Minty is right. Leaving the abortion issue to the mercies of elections would not solve anything. The bitterness would never end, because the issue would always be up in the air.
This may well be correct, but the acrimony would be with ballots, rather than with bullets. We have perpetual acrimony on lots of political issues, and it’s no big deal.
I have heard people assert that a reversal of Roe v. Wade would lead to a reversal of women’s rights. Does anyone support that POV?
That seems to be the logical conclusion of what would happen. Some states would undoubtedly outlaw the practice, thus certain women would be prevented from exercising a right that they previously enjoyed.
I’m saying that on a case by case bases you can’t make a value judgement on having a baby out of wedlock. In the majority of cases, this is a bad thing - high rates of poverty, single parenting being extraordinarily stressful, etc. But that in a few cases, out of wedlock births turn out great. That the outcome for a child of a single parent is often more an issue of resources (a single parent generally having fewer of them than a married parent - money, time, energy) than just single parentness. That you can’t predict the outcome for an individual based on population statistics.
One of my girlfriends is the single mom of a daughter. She actively set out to be a single parent (her daughter is adopted, and its hard to do that accidentially). She is also fairly well off, in her 30s, has a very close family (much of it in town) and a very close and involved circle of friends. She has an involved brother, and lots of close male friends to provide male role models. Her daughter is not suffering for lack of a dad. However, take a sixteen year old girl, give her a baby, parents who throw her out of the house for having the baby, a boyfriend who disappears, friends who (being 16) are more interested in their own boyfriends than watching the baby when you are ill, and your chances of everything being ok are not so good.
This was not an acrimonious debate prior to Roe v. Wade. And for the reasons that CyberPundit (and Scalia) point out, that likely would once again be the case if Roe were overturned: while the nation overall is sharply divided over the abortion issue, those divisions also run along geographical fault lines. Southern and midwestern states would take a more restrictive position on abortion while the west and northeast would be permissive.
I think the acrimony the abortion debate fosters has as much to do with the fact that important social policy decisions are being made by unaccountable persons thousands of miles away as it does with the substantive moral issues involved. Were abortoin left to the states, New Yorkers would just roll his eyes at those ignorant Texans and their narrow view of women’s rights, and Texans would just roll his eyes at those New Yorkers and their Gommorrah-like view of morality, and that would be that. As long as the Texan doesn’t have to live under the New Yorker’s rules and the New Yorker doesn’t have to live under the Texan’s rules, there’s a lot less reason for either to be angry at the other.
Well, JThunder, I don’t agree with you, and this is why…
Back in the day when abortion was illegal, we didn’t prosecute women for murder if they aborted and went in for treatment for an infection. These days, we do prosecute women who do drugs or drink during pregnancy for child abuse. I suspect if abortion becomes illegal, we will prosecute women (in some states, not all) for murder - making it much less likely she will seek medical care if she requires it.
Now, if we don’t ever prosecute the woman for murder, I think the risks will be similar to what they are now. But I think the trend is to treat women as vessels during pregnancy, not human’s who happen to be carrying a child. As you said, most women when abortions were illegal got theres from a willing OB under proper medical care. And, given the amount of information over the internet regarding the methods to induce an herbal abortion, its possible that the number of abortions would not even decrease that much - and more women would move to herbal (of questionable saftely itself) abortions rather than medical ones.
I doubt this would actually be the case. Even the most conservative southern state isn’t going to ban abortion outright, any more than they would bring back segregation if Brown v. Board and the 1964 Civil Rights Act were repealed. What you’re more likely to see is southern states making an abortion very difficult (but not impossible) to procure.
I don’t mean to sound like a wise guy, but why not? When you think about it, the woman can say whether she wants the child or not without anyone saying different. Even if the father of the baby wants it and is willing to take it on his own. But if she decides to have the baby then the father is financially responsible for it whether he wanted it or not. So the father can get the shaft either way. How does that seem fair and how do you justify this?
Wants the child or not and wants the pregnancy or not are two seperate issues. There are lots of people who want the child (healthy white babies are a valued and scarce resource in the adoption world) - does that mean a woman should have to go through the pregnancy. In the case of the baby’s father, he has provided genetic material, and therefore may (or may not) have a right to a bigger say - but he still doesn’t need to go through the pregnancy.
