Excluded middle.
I try to kill the laws (so to speak) by forthrightly attacking the terrible nature of punishing theft with death.
Hector has a point, one which I hope will not be explored in this thread after this post. If I believed abortion was literally the killing of children (or the moral equivalent of the killing of children) and I lived in a country where about a million children were killed every year with little or no restrictions, I can see the point of doing whatever it takes to stop the slaughter. It would be like the Holocaust happening every six years.
I think that point is not related to whether the Texas law imposes an undue burden on abortion given the current SCOTUS precedent, although it might inform the views of a few of the Justices in how they rule.
Or, (referring to my earlier post) if one truly opposed abortion to that degree, how could one not endorse and support a tried-and-true method to collapse the abortion rate and save a lot of money in the process (although money should be no object)?
Isn’t that kind of trying to impose your personal morality on society pretty much exactly what you’ve accused hundreds of people on this board of?
No.
Then the distinction has escaped me. I’ll have to carefully parse your next “liberal hypocrites!” thread. [checks watch]
Didn’t want to start an entirely new thread for this, so bumping this one instead, since it has to do with Texas abortions:
A law is set to take effect in Texas that would ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat is discovered. While it does not formally criminalize abortion, it does impose a $10,000-or-more penalty per abortion. It would also allow people to be sued for assisting an abortion.
Here’s a NY Times article that discusses how radical this approach is, and broader implications of this kind of citizen-lawsuit method of banning something (it’s an op-ed, not a regular article):
But, what I really wanted to mention was that I miss @Bryan_Ekers on this site.
Thanks, but I’m kind-of still here. Admittedly not as active as I once was.
Welcome kind-of back!
What I’m trying to understand is why Texas is setting up the law this way, so that there are no criminal penalties but private citizen can sue to win money out of other women getting abortions. I can only guess that it has to do with incentive - that if people sniff money, they’ll have much more personal reason to get involved and win bounty money than if abortion were simply criminalized and an overworked district attorney or prosecutor couldn’t be bothered to prosecute abortion.
Or - maybe it’s because Roe v Wade mandates that abortion remain legal, and so Texas is taking the approach of “Okay, then, we’ll keep it technically legal, but you can expect to go bankrupt if you perform abortions?”
Slate had a pretty good article about the motivation behind structing the law this way. Essentially, they’re trying to prevent federal courts from enjoining the law by removing the state as a party.
Yup, it’s an end-run around Roe.
How about the opposite. Several states exempt the Bible and other religious texts from sales tax. Some states define religous books narrowly. For example, in Georgia, the Bible, the Torah, and Koran are tax-exempt, but Hindu texts, as one example, are taxable. Is this an undue burden on Hinduism?
Right. That is the game, but it won’t work. If you take the first week of Con Law class you make the (clearly correct) argument that by setting up this tort action, the state has allowed private parties to deny others (what is now at least) a guaranteed Constitutional right. A judge would laugh at a state coming into court saying “not our fault.”
I didn’t remember writing this, but it was seven years ago. I’m not familiar with GA law, but I would agree. The state cannot discriminate against Hindu texts that way.
Then I can probably guess your next question: What is a religion that the state has to recognize? If I call myself the Church of Today and it consists of me and my buddies having beer in the garage, but we call it a religion, is it one? Who decides? The state? That’s a dangerous proposition and one courts have historically ran away from deciding.
I always love a good abortion thread because we talk past each other by starting from completely different fundamental premises.
The pro-life side (yes, let’s not argue over that term) comes from the idea that what is happening is simple murder; the taking of an innocent human life. Nobody has the right to do that. We aren’t saying that women cannot have all the sex they choose to have, but at the end of the day it is an innocent human life. We can’t allow someone to just kill such a vulnerable creature.
The pro-choice side (yes, let’s not argue over that term) comes from a complete 180 degree perspective. They look at the terrible consequences a woman would suffer, most likely not with the support, wanted or not, from the father. They don’t view the entity inside the woman as a human life, and would disagree with my use of the word “entity.” They view this as a woman’s rights, indeed a human rights issue in the completely opposite direction.
So when we say things to each other, we are on different planets from the outset.
But, as a constitutional matter, the case law is an absolute mess. No judge can say what an undue burden is until five Justices just pick something out of a hat and say what it is. That gives Roberts and Kavanaugh, maybe two Justices who would pull a Casey and uphold Casey and Roe under stare decisis and decide that, yes, this is a terrible line of cases with no legal justification and it is time to overrule them.
I think from a legal perspective, when you get a couple of beers in a pro-choice person, they admit that Roe was a terrible case and it is inconsistent with every other area of law save abortion. It’s reasoning was laughable and pretty much non-existent. I would love to debate someone about how Roe was correctly decided as a matter of law.
This is an incorrect characterization. I feel like I shouldn’t be forced to carry a baby to term for the same reason I don’t think I should be forced to donate a kidney to my own kid. Both involve undergoing a drastic medical procedure to save the life of a third party. I am pretty sure I’d donate a kidney in a heartbeat if my son needed it, but it ought not be compelled. The same for undergoing a pregnancy and birth. The fact that I would have to have another C-section makes the comparison even more apt.
ETA: the “talking past” I always see in these threads is that men think abortion is a debate about having or not having a child. Women understand it as a debate about being pregnant. Men so often hand wave off the pregnancy itself as irrelevant.
And I appreciate that, but what you are talking about is the very thing that every woman had to do for all of us to be here. To discuss it like it is donating a kidney is, IMHO, contrary to the idea of life itself, and this idea that it is an invasion or some “third party” inside you goes against nature. It’s how both you and I got here.
And that’s very fair. I don’t know what a pregnancy is like. Point taken. But like everything else I get to have an opinion. I hear so many times that men aren’t even allow to have an opinion on this issue. I reject that view for the same reason that, say, you don’t own a gun and want to make it illegal for me to own one. You still can have an opinion on that. You are a human being. I have never and will never be pregnant, but I think I have a vested interest in my children which is completely disavowed by current law, and laws just made up by judges. That is wrong.
I don’t know how you got here, but I got here because a woman chose to give birth. Some women do that, y’know?
(Virtually) Everyone is the result of a sex act, but we don’t expect women to submit to that for the good of the species.
I cannot see how an appeal to “the idea of life itself” justifies forcing me to endure a pregnancy if I don’t choose to.