I find this whole thing so puzzling. In the UK, not so different from the USA, this is not really a thing at all. Even amongst Christians I have never heard it brought up. Is it a political thing, and if so how did it become so?
It's a wedge issue where neither side will give any ground, which makes it exploitable. If you figure out a way to tie a wedge issue to the rest of your political platform you're virtually guaranteed support from one side or another. IMO one side has been much, much better at exploiting this fact and has has achieved great power despite representing less than a plurality of voters.
It’s a divisive issue because it represents fundamentally different world views. As an asian, the idea that the government can’t regulate abortion, which is prevalent among a large minority of Democrats these days, is remarkable. Even if abortion was a moral issue, and not about preserving human life, nothing precludes states from legislating morality. It’s illustrative to compare to Japan or Germany, which have “liberal” abortion regimes insofar as it’s widely available. But in both countries it’s still technically illegal. The state has the power to regulate, but simply tolerates abortion under certain conditions.
When people deny that power altogether, you’re dealing with fundamentally different notions of how society works, and that predictably produces conflict. And people perceive that conflict as involving more fundamental issues than what the marginal income tax rate should be.
And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?” Republicans won a majority of the Congressional popular vote in 2016. They got a million and a half more votes than Democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_Re.... They’re on pace to do it again this year. They’re also a couple of points ahead in the generic Congressional ballot.
It’s an error to rely on the Presidential popular vote. Because it doesn’t count nobody is trying to win it. It’s easy for Democrats to campaign in big cities in red states, but the GOP has no incentive to spend resources in rural areas of blue states. But they can and do field Congressional candidates in those areas, which is reflected in the Congressional popular vote.
Government does and should regulate behavior. But, morality based on religious beliefs becomes a problem, when the beliefs of particular religious groups are imposed on others who don't believe as they do. Effective government would find the correct balance, where the laws reflect what's best for the majority and protects individual rights and freedoms within reason.
> The state has the power to regulate, but simply tolerates abortion under certain conditions.
The issue the U.S. will now be running into, is that various states will have conflicting laws on abortion, adding to chaos and confusion.
The extremism involved in total or nonsensical abortion bans by various states, like even in cases of: rape, statutory rape, teenage/child pregnancy, incest, life of mother in danger, high percentage chance child will have major birth defects, various contraceptive measures (IUDs, abortion pills) etc... Then becomes a matter of showing a callous attitude of destroying and endangering the lives of various women and even the children they might be forced to bear.
As someone who wishes this was codified in our constitution, I'm afraid the 'concept' is held relatively weakly.
Clarence Thomas has stated, regarding the Establishment Clause: 'The text and history of this Clause suggest that it should not be incorporated against the States.'
I wouldn't be surprised if there is concurrence among the conservative justices sans Roberts.
IMO, it's held "weakly" because there's a christian majority in the government at large (and the SC in particular). As such, the morality they advocate for just happens to also align with morality as defined by their faith.
If you hold a different morality (in particular the Jewish or Muslim views on abortion rights), you're just SOL because you're not a majority.
The Supreme Court has fewer deeply religious people than the country as a whole, because of the appointment process. The religious wing of the Democratic Party (conservative Hispanics and Black people) is excluded, while the religious wing of the Republican Party has to share appointments with economic libertarians (Kennedy, Roberts, etc).
That's besides the point regardless. The "Establishment Clause" prohibits the creation of a national church: https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/inte.... That's what "Establishment of Religion" means--creating an official, established Church. Several states had an established church around the time of the founding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state.... For example, Massachusetts had "disestablished" its official church less than 10 years before the Constitution, and continued public funding of it until 40 years after the Constitution. The "Establishment Clause" prohibited the federal government from creating such an official religion.
The Establishment Clause does not prohibit people from voting for laws based on their religion. That is to say, it does not put a thumb on the scale in favor of beliefs based on secular philosophy versus religious philosophy. Voters (at the state level) can close stores on Sunday based on Christianity, no different than doing so based on secular beliefs about workers needing a day off.
So, none of that actually challenges my statement - that our politicians' morals are based extensively on those of their religion, thus avoiding any conflict of interest in their mind (i.e. Who doesn't view abortion as murder?), while still creating a "tyranny of the majority" for those who don't share their religion.
Legal or not according to the intent of "separation of church and state", it's holding us back as a country.
No, you're confused. The US has the Establishment Clause (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause) and the Free Exercise Clause, and they don't preclude religious people from using a religious basis to choose between secular policies. Abortion regulation is a secular policy area.
> The extremism involved in total or nonsensical abortion bans by various states, like even in cases of...
IIRC, most of those bans were passed when they had no hope of being enforced because of Roe v. Wade (e.g. they were for show). Now that case has been repealed, as things shake out, I expect many of those laws will be revised.
Religion is a red herring in the abortion debate. Abortion is illegal in Poland (Catholic) and Bangladesh (Muslim), and is technically illegal (though available) in Japan (Shinto and Buddhist). Regulation of abortion is therefore not something specific to a particular religious tradition.
In the U.S. specifically, moreover, abortion is best described as an internecine conflict between different branches of Christianity. The pro-choice movement is an outgrowth of mainline Protestantism, with its focus on individual self determination. The notion that the morality of extinguishing a fetal life "is between a woman and her doctor" and society has no say is uniquely Protestant. It's quite alien even to other societies that permit abortions, which tend to do so on utilitarian grounds like overpopulation.
