Nor am I. And I’m not old enough to literally remember how things were in the US before the case in question. I assume however that 25% of the female population weren’t actually in jail for illegal abortion? :dubious:
Well, abortion wasn’t illegal in the whole US before RvW. And where it was, I don’t know the precise penalties. What has that to do with anything, unless anti-abortion activists now are saying that they want the exact penalties that were in place before RvW in the places where abortion was illegal?
I know you just wanted to make a snarky comment, but it’s nice when the snarky comments are relevant.
A good predictor of a post-Roe world is what the pre-Roe world looked like. Indeed, many state abortion laws are still on the books. They would simply become active again if Roe were overturned. So it is entirely relevant to discuss what the penalties used to be, and the previous sociological effects.
As has been said before in this thread, it doesn’t help the pro-choice cause to use scare tactics. The notion that half of the female populace would go to jail if Roe was overturned in just a scare tactic with no basis in reality.
It’s perfectly relevant to irishgirl’s ludicrous claim that there will ever be a situation where 25% of the world’s women will be in jail, which was what sparked my comment.
How is it tub thumping? You wondered what the risks of abortion were. I pointed out that whatever those risks are, they would be higher if it was criminalized.
If you think that is irrelevant, I think that says something about your attitude to the question.
Except you didn’t ask about the risk of dying from pregnancy, you asked about the risk of abortion.
Of course it’s tub thumping. I was trying to address the comparative risks of abortion and pregnancy given that we were talking about the danger of death in pregnancy being a factor in the decision to abort. For instance, if a legal abortion is actually more life-threatening than pregnancy, it would blow the whole argument out of the water, whether or not illegal abortion is still more dangerous.
If you think your interjection is relevant, I think that says something about your attitude to the question. (See? I can play too! Advances the argument no end, doesn’t it?)
Were you paying attention at all? I doubt it, or you would have seen that irishgirl had already posted a statistic about the the risk of dying from pregnancy (in response to which I’d asked her about the risk of dying from abortion) and that was where I got the risk from in the calculation you quoted. :smack:
Yes I think the interjection that a legal abortion is safer than an illegal one is relevant to the risks of abortion. Assuming the risks of pregnancy don’t change as a result of criminalizing abortion, then any increase in the risk of abortion caused by criminalization means it becomes relatively more risky as regards to allowing the pregnancy to continue. That ain’t rocket science.
If the risk of death from pregnancy is X%, and the risk of pregnancy from an abortion is Y%, can you not see that the calculation shifts if the risk of abortion shifts to be Z%, where Z>Y?
Its a situation where relative changes are important. Even if the risk of pregnancy is lower than the risks of (legal) abortion, then the change is still relevant. No one is claimign the sole reason abortion should be permissible is because it is safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. I don’t know the numbers on that, though I have no doubt whatsoever there are situations where it is the case - it may, or may not, be true for pregnancies as a whole.
If the danger of death is “a factor” as you are talking about, then changes in the danger are relevant, even if that danger starts out from a point that is greater than the risks of pregnancy. There is no argument ‘blown out of the water.’ If a person is facing a 10% greater risk of death through a legal abortion than a pregnancy, they may consider that risk worth taking. If they are now, because abortion has been criminalized, facing a 100% greater risk of death, they may not think that risk is worth taking.
For your argument to have any merit, you would have to be talking of a situation where the sole reason for abortion was the risk of death. But you yourself said:
A factor, not the sole factor.
I always think it helps to finish one line of the argument before going down another. irishgirl chose to raise the ugly spectre of rape victims dying through being denied abortions, and I wanted to examine the comparative risks. In such a case, if the risk of the abortion is greater than the risk of the pregnancy, it’s stupid to talk as if rape victims were to be sentenced to death - for more would die if allowed abortions than if denied them. And if that were so, then this part of the argument would indeed be blown out of the water.
You didn’t need to bold the word “A”. That the risk of death from pregnancy was only a factor in the decision to abort, not the factor, was not in dispute. Like most of the rest of your post, it’s true but not relevant. We can get on with such discussions once we’ve dealt with the question of “Won’t someone pleeeeease think of the rape victims?”.
Along the lines of, “It’s your body, therefore it’s your choice…” I’d like to offer some thoughts.
It’s true that under our law, in general, we don’t impose a general duty on one person to help another. For example, you could walk right by a pond where someone is drowning, and choose not to assist them, and the law imposes no particular duty on you to do otherwise.
However, if you stumbled and bumped someone who fell into the pond, the situation changes. Now you can’t merely walk away, because you created the danger; the law imposes a duty upon you to act. But even then, you wouldn’t be liable if, for example, the only way to save the victim was to dive in and swim, and you couldn’t swim. You wouldn’t be liable for refusing to risk your life. At the same time, the “risk” must be reasonable… you couldn’t say, “Yes, there was a long metal pole I could have used to save the victim, but you know, it looked kinda cloudy, and I didn’t want to risk a lightning strike.”
