Is there any other civil rights fight going on now that's more vicious than the fight over firearms rights? Maybe abortion rights, although I don't know of Planned Parenthood doing anything like this.
State attorney generals are suing hospitals in other states to obtain information on both transgender and pregnant folk's visits, with the intent to use that information to prosecute those people in the AG's state.
I'm not sure if that counts by your measure, but it involves the government directly.
That's kind of baffling; like, I'd have to assume that _very_ few people, even people who were generally opposed to abortion, would be okay with _that_.
I live in a country (Ireland) which only recently generally legalised abortion; before that people would normally have gone to the UK. If there had been any suggestion of the government prosecuting people who did that, never mind trying to force UK hospitals to divulge records, well... people wouldn't have put up with that. The situation as it was only continued so long because it was easy to ignore; ~no-one was ever actually prosecuted under the law, and the UK was enough of a safety valve that the human cost of the law was largely masked.
Like, doing things like this seems like a very good way to stoke national outrage and be forced to legalise it.
> Like, doing things like this seems like a very good way to stoke national outrage and be forced to legalise it.
That is absolutely happened. As soon as Roe v. Wade was overturned this stuff went on a lot of ballots and in every case the restrictions lost.
There are going to be a bunch of laws about it voted on in the election next Tuesday, as well as it being a very important thing in candidate races. We’ll see how it goes.
The right has pushed this for decades, it was a popular issue for them. As soon as they finally got their way it appears to have backfired big time and galvanized a ton of people against them.
> There are going to be a bunch of laws about it voted on in the election next Tuesday
Also worth looking at is how these state constitutional amendments have been attacked before they were even up for vote, and how many plans are in place to attack the results.
Even so, if the new president decides to, they can effectively destroy the ability to get an abortion anywhere in the US by using the Comstock Act; by enforcing a provision of the Comstock Act which prohibits the shipping of "... every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion."
Not only that, I also know there have been changes/proposed changes to make it harder to submit possible amendments or to allow the legislature to override amendments that people vote for.
All to prevent people from getting their say. Because it’s the “wrong” say.
At least many people opposed to abortion ostensibly think that it's murder. Given that framing, trying to collect evidence from hospitals seems reasonable.
(At least they say they they consider it murder. The way they act concerning it makes me think that relatively few really believe it.)
> The way they act concerning it makes me think that relatively few really believe it.)
Enough people in power believe it:
At least one woman (Marshae Jones) was put in jail for getting shot while pregnant, while the shooter was let free. The woman was accused of not doing more to protect the "unborn baby".
At least one woman (Brittney Poolaw) has been sentenced for having a miscarriage, and others have been arrested and charges brought against them.
> Pregnancy advocates and others on social media are expressing outrage after a 21-year-old Oklahoma woman was convicted of first-degree manslaughter earlier this month for having a miscarriage, which the prosecutor blamed on her alleged use of methamphetamine.[1]
I would argue she should be prosecuted (assuming the drug use can be proved) even if abortion in that state were legal right up until birth. This isn't a miscarriage due to natural causes or some kind of accident but due to drug use. Is the argument that the mother has absolutely no responsibility for the well-being of the fetus?
Edit: It seems like the case hinges on the claim that the meth caused the miscarriage.
> Prosecutors argued that the miscarriage Poolaw suffered was from her use of methamphetamine. An autopsy of the fetus showed it had tested positive for methamphetamine, the Associated Press reported, but there was no evidence her use of the substance is what caused the miscarriage. The autopsy showed the miscarriage could have been caused by a congenital abnormality and placental abruption, when the placenta detaches from the womb, the AP said.
> even if abortion in that state were legal right up until birth. This isn't a miscarriage due to natural causes or some kind of accident but due to drug use.
First, in 2020 abortion was not a crime since it is pre-Dobbs.
Second, they don't know why she miscarried. They only assumed (as you've noted).
They simply got creative in the meth charges in an effort to push the "unborn baby" narrative over a "fetus". The fact that the woman was a minority and a criminal simply made it easier.
> Is the argument that the mother has absolutely no responsibility for the well-being of the fetus?
Not really, when it results in a miscarriage. There's just too many reasons that miscarriage can happen, and no real reason to prove why to anything resembling reasonable doubt. If the child had lived to be born and shown problems with meth during pregnancy, they would have been taken from the mother and put in the foster system.
Your argument is a house of cards built on moral relativism. You decry the prosecution of miscarriages while tacitly acknowledging the harm of maternal drug use, a logical pretzel that would make even the most skilled sophist blush. This not only insults the capabilities of modern medicine but also abdicates our societal responsibility to protect the most vulnerable. Until we're prepared to confront the thorny realities of individual rights versus collective obligations, we're doomed to wallow in a quagmire of our own making, where justice is as elusive as the truth you seem so eager to obfuscate.