And all that is fine, because "separation of church and state" does not mean that the government cannot regulate behavior "based on religious beliefs." The U.S. does not have French-style secularism, where there is a separate body of secular philosophy animating government and religious belief is actively excluded. It doesn't matter what people's reasons are for voting a particular way, as long as the end result is otherwise permissible.
> The U.S. has the concept of separating religion from government
Realizing that this is getting more deeply into politics...
GOP Rep. Boebert: ‘I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk’ - https://wapo.st/3u7AkGL
> Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who faces a primary election Tuesday, says she is “tired” of the U.S. separation of church and state, a long-standing concept stemming only from a “stinking letter” penned by one of the Founding Fathers.
> Speaking at a religious service Sunday in Colorado, she told worshipers: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.”
And then there's Mary Miller (R-Ill) who celebrated the ruling as a victory for white life. She claims it was just a mistake, but she's also the person that used a quote from Hitler in a campaign speech so "who knows." IMO it's an example of what I'm talking about: using the wedge issue of abortion to move folks closer to white nationalism and fascism in general.
>And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?” Republicans won a majority of the Congressional popular vote in 2016. They got a million and a half more votes than Democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_Re.... They’re on pace to do it again this year.
This coupled with Presidential votes, even though technically only the electoral college counts, makes it quite fair to imply it is the Republicans that represent less than a plurality of voters.
The House popular vote more accurately reflects nationwide sentiment because both parties have an incentive to campaign in every state. Indeed, the leaders of both parties in the House are from California.
But both parties lack an incentive to try and win statewide "winner take all" contests in opposite-color states. Cross-referencing those results against polling suggests that this effect hurts the GOP, with their geographically more spread out base, slightly more than it hurts Democrats.
Rayiner. Dude. First, using the word 'plurality' the way you introduced it is confusing at best, and possibly just wrong.
Second, the 538 poll aggregation has massive margin for error. Filter down to just the polls rated A+ and you only get an half point advantage for Republicans. Change the filter to the polls rated B+ and above and you get a full point advantage for Democrats. Also, consider the changes over time. How confident are you that a 5% swing from Democrats to Republicans over the past year represents an actual ideological change mapping directly to abortion ideology?
> Rayiner. Dude. First, using the word 'plurality' the way you introduced it is confusing at best, and possibly just wrong.
The polls literally show Republicans with a plurality in the generic ballot.
> Second, the 538 poll aggregation has massive margin for error.
And in the last several cycles, polling error has undercounted conservatives.
> How confident are you that a 5% swing from Democrats to Republicans over the past year represents an actual ideological change mapping directly to abortion ideology?
I didn't say any of that, and I don't think that's true. My point is refuting this idea that Republicans are some sort of minority party. We're a closely divided country, as demonstrated by the fact that the GOP has won an absolute larger number of votes in more than half of House elections since 1992, and regularly pulls ahead of Democrats on the generic ballot.
> > Rayiner. Dude. First, using the word 'plurality' the way you introduced it is confusing at best, and possibly just wrong.
> The polls literally show Republicans with a plurality in the generic ballot.
I missed that the first comment you responded to was the one that suggested the Republicans didn't have a plurality. Thought you brought up a question of who has less than a plurality when both Republicans and Democrats clearly have at least a plurality.
> But in both countries it’s still technically illegal.
It would be nonsensical for activists in Japan to spend time advocating that abortion become technically legal without regard to practical situations where it could be performed.
This is essentialist reasoning ascribing some kind of soul to the law, which feels out of character for you. I suppose you could argue that sodomy is
'technically illegal' in many states, but that Lawrence & Baker carved out situations where it is tolerated.
Does the technicality of being prosecuted for non-consensual act of sodomy vs. an explicit sexual assault crime actually mean anything to the perpetrator if the penalty is the same?
> And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?”
Party affiliation and political ideology are far from an exact match. That's why there are a handful of Republican governors posturing to uphold abortion rights.
Abortion is often a singular issue for pro-life advocates, who have had a particular motivation to mobilize built up over the past half-century. I personally have met a handful of people who hated everything about the Republican platform except for its stance on abortion, and that was the sole issue that decided their vote. Polarization has progressed to the point that there's only one
The pro-choice movement doesn't have the same fervor at this point, and I think a backlash is not going to be rapid due to a combination of:
- those who are pro-choice but happy to rationalize that it's now a state level issue and that the reversal of Roe v Wade was simply the correction of improper judicial activism.
- defeatist stances by those who feel disenfranchised and that voting is ineffective, particularly when done strategically to 'win' instead of based on a hard ideal
- those who would vote for abortion rights if a ballot was set in front of them but who personally find abortion repugnant or deserving of severe restriction
> It would be nonsensical for activists in Japan to spend time advocating that abortion become technically legal without regard to practical situations where it could be performed. This is essentialist reasoning ascribing some kind of soul to the law, which feels out of character for you.
I'm simply pointing out the difference between the government tolerating certain conduct, and the government lacking the power to prohibit that conduct. Abortion in Japan and Germany are examples of the former--legalization happened without denying the power of the government to have made it illegal in the first place.
Roe (and Lawrence), by contrast, not only legalized certain conduct, but declared that the government never had the power to make it illegal in the first place. That's actually quite radical compared to how most advanced countries view the issue.
