I think "muddling" in the subtitle is a key point, because that's exactly how things are going. These reversions, due to in effect religious fundamentalism and pandering to what I only hope are minority crowds emboldened by gerrymandering and the electoral college, are concerning. The U.S. will continue to stagnate if all we ever discuss and rabble about are fringe issues. Why is abortion literally a major topic in every presidential election over decades? Abortion is a tough issue no matter what, and so a compromise is needed. There will never be a totally clean solution. Why are people so damn concerned with decisions others make? In Texas, last time I looked, anybody can initiate a lawsuit against a doctor on abortion related issues, making doctors frozen due to legal worries and even reverting to communicating on paper notes that they then throw away. It's insane. We're taking decision making from the educated and giving it to the uneducated.
Education in the country is a major concern and has domino effects that take decades to correct, but the more the less educated come into power, the harder it gets to revert. And we're trending in the wrong direction.
I also think the section on inequality is greatly misleading. Inequality keeps getting worse and worse by basically any measure. Picking out any data over the past two years is likely to be very, very biased, because the economy has been wildly swinging back and forth. Data can be picked to basically back up any position. The middle class is getting absolutely hammered by taxes while the rich just keep on keeping on in a tax-free world not experienced by others.
> Bloomberg reports that the world’s richest 500 people have lost a total of $1 trillion this year.
I can't view the article, but aren't those "losses" likely to be paper losses, i.e., unrealized losses? When lower and middle class people have losses, they are realized. People lose jobs, money, homes, etc. Rich people "losing" money in the various markets and their investments continue to reap dividends and other monetary gains and will eventually recuperate.
Articles like this are akin to burying one's head in the sand and consist of cherry-picked data to say everything's okay.
> Why is abortion literally a major topic in every presidential election over decades?
Abortion is a big issue that will continue to come up because one group of people view it as literally murdering a child and another group see it as a minor medical procedure. In reality the debate should just be "how many weeks into pregnancy should it be allowed?", but that's hard to sell in a campaign so politicians will go hard one way or the other.
Except they obviously don't, actually, or they wouldn't so regularly permit abortion in the case of rape or incest, nor would fertilization-preventing birth control be so often mislabeled as 'abortifacents'.
Preserving life may be the stated goal, but if you look at the actual actions taken, it's obvious that it's actually about controlling sexuality.
51.1% of the United States (women) have a direct and personal stake in this issue. They care, although many don't think about it until it's actually their immediate problem, and then it might be too late.
As a male, I also care because the issue directly impacts people in my life that I care about. The pro-life side of the aisle is directly and viciously assaulting their bodily sovereignty and potentially their health and life.
The pro-lifers might be fighting for some nebulous "unborn" who they will likely never know and never have any real obligation to, but I'm fighting for my partner, my daughters, my sisters, my friends. And I'll be damned before I let some disgusting religious extremists create a system that enslaves them.
No one has the right to continue living by parasitically sucking off another person without their consent. You and I only get to be here debating because our mothers chose to give that gift to us. It is not within our rights to force others to do the same for their own fetuses.
>No one has the right to continue living by parasitically sucking off another person without their consent.
This clearly does not hold up for children after birth. I can't deposit my infant in the desert and withdraw my consent to provide for it. This would be murder.
It is only in the privilege of modern society where we have such an abundance of resources that we have collectively consented to allocate a percentage of our commonwealth to the care of unwanted infants and children through orphanages and foster care, that we can treat infanticide as barbaric murder. You can sever your responsibility to you child by surrendering them to the state, so severing your responsibility by leaving them to die of exposure is indeed unnecessary and barbaric.
I personally believe that in the future, when we develop artificial wombs, we may revisit the question of abortion and require that women "abort" by having the fetus extracted alive and transplanted into an artificial womb. Preemie care is effectively the state of the art for "artificial wombs" and the current record survival is 21 weeks of age, which is just shy of the third trimester. This would also then require us to collectively allocate money and resources to caring for and raising these unwanted infants in an expensive medical setting.
However, I suspect we'll develop near perfect, side effect free, and reversible birth control before this happens, so the issue of abortion may mostly resolve itself on its own. That is, unless the religious extremists get their way and ban birth control too, which the current leaked court decision seems like it's paving the way for.
