not grant them the right to remain in any woman’s uterus prior to viability.
emily1 – have you read the task force’s report? I can’t see how you could have and not recognise that the reasoning is completely scientific. You may not agree with the conclusions, but science was the disciplin employed to reach those conclusions.
Now, the SD law certainly ALSO has ramifications for women’s sexual autonomy. And it certainly ALSO deals with bodily autonomy issues that are unique from any other 14th Amendment discussions. I agree with you there. But those facts do not in any way make it a religiously motivated law or make it a law derived on religious grounds.
emily1 – have you read the task force’s report? I can’t see how you could have and not recognise that the reasoning is completely scientific. You may not agree with the conclusions, but science was the disciplin employed to reach those conclusions.
yes, i have read the report. it is, like Intelligent Design, a trojan horse. it is an attempt to endow a religious and philosophical idea with scientific authority by adopting language that sounds ‘science-y’. it is nothing more than a collection of the same old crap that the anti-choice agenda has been spouting for years:
1) Because some women regret their abortions, abortion is bad and must be banned.
this would be a compelling argument for outlawing abortion if you bought into the idea that it’s acceptable to infantalize women by assuming they need the government to protect them from their own choices. this is not a scientific viewpoint, and it is not a legitimate exercise of state power to prevent women from making choices they might regret later.
2) A fetus feels pain
sure, it feels pain when it has sufficiently developed the brain structures necessary in order to experience pain. these structures do not exist until very late in pregnancy. the report completely elided this fact. i happen to believe that this was deliberate. ‘response to painful stimuli’ is not the same as ‘experiencing pain.’ a brain dead person is not considered ‘alive’ medically, but they still have reflex responses. the fact that this report conflates the two makes me think that the authors are being deliberately dishonest or they don’t know enough about biological and neurological development to make that distinction.
3) There are always pregnancy help centers!
yes, there are. however, this does not scientifically prove that from the moment of conception onward, there is a human being.
4) Abortion violates the rights of women
really? even the ones who report feeling nothing but relief after having one? again, this is not a scientific viewpoint. it is a marketing strategy for LIMITING the rights of women.
5) when sperm meets egg, a unique genetic combination is formed
Duh. This does not proof that the product of conception is a person.
this law is rooted in traditional religious beliefs about sexuality and gender. that is clear enough to me just from watching the shining eyes of State Rep. Bill Napoli (R) (and probable sexual pervert) that the only ‘real’ rape victim is a girl who was a *religious* (surprise surprise) virgin (surprise surprise) who was saving herself for marriage (surprise surprise) and was brutally sodomized (i think he threw that one in because… well.. he’s a sicko) in addition to being vaginally raped.
btw, where in the 14 amendment does it state that the rights recognized by the amendment include the right to use the body parts of another person against their will for life support? that notion is in conflict with the prohibition against indentured servitude.
1) Because some women regret their abortions, abortion is bad and must be banned.
2) A fetus feels pain.
3) There are always pregnancy help centers!
4) Abortion violates the rights of women
5) when sperm meets egg, a unique genetic combination is formed
Where is the religion in any of this?
this law is rooted in traditional religious beliefs about sexuality and gender.
So says you (and you may be correct) but you still have not demonstrated how those “traditional religious beliefs about sexuality and gender” are in away associated with the report or the law it is based on.
the religion is in the statements of the people who voted for the law. see the rest of my comment that you ignored.
where’s the ‘science’?
you still have not demonstrated how those “traditional religious beliefs about sexuality and gender” are in away associated with the report or the law it is based on.
and you have not demonstrated that it was based on good science.
gengwall:
i’m going to decline to particpate in any further discussion with you. you’re intellectually dishonest in your approach. you ignore everything that might be even the least bit challenging to your position. it’s a waste of my time to continue. please don’t bother responding to my comments anymore because i won’t bother to engage with you. if i’m going to take the time to compose a thoughtful response to your statements, you own me the same.
and you have not demonstrated that it was based on good science.
Whether or not it is “good” science is not my point. My point is that the reasoning is scientific, not religious.
And I did not ignore your comments. I am simply pointing out that nowhere in them have you demonstrated what the religious arguments or conclusions of the report are.
