When can X make Y support X?
Sorry, but this is all bullshit. The Court ruled on the Constitutionality of abortion restrictiosn. It’s the Court’s job to decide whether laws are Constitutional. The court had previously found in Griswold that a right to privacy exists in the Constitution and then decided in Roe restrictions on abortion violate that right. Roe did not create any laws, it struck laws down. There is no law saying “you are allowed to terminate pregnancies,” there is a Supreme Court ruling saying it’s unconstutional for states to legislate against it. It’s not “legislating from the bench” to strike down unconstitutional laws. It’s the court’s JOB to do that. The Supreme Court IS one of the three branches of government, and it protects the Constitution against trhe Legislative and Executive branches.
This is absolutely, factually false.
And so it is. Every Safe Haven law I have found says that the PARENT of a newborn infant may drop it off at a designated location. How would you rework that to be more “fair” to men? Under Safe Haven law a father has exactly the same rights as a mother.
Are you under the impression that only a woman can be the parent of a newborn? If so, get thee to a dictionary. Only a woman can be pregnant, but both men and women can be parents. Neither the law nor nature prevents a man from exercising his Safe Haven rights.
If a mother wants to leave a newborn at a Safe Haven location within the designated time frame, it is both legal AND possible for her to do so.
If a father wants to leave a newborn at a Safe Haven location within the designated time frame, it is both legal AND possible for him to do so.
That’s as equal as equal can be.
Reading Safe Haven Laws I see that they do vary and in a few states it must be the mother who surrenders the child. I think the concern is that the mother can surrender the child without even consulting the father and offering him a chance at custody. Fortunately most states seem to have a window of opportunity where a parent can reclaim a surrendered child. In several states it’s pretty short {30 days} which must result in some fathers not even knowing their child has been surrendered until the window is gone. That’s another unavoidable consequence of biology. Women don’t have to tell men they’re pregnant and men can have children they don’t know about.
Personally I think there are far more cases of men trying to avoid parental responsibilities than men who are being kept from parental responsibilities they want.
No privacy issue existed? How do you come by that conclusion?
Yes.
The viewpoint I’m discussing is the one that says “Prohibitions against abortion are wrong because they take away a woman’s control of her own body.” You are making part of my point for me, by pointing out that just because a law takes away someone’s control of their own body, that doesn’t make it a bad law. Something else is required to make it a bad law. Your suggestion is that what is required is that the “point” of the law be to take control of someone’s body. Something that makes a law okay–even if it interferes with someone’s control over their own body–is if its “point” involves the rights of individuals whine their actions affect others.
I am not sure how to know what the “point” of a law is, but I do agree that it is permissible for a law to interfere with someone’s control over their body as long as that interference amounts to the protection of others’ rights.
But no anti-abortion advocate will agree with you that the “point” of prohibition laws is to take away control from people’s bodies. Rather, they think the “point” is exactly what it is you say makes a body-control-interfering law permissible–to protect the rights of others.
But like I said, I don’t know how to discover the “point” of a law. (All I know how to do is estimate its consequences.) Do you know of a way to discover whether a law’s “point” is to take away bodily control, and is not to protect others’ rights?
I suppose if there is no one there whose rights are being protected, it’s implausible that the law’s point is to protect rights. (Unless its framers are under the influence of a hallucination. Then isn’t its point indeed of the kind that makes the law benign? And so isn’t what’s wrong with such a law not its “point” but something else? Its disconnect from reality or something?)
Anyway my original point remains. Just saying “The law is wrong because it interferes with a woman’s control of her body” isn’t enough–because all laws interfere with people’s control of their body. You agree, and you supply something in addition to such interference. Namely, you supply the notion of a law’s “point.” It looks to me like putting things this way leads the discussion inevitably to the metaphysics of fetal personhood, and that’s exactly the quagmire I think people are hoping to avoid when they try to boil it down to “a woman’s control over her body.”
I think you’re making an incredibly sophist argument.