This is an extremely good point, if you care a lot about no more abortions then start working and investing in the ability to create children without depending on a person with a uterus.
Until then, keep your moral outrage out of people's bodies.
The equivalent argument is forcing everyone to become a living organ donor. It would unquestionably save lives, so from a pro-life perspective, it’s a no brainer.
> Except they obviously don't, actually ... regularly permit abortion in the case of rape
Have you actually talked to anyone on the other side of this issue? Most are consistent on not allowing it- even when the rapist is a skin color you think they hate.
Even among the most extremist group, white evangelicals, a larger percentage favor legal abortion in the case of rape than a blanket ban.
But as someone who was myself raised in these extremist groups, I fully echo your perception that most vocal pro-lifers wouldn't be willing to carve out a rape exception. But this does seem to be a case of the screaming minority drowning out the silent majority.
Did you read your own link? It supports my claim that a majority of the people on the other side of the issue (white evangelicals, who are btw the majority sect in America) oppose abortion in all cases.
The link I provided clearly shows that of white Evangelicals when asked specifically about the question of abortion in cases of rape, 40% said it should be legal, 34% said it should be illegal, and 24% said it depends. Are you referring to something else?
In fact, it looks like religious "nones" are growing so fast that the previous link is already out of date and they have already surpassed evangelicals to become the largest "religious" category (when you break down the larger Christian category). https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/12/14/about-three-...
>Except they obviously don't, actually, or they wouldn't so regularly permit abortion in the case of rape or incest
That just seems like pragmatism. An unqualified ban would be voted down or struck down by a court. They might just be crafting legislation they feel they can pass.
> I don’t support abortion in the case of rape or incest
Fundamentally this means you are fine with children giving birth to children. Today, usually when an 11 or 12 year old girl is raped by her relative or authority figure, the pregnancy is aborted and that little girl is allowed to move on with their life. After this decision comes down, abortion will be criminalized to the point of charging it as homicide. Young girls will be forced into social isolation at a young age to bear children that may in fact be their siblings. That, or they will undergo illegal and dangerous abortions which will end up killing them or putting them in jail for 30 years. Either way, the "Save The Children" crowd think they won one for babies, but the horror stories are just beginning.
You might be interested in this philosophical argument, "Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal--Even if the Fetus is a Person".
From the book description...
> Most arguments for or against abortion focus on one question: is the fetus a person? In this provocative and important book, David Boonin defends the claim that even if the fetus is a person with the same right to life you and I have, abortion should still be legal, and most current restrictions on abortion should be abolished. Beyond Roe points to a key legal precedent: McFall v. Shimp. In 1978, an ailing Robert McFall sued his cousin, David Shimp, asking the court to order Shimp to provide McFall with the bone marrow he needed. The court ruled in Shimp's favor and McFall soon died. Boonin extracts a compelling lesson from the case of McFall v. Shimp--that having a right to life does not give a person the right to use another person's body even if they need to use that person's body to go on living-and he uses this principle to support his claim that abortion should be legal and far less restricted than it currently is, regardless of whether the fetus is a person.
So, the ethical and legal question of abortion is not just one of if or when the fetus is a full human deserving of equal protection under the law, but one of when it is legally permissible to coerce a person into having their body used to preserve the life of another. Answering that question the wrong way is a potential legal slippery slope for all people, not just fertile females.
As a person who was raised fiercely pro-life, these are the kinds of ethical, philosophical, and legal considerations that I was never taught. All you ever hear in that world is "It's a baby! Murderers!"
I am now fiercely pro-choice, but I still consider the question of abortion to be a difficult one with no easy answer. However, I fundamentally believe that one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone, so even if you could prove to me that the fetus is conscious at the moment of conception, I would still never surrender a woman's right to sovereignty over her body.
I really enjoyed reading your comment and it gave me a new perspective. I had never thought of this issue in terms of using your body to preserve the life of someone else.
Just to continue the discussion, in the case where the fetus is the product of a consensual sexual relationship (not rape), morally does that make a difference? In that case are you now ethically required to save the fetus's life?
The fetus would not exist had it not been for your actions and perhaps should not have to suffer pain and death (depending on how long the pregnancy is).
Not arguing for or against, im of the opinion that its very personal and complex.