State Rep. Bill Napoli (R) (and probable sexual pervert) that the only ‘real’ rape victim is a girl who was a *religious* (surprise surprise) virgin (surprise surprise) who was saving herself for marriage (surprise surprise) and was brutally sodomized (i think he threw that one in because… well.. he’s a sicko) in addition to being vaginally raped.
Are you contending that this is the legislature’s sole reasoning (or even any part of their reasoning) for not having a rape exclusion? You’ll have to show me in the text of the bill or the report where this is outlined. I must have missed it.
(In reality, they gave no reasoning for not having rape and incest exclusions. No doubt, some feel as Sen. Napoli does. That is sad but his limited definition of rape is irrelevant. Even those who he would consider legitimately raped would be banned from abortion. Whether your definition of rape is narrow or broad – remember some feminists consider any sex that is not female initiated to be rape, after all – it has no impact on the reasoning for including or excluding rape based abortions)
Well, my response passed yours in cyberspace. So, you don’t have to talk to me anymore if you don’t want. That’s fine.
You know what really ticks me off about gengwall? Brevity. While I’ve been laboring over my thoughts, gengwall beat me to it. But too late. I’ve labored, so now you’re gonna, too.
We’ve been discussing the relevance of majority religious views on the abortion debate. I see two points in the argument where majority religious views might influence the debate, and I sense that different people may be discussing different points without realizing it.
For me, the issue is 1) whether a woman has an autonomy interest in being able to choose not to bear a fetus to term, and 2) whether government has a legitimate interest adequate to justify impinging on the rights of the woman.
I suspect even Robert would agree with the general proposition that government should not impinge upon a person’s autonomy, absent a legitimate interest, even if the majority wants it to. A majority may be offended by seeing a cross submerged in urine or burning flags. Too damn bad; there’s no legit gov. interest in stopping it. Similarly, even if a majority of people don’t like abortion, too damn bad. Majority opinion is not relevant. Doesn’t seem so hard, right?
But is there a legit. gov. interest in stopping abortion? This gets tougher. Sure, pro-lifers object that abortion offends their religious views; too damn bad. But they also argue something else. They say that the fetus has a right in being born, and the state needs to defend those rights. And they say that the state has an interest in the fetus being born. This is different than those arguments raised above; no one argued that the state needed to defend the rights of crosses or flags.
So, what standards should apply for deciding whether the state should act to defend the interest of a potential citizen in becoming born, even at the expense of impinging on someone’s autonomy? Some possible decision standards:
1. The interest of life trumps all others because no other interests matter if you are never born, and birth is a necessary step in life.
2. A fetus has no standing, no legally-recognizable interest.
3. Government should intervene to protect the weak against the strong, especially where there is a conflict in their interests.
4. Where the interests of an entity with standing conflicts with the interests of an entity with doubtful standing, the interests of the entity with standing prevail.
5. When in doubt, government should act to avoid the greatest irreversible harm, and the harm of bringing a fetus to term is less than the harm of ending a potential life.
6. Where a cognizant person’s interests arguably conflict with an incognizant family member, the cognizant person is in the best position to balance the interests. (Consider adults caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s.)
7. Avoid risk; when in doubt, preserve the natural outcome.
8. The cost of prohibiting acts that lack autonomous victims exceeds its benefits.
9. Where a conflict arises between a party who bears no responsibility for the situation and a party who bears responsibility for the situation, err on the side of the innocent party.
10. ….
How should government (courts or legislatures) decide among these decision options? It looks like a flat-out policy decision to me. And policy decisions inevitably rest on people’s opinions about the good and the right. World views. Religions, if you will.
So I object when people argue “We need to ban abortions because Jesus sez life trumps all other concerns.” But not strenuously, because I think it’s legitimate to argue “We need to ban abortions because I think life trumps all other concerns.” I may disagree or find that view simplistic, but I recognize that my point of view has not much firmer grounding. At the level of policy, we’re just arguing our world views.
nobody.really:
thank you for joining. that was an amazing comment. i’ll say more after i get out of work.
um — that will be many many hours from now. not that i’m assuming you’re hitting the refresh button every minute or so to see my wise and cogent and prose, rife with mispellings and grammatical errors. ;-)
nobody.really – briefly, well said.
