Yes, I think it would be a much bigger issue for voters if SCOTUS found some 14th Amendment protection or something for fetuses, or some personhood law becomes the law of the land, and it’s banned nationwide. I mean, I did start my statement with “unless there’s a nationwide ban”.
I’ve argued on this board that one state could make it illegal to get an abortion in another state, or even to plan a trip to get an abortion (some sort of conspiracy charge). I’m not a law-talkin’ guy, though.
My main argument is that it’s already effectively nearly banned in several states and Republicans have no issue continuing to win in those states, so I don’t think a total ban will be the “win” that the Democrats might expect. Personally, I think an abortion ban would be a disaster, and those states that have nearly banned it routinely lie to the courts to keep those ridiculous rules in place.
In any case, you are mistaken. Some Fundamentalists are not overly concerned with being pro-life. The largest religious group opposed to abortion (and birth control) are the Catholics, who are not Fundamentalists.
Remarkably enough, lumping people like that is not a nice thing to do.
This is not my working understanding. The stiffest pressure against choice rises from SBC Fundamentalists. From these come the people who protest outside clinics and kill doctors and healthcare staff with bombs. Some, yes, are less strident/violent than others, but that is true of any random group of more than a few dozen people.
American Catholics generally tend to be more educated than the average Southern Baptist Fundamentalist, giving Catholics a better sense of the complexity of society. There are virulently-anti-choice Catholics, but their numbers are somewhat smaller than those of the Fundies.
Maybe Paul_in_Saudi was just trying to say that Catholics are a larger group worldwide, but in terms of US opposition to abortion, it’s very much an evangelical-Protestant-driven movement.
At least at one time, the ONLY major organized religion who SPECIFICALLY was anti-abortion was the Roman Catholic church. This may be because many of the other “organized” religions do not have as centralized of a structure.
The Evangelicals have ABSOLUTELY been behind the anti-abortion push in the last 40 years, but “Evangelical” is not an organized religion. What we have here is an argument over semantics - yes, the Catholic Church is against abortion, but the major anti-abortion push in the United States is not because of Catholics.
And, not that eschereal needs me to defend their comments, but he never said that people who disagreed with him were unintelligent - what he said was that Catholics tend to be more intelligent, and thus are more likely to make up their own mind rather than rote-repeat what their religious leaders tell them.
Nitpick: eschereal didn’t even say that American Catholics tend to be more “intelligent”, just that they tend to be more “educated”. And yes, AFAICT it’s true that support for abortion rights tends to correlate somewhat with education level.
It’s not a semantic distinction, words actually mean things, you know. The legislature is elected by the electorate. The actions of the state are a reflection of those who elected them.
Thank you for ignoring 90% of my post, in order to make your irrelevant flippant remark.
You did ask:
When you said:
Now that you have been corrected on this, does that actually change your position, or was your position not actually based on evidence or information in the first place?
Very respectfully, I think some of you all are way out in the weeds. The most that will happen with the overturning of Roe and Casey is a return to state law practices which permit the prohibition of abortion except to save the mother’s life. There is no serious national movement to impose personhood on a fetus, or ban travelling across state lines to get an abortion, or imposing a theocracy.
Yes, it will be harder for poor women in red states to get an abortion as they would then need to get a bus ticket to a blue state to get an abortion, and that is not a trifling thing for some, but it is no different than the situation today where women who live in rural areas need to get a bus ticket to get to a large city that offers abortion services.
I’m a minority voice in this thread, but the overruling of Roe v. Wade would be the best thing to ever happen to U.S. Politics: to take this issue and give it the ability to be resolved where most people will be happy with its resolution, while still making legal abortion a bus ride away just like it is today.
I think that you haven’t been keeping up with the laws that are being passed.
Now, I would say, these are simply unconstitutional, based on Roe v Wade, and would be struck down. However, that’s not sure to be the case, and it seems as though these laws being upheld “would be the best thing to ever happen to U.S. Politics”.
Long bus ride. Especially for someone without the ability to take a week or more off of work.
Especially when they come home to face murder charges.
Okay, well, your source is Slate which I hope we can agree is a far left leaning publication. They are not stating anything from Georgia officials, but are postulating on a worst case scenario of creative prosecutors who could possibly use general state laws to prosecute women for murder as accessories. I can do that with many of my own state laws, those that don’t deal with abortion, and present a “horribles” situation that in practice never happens.
I understand that your reliance on the good faith of these prosecutors is far less than mine, but it never happened Pre-Roe, and I don’t see any reason that it would happen now. If you want to join me in getting rid of these loopholes in the law “just in case” then I would welcome you, but my experience has shown that this simply doesn’t happen. The Slate article declares, without evidence, that it will happen in this situation which there is simply no support for.
I’m sure we can point at maps and show how it will affect some women worse than it is now, but I can use my own geographic area as an example. My state has ONE abortion clinic which is a two hour car ride from where I live. There is a clinic in Maryland (a state which has affirmative laws permitting abortion that will survive an overruling of Roe) that is a 45 minute car ride away. No waiting period, no pamphlets, and no lectures on adoption or the fetal development. Women from here take that option, and would continue to do so if the one abortion clinic in my state closed.
So, I’m sure it would place an extra burden on some women, but that is the nature of a constitutional ruling. Not to hijack the thread, but many states put more of a burden on purchasing a gun, which is an enumerated constitutional right, or getting married which is an implied constitutional right. IOW, this new abortion scheme would still leave abortion within easy access of most other constitutional rights, even with a ruling holding that abortion is not such a right.
It’s hard for me to believe conservatives who claim that overturning Roe v Wade will be no big deal when they’ve spent their entire lives on getting it to happen.
It is simply a “not in my backyard” scenario. Nothing more. That may seem a minor thing, but it is important to many people. Personally, I abhor abortion and abhor the damage that Roe has done to the Constitution, but I harbor no ridiculous belief that making it illegal will stop it.
If you consider that a big deal, then yes. And it is a big deal to a lot of people. Not here. Go to Maryland to do that, but we don’t want it in our state. States make those choices all of the time. We don’t want legal gambling here, but go to Vegas and it is fine. Nothing unique about this.
Respectfully, that is just simplistic and a gotcha attempt. You are assuming that abortion is a constitutional right which is the whole point of the thread in saying that the overruling of Roe would make it not a constitutional right. Also, there are different interests at stake. Under Casey, a state has a legitimate interest in protecting fetal life at all stages of pregnancy; it is just that such interest may not pose an undue burden on a woman’s choice to terminate her pregnancy. In dissent, Scalia rightfully excoriated that holding because in regards to constitutional rights, we don’t allow states to impose burdens for the sake of burdening a constitutional right. Even a $1 tax on religious books because the state doesn’t like religion would be struck down immediately, yet restrictions on abortion are allowed simply because the state doesn’t like abortion. It is a confusing area of law which is a factor in calling for its overruling.