> The pro-choice movement doesn't have the same fervor at this point
I don't think that's accurate. For a significant chunk of the pro-choice movement, it's a moral issue as much as it is for dedicated pro-lifers. They believe that the purpose of life is fulfilling one's individual hopes and dreams in the same way pro-lifers believe that the purpose of life is to be fruitful and multiply. For dedicated pro-choicers, the possibility of derailing individual aspirations is so unthinkable that it justifies ending a nascent human life. For dedicated pro-lifers, reproduction is such a clear mandate that it justifies derailing individual ambitions and aspirations. That's the fundamental conflict in world view that I'm talking about.
Not that I support this ruling in any way or form, but the 2016 election led to the current slate of justices who came up with this ruling. It is probably good and by design that we don’t change justices with the popular vote.
The House of Representatives is fully inconsequential to the selection and confirmation of Supreme Court justices, and the only Republicans on the ballot nation-wide lost the popular vote by a substantial margin.
As a legal matter, the Presidential popular vote is also “fully inconsequential” to the selection of Supreme Court Justices, or anything else.
We’re only talking about the popular vote insofar as Democrats try to delegitimize Republican administrations by insisting that they are a minority party that can gain power only through the quirk of our voting system. But in doing so they conveniently ignore the House popular vote, which Republicans routinely win.
You shouldn’t drink your own Kool-Aid. This Nixonian “Silent Majority” thinking is bad for Democrats, insofar as it causes them to get over their skis. In 2010, Democrats lost the House popular vote by almost 6 million votes. They lost it by 5 million in 2014 and 1.5 million in 2016. The House popular vote is a far better proxy for where the parties stand with the electorate.
The entire point of life appointments is to remove partisanship from judicial decisions. If the judges were up for election, their performance would most certainly suffer.
For example, look at the Federal Reserve. They are supposed to be independent from politics, but their head is appointed by the president every X years, and so they naturally make the decisions that guarantee them reelection and not the decisions which would maximize economic stability/utility.
> Even if abortion was a moral issue, and not about preserving human life, nothing precludes states from legislating morality.
Not nothing -- we have a constitution that guarantees rights, many of which are rights to behave immorally (in the eyes of some). In fact that's the core of the Democrat's argument.
> And people perceive that conflict as involving more fundamental issues than what the marginal income tax rate should be.
Agreed, and that's pretty much my entire point.
> It’s an error to rely on the Presidential popular vote. Because it doesn’t count nobody is trying to win it.
I see this argument a lot but I don't find it convincing. There are plenty of senate and representative seats that are not competitive and yet we still count their votes when discussing the balance of power between the two parties, despite the fact that one side is less likely to try to win.
Your answer begs the question. Yes, abortion is a wedge issue, but why is it a wedge issue? Why are people against abortions in the US when most people aren’t against abortion access in other countries.
Right. It seems to me that both sides would be better off at advancing their so called goals if they could compromise and offer concessions, but that never happens.
That's what makes it a wedge issue: there isn't much room for compromise. If one side believes abortion is literally murder, they're not going to say "well, a little bit of murder is OK if we get <foo>".
It's just tacked on to identity politics. It doesn't really matter what the issue at hand is, only what stance is taken with the group the people identify with.
There is no logic on the issue itself at all, trying to find any logic will only result in conflicting results. (i.e. being against governmental influence, but wanting the government to control people's bodies; or having death penalties and weekly school shootings and not helping people to survive with basic living standards, but forcing childbirth wherever possible)
Unfertilized eggs are not human and have no capacity to become human. Should “lesser” humans have fewer rights than “full” humans? I think we’ve already been through that a few times in history and it has always turned out to be the wrong choice.
They don’t need the capacity to become human they are human. How else would you describe these unfertilized eggs except as living organisms, species human? Unless you want to suggest your ancestors are egg, human, egg, human, egg, human …
If you want to give all humans the same rights then they should clearly qualify. Of course giving an egg, fetus, or baby the right to vote in an election is going to run into some practical problems.
I'm not conceding any other part of whatever argument you're making, but saying that unfertilized eggs are individual humans is completely ludicrous. They aren't separate organisms. They might eventually be used to create one, but it's not likely. This is like arguing that every skin cell is an individual human just because you could theoretically extract DNA from it and make a clone.
Eggs are happy to sit frozen for decades outside a human body after the donors death then be implanted in someone else. That’s a living organism though less hardy than a HeLa cell line. Sure they aren’t viable on their own, but apparently we can’t apply that standard to a fetus.
Clearly someone should not be considered alive because theirs frozen eggs still alive. That’s independent.
Eggs that are sitting around like that presumably have vastly higher odds of being implanted than one of your random skin cells. Something like 15 orders of magnitude or more.
Despite what is sometimes said, the moment of fertilization isn’t suddenly creating life both cells where alive before that point.
Maybe if the state enforced birth crowd adopted some post-birth childcare policies that weren't pure social darwinism and rugged individualism, less people would want to abort...
In the UK, the largest Christian denomination is the Church of England, with Her Majesty as the figurehead - and while they oppose abortion, their stance is [1]
"The Church of England's stated position combines principled opposition with a recognition that there can be strictly limited conditions under which abortion may be morally preferable to any available alternative. "
I assume that being an Established Church makes a difference too. We don't do separation of church and state the same way over here, after all that was one of the things the newly independent states of America decided to make very clear they were going to do differently from Britain, so the UK and USA are very different in this regard.
Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued roe v wade was a mistake because it placed abortion rights into constitutional law rather than letting democratic institutions decide an issue like this.
The reason it’s not an issue in Europe is because opposing sides all get a say in this and arrive at a compromise, namely abortion allowed up to 12 weeks which is fairly standard in most European countries.
But because row v wade basically said abortion has to be allowed in the US, the issue has had no real democratic debate just massively polarized arguing.
I’d argue the current situation will be better for almost everyone a few years down the line. Democracy works in resolving these issues. And why not have stricter laws in more Christian states? And free for all in California, if that’s what democracy decides?
> Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued roe v wade was a mistake because it placed abortion rights into constitutional law rather than letting democratic institutions decide an issue like this.
That's an oversimplification of a very nuanced and pragmatic view that is better explained here:
"What Ruth Bader Ginsburg really said about Roe v. Wade", Washington Post https://archive.ph/jJENv
It's not that she felt the rights granted by Roe were wrong to grant, she was worried that it would not be insulated from legal challenges.
Essentially, the pro-choice group scored a tactical victory, that turned out to be a strategically vulnerable position. And in turn, the can got kicked down to our era.
“Roe v. Wade, in contrast, invited no dialogue with legislators. Instead, it seemed entirely to remove the ball from the legislators’ court. In 1973, when Roe issued, abortion law was in a state of change across the nation. As the Supreme Court itself noted, there was a marked trend in state legislatures “toward liberalization of abortion statutes.” That movement for legislative change ran parallel to another law revision effort then underway-the change from fault to no-fault divorce regimes, a reform that swept through the state legislatures and captured all of them by the mid-1980s.
No measured motion, the Roe decision left virtually no state with laws fully conforming to the Court’s delineation of abortion regulation still permissible. Around that extraordinary decision, a well-organized and vocal right-to-life movement rallied and succeeded, for a considerable time, in turning the legislative tide in the opposite direction.”
Yet we see religiously-inspired laws everywhere. Any laws relating to alcohol sales is probably reflective of local religiosity, as is the state philosophy on criminal justice. These are not 1st amendment violations. Going deeper, religion created a culture which we have inherited: marriages, government holidays, even the official work week being seven days long. These do not violate the 1st Amendment.
> Any laws relating to alcohol sales is probably reflective of local religiosity, as is the state philosophy on criminal justice.
My guess is these don't inconvenience people enough to make it to the Supreme Court. And there's also the fig leaf of "crime reduction".
> as is the state philosophy on criminal justice
Can you give some examples? I'm not familiar with this.
> religion created a culture which we have inherited
Which of these restrict individual freedoms by law?
> even the official work week being seven days long.
You'll be surprised to learn that pre-Christian and non-Christian cultures have also had 7-day weeks, likely because they divide a lunar month so well.[1]
The Constitution does not enumerate a federal power to govern alcohol. That is left to the states, and it is not a violation of an ammendment.
Though the federal government did coerce every state into moving their drinking age from 18 to 21 under threat of withholding federal highway funding to states that had drinking ages set lower than 21.
That case went to the Supreme Court and is also in dire need of overruling in my opinion.
> That is left to the states, and it is not a violation of an ammendment
Not alcohol specifically, but any law that appears to promote a state religion. Like I said, alcohol sale restrictions are hard to prove as being motivated solely by religion. There are crime reduction, public health and safety, labor safety considerations too. I imagine the bar/restaurant lobby is also influential.
Can you provide an example of a law that is motivated purely by religion? And can you explain how that differs from legislation/policy crafted based on how someone feels, or even data?
The point of the 10th ammendment was to allow people to self govern from the bottom up, realizing that not all solutions are universal because people have different preferences.
With regards specifically to abortion, abortion bans are not necessarily motivated by religion. Many people believe life begins at conception, regardless of religion.
> Can you provide an example of a law that is motivated purely by religion?
Certainly.
The Pledge of Allegiance. [1]
There's no non-religious basis for finding gay marriage objectionable. But it was not legal everywhere in the US until only 7 years ago. And appears to be in jeopardy again.
These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
> There's no non-religious basis for finding gay marriage objectionable. But it was not legal everywhere in the US until only 7 years ago. And appears to be in jeopardy again.
Yes there is. You can easily argue that marriage is a cultural or legal system based on making it easier for families with children in a society. Giving them tax benefits, beaurocratic benefits (so one person can represent an entire family for example). Because whatever the fashion in 2022, societies need children to survive and want to incentivise it.
Now there might be edge cases in terms of children + gay couples in 2022, historically you can easily make a non religious case for marriage being between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreating.
> You can easily argue that marriage is a cultural or legal system based on making it easier for families with children in a society
And families headed by a non-hetero or non-couple can't raise children? What about other non-traditional family types? (E.g. a grandparent and a parent, two or three adult siblings raising their younger siblings without parents, a couple raising their nieces/nephews/godchildren, the family in Full House etc.) You gonna make those illegal too?
> for the purpose of procreating
If that were really the case, what about couples who can't have children due to age or infertility? Should their marriages be illegal too? Should hetero couples divorce the minute the woman hits menopause, if they don't already have kids? Are widows over 50 not allowed to remarry? Seems like a heartless society to me, and also contrary to "tradition" (whatever that means).
Maybe we can admit that marriage in today's society is also about love, companionship, and deep emotional bonds. Not just raising children.