A similar debate might be same sex marriage. I certainly have very strong religious views about same sex marriage. And although there are forums for those views which I appreciate, they get a collective, as nobody.really would put it, “to damn bad”, as far as being relevant to any legal argument about same sex marriage. Unless I can demonstrate that those religious beliefs ALSO have pertinent social, economic, or health ramifications, I’d best keep them out of any reasoning for or against the legalization of same sex marriage.
That is what is happening in SD. Certainly many people have very strong religious convictions about abortion in SD. But those religious convictions do not form the basis for the argument they are making in attempting to ban abortion.
Whether or not it is “good” science is not my point. My point is that the reasoning is scientific, not religious.
I disagree. I think that emily1 is correct that it is not, in fact, scientific. It attempts to fool the reader into thinking that the reasoning is scientific by using “sciency” sounding words & phraseology. But the reasoning used is pretty much faith based or, if you prefer, philosophically based rather than scientific.
You ask where the religion in the 5 points mentioned by emily1 are. Well, religion (or faith or philosophy) is certainly present in all 5 points if those 5 points are being used as the reasons to ban abortion. Not a single one of the 5 bullet points can be said to be a “scientific” reason for banning abortion. Only 3 of those points can be held as objectively true & all 3 of those are completely irrelevant.
That’s what it looks like to me, anyway.
I disagree. I think that emily1 is correct that it is not, in fact, scientific. It attempts to fool the reader into thinking that the reasoning is scientific by using “sciency” sounding words & phraseology. But the reasoning used is pretty much faith based or, if you prefer, philosophically based rather than scientific.
Boy Jake, I continue to be baffled at what report you all are reading.
Section B, pages 22-30, is the section regarding personhood. It is a summary of the testimony of real scientists quoting real scientific research and development about the personhood of the unborn. Now, I know that scientists use “sciency” sounding words. After all, they are scientists. And one may not agree with the conclusions the task force came to about personhood. But they were still articulated from a scientific perspective.
You ask where the religion in the 5 points mentioned by emily1 are. Well, religion (or faith or philosophy) is certainly present in all 5 points if those 5 points are being used as the reasons to ban abortion. Not a single one of the 5 bullet points can be said to be a “scientific” reason for banning abortion. Only 3 of those points can be held as objectively true & all 3 of those are completely irrelevant.
Well, I just don’t see it. I fail to see how religion or God have been invoked anywhere in the task force report or the bill as reasons why abortion should be banned. I don’t deny that religion might have been, (probably was), the motivation behind seeking a ban by many or all of the people involved. But I have not had anyone illustrate one religious argument that was made by them.
Thanks to emily1 and gengwall for their kind and welcoming remarks. Now let me wear out my welcome.
I have not read the SD report justifying the abortion ban so I am speaking from ignorance. Moreso than usual, even. But why let angles have all the fun treading on this turf?
I understand gengwall to argue that the report authors cite factual evidence, perhaps even the results of scientific studies, to support their policy conclusions. Although gengwall says that the study was “completely scientific,” I did not understand gengwall to mean that the policy conclusions themselves are the result of a scientific study. While gengwall has made me curious about what scientists have to say about “personhood,” I suspect they aren’t reporting on the results of a study entitled, “Comparative Degrees of Personhood in Fetusi, Platipi, and Cow Pies: a regression analysis of the 2000 Census track data.”
I understand emily1 and Jake to argue that the conclusions provide an insufficient grounding to justify the legislation. While emily1 criticizes the report for failing to “present reliable evidence,” I did not see her quote any evidence that she regarded to be unreliable. Rather, I understand her to mean to the evidence presented – whether reliable or not – doesn’t adequately support the conclusions because the evidence is incomplete, selectively drawn, misinterpreted, etc., and/or she disagrees with the reasoning applied to the facts. The weakness of the report’s rationale leads emily1 and Jake to infer that it is merely a pretext for an unstated rationale. Emily1 and Jake then opine that the unstated rationale is religious. I understand emily1 and Jake to draw this opinion from the larger social context, not from the text of the report itself.
In short, and without benefit of reading the report itself, my powers of ESP give me four intuitions:
1. The SD report applies a philosophical framework (likely influenced by religion) to a set of reasonably accurate facts, and purports to draw a policy conclusion on that basis.