Then presumably you think there’s an error in the argument somewhere. (A sophistical argument doesn’t necessarily contain an argument, but it can contain one and I don’t see what point there would be in calling an argument sophistical if it doesn’t have any errors in it. Otherwise, just accept the conclusion and move on.)
So where’s the error?
A sophistical argument is an argument made independent of any motivation to discover the truth about the matter being argued. To call my argument sophistical is to comment on my motivations in making the argument. But it seems much more productive and useful to comment on the argument rather than on my motivations for making it.
But if you’d like, also, to argue about my motivations, I’m interested. Why do you think I’m not motivated to discover the truth about the things being discussed in my conversation with you?
Can you explain to me what you mean by saying a law interferes with someone’s control over their body? Can you make it clear to me what this means, in a way that shows that abortion prohibitions do interfere with bodily control, and many other laws do not? Or do you agree with me that bodily control isn’t all there is to this, that what makes abortion prohibitions wrong is something more than the fact that they interfere with someone’s control over her own body?
-Kris
Most laws are about people’s environment and actions, not their bodies. When we start shackling hands for nine months when you steal and your penis for nine months when you rape, then you can complain.
Anti-abortion laws force a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy, even if it affects her negatively. It gives the fetus total control over her body for nine months.
A doctor cannot force you to donate blood, even if you have a rare type and another person will die if you don’t. But we expect woman to donate their wombs for nine months?
I looked at a good number of Safe Haven laws on my own when writing my post above and didn’t see any that specified that only the mother could drop off the baby, but you’re right – according to your link there are four states where this is the case: Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee.
I can understand why those laws are written that way (if one parent winds up stuck with an unwanted infant, it’s usually going to be the mother), but I think they should be changed to make them more fair. Safe Haven laws aren’t meant as a quick and easy alternative to adoption but rather to protect infants who might otherwise be killed or left to die by frightened, desperate parents. It would be rare but certainly not impossible for an unwilling, desperate mother to die in childbirth, commit suicide, or run away, leaving the baby’s likewise unwilling, desperate father to find someone to take care of the baby.
I spelled it out… if you enlist a state-licensed and board-regulated practitioner to preform a proceedure, you have left the realm of privacy.
Now, Diogenes said that was absolutly false, but Diogenes is confusing confidentiality with privacy. There’s a difference.
Man, talk about bullshit. (your words, not mine) Yes, it is the Court’s job to strike down unconstitutional laws, but what the Court did was to proclaim something unconstitutional, that was not unconstitutional. So, are the laws that prohibit one from selling a kidney for profit unconstitutional? How about the laws that prohibit doctors from PRIVATELY prescribing medicinal marijuana?
Yes, the Court did find a privacy issue in Griswold, but Griswold was dealing with the issue of conctracptives. Abortion is not a contraceptive.
In Roe, the Court went to great lengths to contort itself to satisfy a political agenda.
Roe was first argued on December 13, 1971, but plaintiff’s counsel failed to put forth testimony sufficient to sway the Court to overturn the Texas statute on the basis of violating the plaintiff’s right of privacy. But, rather than rule accordingly, the Court gave plaintiff’s counsel another chance to make their case, and remanded the case to be re-argued on October 11, 1972.
In the meantime, the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird came across the Supreme Court’s docket. In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court ruled a Massachusetts law that banned the distribution of contraceptives to single people to be unconstitutional, and while writing the majority opinion, Justice William Brennen buried a bone.
Former Supreme Court Clerk, Edward Lazarus, in his book, “Closed Chambers”, describes the tactic of “burying bones” as the deliberate insertion of words or phrases into court decisions, so they can later be dug up to be used to influence future cases.
Lazarus details Brennen’s insertion into the Eisenstadt opinion a sentence claiming that the privacy right included freedom to decide “whether to bear or beget a child”. Eisenstadt was about begeting, not bearing. There was no inherent privacy violation within Roe, the Court created one.