> And families headed by a non-hetero or non-couple can't raise children? What about other non-traditional family types? (E.g. a grandparent and a parent, two or three adult siblings raising their younger siblings without parents, a couple raising their nieces/nephews/godchildren, the family in Full House etc.) You gonna make those illegal too?
There is raising children and there is the creation of children. The argument was that the government incentivized marriage because it led to both the creation of children as well as their raising in a stable home.
Non-traditional guardians (homos, grandparents, etc.) can obviously raise children, but they cannot make them.
That is likely how marriage ended up governed by the state. You are correct that it was rooted in religion, so thanks for the example.
Imo, marriage should not be regulated by the government. It is a derived of and should remain in religious institutions.
Instead, the government can come up with a private partnership, which would easily do everything marriage does without the underlying religious debate and exclusions.
> the government incentivized marriage because it led to both the creation of children
Except this part is false. Because, as I mentioned previously, not every hetero marriage could lead to creating children. There have never been any strong religious restrictions on old people, or people with known infertility getting married in Western society.
> the government can come up with a private partnership, which would easily do everything marriage does without the underlying religious debate and exclusions.
So...marriage? In US law at least, there aren't any religious components to marriage. No religious body needs to be involved to have a marriage be legally valid. You go down to city hall, get a marriage license, and you're done. There's no legal requirement that a religious institution that objects to a marriage, for any reason, has to perform that marriage. Can divorced Catholics remarry in a Catholic church now, without getting a dispensation?
Now if your objection is to the use of the word "marriage" to refer to partnerships that certain religions don't agree with...I don't really know what to say. That's everyday language at work. You can't stop people from using words the way they want. And it's not a real problem that the government should be involved in.
> E.g. a grandparent and a parent, two or three adult siblings raising their younger siblings without parents, a couple raising their nieces/nephews/godchildren, the family in Full House etc.
These can raise children obviously, and do it well. But it’s not called a marriage. Thanks for making my point for me.
Your point was a "marriage" is a requirement for raising children well. And a "marriage" is solely for procreation. I proved that both are false by providing countercases. You didn't even attempt to engage with the second point. And in fact you seem to be agreeing with me on my first point.
I don't think you understand how a debate works. This ain't YouTube, there's no partisan audience that will clap when you say "So then you agree with me" for something completely illogical. I can't help you any further and I wish you luck.
I think this completely ignores the moral issues of later term abortions. I am an atheist, and I am disturbed by the idea of a voluntary abortion after 20 weeks. Voluntary meaning no medical necessity.
I think Republicans have latched onto this issue and Christianity in America has adopted it, but there is far more at play here than just Christian nationalism.
Yes, they've taken the extreme view of "aborting a baby right before it's born" which doesn't fit the majority of cases and used it to argue against the norm, but if that were actually the case they would be limiting abortion to "reasonable" limits, not straight up "snitch on your neighbours if you think they've had an abortion" laws.
Late term abortions are almost all wanted babies where something has gone horribly wrong for the baby, the mother, or both. There are also vanishingly few of them.
What issue? What are the numbers on non medical necessity abortions post 20 weeks?
Why 20 weeks? Are the voting populace or politicians knowledgeable enough about pregnancy to be able to legislate these things without exposing doctors and women to unnecessary legal risk? And again, back to the numbers, does the is even need legislating? Are women or doctors haphazardly running around killing perfectly viable fetuses for fun?
There are over a million abortions performed every year in the US. If your belief is that these are humans with all the rights of any other human, that’s a staggering human rights issue.
The concept of viability is legal fiction. Given the technology, there’s no reason a fetus couldn’t live at any stage of development and likewise, until about age 3 or so, no child will live without external support. Culturally, we celebrate “birth”, but that event has nothing to do with life.
On the other end is the necessity to support the life of a mother. While unfortunate, I think that’s a rare time that terminating a pregnancy is appropriate. That doesn’t mean lifestyle or convenience, though. That’s situations where only one or fewer people will make it alive if nothing is done. This represents a fraction of one percent of abortions. Other abuses may fall into this category.
> Given the technology, there’s no reason a fetus couldn’t live at any stage of development
This cannot be true, and just because a fetus could live does not mean the quality of life is worth living. Not to mention the staggering costs of NICU healthcare.
The numbers I was asking about were specifically post 20 week, as a reply to parkingrift’s concerns.
Babies survive outside the womb prior to 20 weeks. That will continue to go down as technology progresses. What does cost have to do with whether someone is a person?
Sorry, I misread “given the technology” as today’s technology. But then I do not see how the concept of viability is legal fiction. Medical science can keep fetuses born after x weeks alive with y probability, and that y is near 0 or 0 before x weeks.
Cost had to do with practicality. It does not seem reasonable to expect a society to invest $10M into raising a 1 week old fetus that will need 24/7 support to live. Point being that there are limits real life and a purely philosophical exercise is not useful.
It’s legal fiction in that the concept was created in a court to justify why a person at a certain developmental stage wasn’t really a person. It’s not a scientific definition, a “law” of nature, or previous cultural definition. The idea was created to advance a legal argument. It’s fiction in that the value chosen was arbitrary then, is not a discrete event or time period, and by the same standard, is earlier than when defined and will continue to be earlier as technology advances.
The practicality of saving a life is certainly different than the legal justification to end a life. The point of technology being able to support development outside of a womb is evidence, imo, of the organism being independent from the mother. If that organism is individual and human, (s)he should have the full rights of all persons.