I understand what you mean. But the father supplied no more genetic material then the mother did. Yet by law she gets to make all the decisions. And I know that she is the one that will have to carry the baby if her decision is to have it. But thats not his fault, yet even if he wants his child he can be told no. I was asking if this is fair. And if so, please justify it.
This is hopelessly optimistic. I think if a woman doesn’t want to tell her husband, there is generally a good reason for it. Maybe her husband is abusive and would beat the crap out of her for getting an abortion. Maybe he is pro-life and she is pro-choice, and she is determined to get an abortion in secret without wrecking the marriage.
Assuming it is his child as well, then he should be afforded so say as to what happens to it. Now if it is someone elses child, I can understand why she wouldn’t want to tell.
But I was assuming it is his when I posted my remark.
Excuse me, bit did you read the article which I cited? The number of maternal deaths from illegal abortions was quite low – far, far less than the thousands per year that the pro-choice lobbyists claimed. The alleged dangers have been vastly overstated. In fact, Planned Parenthood’s own Mary Calderone said,
So even if you grant that there would be some increased risk to post-abortive women (a claim which I readily granted in my previous post), this increase would be quite small. After all, if the abortions are performed by trained physicians, and if these procedures are as safe as Planned Parenthood emphatically claimed, then the risk of complications should be small indeed.
Besides, at the risk of stating the obvious, the woman can always go to the physician who performed her abortion. This would grant her the secrecy she needs, and the physician in question would have ample motivation to make sure that the client would survive her complications.
Well maybe it is, that’s why she doesn’t want to tell him.
And in that case I wouldn’t expect her to have to tell him either. She isn’t his property and can do whatever she wants as long as she is willing to accept the consequenses of her actions. However, if the child is indeed his then he should have some say about it’s disposition. That’s all I’m trying to say.
The thing is its impossible to prove whose child it is. So they’ll pretty much have to take the womans word on that.
In a number of states - whether Texas is one or not I do not know - any child born within a marriage is legally a product of that marriage regardless. This has come up any number of times in child support cases of late.
You are mistaken. While the law of every state provides that a child born during the pendency of a marriage is presumed to be the child of the husband, that is only a presumption. That presumption can be rebutted by contrary evidence, assuming that the husband challenges paternity within the statutory limitations period (which varies from state to state, but is typically somewhere in the range of 2-5 years, as I recall).
I think there would be an increased level of acrimony if abortion rights become a states’ right battle. While it’s true that the situation pre Roe v. Wade wasn’t so acrimonious as it is now, I just don’t see all the escalation of the rhetoric magically blowing away just because the venue has shifted from the federal to the state level. Nobody’s arguing that the problem with abortion is that it’s being imposed on us by jurists rather than legislators – they speak entirely in terms of good and evil.
Sure, many states will have overwhelming majorities who will vote one way or another. But it’s silly to imagine that the defeated minorities will then calmly fold their hands and say, “Ho, hum! Looks like they win! I’ll just set my deeply held moral values aside here because this was a legislative rather than a judicial decision”.
Especially in states where abortion is outlawed, you’ll see more acrimony. Perhaps deaths from illegal abortions will not be as great in numbers as is commonly believed, but there will be some. And that means that abortion rights supporters will have have plenty of opportunities to borrow a few tactics from their opponents.
State legislators and religious leaders who spearhead successful attempts to end abortion rights or make abortions impossibly difficult to obtain can look forward to finding effigies of women dead from illegal abortions outside their offices, surrounded by crowds chanting, “Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!” at the legislator or whomever while the local news crew films them.
Anti-Catholic feeling will grow by leaps and bounds as well.
And the Repubs will lose big if abortion becomes a legislative issue. They’ll either keep the religious right and lose the rest, or keep the rest and lose the religious right. The big tent will come down either way.
That’s why Roe v. Wade will not be reversed by the present Supreme Court. They proved their willingness to pull their robes down around their ankles and bend over for their Republican masters in the 2000 election.
No, it isn’t. They do genetic testing invitro quite often now. So telling who the genetic parents are is a simple procedure.