Both of these situations make sense to me. While I would hope that every person WOULD assist the drowning victim in the first scenario, if our notions of individual liberty are to mean anything, we shouldn’t, as a general principle, COMPEL such assistance by force of law.
But when you are responsible for the dire danger, then it makes sense to me that you should be expected to act to save another even at some minimal risk to yourself.
The analogy is, I hope, plain.
You just are missing the point again. Let me try once more…
Even if the risk of abortion is greater than that of pregnancy, there are a proportion of pregnant rape victims, who will choose abortion over pregnancy.
That is presumably because the other factors involved outweigh that differential in the risk.
If you criminalize abortion, abortion becomes riskier. You therefore change that calculation. That is why I considered it relevant to mention that criminalized abortion is riskier than legal abortion
Now it is possible that the increase in deaths from unsafe illegal abortions will be outweighed the reduction in deaths from rape victims not having abortions at all (assuming, if it is the case, that pregnancy to term is safer than a legal abortion). But that still does not make the increase in risk from criminalizing abortion irrelevant. It is an integral part of the calculation of the effect of criminalization on the number of deaths of rape victims (as if that was the sole relevant factor).
Of course, the rape victim in that case would now be a criminal, and in some people’s minds a murderer, so their death becomes less relevant to some.
No, I’m not missing the point. I was only responding to this - a quite unambitious effort on my part to show that irishgirl’s statement about rape victims dying through being denied abortions was quite possibly a complete red herring. The rest of this we can perhaps discuss, but I’d like you to acknowledge that it’s a tangent, and not a point that I was missing.
Only to the extent that anti-abortion activists would be content with a post-Roe world, and only to the minor extent that the US is the world. The post-Roe US might resemble the pre-Roe US for a short time, but I very much doubt it would be remotely permanent, and I very much doubt the anti-abortion people in this thread would be content with abortion being legal anywhere.
I don’t see how a doctor from Ireland commenting on abortion being illegal has anything at all to do with Roe since overturning Roe does not make abortion illegal and the poster has nothing to do with overturning Roe in the first place since she’s not even in this freaking country.
Huh? You envisage a worldwide American crusade to rid the world of abortion? 
True. So perhaps irishgirl can tell us what life’s like in Ireland, where abortion is illegal and 25% of the women are in jail. :dubious:
For the rest, while I’m not from the States either, Roe is a convenient turning point to serve as a focus for discussion. Consider it symbolic of similar social change elsewhere in the Western world.
How in the world is it relevant? Roe doesn’t affect most women in the world. It has zero to do with most women in the world.
And Roe did not take a country where all abortions were illegal and turn it into a country where all abortions were legal.
So, she was talking world. She was talking 100% illegal.
You responded with US. You responded with some illegal.
And you think that’s relevant? Weird.
Well, it’s a start. Do you think you can make out a case for 25% of the world’s women in jail?
You’re right! It simply could never happen that someone would want to end abortion in another country than the one he lives in currently. And it could never happen that governmental policies get designed around attempts to force or otherwise influence other countries.
I just don’t know what I was thinking.
Yeah, it’s plain, but only if you assume the fetus is a person. I know you do, but lots of us don’t. And I think you’ll agree that it’s not objectively incorrect to take the position that a fetus is not a person.
I was very careful in limiting myself to talking about Roe and America, not elsewhere. It should be obvious enough that Roe doesn’t affect Ireland that no one in this thread was saying it did. When you find yourself interpreting someone’s posts as him saying something absurd, it might behoove you to seek a more charitable interpretation. As you can see, the US being the world has nothing to do with what I said in response to you.
Your other point, that anti-abortion activists would successfully push beyond the prior restrictions, is simply without evidence. All of the actual evidence suggests that America is now more in favor of abortion than 40 years ago. Therefore, overturning Roe would actually, in all evidence-based likelihood, lead to a less bad situation than pre-Roe.
Indeed. Two years ago, when the South Dakota Legislature passed a new law banning abortions, the punishment was focused on the doctors-- women would not have been punished (if the law had been able to be enforced). And the voters ended up overturning that law in a ballot initiative later that year anyway.
The pro-life stance is still a minority position in the US, so they’re pretty much forced to make sure women aren’t punished in their vision of what abortion law should be like in the US. Otherwise, they’d be even more marginalized.
But what you said in response to me was that someone bringing up Roe was perfectly relevant when he was responding to someone who hadn’t brought it up, who wasn’t in the US, and who was assuming a completely different set of criteria. It still doesn’t make sense to counter a comment about what can happen if abortions are illegal worldwide with “it wasn’t that way before Roe.”
In an environment where Roe is overturned, they would absolutely push for more. Would they get it? I don’t know. This isn’t today, since Roe hasn’t been overturned.
I don’t personally believe that any plan to imprison women for having abortions would work. I imagine some nutters would try to get such legislation passed, and I think it would fail. But it would fail because of where we came from, not because of where we were pre-Roe.