To me that means finding options that don’t involve terminating lives when the mother decides they are not prepared to parent. Right now the options outside abortion place significant strain on mothers, but as a society, 50 years have been spent not investigating alternatives and going all in on abortion. It’s already possible to transfer embryos fertilized in a lab successfully into an unrelated host.
Ultimately it is a philosophical argument. I can’t find any argument that has convinced me that a human is a human regardless of the stage of development or capabilities of the person. I’ve argued that “viability” will continue to be earlier for the past 20 years and haven’t been wrong about that yet. It’s currently limited by technology, but that shouldn’t impact the rights of individuals (in this case the unborn).
> And again, back to the numbers, does the is even need legislating? Are women or doctors haphazardly running around killing perfectly viable fetuses for fun?
1% of the abortions occur in week 21 or later, of a total of 625.000-930.000 abortion per year. So about 6250-9300 abortion per year in week 21 or later. Assuming a number of these are health related, "livestyle" abortions is probably less than 9300 per year.
You're trying to make a scientific or analytical response to what I've just said is a moral issue. You can surely disagree, but many people find late term abortions repugnant. Some people find any abortion at any term repugnant. You can have these feelings without associating them with religious views. I'm not religious, as I've said. However, my broader point here is that people are making a mistake directly associating views on abortion with religiosity or conservative political views. It's not that black and white.
I live in New York. Abortion is legal for any reason up to 24 weeks, and then legal for any medical reason beyond 24 weeks.
Nationally, about 1.3% of all abortions are after 20 weeks. I don't have further data as to what percentage of that 1.3% were due to medical reasons. Big round numbers here 1.3% is roughly 8,500 20+ week abortions in the US per year.
> Why 20 weeks?
With current technology it is roughly where viability starts to climb from 0%. Possibility of feeling pain and/or terminating a living, viable, being. At 24 weeks the viability can be as high as 70%. It is okay that you do not find this disturbing, but I do find it disturbing. It's disturbing to me to think about voluntarily terminating a pregnancy after 20 weeks with no medical issues for the child or mother.
If given an option this is how I would vote. Unfortunately, there is no nuance in most American political issues. I don't have a choice to vote on allowing abortions for any reason up to 20 weeks, or for any medical reason afterward. I typically get to choose between "ban all abortions" and "allow almost all abortions."
And after 25 weeks one really needs to consider that the fetus may have a misshaped heart and no chance of survival outside the womb, requiring an abortion.
I am also pro-choice - I have thought the viability standard was always going to be a moving target thanks to
medical and technological advances that could topple at some point too - even if you defined it as something like NNth percentile.
It does seem to me that setting an arbitrary (but flexible) point of no return was going to be necessary (probably around 18-24 weeks)
The trimesters have absolutely 0 actual meaning here, as this is fundamentally putting an arbitrary line on a continuous process. Yet this is probably the only way you're getting anything, as they're at least a useful Schelling point that can get some compromise.
Regarding your second statement, I don't think anyone would consider aborting babie(s) after carrying for 20 weeks. These cases are outliers & it is mostly due to medical conditions.
> I think Republicans have latched onto this issue and Christianity in America has adopted it, but there is far more at play here than just Christian nationalism.
Yes, and polarization-fueled straw-man memes really obscure that. I swear some people's only understanding of "the other side" is a twisted view of the distortions of some overheated partisan bomb-thrower, stupefied into slogan form. But you kind of need something like that to feel confidently self-righteous.
I'd wager than many are talked to abortion, specifically that late in the cycle, out of a desire for organ harvesting from newborns and not out of necessity.
What’s the context? What is the research of? Is consent required / has it been received? Is this a common practice? Is it common to sell non-fetal tissue for research purposes? Etc etc
Linking to a cryptic 575 page long PDF file is too conspiratorial to take seriously.
> I'd wager that the vast majority of abortions post 20 weeks are performed with extreme reluctance and sadness, and only out of great necessity.
My point was specifically aimed at this parent comment. It is easy to make baseless wagers about motivation. I find it an equally compelling narrative that, given research and financial incentives, there is great motivation for abortion clinics to persuade individuals to abort children. Especially late-term abortions since developed infant organs are likely demanding a premium due to their rarity.
Not really, no. You're spouting random conspiracy theories. You provided unverified primary sources. Any rando can make a website and post a PDF on it for $10.
If the SCOTUS did that, then they would be legislators, not judges; it is up to congress to decide where that cutoff should be, and then pass a law if they want - RvW didn't outlaw abortions, it just punted it back to the correct body to act if they wanted; I suspect they (congress) will be forced to pass a law, and it will likely set at a date that makes nobody happy - not the abortion at any time crowd, and not the 'zero exceptions' crowd. Most of Europe seems OK with a ~12 week cutoff. I suspect something around that, with narrow set of exceptions, would satisfy all but the most extremes on both sides.
My assumption is that it caused by the fact that democracy is broken in the US. They have only two parties, whereas most countries in Europe have many.
With only two parties the differences get exxagerated and causes polarisation. With only 2 parties is often a question of "them or us".
People are forgetting we're a union of fairly sovereign states. In 1969, as you have today, some states allowed abortions, and other prohibited or restricted them. Thus it was decided democratically, as it is in most of the rest of the world. But when the federal government can come in and preempt state law, because the USA as a whole has a different idea, or in the case of Roe v. Wade, the unelected judges had a different idea, that is going to cause friction.
