And the same with rape and incest exceptions. If a fetus is a person, it shouldn’t matter how the fetus was conceived.
It doesn’t. There is a general consensus in Canada that abortion is a reasonable choice for a competent woman to make on her own, appropriately early in pregnancy, except in more difficult cases. Doctors should maintain the right to their own beliefs, but place patient care first. There is some room for a spectrum if beliefs. This is not an all or nothing position, nor should it be, but this is only my opinion. This debate has gone on since before Hippocrates and Plato.
A lot of people who care deeply about a single issue take more extreme positions on either side. These are amplified by the media and the antagonistic nature of law and politics. However, they do not usually represent the views of most people.
I would like to see lawsuits from women who were not allowed to get an abortion for the cost of raising a child to an adult, along with punitive damages. So start with all the supreme court justices who overturned Roe, then each of the state legislators and governor of the state. Maybe start with 5 million from each women. If they can make anyone sue for having an abortion, maybe we can start the lawsuits working the other way.
The thing is, most women who are functional enough to successfully raise an initially unwanted child to adulthood are compassionate enough not to want their adult child dragged into the limelight in a case like this, with the subtext “The government needs to pay me for not having been allowed to abort you like I wanted to.”
As usual, conservative activists and politicians are gleefully inflicting tyrannical and cruel policies on women, while smugly relying on the expectation that the women affected won’t pass the tyranny and cruelty on to their unsuspecting children.
Or get fed up and drag those shitheads out onto the lawn for an old fashioned lynching. They rely on our humanity in order to abandon their own completely.
Drastic life-changing decision? Having a child is a drastic, life-changing decision.
For someone that doesn’t believe a fetus is a person and who doesn’t believe abortion is murder, they take a day off work for the procedure, and then they go back to the exact same unchanged life they had before. That’s kind of the point. That’s why conservatives HATE it, it involves absolutely no punishment whatsoever.
Now, if they are strongly pro-life and actually do believe they murdered their baby, it might be more complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.
I know this was semi-facetious, but there’s a broad doctrine that you can’t sue the government for duly enacting and enforcing a law: Sovereign immunity - Wikipedia
That insistence men have in continually painting abortion as “drastic” and “life-changing” is a great big reason why men need to STFU and get their noses out of women’s healthcare. It’s nothing of the sort, as you point out. Hell, with the vast majority of early term abortions being chemical these days it’s not even that much of an inconvenience. Take your pill, buckle in for a really heavy period and you’re golden. Get this, men, for most women abortion is NO BIG DEAL. We don’t agonize over it, we don’t sob for days over it, we don’t freak out on our deathbed about THE BABBY WE KILT SOB SOB SOB because sensible women are aware that most of us have had a miscarriage all unknowing in our lifetimes and it’s not a big deal. Nature abandons pregnancies that aren’t viable, usually in about the same timeframe as we get abortions and for about the same reason–BECAUSE NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR A BABY. That is IT. We don’t care if men don’t like our reasons for having abortions, we generally don’t think of men at all aside from “dammit, fucking rogue sperm again shit.”
You know what we DO agonize over? How much we DON’T want a baby. How dangerous pregnancy and birth are for humans. How much fucking WORK it is to raise a child. How fucking miserably horrible it will be to be yoked to some jackass of a man just because he put it in us instead of a sock. How pregnancy and parenthood derails our life plan, fucks over our career, just isn’t what we WANT. That, we do give a lot of thought to.
Could you send this to every SC justice and every GOP legislator, please?
If I thought it would do even the tiniest scintilla of good I would–but people are mostly ignoring the fact that these laws are mostly an attack on the right to privacy, but they work out the kinks on women and POC because if they come right outta the chute fucking over white men there will be Hell To Pay and they know it. Get the skids all greased screwing over women and POC and LGBTQ people then and only then do you set up the Big Whammy that installs the full surveillance state when it’s too late for the white men to put the kibosh on it. White men really ought to be channelling Pastor Niemoller and kicking up a giant fuss in support of women’s reproductive rights because by the time it hits them there won’t be anyone capable or willing to support them.
No, we all do not have the ability to vote. The politicians that you support have been actively working to take away the ability to vote from people who don’t vote for them.
< jumps up for a standing ovation >
I wish I had a really big pillow with this post embroidered on it.
Boy, wouldn’t THAT make an interesting winter project? 
Not a band name but an album name instead:
Desperation, Death and Interstate Travel
…aaaaaaaaaaaand here’s the band that recorded the album:
Transvaginal Ultrasound
Sounds like a Stone Temple Pilots song.
This is a really excellent post. Just one minor nitpick: the number of healthy newborn babies who are given up for adoption in America and don’t find homes is zero. A generation ago it was difficult to place non-white babies, but at least we seem to have moved on from there, thank God.
Of course, that doesn’t remotely mean that women should be obligated to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. and it doesn’t help the kids who do have health problems. But it does mean that a woman contemplating her options doesn’t need to worry that choosing adoption could lead to their kid getting stuck in the foster care system.
If the overturning of Roe makes abortions significantly more difficult to get, of course, especially for poor women at high risk for pre-natal health problems, that could significantly change. About half of all women who seek abortion in the US now are below the poverty line. Making abortion substantially more difficult to get isn’t going to improve those women’s circumstances or make it easier for them to raise an unwanted baby. Nor will it make their unwanted babies (especially those with health impairments) more desirable to adoptive parents.
And the ones that aren’t perfect? The ones with vision problems or hearing problems or maybe less than the ideal number of fingers and toes?
And, add another 500k babies to the pile if abortion is really banned.
It’ll just shift to other states, which is what Texas has seen. The number performed in state dropped by over half but women who had any sort of means found alternatives so the number of women who got them dropped by less than 10%.
And presumably even these 10% would mostly be the women who were the poorest and least able to access medical care or leave the state.
So those folks have been mostly right about what would happen. While it may stem some abortions, the effect mostly appears to be the pre-Roe status quo where women with any means find alternatives and the poorest are left with an array of unsavory alternatives.