If Roe V. Wade is overturned

Except it’s obvious that they don’t truly think it’s murder. If they did, it would not be OK to leave it up to the states, when you know some states won’t outlaw it. It would obviously be necessary to deal with it at the national level. (And practically everyone on that side would fully support shooting up abortion clinics on a defense of others theory. If they really thought it was murder.)

It’s like the hypothetical fire at the fertility clinic. If you can only carry one, which do you save: the child standing in front of you, or a vessel holding 25 frozen embryos? There’s rhetoric, and then there’s how people actually behave. They don’t match up.

I’ll keep doing what I already do. Vote Democratic during every election. That’s the only reasonable option I have. Technically there are other things I could do, but none that would be particularly effective. I’d be a poor candidate to run for office. I don’t think that my personally protesting is going to accomplish anything. I’m not in the least bit charismatic, and simply lack the ability to convince other people to stop voting GOP and start voting Democratic. So yeah, that’s about the limits of what I can personally accomplish.

TBF, I’m pretty sure that a lot of anti-abortion advocates see what’s happening now as a first step toward a national law. They might also be more open to incremental steps than the left.

The middle ground is that human life begins gradually and make some cutoff in the middle of pregnancy.

That would be what we have now, except that there also is obnoxious legalized red state harassment, such as the Texas sonogram law,

If the Supreme Court rules for Mississippi, and Roberts gets to write the decision, he’ll probably try to sell 15 weeks as the middle ground, while, I’m guessing, Democrats will say Roe was overturned. What swing voters will make of it, I don’t know.

IANAL, but if it’s overturned (which I think it should be), I don’t think the court is going to decide on “when life begins,” nor do I think they will comment on the ethical/moral issues with abortion. I think the court will simply say the SCOTUS does not have authority on the matter, and that it should be left up to the states.

Yeah, they’ll wait until one of the personhood laws shows up on their docket and then say that fetuses have a 14 Amendment right to equal protection or something, and ban it nationwide.

If the court overturns Roe, it has to explain why. Cases at this level are decided to address matters beyond the narrow interests of the litigants, and so their logic and reasoning are usually as important as who actually prevailed.

Roe didn’t arise out of nowhere; it builds on the cases it cites, and makes a case for why those legal principles apply to the abortion issue. And, for years, people have relied upon that argument in conducting applicable legal analysis.

So, it’s not simply a matter of saying that this isn’t something the Supremes have authority over. For one, if that be the case, than they shouldn’t make a ruling in the first place (obviously, they have authority on the matter; the issue is whether these laws interfere with a constitutional right).

But more importantly, if abortion is a state issue, and does not violate a constitutional right, why?

Is it because Roe was wrong that there is a right to privacy inherent in the constitution?

Is it because Roe did correctly identify that a right to privacy exists, but erred by extending that right to this abortion issue?

Or is it because Roe correctly identified that a right to privacy is weighed against the states’ interest in protecting life, but failed to recognize that the state’s compelling interest in protecting life begins at conception, because that is when life begins?

Or is there some other basis?

Because each possible explanation has implications for other cases, other legal issues, and other people.

I believe it’s murder, and I still want it legal

Unless the court goes way out of its way to find that there is no congressional power to regulate abortion, a question not before it in this case, overturning Roe will not “return it to the states” or whatever, but instead unleash additional federal involvement in abortion. Democrats likely don’t and won’t have the votes to do anything any time this decade, but Republicans probably will in 2025 or 2029. (In any case, whether a federal abortion law fits within the commerce clause will be decided by which party passes it. If Democrats somehow manage to “codify Roe,” it will be struck down, and if Republicans impose TRAP laws or even full bans on blue states, it will be upheld as the logical outcome of Gonzales v. Carhart with no Roe v. Wade.)

No it doesn’t. They can do whatever they want. If gets overturned, for now it will be up to the States to decide. A couple of dozen of them will enact a law similar to the Texas one. Then there will be attempts to have States be allowed to outlaw it altogether even for rape victims, then no more Plan B.

I think you’re missing my point- the murder/not murder issue is a binary choice- there’s no Princess Bride-style “mostly dead” concept at play here. It’s all or nothing.

So as a result, any sort of compromise is never going to be acceptable, except in a begrudging, temporary kind of way. To the murder sorts, ANYTHING other than a complete ban is unacceptable, because it’s murder, and not only that, murder of the most defenseless and innocent among us. To the not-murder sorts, any restrictions are seen as interference in a woman’s right to bodily autonomy that aren’t other people’s choice to make.