2. A different philosophical framework applied to different set of facts would support a different policy conclusion.
3. The report does not contain any testable hypothesis for the proposition “abortions should be banned,” and gengwall didn’t intend to suggest otherwise.
4. The report does not contain the phrase “cuz Jesus says so,” and emily1 and Jake didn’t intend to suggest otherwise.
I am at a conference and catching up with my reading here, so I haven’t had the time to go through all the responses to this post, but regarding the question of whether the SD law’s definition of personhood rests on scientific or religious reasoning, I don’t think you will persuade gengwall that it is religious because the reasoning process, from point to point, does not rely overtly on an assertion of faith or any of the other kinds of thinking/feeling that usually accompany religious reasoning. I think that if you want to find the religious component in the reasoning, you have to look at it as metaphorical reasoning. In other words, the specific scientific argument put forward for fetal personhood is modeled on a religious one and the modeling can be detected first in the fact that assigning to a fetus all the right of a born person is itself metaphorical logic. I have tried to outline this here on my own blog.
Section B, pages 22-30, is the section regarding personhood. It is a summary of the testimony of real scientists quoting real scientific research and development about the personhood of the unborn. Now, I know that scientists use “sciency” sounding words. After all, they are scientists. And one may not agree with the conclusions the task force came to about personhood. But they were still articulated from a scientific perspective.
Gengwall, I read the report from the task force. The science they are basing personhood on is the fact that a fertilized egg has a unique DNA signature that does not change as the cells develop and divide. That doesn’t make the mass of cells a person. It just means there is a unique DNA signature.
A few pages later, much is made of the fact that some congenital physical abnormalities can be surgically repaired in utero as early as 16 weeks. Just because you can perform surgery on some thing does not make it a person.
The whole task force report is littered through with pro-life phrasing. “Unborn child” is the term used though out, even to describe a just fertilized egg. It is not an unborn child, it is a mass of cells.
This task force did not come to the conclusion that a fertilized egg has personhood though scientific proof, it started out with that theory and then went looking for anything that seemed to support the conclusion they wanted.
Here are examples from the bill that I think are pseudo-science or “sciency sounding.”
Section 2. The Legislature finds that the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm. The Legislature finds that the explosion of knowledge derived from new recombinant DNA technologies over the past twenty-five years has reinforced the validity of the finding of this scientific fact.
It is not, in fact, scientifically established that “the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm.” As others have already mentioned, a more commonly accepted opinion among the scientific community is that the life of a human being begins when a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus. As has also been pointed out, what kind of sperm other than male is there? The “male sperm” phrase is a red flag that non-scientific opinion is being couched in phrasing that sounds like it came from the scientific community. What would the motivation for this be?
Let’s move on to…
Section 4. The Legislature finds that abortion procedures impose significant risks to the health and life of the pregnant mother, including subjecting women to significant risk of severe depression, suicidal ideation, suicide, attempted suicide, post traumatic stress disorders, adverse impact in the lives of women, physical injury, and a greater risk of death than risks associated with carrying the unborn child to full term and childbirth.
What risks associated with carrying a pregnancy (wanted or unwanted) did the legislature find? Why isn’t it included? This is hardly a balanced disclosure of the “science” relating to this bill. What would the motivation be for this?
Now, why don’t we take a look at the report by the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion?
From II(Findings of the Task Force) A(The Practice Of Abortion Since Its Legalization) 2(What Has Been Learned From the Practice of Abortion Since the Roe v. WadeDecision)
It can no longer be doubted that the unborn child from the moment of conception is awhole separate human being.
Really? Where is the scientific evidence produced to support this allegation? Oh, they didn’t provide any. That’s damned scientific. In fact, the testimony that they summarize (and sometimes quote) establishes nothing of the sort. What the testimony does support is that abortion ends the life of a human being (Dr. Nathanson) and that new molecular biological,”… techniques…permits scientists toobserve human existence and development at a molecular level, which isapplicable in determining genetic uniqueness, genetic diseases and relatedinformation through the analysis of human genes well in advance of the old gross, anatomical observation.” Nowhere in that section do they provide any supporting evidence to their stunning pronouncement of what can no longer be doubted. Drawing an unrelated conclusion from the evidence presented is simply not scientific.
