The “actual issue at hand” is a bunch of misinformation and ignorance being spread by Slate about what the effects of the law. That’s what I “prefer to fixate on knocking down”: the ignorance of Dopers.
You’re certainly free to share how you interpret it and if / why you think that interpretation is superior. Others are free to point out when your interpretation is at odds with precedent.
You want a cite for something the law doesn’t say? I’ve already provided a direct link to the law. It does not say that women can be sentenced to death for having an abortion.
ETA: ninja’d by UV, but that Slate article in the OP is still horseshit.
Perhaps you could explain how an embryo/fetus/baby can be considered a natural person ONLY if it was conceived through consensual sex by too people who are not too closely related to marry each other. If rape or incest results in a pregnancy, that embryo/fetus/baby is not a natural person?
This isn’t a gotcha. I think you thought you answered my question, but you did not. I didn’t ask if you thought this law was better than the status quo ante. I assumed you did. And it does not mean you oppose the law entirely if you don’t approve of one part of it. I’ve noted many times when others have criticized you for sidestepping questions. I’m giving you a chance to avoid doing so here.
It sounded to me like the classification of a fetus as a natural person conferred certain protections and incurred specific penalties if one were to cause death of such, whether the doctor who performs an abortion or a women who induces one. Is that not the case? I’m relieved to hear it, in that case.
Again, I read the law. The sticking points arise from the law going to great lengths to declare that as soon as an embryo has a detectable heartbeat, it is a “natural person” and has the right to Equal Protection as guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment. It even quotes the Fourteenth to make this very clear.Yet at the same time, the law denies equal protection to embryos/fetuses/unborn that were conceived as a result of rape or incest. So on the one hand, you have embryos who are entitled to a form of child support and who count as dependents for state income tax deductions, yet on the other hand, you have embryos (“natural persons”) who are denied equal protection due to circumstances beyond their–and in the case of rapes, the women’s–control.
I also find it interesting that the law determines that personhood begins when a heartbeat is detectable, not when the heart actually begins to beat. That, of course, is a practical matter. Yet if the heartbeat is used as the determination of personhood, it would make sense to declare that natural personhood even earlier, at 3 weeks + 1 day. The issue of personhood is complex. The law both tries to simplify it and cover it completely and fails at both, as it was bound to do.
Speaking as a former pro-lifer, I think it’s put up or shut up time. Forty years is a long time to be sacrificing everything for a cause and failing.
The GOP and the Federalist Society can either overturn Roe, which will weaken the part of their coalition that thought abortion would still be there for them; or they can reveal that they’re just playing the churchgoing rubes. Either way, the Reagan-Bush GOP coalition loses somebody.
I have a pretty good idea who is supposed to step in to replace the lost voters. I’m not sure which existing camp the GOP are cutting out in favor of the new race realist / neo-fascist constituency, but it may not matter. Get yourself enough stormtroopers, and you don’t *need *a majority anymore.
Not quite accurate. If you re-read the law, it defines all unborn children/fetuses/embryos as “natural persons” and as part of Georgia law bestows the protections of the 14th amendment on them. It states that medical science has progressed since Roe and Casey that unborn children are “living persons” perhaps foreshadowing an eventual argument to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe.
But Georgia is bound by federal case law, most importantly Roe, and cannot take the logical conclusion of its personhood argument and say: no abortions. So it enacts a lesser scheme that it will argue in court complies with Roe and Casey. No abortions after a detectable heartbeat at all except for those listed reasons, and no abortions from heartbeat detection until 20 weeks except for rape and incest.
Nothing says that statutes have to be internally consistent. I don’t see anything terribly wrong with a state, for example, granting personhood from the moment of fertilization yet also recognizing a woman’s right to choose and stating that abortion is still legal up to 36 weeks for any reason. It is not logically consistent, but it doesn’t need to be; it can be a recognition of competing values.
Maybe it doesn’t, if this is just a feel-good law to make the base happy and there is no intention of bothering to enforce it. Trouble is, there’s quite a difference between a pregnancy ending at 22+ weeks and one that ends at 8 weeks, in that the former is likely to have some medical records attached, i.e. the woman sought care from an OB/GYN at some point because she knew was pregnant and wanted the pregnancy to continue (i.e. she was not seeking to terminate it). I expect any reasonable law-enforcement officer who is told the woman miscarried will accept this on its face. Compare that to a woman who was 8 weeks pregnant and now isn’t. If there’s no positive indication that she wanted the pregnancy to continue, i.e. no prenatal medical appointments, can an law-enforcement officer demand she prove she didn’t quietly get an abortion?
Of course, that’s putting aside the larger issue of why this should be a law-enforcement issue at all. Heck, Georgia is a stand-your-ground state, which compels no duty to retreat on someone who, say, finds an unwanted trespasser on one’s land. I’m vaguely hoping a Georgia woman tries to apply this argument to the greater intrusion posed by an unwanted trespasser in one’s body, and then we’ll get to see just how much respect the state actually has for individual freedom.
