And getting an ultrasound prior to an abortion has been at least preliminarily found constitutional by the Fifth Circuit; the Supremes have not addressed it.
How can you possibly say I have no respect for the law?
No. As a Catholic, I don’t regard Genesis as a literal account of the beginning of man, for one thing. Even if I did, it would be my first assumption that Adam was sui generis in this regard, and that future humans, born of woman rather than created directly by God, had a different method of becoming living souls.
And if you found out you WERE diseased, I trust you would not appreciate a government-mandated lecture on the history and biology of the microbe to be delivered before you could get your antibiotics.
I might or might not appreciate it – but if the legislature passed and the governor signed a bill mandating this, I’d certainly not try to claim it was somehow invalid.
Bricker, your strategy appears to pretend that all we are talking about is the usefulness of ultrasound as medical procedure. As if you could justify all of these obnoxious hassles if you can just shoe-horn a reasonable doubt in place. Failing that, well, its legal, so there.
But the medical professionals have spoken, loud and clear. Referenced above, to an exhaustive degree. This is an effort to make getting a safe and clean abortion more difficult. If you can look me in the monitor and bat big brown innocent eyes and tell me that you believe that the motivation for these laws is the well-being of the mother, I will be, once again, astonished at the level of mendacity you are capable of embracing.
But what I’m expecting to get is a rewarmed serving of voting rights, that even if the motivation for the law is utterly reprehensible, so long as you can find even the slightest justification, you can convince yourself that a good thing blossomed from evil intent.
Would you be so accommodating if the state implemented a one child policy and mandated forced abortions on violators? Many see this as a gross violation of basic human rights, whether or not it was passed by a legislature and signed by a governor.
But you know, of course, that “I cannot imagine X existing” is not a valid argument that “X does not exist.” You must have some other assumptions implicit in this argument. What are they?
I have never really thought about the issue the way I’m about to frame it, but here goes.
I don’t think the gov’t has the right to require that a particular person or kind of person consume a particular kind of information. (There are probably exceptions to this, so that can be one direction to go in the discussion). The gov’t has the right to make certain information generally available, but not to require that particular classes make use of that information.
Well, that’s the view. What legal or philosophical arguments against (or outright counterexamples) are there?
Some large percentage (I want to say it’s over half but can’t find the cite ATM) of fertilized eggs never implant, and die a few days later. This is definitely a death from natural causes. But the significance of this fact is that very nearly zero anti-abortion people will feel even a little bit sad about it. People are dying around them every day (on their view) and sure, there’s nothing we can really do about it, but shouldn’t this at least be a cause for sadness or regret?
Will anti-abortion people be all for doing what we can to go in there and save those unimplanted zygotes should the tech ever be available?
Oh, I’m not claiming the law is invalid. I sure it crossed the right i’s and dotted all its t’s. It may well represent a perfectly-formatted, properly procedured, perfectly legal piece of immoral governmental intrusion into the lives of individuals.
Actually, there are numerous examples. The government can mandate that certain information be taught in various classes. The government can require driver’s education prior to handing out licenses. Possibly also education on gun-handling for similar reasons. I gather one cannot get a law license or a medical license or various other licenses without being exposed to certain information, though standards vary by venue.
If we’re going to use the term “rational basis” as anything other than a buzzword meaning “the legislature says so”, one can see the rational basis of requiring doctors to know what a kidney is, for example, or drivers know what a yield sign looks like, or that in order to get a high-school diploma, a student must have been shown what arithmetic is.
The rational aspect of making a pregnant woman undergo an ultrasound as a prelude to terminating that pregnancy escapes me. If she wants an ultrasound, fine. If her doctor honestly believes it would be medically useful, fine. Why is government involved?
Yes, I know it’s a coercive ploy. I was being Socratic.
As for tobacco warnings, the tobacco companies analogous position is that of the doctor who must perform a service before delivering to the smoker/pregnant woman what the smoker/pregnant woman really wants.
It’s an icky analogy on several levels, but there you go.
Heck, history and traditions get slapped down by the courts quite a bit. I can see them letting a one-child policy slide or, more specifically, it’s within their discretion to let it, just as we recognize it’s within the discretion of a legislature to pass laws that cause more harm than good.
This is one of those laws.