I don’t know that there’s a huge difference among men and women on this subject. See here:
If you look at the gender breakdown, 59% women want it legal in almost all cases, vs. 55% of men. Is that difference even statistically significant? If so, it’s probably not that significant.
I used to think it would be politically difficult for Republicans if Roe were to be overturned, just because it takes away a rallying cry. However, even after Heller guaranteed a personal right to bear arms, the 2nd Amendment is still a powerful rallying cry, so I don’t see why overturning Roe would remove that. The cry would go from overturning Roe to keeping the progress or putting in more and more restrictions in states where abortion were still legal.
If this law makes its way up to the Supreme Court and Kennedy were to die or retire and be replaced by Gorsuch II, I don’t see how Roe stays in place.
I actually suspect the REAL purpose of this type of bill is in fact to help raise public awareness of things like when fetal heartbeat can be detected (as noted here, some of the people on this thread didn’t even realize that the heartbeat can be detected at 6 weeks). The people who passed this bill know that it WILL be held up in court and not actually go into effect. Remember the pro-life slogan “Abortion stops a beating heart”? They’re trying to get you to think about that.
I find it really interesting that most people have a strong opinion on abortion WITHOUT knowing really basic facts like this. "I have no idea what a fetus actually looks like at different stages of development or what the different methods of performing abortions involve, but, nonetheless, I am SURE that only a crazy lunatic would object to it!"
I think it’s also worth pointing out that very few European countries allow abortion on demand beyond the first trimester like America does. Abortion advocates always act like the sky is falling anytime someone tries to restrict abortion here, but to my knowledge, few people in Europe are freaking out over the fact that France, Germany, Italy and Spain don’t allow you to get abortions after 12 weeks, unlike in America where abortion is available until 24 weeks in many states (and in some states like New Mexico you can get abortions even later than that, even though babies that age would be able to survive if born).
I agree that most Americans are probably ignorant of that fact. I’ve brought that up here a few times as it seems common to think of the US as overly religious and Europeans being more enlightened and secular. But… does a woman really have a difficult time getting a post-1st trimester abortion in a country like Germany or France or the UK? That is to say, the law may say one thing, but is there actually an enforcement mechanism in place? I honestly don’t know.
I respectfully disagree that the point of passage of this law is to raise awareness as to when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. First, the BILL is about detection, but most Right to Lifers want people to know when the fetal heart starts beating, not merely when it can be detected. In case you didn’t realize when that is, it’s about 22 days after conception. If the law were intended merely to raise awareness, you can bet it’d focus on that 22 day mark.
And the law’s supporters clearly don’t share your conviction that the law will be held up in court. From the New York TImes [bolding mine]:
There are many ways to raise public awareness. This law clearly wasn’t passed to be another one of them.
I’ve never understood the emphasis on heartbeats to begin with. Dick Cheney doesn’t have a heartbeat, but nobody denies that he’s a person, with all of the rights that go along with that. But on the other hand, you can keep a patient’s heart beating long after brain death, when they’re no longer a person. Personhood is based on brain phenomena, and so if you’re going to be passing laws like this, they should be based on milestones of brain development. Or, if that’s impractical, find out what number of days corresponds to that milestone, and make the law that number of days.
Just because Mahendra believes that cows are loved by Krishna and it is just as bad to kill one as to murder your neighbor, doesn’t mean that Mahendra and 160 million other Indians who have immigrated into the USA can vote for the government to create a law banning steak.
Just because Kyoko believes that we are all reborn as different animals on our path towards nirvana, and so it is just as bad to kill a grasshopper as it is to kill your great-grandfather - since the grasshopper may well be your great-grandfather - doesn’t mean that Hollywood and all of the other Buddhists in the state of California can establish a law mandating that everyone else has to be a vegetarian. (Fish are okay - they’re vegetables.)
Just because Billy and his 160 fellow Christians in the Bible belt believe that magical spirits come flying down out of the heavens, zip into the womb at the same moment sperm contacts an egg, and creates a miniaturized human doesn’t mean that the government is allowed to ban abortion.