In 2014 Georgiatried to charge a woman for murder after a miscarriage in the 2nd trimester. She had taken some abortifacient pills.
The prosecutor later determined that mothers were immune from punishment under the law of the time. The new law closes that loophole. Mothers are now liable for murder or manslaughter charges depending on whether someone else thinks their action caused the death of their fetus.
Further, they are liable to civil action to some other party acting as parent who can recovery damages for the value of the lost “child”. So we’d allow, say, a rapist in jail to use the threat of lawsuit against a woman to force her to give birth to his child - which presumably she’d be on the hook for parental duties as well. This is what the law allows for.
The scary thing is the law leaves a wide interpretation of how a mother would cause her own miscarriage. Someone seen having a glass of wine or a cigarette, or going for a jog, and then has an unrelated miscarriage later, could find themselves on the hook for a murder charge if a crazy mother-in-law pursues it. Keeping in mind that fetuses are now people, we now have the risk of a crazy mother-in-law and a non-medical prosecutor deciding whether a woman killed her child with a cigarette, a glass of wine, or vigorous exercise.
Some will of course ask “where did this actually happen” and my response would be that it doesn’t matter. If the law allows a ridiculous and unconscionable outcome, then it’s a ridiculous and unconscionable law.
There’s also the case of Christine Taylor, of Iowa, who was arrested and nearly prosecuted for falling down stairs.
But specific examples and cites aren’t really necessary because it’s basic common sense that these laws are part of a Taliban-ish movement to debase women by turning their bodies into potential crime scenes. Imagine a wife and husband having to go through the grief of coming back from a hospital after a miscarriage, and then have emotionless detectives asking them questions about whether they did anything to cause their baby’s death.
FFS, there’s now a law in Texas that would make abortion capital murder and thus make mothers themselves subject to execution.
There’s a horse race among conservative states to see which legislature can introduce the most extreme anti-abortion bill. In all cases, abortion is a smokescreen for the real objective, which is to restore a kind of plutocratic society based on patriarchal and extremist values.
For the people claiming that the law doesn’t specifically punish the woman for having an abortion after the heartbeat is detected, can you address the personhood provisions of the law? It seems to me that if a fetus is a person with 14th amendment rights, then killing that person would come with punishment. Leaving the state to kill that person and then returning would also be punished.
I’m not a lawyer. But, if the law defines a non-rape fetus as a person, then it doesn’t have to lay out all the rest of it – the other implications come along with personhood.
Ultravires, regarding the rape and incest exception especially, can those fetuses be aborted any time? Are they never granted personhood? How about after birth?
The issue at hand is not your jihad against liberals. The issue at hand is an abortion law, and whether it it good or not. Cherry-picking a couple arguments and pretending that if you disprove one, every other argument that the other side has thrown out is wrong is a chickenshit debate.
So when I ask whether you will be consistent with how you assess the constitutionality of laws, you are asserting that you will pick and choose how you will answer that question? Just trying to be clear here.
There’s millions of lawyers in this country, and I’m sure you can find a reputable expert who explains in some detail that your reading of the law is correct. Instead, we just have you repeating that you read the law, and that Slate is incorrect. You ask others for cites all the time; you should provide cites that your reading is correct. You may be right, who knows? But you have provided no reason whatsoever for anyone to listen to your opinion.
IANAL either, but let’s start with this argument because it’s been repeated several times and I think it’s obviously wrong. Georgia doesn’t have a law against leaving the state to murder a person. If you traveled to New York with a two-year-old in tow, which every state in the Union recognizes as a person, and then murdered that two-year-old in New York, Georgia could not prosecute you for the murder. New York would have to do that. That same logic would apply to an unborn child, except that New York would not prosecute you for it.
Bob needs a kidney, his identical twin brother Doug is a perfect match. Even though it’s a relatively safe medical procedure, and a grown man’s, life, (and the shape of his family’s future!), hangs in the balance, Doug’s rock solid body autonomy insures without question, that no one, not even the state, can force him to give his kidney.
His right to body autonomy extends beyond his lifetime and applies even to his corpse. He has to consent for his organs to be taken.
But if Bob impregnates Anne, at six weeks in, quite possibly before she knows she’s pregnant, she has lost all right to body autonomy? She now has no say in any medical risk her body undergoes, or the shape of her family and future?
So, doesn’t it come down to: do all people have full body autonomy? Or just men?
Per Trump and many of his supporters, just men, quite obviously. From pussy grabbing to jailing women for doing certain things to their bodies, it’s quite clear how this administration and many of its supporters view women. They’re okay with women not being in control of their bodies. This is what they want.
I always ask the anti-abortion folks I talk to if they would like to go back to the world like it was before abortion was legal. When men could beat their wives and children, use “I couldn’t help myself” as an excuse for rape, sexually harass women, fire a pregnant single woman, yada, yada, yada. So far, nobody has answered yes.