At this point, politically speaking, states don’t even need to have Roe v Wade overruled; they can make abortion de facto illegal in anti-abortion states by simply regulating and legislating it to death, so that the SCOTUS accepts so many restrictions that Roe v Wade becomes moot.
As with so much else in this country, it will be up to the people to stand up and define their country on their own. The voters will have to decide what kind of country they want to live in.
But look at the decision I quoted. The Supreme Court left a decision standing that would allow a woman to abort her child/fetus simply because she disapproved of its race or sex. It did not review a law to the contrary.
Whatever your opinion on the law, it doesn’t sound like a Court frothing at the mouth to overturn Roe or even to nibble at it. Their stated reason, because there is not a circuit split, is pretty unavailing. Any challenges to Roe itself will not have a circuit split.
As if we didnt know already, Mitch has the ethics of a snake.
*Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday if a Supreme Court vacancy occurs during next year’s presidential election, he would work to confirm a nominee appointed by President Donald Trump.
That’s a move that is in sharp contrast to his decision to block President Barack Obama’s nominee to the high court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016.
At the time, he cited the right of the voters in the presidential election to decide whether a Democrat or a Republican would fill that opening, a move that infuriated Democrats…The leader took a long sip of what appeared to be iced tea before announcing with a smile, “Oh, we’d fill it,” triggering loud laughter from the audience.*
Control of the Senate may be more important than getting rid of Trump.
Well…we want honest Senators, right?
To be fair, most of what you have written here doesn’t really follow, and it certainly doesn’t break down into such a facile question as you come to in your conclusion, but this last line is where I think I see the problem that causes you to struggle with this so.
You cannot tell the difference between a woman’s uterus and a public accomodation.
I don’t think I am “struggling with it” but I respect your opinion.
The issue is that, for everyone not on either extreme position, the abortion debate pits a very difficult dilemma, the right of a pregnant woman to determine whether to bear a child, and the life, or at least the potential life of a fetus. Again, for everyone not on the extremes, that is a tough question and why it is such a contentious issue.
But when a woman would otherwise want a child, but does not want this particular child she is carrying because of its race, then the question is much easier and the sympathy for the pregnant woman all but vanishes.
No, her uterus is not a place of public accommodation, but again, except to those extreme pro-choice people, sex is understood to come with risks and responsibilities. It is how we all got here. You and I were both in a woman’s uterus and that 9 month occupation of a woman is necessary for everyone’s existence. Everyone knows that if you have sex that pregnancy is a possibility and most people believe that if it happens, even unintended, then that is something that a person has to deal with, and women being biologically capable of carrying a child to the exclusion of men will face a greater burden.
I, along with most other people, reject the idea that sex is or should be a consequence free recreational activity like a ride at the amusement park. That is not to shame anyone or attempt to enact some Puritan morality, but simply a realization that it involves the creation of life. To go so far as to say that the woman’s freedom over her body trumps the right of potential life/life of a fetus/unborn child solely because of the race of that child is an extreme position, IMHO.
And as much as I might be going too far afield here, the traditional way of doing things tried to rid society of these problems. Again, I’m not a Puritan, but society recognized the issues that are present in this thread from its foundation, across all groups and all religions.
Yes, we all want to have sex. But with that comes babies. If we don’t do something to constrain our sexual desires, then there are children everywhere that (at the time when only men were capable of caring for) that go unsupported because no male person feels a bond to that child. The village has to use its resources to care for an unhappy child, and money can’t buy the love of a father no matter how much you spend.
So, here is the deal, society. And this is to society, not just women, but men as well. Yes, we all like sex, but you can’t just fuck anyone you want. Yes, that means you too, Dave. We have too many damn kids running around, so here’s the deal:
Men, you pick one woman to be with for your life, and women you do the same. And you can only have sex with that person. Any type of sex outside of this relationship heretofore described called “marriage” will be punished. If you have sex before that marriage, we call that “fornication” and it will be punished. If you have sex with another person while married, or with a married person, we call that “adultery” and it will be punished. Dammit, Dave, will you pay attention because it concerns you!
We feel that this new policy will have significant benefits. You have an outlet for your sexual desires. Any children born from sex will have two parents who know that the child is their own progeny and will care for them. The child will have the benefit of a male and a female role model to learn as it grows. This, we believe, will solve the problem of these unwanted children.
What’s that Dave? No, just because you think she is good looking is not a good enough reason to depart from this rule. Any other questions from anyone not Dave? Good.