The government must act based on secular definitions. They have to consider the possibility that we program up a molecular simulator in a computer and, left running for too long, the simulated molecules merge and evolve and create intelligent life, operating purely as digital data on a CPU. Is it genocide to turn off the computer? If we can take a sample of elbow skin, turn one of the cells into a pluripotent cell, turn it into an egg cell, and impregnate it using a nanobot carrying artificially generated DNA strands, then is it just as much abortion to scratch my elbow as it is to take a plan B pill?
A secular definition has to be able to incorporate the fact that basic matter - atoms and molecules - can become human life. Adult human in potentia is not a viable standard for human life. It has to incorporate the possibility of digital life and alien life.
This is the mandate of the 1st Amendment. What the actual answer is to that question be what it may, it cannot be based on a religious standard, and it’s reasonable to say that most votes to ban abortion - both in the general public and in Congress - are based on religious standards. That makes these laws unlawful.
And then there are nations like El Salvador, where abortions are illegal under any circumstances and women are often jailed for years just for miscarrying and/or delivering a stillbirth.
It’s a vital life function that occurs very early in development. If you realize you cannot ban abortions, but you want to significantly reduce their number, it’s a great candidate for a milestone. You’re looking at things too much like a scientist and most people are not scientists.
Why would a heart transplant patient not have a heartbeat?
If your goal is to significantly cut back on abortions, basing the cutoff at brain function isn’t going to do the trick. You’d have to go for something like “development of the nervous system or the first stages of brain development”. But he thing about the heartbeat is you can show a video of a fetus with a beating heart. You can’t show a video of a fetus thinking.
This exact same argument could be used to say that a law against murder is unconstitutional. Because it’s an attempt by the government to enforce the Judeo-Christian commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
The counter-argument is that it’s not a First Amendment violation for the government to prohibit something as long as there are secular reasons to do so, even if there is also religious support for the law.
I’m not Chronos but I would speculate that he may be suggesting that the heart that is located inside Cheney’s is not his original heart. In this view, Cheney’s heart was removed and is no longer beating. The heart that’s beating inside Cheney’s chest is somebody else’s.
That seems ridiculous but I think it makes a good point in context. If we define life as the ongoing beating of a heart then the anonymous donor is still alive and Dick Cheney died during the operation. From a legal standpoint, it was Cheney who gave up his life and donated his body to keep somebody else alive. This absurdity makes the point that we should define life as something other than the beating of a heart. A better standard would be something like brain activity.
If the goal is to significantly cut back on abortions, this law is utter shit. A woman finding out she’s pregnant seven or eight weeks in isn’t going to stop her if she feels she can’t carry the child to term, for whatever reason. She’ll just find another way to do it, which will most likely be more dangerous or life-threatening to herself.
There’s a pretty simple formula that has been shown time and again to reducing abortion - easy and affordable access to birth control and education. This shitshow is an emotional plea based on religious dogma intended to drive abortion back into the alleys where women died.
Presuming the law against murder is based on Christianity, then yes.
I personally don’t believe that it is and I’m unaware of any religious/humanist angst over the topic. In general, the humanists are more anti-murder than the religious, trying to do things like blocking legal executions and such.
I am aware. I imagine that they went that direction because the 1st Amendment argument would make people angry than because it wasn’t the more solid argument.
The 14th Amendment argument (really the “penumbra of privacy” argument) says that abortion is legal because medical decisions are personal and private. But if we take the view that abortion is murder - which is the position of those who oppose abortion - then that argument makes no sense. Most murder is personal and private and the murderer would much prefer to keep it that way.
People who oppose all abortions would redefine the legal definition of “personhood” to include a fetus. It’s been tried. There is nothing objectively correct about the current jurisprudence surrounding abortion in the US, so moving the bar is not unthinkable. Saying “it doesn’t make sense” isn’t a legal argument, and trying to tie abortion to the 1st amendment like you did would, I believe, be a lost cause. But the main point I was making is that you were not describing current jurisprudence regarding abortion in the US. You were describing some hypothetical jurisprudence that, I believe, wouldn’t fly. The current 1st amendment jurisprudence in the US is tied to the Lemon Test, which is a bit more complicated that Little Nemo expressed, but he got the main idea right. When it comes to human life, there is always going to be an intermingling of secular and non-secular thinking, so you’re going to need to a lot more than just point at the non-secular thinking.