Roe v Wade in danger?
This discussion was created from comments split from: Texas Abortion thread - New.
hosting
Hi,
On this thread please stick to whether abortion rights in general in the US are likely to be endangered by the Supreme Court and the effects of that.
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies Host
hosting off
hosting
Hi,
On this thread please stick to whether abortion rights in general in the US are likely to be endangered by the Supreme Court and the effects of that.
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies Host
hosting off
Comments
I find the states that want to limit abortion the most are also the very states that have high teenage pregnancies.
Sixty-Two percent of all Americans want to keep abortion legal. Thirty-Eight percent want to ban.
No matter what the justices decide, it ain't over by a long shot.
That venn diagram must be pretty damn close to a circle.
. . . until the next federal Republican trifecta, but I guess we're all supposed to play stupid and pretend that's not the obvious next step. Kavanaugh's statement about the court's "neutrality" on the rights of 51% of the American population was a PR exercise, intended to cast overturning Roe and Casey as the moderate position.
Watching the rich eat the rest of us?
And that's why the GOP is working its tail off to make sure that democrat votes don't count.
I also know a lot of women who don't care about abortion because they don't ever see themselves in that awkward position.
Looking at the way elections have gone, and how many Americans are too apathetic to show up. I'm not optimistic.
That kind of "it doesn't affect me so who cares" attitude I'd expect from Republicans.
Not a lot of people noted at the time but Roe was overruled in 1992 by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which replaced Roe's trimester standard with a standard of "undue burden". It's kind of vague exactly what kind of burden is "undue", but the only abortion restriction ruled unconstitutional in Casey was a spousal notification requirement. In other words, the kind of burden that would affect someone with the same rough socio-economic status as Sandra Day O'Connor is "undue", whereas rules that can be evaded by those with enough resources are not "undue". In other words the understanding among elite Republicans is that their own [ selves / wives / daughters / mistresses ] will always have the wherewithal to either travel to some jurisdiction where abortion is still legal or obtain a grey-market abortion from a sympathetic and/or bribeable doctor.
A huge swathe of women - specifically white evangelical women in particular - vote specifically for anti-abortion candidates. I think you underestimate the extent to which women on the Religious Right vote against their own interests. They do not see abortion as something necessary or that would affect them.
About women on the religious right voting against their own interests: it's remarkable to me how often people presume to know what others' interests are.
But he didn't say moderate/swing voters, he said suburban Republican-voting women. That certainly includes much of the women on the Religious Right. If he meant moderate/swing voters, fair enough - but that's not what was said.
If you're someone who can get pregnant, voting to ban abortion is voting against your interests. Nobody who can get pregnant can guarantee that they won't need an abortion - and many of these laws exclude situations like pregnancy resulting from rape.
If you are a person who can get pregnant, and have decided that you would not have an abortion on religious / ethical grounds, even if you were raped, then you have decided that you will never "need" an abortion - and you quite probably also assert that nobody else "needs" an abortion either.
To circle back to @Curiosity killed's earlier observation it's not just abortion itself but the criminalizing of anything that could potentially interfere with a pregnancy that's going to cause a lot of problems. For example, American doctors are already pretty skittish about treating anyone who might possibly be pregnant, sometimes requiring a negative pregnancy test before doing anything other than a routine physical. That's just to avoid malpractice suits. Think how much more reluctant they'll be to perform any kind of treatment on women when there are potential criminal penalties involved.
But of course we've already been alerted to a consequence of the law in Texas which is that even non-viable and potentially dangerous pregnancies can't be terminated unless the threat to the pregnant person is imminent. Any person who might find themselves pregnant could be in that situation, and end up dead as a result (as certainly happened in Ireland before the ban there was lifted).
Sure. And I suspect that most people think "that won't happen to me".
At some level, this comes back to a question of how people value women vs how they value a foetus. Currently in the US, the ratio of elective abortions to live births is about 1:4. The number of dangerous pregnancies that require abortion is a lot smaller than that.