> At least many people opposed to abortion ostensibly think that it's murder. Given that framing, trying to collect evidence from hospitals seems reasonable.
Is it? I often frame abortion as murder, but even then this goes a little far. If someone travels internationally to Slovenia (or Thailand, whereever), and they rob a bank there then it is more than a bit absurd for my Attorney General to try to prosecute that bank robbery from here in Minnesota. Even if the Slovenian government declines to prosecute and people are generally worried about justice being denied... it just can't happen from here. It doesn't work.
Even that's not the end of it. A prosecutor who attempted it is merely wasting time and money, and maybe there's more than enough time (and though we shouldn't be wasteful, we're a rich country... wasting money's not as big of a deal as we might want it to be). But if it were more than a waste of time and money, if it undermined some principle or another that we should hold dear, then it becomes a big problem. General medical privacy is maybe one of those. How are we supposed to believe that it would only turn up abortion records? Maybe they're trawling for medical info so my insurance can be dropped even though my cancer's in remission.
> The way they act concerning it makes me think that relatively few really believe it.
How are they supposed to act? Like, is there a particular set of behaviors that would preserve your belief in their sincerity and their sanity? As far as they're concerned, they've lived through a half-century holocaust of baby murder, but the abortion clinic bomber was a terrorist and suggesting otherwise should have their names put on a watchlist. They're impotent to fix the greatest moral failing of their lifetime, ridiculed for even speaking out against it, and don't know how to pass their values on to their own offspring successfully.
I suspect that, given their need to cope with something that is intolerable-yet-must-be-tolerated, they've all collectively decided not to bother trying to seem sincere to those who do not agree with them.
> As far as they're concerned, they've lived through a half-century holocaust of baby murder
It's interesting how this narrative has developed only in the past 40 years or so. At the time of Roe vs. Wade, the Catholic Church did not view a person as being alive until the first breath (a view held today by the Jewish Faith - I've heard they consider the truncated care available to women as an affront to their faith). It wasn't until around Regan that the view really started to change as stopping abortion became a mainstay of the Republican party's policies.
This incorporation into their policies and values is mostly what drove the change in view - going from "it's not a person until it's born" to "fetal personhood". Then after the Dobbs decision and in the leadup to this election, that the phrase murder started being thrown around.
Ever wonder why they're still only prosecuting for the act of abortion, not murder? It's because federal law (which trumps state law) only considers a person as someone who is born.
> they've all collectively decided not to bother trying to seem sincere to those who do not agree with them.
I'd argue that they act quite sincere, and often violently so. Raised voices is the least of what a conversation between a "abortion is murder" and "abortion is health care" tends to result in.
> the Catholic Church did not view a person as being alive until the first breath
I'm an atheist. All I know is biology. It's made of cells, it metabolizes, excretes, grows, etc. It's alive. I can run a genetics test on it, it will return results that it's human. I know physiology well enough to be certain women do not regularly have four kidneys. The presence of a second pair indicates a second person. Or that women don't have two noses, etc.
We might say, for instance, that religion is evolving (this isn't an absurd position from the standpoint of anthropology). Somehow, collectively, they've come to the realization that maybe their scriptures don't have all the detailed answers they need, and they're "stepping up" and trying to be moral. But this is the one time they shouldn't trust the science, I guess.
> Ever wonder why they're still only prosecuting for the act of abortion, not murder?
Because legally speaking, there are many different types of homicide that consider a dozen or more factors in the crime, and that even amongst the various kinds of manslaughter, society thinks some worse than others or not?
> Raised voices is the least of what a conversation between a "abortion is murder" and "abortion is health care" tends to result in.
Not really. The vast majority of it ends up being stuff the DA doesn't mind pleading down to misdemeanors, other than a few high profile cases over the decades (the Atlanta Olympics were 1996, so that's about the time frame of the bombings/arson, Tiller 10 years later, etc).
How many of those are there? If I'm posed with a problem where in a given year 500,000 babies die or 350 women die depending on which of the two options I choose, how am I supposed to choose?
And what if I have reason to believe that those 350 women die because, more often than not, pro-abortionists hold them hostage and then whine "it's not our fault, you wouldn't let us deal with the ectopic pregnancy! only legalized partial-birth abortions could've saved their lives!!!" ?