When Roe v. Wade was re-argued on October 11, 1972, attorneys for Roe cited the Eisenstadt opinion as a precedent and the rest is history.
Because most laws affecting what you do with your body are of the “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose” variety. They control what you do with your body when it presents a risk to other people’s bodies and property. As a fetus isn’t a person and is part of the mother’s body, and is no one’s property, her control over her body via abortion is not impinging on anyone else’s life or property. It’s no different than cutting her hair or fingernails. My husband liking long hair on me does not supersede my right to cut my own hair.
Image there’s a disease that always kills people. Doctors discover that people can be cured of the disease by being hooked up to another person’s body for nine months, then being unhooked. Laws are passed so there is no discrimination against the people being hooked up.
People start volunteering to be hooked up. You get hooked up to diseased person six months into the program and sign a contract agreeing to go through with it.
Three months later, when doctors start unhooking people, most of them are fine. But some of them can’t be unhooked and have to stay hooked up for the rest of their lives. Some of the victims and some of the volunteers die anyway. Some of the victims have become supergenius and sportsmen, while others have become serial killers and cannibals.
You decide you can’t go through the next six months before you are unhooked. Should your person be able to force you to stay hooked up for six months because you signed a contract and he will die if you don’t?
This is the same thing brought up by Cosmodan. Note that what you’ve just said amounts to an agreement with my point that just interfering with someone’s control of their body is not enough to make a law unjust. Something more is needed–on your account, the “something more” that is needed is that the action prohibited doesn’t interfere with others’ rights.
Remember, my original reason for bringing this up was as a corrective to people who think that it suffices just to point out that abortion prohibitions interfere with women’s control of their bodies. That’s not sufficient, because all laws interfere with people’s control over their own bodies. There’s something else about abortion prohibitions wrong. What you and Cosmodan have proposed is that this “something else” is such prohibitions’ failure to protect anyone’s rights.
That proposal brings the discussion into the metaphyiscal quagmire of discussions over fetal personhood.
He should not be able to get an injunction requiring me to stay hooked up to him. The reason for this is not because such an injunction would be interfering with my own control of my body. There are plenty of laws on the books which are perfectly justified and which do allow people to interfere with my control over my own body. (I know you haven’t been convinced of that point yet, but I do not understand what “control over my body is” if laws requiring that I do or not do this or that don’t count as interfering with it.)
Rather, he has no right to my support for other reasons–for example, for the reason that I have not entered into any agreement giving him a right to that support.
Then please explain how confidentiality is much different than privacy.
There are four possible scenarios as I see it:
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Female wants the child. Male does not want the child. Pregnancy not terminated because at least one parent wants the child.
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Female wants the child. Male does not want the child. Pregnancy terminated because at least one parent does NOT want the child.
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Female does not want the child. Male wants the child. Pregnancy not terminated because at least one parent wants the child.
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Female does not want the child. Male wants the child. Pregnancy terminated because at least one parent does NOT want the child.
I know some of these sound preposterous; for example, in my mind, #2 is unthinkable, but for the same reason that #4 probably happens with regularity. (My own assumption, not necessarily based on hard facts.)
The only things I think I can say for sure is these two things:
-that I believe a male should always be INFORMED that he has conceived with a female, whether the conception results in a birth or not.
-the fact that a pregnancy involves impact to a female’s health, while having virtually no effects on a male’s, is the only reason that a female should have greater say in the matter.
As it turns out, I am mostly pro-life anyway. But I just can’t see many ways that abortion can be banned without a massive backlash on so many fronts.
Other laws such as a restraining order are placing some rights over others in a particular situation. The question for abortion laws is what other people are involved and how do we balance those rights. Since the woman bears the physical burden of pregnancy her rights supersede the rights of the father, and grandparents. Anti abortionists want to insist that a fertilized egg is a person with equal rights of protection. The problem is science does not support that premise so then it is a matter of a woman’s right to make certain determinations about her own body.
Put some sperm in storage, get a vasectomy. That’ll teach her who’s boss.