These suburban women who vote against abortion, who Pomona says are voting against their own interest, think they are saving babies. We can rehash all the arguments that say that banning abortion doesn't actually do that, but that's not relevant to the intent of these women. If you posed the question as "would you save 1,000 babies, or 10,000 babies, at the cost of one woman's life?" then they'd tell you "yes, of course" - and accept the 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 chance that they might be that woman.
If you think that pregnant people have more rights over their own bodies than their foetus, none of this matters - the pregnant person chooses not to be pregnant any more, and that's it. But the pro-life people don't think that.
I think, darkly, that there are also a population of women who raised kids when they really shouldn't have, and certainly paid for it; but because they suffered through this they think that such suffering should be normalized instead of treated as a flawed decision. Like imagine telling your kid, "Honestly, this family would be in a better place if you hadn't been born."
That observation feels very grim, but I think there's some truth in it.
And for what it's worth, I'm not intending to demonize such people. I find it an easy attitude to empathize with. But I don't think I would say I sympathize. It's not good to build public policy around personal psychology. There are an awful lot of random factors that go into anyone's life.
I would compare it to something like Jehovah's Witnesses refusing blood transfusions. I think most people would see that as making a decision that goes against your own interests.
Might be the difference between perceived and actual interests.
I mean I think they have the right to *say* what their percieved interests are. I don't think that means it's their actual interests.
As has already been said, the wealthy will always have access to abortion anyway.
It would be irrational if the stated policies of the parties I voted for were to also cut services to people worse off than me.
But only because most people think the JW stance on blood is wrong. If most people shared the JW stance that accepting a blood transfusion resulted in spiritual condemnation, then the answer to the question would depend on how you ranked the state of your body vs the state of your soul.
Similarly, the "interests" of a potentially pregnant person aren't necessarily narrowly restricted to the interests of their future health.
So you're the person to decide what their actual interests may be.
And clearly people are wrong, so we as humanity can certainly look back and see humans who made errors in history. It is logical to think that with the U.S. so split at least half of us are wrong about the divisive topics.
You're right - those exact words were not used.
And then I have another friend who said "Well, my mother was in a relationship with a jerk and got pregnant, she had an abortion and left the jerk. Later she married my dad. Without that abortion, no way I'd have ever been born, because she would've been stuck with the jerk."
I think some people build their world out of their own experiences, and generalize.
I tend to pro choice, but I do think there's some complicated stuff going on for pro lifers.
But it's also not what I was talking about. The examples I gave were clearly literal ones in terms of medical emergencies. I'm not saying that someone should be forced to have an abortion - I simply pointed out that every person who can get pregnant is at risk of needing an abortion to survive the pregnancy. That has nothing to do with any decision of mine, it's just medical reality that unfortunately pregnancy is still potentially lethal and there is no way to guarantee that it won't be. As has been pointed out upthread, requiring immediate risk to the pregnant person before an abortion is permitted means that this can potentially be too late since 'immediate' is open to interpretation.
I am a bit surprised that this concept - that dying due to problems in pregnancy, because of lack of abortion access, is contrary to the interests of people who can get pregnant - is controversial. Do you think that if someone is willing to die rather than have a medically necessary abortion, that is actually in that person's best interests? I'm not saying that they shouldn't have the legal right to do so, literally just saying that it's against their own interests to die. It seems quite odd to suggest that because the patient thinks so, it actually *is* in their interests to die unnecessarily?
I do see that a person may well be willing to die rather than have an abortion, and that is very much the decision of that particular person. That person could well believe that such a decision is in their best interests. If they believe that, who am I to say otherwise?
But there is more at stake here. If the court decides to allow the states to limit the right to an abortion, what other rights could be on the chopping block again? School Desegregation? Miranda Rights (the right to have an attorney present when questioned)? Equal Marriage? It's more than just abortion that is at stake, many other individual rights could be impacted as well.
(It's also worth noting that the number of nonwhite Evangelicals in the USA is steadily increasing, and many of them come from culturally conservative backgrounds as well.)
In which case "best interests" and "desires" are indistinguishable. Which seems counterintuitive.