It's difficult to even take your argument, as presented in the comment above, seriously. Are you just this bad at arguing, or do you just parrot the catchphrases without even thinking about them? Maybe you want me to feel bad about those 350 women? If I cry properly while singing the praises of their brave sacrifice, that's all you were asking for all along, and you'll stop supporting infant massacres? Is it that you've sort of ballparked how much of each occur, and you think the numbers are swapped? Only 350 fetuses aborted per year, but nearly half a million women? Maybe it's not even that one-sided, there's numerical parity?
Under abortion bans, more women are getting abortions. Under abortion bans, maternal mortality rates have gone up. The infant mortality rate is up in states with abortion bans too.
So even if you consider the flushing of an embryo or fetus to be murder, the abortion bans have not (and likely will not) help the numbers.
> Under abortion bans, more women are getting abortions.
Strange claim. Don't bother to try to substantiate it... just toss out some hypothesis of the mechanism. You should understand though, that someone like myself wouldn't believe you on that and definitely not without something to back it up. And that if someone like me did end up believing you, it wouldn't change much... just get chalked up as "well, another strange sociological trend".
No, COVID is a virus. Viruses spread, which affects OTHER people. Like actual people, not imaginary people that only exist in a specific religious context. It did further cement which side is aligned with scientific knowledge, however. Next?
When I said that abortion protestors don't seem sincere in their claim that abortion is murder, I said that because there's a huge gap between the intensity of their rhetoric (claiming that abortion is murder) and the their actions, which 99% of the time amount to little more than whining on social media. A very small minority resort to some form of vigilantism, those few probably believe their own rhetoric but the rest of them are full of hot air.
But this argument also applies to the "You're killing Grandma!" crowd. Very few truly believe that refusing to take a vaccine is a murderous act, and that's why the most they do about it is whine online.
In both cases you have people using very hyperbolic rhetoric to support a position they don't actually feel so strongly about. Very typical of American politics.
The only time people didn't have a choice is when they wanted to interact with society. Something which, thanks to the internet and delivery services, is almost wholly optional in this day and age.
But, the moment you start interacting with society at large, you have to follow that society's laws. Laws which have always included things like quarantining and mandatory vaccinations to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
See, as one example, the 1920 response to the Spanish Flu epidemic.
I'm holding out hope that we will avoid that kind of a period of time. The polls show a dead heat, but, well, when's the last time you answered a phone call which was marked as 'potential spam' or which came from an unknown number? My phone's been configured to block those entirely. And I'm a xennial.
I think the poll results have been skewed by their reliance on cold calling people, and those cold calls probably only really hit those who are 50+. I don't believe the Republican party has anywhere near the same kind of support from those under 50.
I tend to agree that support wanes with decreasing age, but anecdotally (I have kids in the middle school age bracket) there are a lot of young men swinging pretty hard to the right lately.
There are restrictions and bans on gender affirming care. Most often for minors, but also for adults. It's telling that most of these that are aimed at adults call out exceptions for Viagra.
There are laws prohibiting drag shows which have been written so vaguely that they can be applied to trans people as well, especially those who do any kind of performance.
Next up are laws forcing trans individuals to use the bathroom assigned to them at birth. I'm very curious how they expect women to react to bearded, burly men entering their bathrooms, and how they expect men to react to women presenting individuals (actually I'm quite sure of how they'll react: they'll be SA'ed if not killed).
And then there's the bans on playing sports for Trans individuals - all 40 or so of them.
So no, they're not explicitly outlawed, yet. Just everything about them living their life is. Much like it was never illegal to be gay, they just outlawed sodomy.
> There are restrictions and bans on gender affirming care. Most often for minors, but also for adults. It's telling that most of these that are aimed at adults call out exceptions for Viagra.
What about hairplugs for balding men? Or cosmetic surgery for, say, gynecomastia? Is that restricted to cis men only in these places? Or facial cosmetic surgery, for that matter. There’s actually quite a bit of gender affirming care for cis men, when you think about it…
(I actually hadn’t realised that anywhere in the US had gone as far as banning gender-affirming care for adults; that’s bonkers.)
They're probably referring to Texas suing at least one hospital in another state for access children's health information:
> The subpoena demanded the hospital system provide medications prescribed to children who reside in Texas, the children’s diagnosis, the number of Texas children in the hospital’s care and the name of Texas laboratories used to administer tests for those youth, [and] sworn written statements from doctors at Seattle Children’s who treated Texas children, describing the medications prescribed and information related to patients’ diagnoses.
And the biggest consumer of hormonal treatments as children (in the 99% range)? Cisgendered girls and boys who have no desire to transition.
And though you didn't mention it, let's do a quick aside on gender affirming surgery: Boys with gynocomastia get mastectomies while girls get breast enlargements to improve their perception of their bodies.