Also, the power of the federal government to impost laws on all states is highly controversial, and its history full of other supreme court cases carving out the definition.
You see the same friction with EU freedom of movement laws and immigration.
Do you find it puzzling that some people think it's wrong to kill unborn babies? You might think it's fine, but anyone can understand that people can think it's wrong.
Just like I as a meat eater can obviously understand that there are vegetarians that oppose the killing of animals.
The USA is very different from the UK because of puritans.
American Christians are much more puritan than Brits (this is true for abortion, but also for tee-totaller movements, and other things)
A lot of American Christians are anti abortion, for the simple yet totally valid reason that they truly believe that embryos are human lives, and that as such they shouldn't be "murdered".
The question of the threshold is central here. Noone in their right mind is pro abortion past 30 weeks of pregnancy. Similarly, no one is really against the morning-after pill.
This issue has been whipped up by the right wing, but they did it IN ORDER TO get more voters (who deeply cared about that issue), and not the other way around.
Similarly, no one is really against the morning-after pill.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A lot of people, including elsewhere in these comments, believe that “life begins at conception” and that therefore any action taken to stop the process post-fertilization is murder. That includes the morning-after pill.
It also includes IUD’s and IVF technology. Ironically, the latter actually enables some couples to have children.
This goes back a long way. Many of the early American colonies were founded by religious extremist sects being pushed out of wherever they came from. The US and UK both experienced the First Great Awakening, but the Second Great Awakening was unique to the US. This led to entirely new sects like the Adventists and Latter Day Saints. It led to an extreme backlash against Enlightenment ideals. Post-millenialism spread rapidly and many Americans were convinced the return of Christ was imminent and American society needed to be purified, which resulted in the first tight intermingling of religion with politics. Religious organizations needed political clout to accomplish their social goals, which were not restricted to their own followers. This was heightened all the more by the reality that the outlying territories didn't have real governments and religious leaders were the only leaders around. Revivalism mixed with frontier folk libertarianism to produce what would eventually become prosperity gospel teaching that the strength of one's adherence to strict behavior and love of Christ would lead to material success, and thus the rich must be pious. The Third Great Awakening gave us American Christian organizations that became increasingly all about social reform in light of the belief that Christ's return was imminent, leading to the very earliest alliance of the Republican party with activist Christians, which was the effort to abolish slavery. That alliance eventually dovetailed quite nicely with the American GOP's post-New Deal long game to cut taxes, business regulation, and social welfare spending, thanks to those earlier seeds of prosperity gospel. This also explains the largely unique to the US "god and guns" phenomenon, which is more about identity politics than religious doctrine because revivalism was tied so tightly to the frontier, where personal firearms ownership and proficiency was all but mandatory.
All in all, I think you get a nice picture of how something well-intended can end up in a bad place. The righteous fervor to make society better resulted in ending slavery, fighting against tenements, but then they ran out of the most obvious evils and we got prohibition, anti-homosexual laws, and this mobilization of single-issue voters that judge all office holders solely by whether they'll try to abolish abortion and don't care about anything else they do. Tack that onto the naked charlatanism of prosperity gospel and you more or less get everything wrong with 20th-century American evangelicalism.
Opposition to abortion in the USA was originally largely driven by Catholics. Which, incidentally, meant that most American Protestants didn’t especially object to it, including the majority of the Justices who issued the Roe decision. Eventually, for a number of reasons, many other Christian denominations, especially the poorer extra-urban ones, came to agree with the Catholics that maybe killing unborn babies really is murdering an innocent human life.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Catholics haven’t been a major political power in the UK since the Jesuits were expelled.
As for why it’s a “political thing” in the USA? Ironically, that’s largely because of Roe. Roe removed the abortion debate from the elected branches so that instead of working something out in a healthy democratic fashion, we got a naked exercise of judicial fiat.
This next bit is personal. I hope people will read it as a desire to satisfy curiosity rather than an attempt to debate a subject that, frankly, has adequate firebrands. For Catholics and those others who agree with our moral reasoning[1], abortion, the killing of smaller helpless innocent human beings, is an intolerable enormity. It’s completely impossible for us to knowingly condone it without falling from a state of grace. And doing nothing is condoning.
[1]. Premise 1: killing innocent human persons is wrong. Premise 2: pre-born babies are innocent human beings. Conclusion: killing pre-born babies is wrong.
The argument is simple enough to follow. Note that, due to the structure of the argument, adding additional premises like “the father is a rapist” doesn’t change the moral calculus unless we add an additional premise like “at least some offspring of rapists are not innocent merely due to their paternity.” Since the argument is structurally sound, we must challenge the premises. Challenging 1) is possible, but permitting killing innocent human beings opens a big door to all manner of atrocities. Challenging 2) is the more seemingly reasonable approach. Catholics believe that the human person comes into existence at fertilization, when the diploid human organism begins. One can reasonably use some other event like heartbeat, or some more vague concept like viability, and claim the human person doesn’t begin until then. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument though. I personally lean toward the fertilization point, because when getting the call wrong means murdering an innocent person I prefer to err on the side of caution.
The most popular arguments against protecting an innocent and dependent human person though are completely unprincipled and not properly even arguments at all. Rather, they they reduce to some kind of hedonic assertion on the level of “I’ll do what I want!”