This went on for thousands of years across nearly every culture including our own. But now we want to return to our base hormonal instincts and fuck everyone. It would be like if we decided we wanted to bring back survival of the fittest.
But premarital sex and the like has become acceptable again and we have the very problems that we tried to solve thousands of years ago with marriage, and everyone just can’t understand why.
Funny how this miraculous solution is to just give the conservatives everything they want. With a side helping of long-since-disproven conservative talking points as proof that “it works.”
It’s not what I “want.” It is the definition of what we all don’t want. Constraints on our base desires are what makes a society. Yes, I like my neighbor’s house. It is much nicer than mine, but I can’t kill him and take it because then I can’t sleep easy at night knowing that someone else might try to kill me and take it.
I have no agenda and am not a member of any group. But the lessons I was taught as a kid seem to be correct in this instance.
You claimed to not be able to determine a legal principle that would distinguish a woman’s uterus from a place of public accommodation. Maybe that’s not struggling, but it’s sure not getting it.
While I would think very poorly of a woman who had elective abortions based on the race of the fetus, I would also think poorly of a person who kicked a dinner guest out of their home due to their race, and I would not support restricting either of them doing so.
It is a hard dilema. One that I do not think that I have any right sticking my nose in. I shirk my responsibility in telling others what to do by putting the burden of that dilema on their shoulders.
I have little sympathy, but I don’t need sympathy to allow someone freedom of bodily autonomy.
And we men get to make those decisions for them, right?
I get that pregnancy is a possibility of sex, but I really don’t care about other people’s babies. I would rather do things that decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies, which leads to fewer abortions, than do things that will increase the number of unwanted pregnancies and then complain and whine about them and attempt to use legislation to impose my morality upon them.
That is exactly what you are doing is imposing your Puritan morality. I say that the woman’s freedom over her body trumps the right of potential life/life of a fetus/unborn child, period. If she is shallow enough to make that choice based on race or eye color or height or anything but gross physical or mental deformity, then I will not think well of her, but just because I don’t think well of her and disagree with her choice doesn’t mean that I should forbid her from making it.
That is an extremely puritanical view. And the reason that it is not accepted is because it has never worked that way. Most of these cultures that you talk about were not monogamous, most of them allowed a man to have multiple wives. Even the ones that were actually monogamous didn’t have any punishment for the man stepping out for some strange, only for the woman.
It’s not like those were peaceful times, it’s not like there was a great respect for the life of your neighbor in those times. You are looking with rose colored nostalgia at a time of suffering and brutality and wishing that we could go back to that. NO THANK YOU.
We live in the best possible time of human history, with the possible exception of an optimistic future. We did not get to this point of less violence, starvation, and poverty by following the teachings of bronze age goat herders. We got here by throwing them out, and determining through secular logic what is actually good for the community.
Maybe those rules made sense for an age when the primary form of birth control was infanticide. Maybe it made sense when women dying in childbirth was just a consequence of them being born a woman.
In order to impose your puritanical views, you have to justify them in the context of the modern world, not just express your desire to go back to a world where those views make sense.
I get it, you would like to impose your religion upon society, and are frustrated when we actually dare to question it. There are theocracies out there, take a hard look at them, and tell me that they have better lives than we do.
That’s reciprocal morality. We don’t want others to murder or steal, because we don’t want to be murdered or stolen from.
Can you really not sleep easy at night knowing that someone is having sex in a manner you disapprove of?
Flip it around. Let’s say a woman from an ethnic minority has a sexual encounter with a white man that she regrets, and she’d rather put her body, time, & resources into a child fathered by a man of her own race. It would be quite an intrusion on her life to say that she has to bear the white man’s child.
Dumb question regarding the Indiana law: How would anyone know *why *a woman wanted the abortion? Was there to be some form she filled out with a checklist of reasons, and if she checked “race of the baby” she’d be thrown out?
I don’t buy this.
For one, it assumes far too much realpoliticking when there are plenty of true believers who actually get elected. Sure, some Republican officials are giving pro-life voters lip service, but some aren’t.
For another, it’s not like overturning Roe makes the abortion issue go away any more than the Roe decision made it go away. If “Elect Republicans to stop the babykillers” is effective at rallying the base, won’t “Elect Republicans to keep the Democrats from stacking the court to let the babykillers start doing it again” be pretty much just as effective? It’s not like Democrats aren’t going to run on the issue as well.
People often incriminate themselves. Sure, most women who get an abortion for that reason will not do so provably, but someone is going to get prosecuted and they’ll find text messages from her saying something like “I could never raise an n-word baby!”