Possible, but rather begs the question of why they've changed their "label", and so many in a short time. Presumably part of it is disgust at the way evangelical leaders were willing to wave away every Trump misdeed and willingly endorse a serial adulterer. That may or may not trigger a broader awakening to the way the GOP and evangelical leaders have worked together to corrupt the Gospel and focus it on policing sexual behaviour.
This statement is true, and we have existence proofs of it in the real world, at least one specific case of which has been mentioned in this thread.
But you extrapolated from this statement to the statement "a person who can get pregnant voting against abortion is voting against their own interests", which makes some quite large assumptions.
Practically all abortions in the UK are carried out on the grounds that the health of the mother is at risk with a continued pregnancy. That's the sort of statement that is technically true, but misleading: what the UK effectively has is abortion available to anyone who wants one, and the statement that being pregnant is always more risky than not being pregnant is one that is always true.
So people who do want to ban elective abortion but allow it in cases where there's a genuine serious health risk involved can't use the sort of language the UK has. I'm not sure we could come up with a form of wording that didn't allow general access to abortion like the UK, but didn't result in some deaths in rare borderline cases.
And that being the case, a person who thinks that supporting elective abortion is a major sin could reasonably assert that it is in the best interests of their soul to accept the small risk that they might become pregnant, develop complications, not be permitted an abortion, and die as a consequence, if they prevented thousands of elective abortions by doing so.
In part this is because since the 2016 election "evangelical" (and especially "white evangelical") have become synonymous with "partisan Republican". The number of self-identified "evangelicals" who claim their church attendance is once per month or less has also risen sharply since 2016, so I think what we're seeing is a lot of folks claiming the evangelical label for political reasons and a lot of former self-identified evangelicals eschewing the label as it becomes more about politics and less about religion. If this is so then it's not so much that self-identified evangelicals oppose legalized abortion as it is people who oppose abortion self-identifying as evangelical for that reason.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473
Yes, Alito (or most likely whichever of his clerks was assigned the duty of writing the rough draft of this opinion) uses some very tendentious and unpersuasive arguments about how the Constitution doesn't explicitly mention abortion, therefore that right does not have long standing in the U.S. understanding of rights. (I'd like to know where the dividing line is on "long standing". Half a century apparently isn't enough. My suspicion is that the dividing line is somewhere around 1858.) At any rate the U.S. Constitution also doesn't explicitly mention inter-racial marriage (goodbye Loving), let alone marriage in general. Nor sex (au revoir, Lawrence v. Texas). Or contraception (so long, Eisenstadt and Griswold!)
At any rate, the conservative majority on SCOTUS no longer seems to feel the need to back up their opinions with reasoning, facts, or the law. This flimsy bit of middle-school debate club text is apparently sufficient for the high court.
1. Total number of abortions
2. Number of abortions where the pregnancy arose from rape or abuse
3. Number of abortions where the mother's physical health was at risk
4. Number of abortions where the mother's mental/emotional/physiological health is at risk
5. Number of abortions where there are serious health issues with the foetus
And what would those statistics mean if we had them?
By construction, all abortions in the UK will indicate one of these things, because those are the legal grounds on which an abortion may occur. The vast majority of abortions are carried out on one of the first two grounds listed here.
Both are true by construction - carrying a pregnancy to term always poses increased health risks to the mother as compared to an abortion, and forcing someone who doesn't want to be pregnant to carry a child to term is always an elevated mental health risk.
So I'm not sure what you want to do with these numbers, but they won't say anything useful.
First off, I'm sorry to hear that your computer doesn't allow you to use Google or any other search engine. It must be really inconvenient.
Second, can you clarify what the distinction is between "physical health" and "physiological health"? The terms seem synonymous in normal usage as I'm familiar with it, but maybe it's a Pond Difference.
Third, what do you mean by "at risk"? Carrying a pregnancy to full term is an inherently risky thing, even without any known pre-existing medical complications. A medically or surgically induced abortion is always less risky than a full term pregnancy so in that sense 100% of abortions occur in situations where the mother's physical/physiological health is "at risk".
[ x-posted with @Leorning Cniht ]