There is no middle ground there - it’s not like you can draw some sort of compromise- OK before X week, etc… that’s going to be acceptable over the long term, because it’s such a binary choice.

I’m pretty much beyond the point where abortion personally affects me, so moving wouldn’t be a necessity. I’d stay and fight by my vote as I think that would be the most beneficial. I seriously doubt my own state would ban abortions, despite a large number of Catholics in the state, so I don’t really think this would happen, but if it did I would certainly fight it. Might actually get me actively involved in local and state politics in fact.

I’m a widower with two adult sons, neither of whom is in a committed relationship with a woman so I’m not going to be a grandfather anytime soon. My personal Dog In This Fight: I was not born in a country where women are considered Brood Mares for The State, and damned if I am going to live in one if I can help it.

And no, sucker, I ain’t moving to Switzerland.

Well, sure, Thomas can submit a crayon drawing of an abortion monster eating a baby if he’s so inspired, but after half a century of claiming that this is bad law, don’t you expect that the justices will have some legal venting they want to do? Besides, if they don’t articulate their reasoning, it will come across as exactly the type of judicial activism that Roe is said to embody - a decision based solely on a desired result, as opposed to a legal determination derived from sound legal analysis.

I would think that the narrowest overturning would be to say that abortion is simply not within the zone of privacy protected by the constitution. But that invites a question as to how to parse this from other declarations that privacy includes family planning decisions - if your constitutional right to decide whether to have a child exists before intercourse (e.g. the government can’t outlaw contraception), then why does that decision end 16 weeks later, before a baby is born?

Now, the obvious answer is that a life was formed in the interim, and that the state has the right to intrude into privacy interests to protect that life. But that leads us into the declaration that life does indeed begin at conception, opening up interesting questions about when other legal rights may arise in a person’s existence.

There is another train of thought, of course: there is no privacy right inherent in the constitution. That, however, would upend lots of notions of what the government can indeed legislate - such as how to raise your kids.

I also readily concede that there may be other avenues of legal analysis that may be appropriate, or even persuasive.

From my limited review of oral arguments, I believe Justice Barrett has taken issue with this particular part of the Roe decision:
“ The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.”

I believe that Barrett is skeptical of the idea that pregnancy, or single motherhood, is a burden on a woman.

Now, can you imagine any ramifications for that? Do insurance companies get to start challenging whether pregnancy is a medical condition requiring coverage? I don’t know.

Googling shows that, in the U.S., abortion as murder polls at about 7 percent.

Abortion being legal for any reason polls at less than half, depending on how worded.

People who post in forums like this may not like middle positions on abortion, but others do.

Less than half of what? The 7 percent, or half the people polled?

The problem is that politically it’s all or nothing. When lately have the political parties been paying any attention whatsoever to what most Americans want? Both of them seem to be contracting away from the center and pandering to their extreme fringes.

Most of the Democratic policy priorities (legal abortion, higher taxes on the wealthy, protecting the environment, reasonable gun control, cheaper prescriptions, universal healthcare) are supported by more than half of the electorate, sometimes much more than half, so I don’t know where you get that from.

What pandering to fringes is Biden doing?

I guess this is off-topic for this thread. Sorry.

From the first rule of enlightened centrism, both sides are equally bad.

I never said both sides are equally bad. What I was saying is that the people that are anti-abortion are generally entirely anti abortion, with the view that it’s murdering the unborn. And the people who are pro-choice are generally entirely pro-choice, because it’s a woman’s choice, and not politicians’ choice.

There’s not a lot of middle ground between those positions that’s going to satisfy them- no matter which way it goes, they’ll be agitating for change. Even if there’s a compromise struck somewhere in the middle, it won’t satisfy anyone- it’ll just be the best they could get for now.

I mean, how do you reconcile

Democrats oppose restrictions on medication abortion care that are inconsistent with the most
recent medical and scientific evidence and that do not protect public health.

with

Accordingly, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental
right to life which cannot be infringed.

I’m not seeing a lot of middle ground for compromise there, and those are directly from the most recent party platforms.

My commentary about the parties is that neither of them seems to be planting their flag near the center of the political spectrum- at best, the Democrats’ coverage is wider and closer to the center than the Republicans’. But there are still a lot of people around the middle who while they might be satisfied with a compromise, they’re not the ideological mainstream of either party- that’s further left for the Democrats and further right for the Republicans.