Lest any doubts remain, this is how authoritarianism and fascism become mainstream in an ostensibly free democratic society:
Restrict the ability of an identifiable segment of a population to exercise previously well established civil/personal rights.
Stack the courts and key government administrations to oppose any legal challenge to ensure overturn of standing law in favor of newly imposed restrictions.
Openly declare contempt for legal precedent and standing law by ignoring it entirely.
Trivialize and dismiss warnings of obviously dangerous downstream consequences of all of the above as mere alarmist “nonsense”.
This right here is how some of the worst recorded events of human history repeat themselves.
Georgia banning most abortions after six weeks is so far down the list of “worst recorded events of human history” that I can’t help but laugh at your silly post.
As to the idea that this law (or some hypothetical future state law in Georgia or some other state) would make it illegal to travel to another state to get an abortion:
This was, in fact, an abortion case; since it was about advertisements in Virginia newspapers, it had First Amendment implications which would not necessarily go away if the Supreme Court struck down the “right to privacy”-based Roe and other decisions, but also wouldn’t necessarily apply to some hypothetical “traveling for an abortion”/“conspiring to help someone else travel for an abortion” case. However, Bigelow does also seem to pretty clearly state (if only in passing) that a state may not “prevent its residents from traveling to [another state] to obtain [abortion] services or, as the State conceded, prosecute them for going there” (and there seems to be a string of precedents about that). Again, that statement likely falls outside the rationale for Roe and the other abortion-rights decisions, and it therefore seems to me that SCOTUS would have to strike down more than just abortion rights to permit a state to prosecute its citizens merely for traveling to another state to do something that is legal in that other state (or even for “conspiring” to assist its citizens in traveling to another state to do something that is legal in that other state).
HurricaneDitka isn’t the only person to slog through the law. I did. Here are some oddities/points of interest:
1.The law is in fact very different from the previous law:
To amend Chapter 2 of Title 1 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to persons and their rights, so as to provide that natural persons include an unborn child; to provide that such unborn children shall be included in certain population based determinations… (bolding mine.)
Note that unborn children will be counted in population-based determinations. I assume all physicians will have to report any pregnancy of over 6 weeks to some state government agency so it can be counted as part of the population. Of course, those women who don’t seek medical care until 8 weeks or after will make those numbers impossible to determine.
The law DOES allow for abortions before 20 weeks in cases where pregnancies are the result of rape or incest. This seems contradictory. If ALL embryos/fetuses with detectable heartbeats are “natural persons,” then why are these embryos/fetuses excluded from that definition?
The law does allow exceptions for when the life of the mother is at stake or the fetus is not viable, but not for the cases in which the woman is suicidal. So she can’t have an abortion, but if a woman kills herself and therefore the fetus–two natural persons dead–apparently that’s preferable to that woman having an abortion.
Fathers will pay child support for embryos/fetuses: Section 5 of the bill amends current Georgia law to include embryos/fetuses, though the law restricts such support to
Of course, paternity can’t be determined until after birth.
Rick Kitchen: Yes.
HurricaneDitka, you said you read the law and “haven’t found anything yet I object to.” I assume that includes the exclusion for rape and incest, even though such embryos/fetuses are not excluded from the definition of “natural persons”?
They are chickenshit questions, because you and I know that you’d prefer to fixate on knocking down a particular claim without debating the actual issue at hand.
So for consistency of arguments as long as you and I choose to participate on this board: your definition of the term “constitutional” relates only to one’s own reading and interpretation of the Constitution, without regard to precedent?
So if my interpretation of a particular law is at odds with precedent, I’m free to say that my interpretation is better than the Supreme Court’s (at least until the Court rules specifically on my take on the issue) and you won’t challenge me on that?
The quality of your argument would be much inproved if you provided your own cite debunking Slate. Seeing as how you are asking people to support their assertions, you should support your own.
so how long until all these laws are struck down by SCOUTS in such a way that it leaves a "we’ve made our decision on this back in the 70s so quit trying to go around it " mark ?
The SCOTUS certainly can decide a case that reverses a previous decision. For example they once said it was OK to outlaw gay sex but then they ruled it was not OK. And of course later ruled that gay marriage cannot be prevented by a state.
I think they’re hoping to slant the SCOTUS to the degree that the entire hyperconservative platform can be made federal law, and fuck what the populace in general wants.
It’s not even really a secret - there’s a substantial slab of those who voted for Trump whose unsummarized reason for doing so was “judges”.
I don’t know but I’m scratching my head over this one:
I’m scratching my head over what this means. Population based determinations? For like… what? Political representation? Like a 3/5 compromise, but instead it’s 5/5?
Color me shocked that you would consider the restriction of women’s reproductive rights a laughing matter. Even less shocking is your disingenuous interpretation and response to what I actually said. Do people IRL let you get away with this bullshit?
We shouldn’t be shocked by this kind of thing any more. Some folks just prove over and over again that they don’t think women should have full control of their own bodies.
There was a court case in 1992 where conservative appointees held an 8-1 advantage. The lone liberal appointee sided with the dissent in Roe V Wade. If you are just counting noses by political lean and previous decisions abortion should have been illegal in the US for decades now. By typical approach to counting votes we could have expected a unanimous overturning of Roe.
That’s not what happened. That court produced a plurality opinion that upheld the central finding of Roe v Wade. It did create the “undue burden” standard for regulation and restriction of abortion that’s been behind most of the big abortion cases we’ve seen since. See Planned Parenthood v Casey
An older Atlantic article asks “URL=“What Is a Conservative Judge? - The Atlantic”]What Is a Conservative Judge?” The label tends to lump together both judges who might be expected to decide differently when there is an existing precedent for a decision that seems liberal. Counting noses by who appointed them or even by their decisions on unrelated cases without long held precedent is filled with the possibility of errors.
Sure – but I would suggest that posters should pick a horse and ride it. If they want to define “constitutionality” as the state of the law as informed by case law, then that’s perfectly fair. If they want to define “constitutionality” as their own opinion of the Constitution while criticizing the case law as being inconsistent with their reading, I can see that in some circumstances.
But to arbitrarily decide that one’s self can abide by the second definition while criticizing others for holding the first (or vice versa) sis not arguing in good faith in debates that touch on the law.
People IRL don’t generally engage in the sort of extreme hyperbole you have here. It’s not the restrictions that’s a laughing matter, it’s your post. Some day I hope I find you in a thread on gun control so I can quote your words back to you.
I read the whole law. Nothing in there says it is illegal to leave the state to have an abortion, that habeas corpus will be available for unborn children, or that life imprisonment for the death penalty will be available punishments for women having abortions, or that a woman can be jailed for a miscarriage.
The law leaves the current penalty for an illegal abortion intact: the doctor, not the woman can get 1 to 10 years in prison, same as before:
The Slate article the OP quoted seems like a liberal horror list created by very bad misunderstandings of how the law works and not from anything in the text of the law itself.
it’s my understanding that Georgia law has generally prohibited abortions after a certain point in pregnancy (recently, 22 weeks), and yet, I’m unaware of a single case of a woman in Georgia who had a miscarriage after that point in her pregnancy being jailed for it. Moving that point forward to ~6 weeks (which is what HB 481 did) does not seem to me to pose any additional danger of women being jailed for miscarriages.
Providing examples of women jailed for miscarriages would go a long ways towards justifying asahi and your concerns.