Hey, no skin of my nose. There are no abortion laws where I live so I’m as happy as a pig in shit. I’m just saying that as a man that seems to be fairly big on individual liberty as well as fiscal conservatism you seem quick to want to impose on an individual’s pocket book when a similar more fiscally conservative method may yield similar results.
But you are of course correct. It is just my opinion and there is no reason to favour my opinion over yours (unless you wish to provide informed consent to the prospective mother without spending personal and state resources without at least studying to see if they could be better spent elsewhere).
“You are old,” said the youth, “And your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
Pray, how did you manage to do it?”
“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.”
from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
This is not a correct statement of the law. Casey says the state has an interest in the life of the fetus from the outset of the pregnancy. It is only after viability that this interest is strong enough to restrict abortion.
Nice. Just wait until the doctors have to describe the features of the fetus to a horrified ectopically-pregnant woman, telling her about the adorable button nose of the developing baby that’s threatening her very life, just because some politicians think they understand medically-“necessary” procedures better than doctors. Or to a woman whose late-term pregnancy is done because her baby has died inside her. But hey, go with that compassion, instead of letting doctors make their own judgement calls about what their patients do and do not need to hear.
Any potential third in this situation is a child of the mother. Generally, parents can make legal and medical decisions for their children. Seeing that the courts have determined that abortion is an acceptable and legal medical procedure for a mother and doctor to perform, why is it necessary that the state supersede the pregnant mother’s rights in this instance? And in what other instances can the state supersede the pregnant mother’s rights to make medical decisions regarding her body and her unborn child?
There are only three people involved if the third is Scott Walker. Wisconsin doesn’t have a foetal personhood statute or amendment (for whatever dubious value such a thing might have.)
I also note that the lack of medical necessity of such a procedure is well settled*:
I find this particularly ironic in light of the stated legislative purposes behind the enactment:
One would think that legislation truly intended to “foster the development of standards of professional conduct” would not mandate that existing standards of conduct be ignored.
[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
This is not a correct statement of the law. Casey says the state has an interest in the life of the fetus from the outset of the pregnancy.
[/QUOTE]
Casey does not say that the foetus is a person, though. Note the use of the language “profound interest in potential life.”
Casey recognizes the state’s interest in the fetus’s imminent personhood from the outset of the pregnancy. So it is not wrong to say the state may consider three people: the mother, the doctor, and the future person that is the fetus.
Casey also rejects any regulations that place an “undue burden” on the mother. I think this clearly fall sin that category.
This is just another way for the anti-abortion side to try and weaken abortion law. I can’t blame them for trying, but no objective person can defend this on legal grounds under current case law.
States have plenary authority. They may legislate on any subject they please, so long as their legislation does not contravene the federal government’s laws (assuming such laws are correctly in furtherance of the powers granted under the federal constitution) or the guarantees in the constitution itself.
So the key question then becomes: under Roe and its progeny, is this kind of mandate permissible? The closest case on point is, in my view, Gonzales v. Carhart, in which the Supreme Court upheld the Congressional ban on partial-birth abortion. As the New England Journal of Medicine said of that ruling:
So we see that Congress does have the constitutional power to replace medical judgement with legislative judgement.
And if Congress, then why not a state legislature, which after all has no constraints on its areas of legislative reach in the way Congress does?
A more restrictive ultrasound bill was passed in Texas in 2011, mandating that abortion providers play an audible heartbeat of the unborn child for the mother seeking abortion, as well as a detailed description of the unborn child in the sonogram. That law was challenged, and the Fifth Circuit dissolved in injunction against it (Texas Medical Providers v. Lakey, 667 F. 3d 570 (2012)), on the grounds that success on the merits was unlikely.
I fear I may have inadvertently misled the reader when I posted about the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposition to the legislation. While that was not in error, it is far from complete. According to our good friends over at ThinkProgress
Oh, you’re not white. How reassuring… Good god, man. Learn to read. Did you think I somehow believed you personally were one of the legislators enacting these draconian measures to control women? Or that your non-whiteness changes my opinion of your ilk one iota?
And if you’d read my post, you’d have seen that I was quoting you. Since you seem to be lost in your conservative fog to the point that you retain no knowledge of what you yourself posted, here - I’ll quote you again:
Actually, what would stop abortion providers from declaring every abortion that comes in an emergency, if this allows them to sidestep the ultrasound requirement? If one side is playing dirty, why can’t the other?