Edit: Please don't reply trying to goad me into some low-brow argument. I am not interested in poorly thought out analogies or any other simulated ratiocination. For the purposes of this discussion I am only interested in the ethics. So by all means please provide clear moral reasoning about why it's OK to kill innocent human persons sometimes but not others. Please explain why it's OK to make it a legal requirement to care for some vitally dependent human persons but not others. And please fully think it through and discuss the potentially unintentional consequences of adopting that ethical system.
An accident occurs and I need 5 litres of blood and a new kidney. You are in the hospital in a coma, should the state be able to require doctors to take your kidney and blood and put it my body without your consent?
It’s because the Supreme Court has imposed for 50 years an extremely liberal abortion regime on an extremely conservative country. Roe guarantees elective abortions up to viability, which is around 22-24 weeks. But by 13-14 weeks, the fetus looks like a baby—it has hands and feet and a face. It can suck its thumb and kick. Most of Europe draws a line for elective abortions (absent exceptions) around that timeframe: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268439/legal-abortion-t.... The UK is an outlier in this by the way, in drawing the line at 24 weeks. That’s the longest in Europe.
Meanwhile, the US is vastly more religious than Western Europe. In terms of people who pray every day, it’s up there with Poland and Iran (both countries where abortion is illegal). On the religiosity front, the United States is more like the rest of the Americans (minus Canada) than like Western Europe.
Sounds like nonsense. Can you explain how it was ‘imposing a regime’, when nobody was forced to do anything? If you didn’t want an abortion you just…didn’t have one.
Kinda sounds like religious people are the ones actually trying to impose a regime to me. Because I couldn’t possibly care less what anyones preferred god thinks, yet religious beliefs are being used to drive political changes that affect everyone.
Religious people in the US get very uncomfortable when other people violate their religious tenets. It's this feeling of discomfort that religious people feel the need to eliminate.
Then why didn't they ever try for a federal abortion ban when they had control of Congress and the presidency? "Murder" isn't suddenly ok just because it happens in another state, right?
I said analogous, not identical. Clearly they see it as bad, but not nearly as bad as murder. If it was literally mass murder to them, I'd expect more bombs and riots, and less "campaign against it for 50 years to repeal it".
If it's "somewhat less than murder" all these states with anti-abortion laws would have carve outs when the mother's life is in danger. You'd definitely allow someone else to commit an evil act that's "less than murder" to save a person's life, wouldn't you?
Imagine you are in a people group that the court decided are free to be killed at someone else’s discretion and you have no legal recourse or advocate. Would you accept that for minority groups, groups of any other association? If you are not the one killing or being killed does that mean it affects no one?
There already are that group - recipients of organ donations. If you or I decide to sign up on a match list, are tested for compatibility, and are selected, we have no legal obligation to proceed with the donation. You or I could be in the operating room side by side with the recipient and object moments before being anesthesized. Again, no legal obligation. Even if it should mean the recipient dies. It doesn't mean you are an asshole, or that it violates your ethical code, but still no legal obligation. So yes, we already have the concept, it's simply not evenly distributed.
In that situation medical professionals are doing everything they can to keep that person alive. If there is another option besides the one donor found it will be used.
Fetuses aren’t granted the right to “pursue happiness”. Abortion doesn’t absolve a mother of obligations while giving the child a chance to part ways amicably. As the potential organ donor you cannot choose to actively terminate the life of the recipient, they are free to continue on until they can no longer.
Those have no bearing on the autonomy of the donor. The ethicalness of declining to donate isn't contingent on support of medical professionals nor the concept of active or passive action.
What does supervene on the ethicalness of the action is autonomy. Bodily autonomy gives a donor the right to back away at the last minute, not the concept of passive action or medical support. I'm not disagreeing that those exist, but they don't lay the foundation for the ethicalness of the action - bodily autonomy does. No one, not even the government, has more say over one's body than oneself.
Parents have an obligation to the care and development of their children. There are plenty of parents who are found guilty of negligence. That is more appropriate than the donor concept.
Parents are not legally obligated to donate their organs to their children even if it would result in saving their child's life. The reasoning behind this is that people, including parents, have bodily autonomy.
The donor concept is a perfectly valid parallel. I can understand that someone wouldn't like it if it challenges their conclusions, but that's sort of the point. No one, not even the government, has more autonomy over ones body than oneself.
In what way, exactly? The historical idea that some people groups have less rights than others? That certainly seems to be what the pro-choice position is. Can you prove the exact point of “viability”, because I can assure you that it is much earlier than was thought in 1973. Do you think it’s a good idea to argue that even though society has continually made egregious mistakes in assigning personhood to humans that we definitely have it right this time and this group of people is, in fact, not really people?
Edit to add: racial minority is just one way that in power groups have oppressed out of power groups, but that is not a unique delineation. Often it’s the most visibly obvious, but humans have done a great job of dehumanizing others based on just about any demographic feature you might want to choose. In American history there is ample example of racial discrimination, but there is also religious, gender, age, physical or mental ability, political affiliation, etc. I don’t really see this as any different from those. Choose a reason why some group isn’t “human” enough and that makes them fair game to do whatever you want. It’s your choice to pick and choose the features you think are necessary to treat a growing group of human cells as human or not. I just think it’s pretty regressive to exclude someone because they aren’t developed to your standard of worth.