Also, in section B, page 25, the task force provides the evidence that was really used for their stunning pronouncement above. That evidence is this quote from Dr. Mark:
There can no longer be any doubt that each human being is totally unique from the very beginning of his or her life at fertilization.
I find their interpretation to be open for debate at best, dishonest at worst. Dr. Mark says that it can’t be doubted that each human being is totally unique, not that it can’t be doubted that life begins at conception.
On page 34 in section 4(Ethical Impact), this quote screams bias:
We can only try to understand its nature and we find that the tears of the women who have given us their testimonies best help us to understand
What about the testimony of women who are thankful that they were allowed to have an abortion? I didn’t see that quoted anywhere. Were any pro-choice women who have had abortions allowed to present their testimony? I don’t know.
Other reasons that I don’t find the report to be scientific? The big one for me is the fact that there are almost no dissenting facts or opinions presented in the whole thing. That hardly represents an unbiased report from a task force. The way in which the report is written and the virtual lack of any area studied on which they cannot come to a conclusion reeks of a predetermined outcome. If that is the case, this is certainly not scientifically done.
I’m sure that I have made mistakes here & missed some things, but my (undoubtedly pro-choice) PC is having a hard time displaying the report for me.
Posted by Kim (basement variety!) | March 7th, 2006
The ban itself can only be described as extremist, going so far as to ban abortions in all cases except for medical necessities. Cases of incest and rape are not included in the exceptions.
…..
Anyone who performs an abortion under any other circumstance … even in a case of rape or incest … can be charged with a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. The mother cannot be charged.
—————————————————
I am far off being a sympathizer for US-feminism and I am totally on the side of MRA. But yes, this ban is extremist and a law back to the Stone Age.
This SD abortion ban law is an impertinence, a totally unreasonable hardship for every woman. Nice to hear, at least the mother, a victim of rape or incest, cannot be charged for her crime to remove such ‘products’ out of her body.
Should the victim of such a crime be a married woman, to give birth in case of rape and incest and raising such children is also an impertinence for her husband.
Daily life will not change however very much in South Dakota, except that abortion will become more expensive in this region. Just get on an airplane – abortion is available in many places in this world.
Claim 1: The South Dakota law is not extreme
extreme means ‘not in the mainstream.’ if this law is ‘mainstream’ with respect to prolife beliefs then one should assume that the prolife advocates on the task force were largely in agreement with the content of the report issued by the task force.
let’s consider this dictionary definition of extremism:
extremism — any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies [Link]
let’s consider the consequences of fetal rights legislation for the medical care of pregnant women:
to clarify my position, i want to add that i also consider extreme any legislation that blatently ignores or attempts to overturn established legal precedent. fetal rights legislation has been challenged and defeated time and again in court. the ACLU has been fighting these cases and winning them for years:
i also consider legislation extreme when it ignores professional expertise surrounding the subject of the legislation. the American Medical Association is firmly against legal intervention in the medical care and medical decisions of pregnant women:
on particularly notorious court-mandated surgery resulted in the death of a woman and her fetus:
again, professional medical opinion went against legal intervention in pregnant women’s medical care and medical decisions:
just one more case for good measure:
now, what does all this have to do with the abortion law passed in South Dakota? plenty. the law does not make any exception for the health of the woman. this is an illegitimate attempt by the state to interfere with the medical care of pregnant women. time and again courts have ruled against the perceived right of some legislators to dictate the health care of pregnant women to protect fetal rights. the South Dakota bill is not merely an anti-abortion bill. it is a fetal rights bill, and these have been found invalid by courts all over the country. courts have stated repeatedly that fetal rights cannot and do not displace the constitutional rights of pregnant women.
there are clear and compelling reasons to oppose this law because medical opinion, past experience, and LEGAL precedent find that these laws encourage and sanction the violation of the constitutional rights of pregnant women. laws that cause people to flee from hospitals in order to avoid coerced treatment are extreme laws. the South Dakota law goes much further than previous fetal rights legislation, and there’s no reason to assume that this even more extreme legislation will result in better outcomes.
i have more to say, but i need to go to work. i will address the pseudoscience of the task force report later this weekend.