Interesting thought about the artificial wombs though - if what you’ve got at the end is the same problem as with conventional adoption (maternal remorse, lowered quality of life for the adopted kid versus a bio-mothered one), and if what you’ve got at the beginning is the need to allow the foetus to live until it can be viably transferred, then it doesn’t look like anything much has been gained, other than to extend women yet another choice simply for the sake of having another choice.
I’ve no idea where this brave new world would end up. I may be happier not knowing.
It’s not just the dogmatism though - it’s the patent absurdity. There’s no reasoning with someone who thinks the typical pro-lifer is someone who wants to see unwilling mothers chained to the delivery bed, and will rub their hands with glee if they die there.
Yep, you’re right. What I’d REALLY like to have is a high-quality, no side effect birth control as the norm, with a free, readily available no side effect drug taken to override it when you want to *become *pregnant.
I think you grossly overestimate the amount of thought people give to the various abortion laws in the different states when the make important life decisions. There’s a whole lot more to life than making sure you live in the most abortion-friendly state in the union.
Talk about making it illegal to cross state lines for an abortion is ridiculous. If a state did try to do that (and I doubt any would), it would never stand up to scrutiny in the courts. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people in this country are not interested in turning it into a Fundamentalist Christian Theocracy.
And if Roe v Wade were overturned, that would be the biggest boon to the Democratic party ever. We’d see the issue “fixed” very quickly. Most people want abortion to be legal in the US. You’d get a similar shift towards the Republicans if the SCOTUS suddenly found a right to SSM in the constitution.
Every suspicious death must be investigated. Any death that takes place outside a hospital must be investigated.
Under those two laws, all miscarriages would have to be investigated. Not punishing every woman who is suspected of “causing” her miscarriage would be a miscarriage of justice.
Before abortion was legal, every miscarriage was investigated by the hospital to determine that it wasn’t a coverup of an illegal abortion.
The book “Intern” written by Doctor X describes how the doctors had to examine every woman who came into the hospital claiming to be miscarrying to find the fetus. If they didn’t find some tissue proving the woman was pregnant and had spontaneously aborted, the doctor had to report it to the Medical Review Board, who then contacted the police.
Annie, I agree with you almost in entirety, but this is a very dangerous path to go down for a pro-choicer. It seems to me that for artificial wombs to end abortions, there would have to be a requirement that pregnant women who wished to terminate could not take RU-486, or something of that ilk, but instead would be required to submit to an invaisve surgical procedure to have the fetus removed.
If all you are saying is that there would be a lesser demand for abortion, then I would probably agree with you. But it wouldn’t end that demand.
Why do you think that? They’re still putting people in jail for smoking pot, with no realistic chance of the laws changing in the foreseeable future. Once an onerous law gets in place, it can be VERY hard to get rid of it, if enough people support it. And LOTS of people would support very heavy-handed abortion laws. I think Der Tris’ vision of anti-choice types rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of women chained to their delivery beds is much closer to the truth than is generally recognized. A major, unacknowledged portion of the energy of the anti-abortionists is “punish those slutty women by making them have the babies their wanton sex produces, whether they want to or not.”
This won’t be a serious solution for at least 100 years, probably longer. Remember, “reality” has to be “not very expensive” for it to be widespread.
And frankly, I would oppose any effort to mandate that women donate their embryos rather than abort. Not to mention that we’d have to find homes for all these “donated embryos” once they are born. I’m not so sure that would be an easy task.
That pretty much says that there’s only an investigation if the death is “suspicious” or unexpected. Otherwise the police and the deceased’s physician can just sign off on it.
Yeah, by the police…not by the medical examiner’s office. And that’s, from what the site describes, the police just looking at the body, then calling the person’s doctor and saying, “Hey, Doc, John Smith is dead. Can you sign off on it?”
Additionally, the quoted page only says that when someone calls 911, the police will respond and perform a preliminary investigation. That says nothing of what the law requires to happen when someone dies, and I imagine is true for all states.