It is an interesting question that complicates the issue.
It partially comes down to the question of whether the act of consenting to sex necessarily implies consent to carry a baby to term. It's not clear that that's true. It's not even clear that if you did consent to get pregnant, that you have a continuous obligation to take the baby to term.
To build an imperfect analogy, consider a case where you have been asked to start donating blood every week because you have a rare blood type, and there is a sick person who will die if you don't donate. Let's assume you consent and begin donating. Do you have a right to revoke consent and stop donating at any time? What if the blood donation is taking an unexpected, significant toll on your health? What if the doctors determine that despite the donation, the receiver isn't getting better and will definitely die in a matter of months? What if you changed you mind and you just don't want to anymore? Do we really want to live in a society where once you've given consent to have your body used, you can't revoke it afterwards?
To build another analogy, let's say you behave recklessly and drive drunk getting into a car wreck with your friend and they get seriously injured and hospitalized. It's so bad that they need an organ donation and you're a match. Are you legally obligated to surrender your bodily autonomy and give up an organ to save your friend's life? We might say that's the ethical thing to do, but can we say that we want that to be a legal obligation and you will be coerced by the violence of the state into doing it?
Comparing a natural process like pregnancy to an extraordinary medical procedure is disingenuous.
The relationship between a mother and her child during a pregnancy is not an artificial construct: it's not created by legal obligations, not by societal norms. It's a basic reality that all just laws and mores simply have to recognize. Similar to how gravity is simply a physical reality: any rational understanding of the natural world just has to recognize that massive objects exert force on other massive objects.
The relationship between McFall and Shimp, on the other hand, was predicated on legal and social conventions. Bone marrow donation is not a normal, naturally occurring process. Shimp did not have a natural obligation to donate bone marrow to his cousin, though it would have been an extraordinary gesture of charity towards McFall.
The error of the abortion argument here is in asserting that the natural relationship between mother and child is the same as any other sort of contractual relationship between consenting adults in the modern world. This is simply false. Mothers do have a moral obligation to their unborn children. Their bodily autonomy is not absolute, and they do not have the right to abort their child in the same way that Shimp had the right to refuse to donate bone marrow.
> so even if you could prove to me that the fetus is conscious at the moment of conception
Based on _this_ assumption, then I would add the following:
Rights are not absolute. Yes, the woman has the right to bodily autonomy, but it can't infringe on the baby's basic right to living. Similar to how you have the right to bear arms, but that right can be limited or forfeited if you start to threaten to shoot random people. That's why we say both matter.
On the contrary, if you look at, say, a Catholic viewpoint, the modern conception of liberty, where you are a sort of free-floating mind, "subject to your will alone", all prevenient natural relations dissolved, or rather transmuted into mere contracts of volition, without natural obligations to impinge your freedom and preferring "to have neither a whence nor a whither, to be neither from nor for, but to be wholly at liberty" (so Ratzinger), is identified as exactly the root of disagreement in a host of issues, from abortion (no mother-child relation), to divorce (no husband-wife relation), to gender and sexuality (no body-self relation).
If I follow you correctly, it seems to me that the root disagreement is not whether these relationships exist. They obviously do.
The question is when it is permissible to sever or alter these relationships. Catholics might say that divorce is impermissible because the husband/wife relations is sanctified by god and is permanent. They might say that god never makes mistakes mismatching the soul (self) with the body. They might say that god blessed the woman with a relation with her fetus.
For those living back here in reality, there is no god setting up these relationships with a grand plan. We are the collective authors of our future, and it's up to us through conversation and education to decided what kind of world we want to build. Maybe we'll decide that the old ways are good, and maybe we'll decide that they're not.
Have you ever questioned if "pro-life" was merely propaganda by the religious elite to enforce a certain lifestyle that gives them control over people?
Ex: "Right to life" disguised as "the obligation of people to live the lifestyle we want to force them to live"?
Fundamentally, the pro-choice side of the aisle is the side of individual sovereignty and freedom. That includes preserving your right to live a more traditional, conservative life if that's what you so choose. I'm personally of the opinion that many, if not most, women when given sufficient information and life experience, would choose the more traditional, motherhood/housewife lifestyle.
Conversely, the pro-life side of the aisle is one of coercion and slavery. It's the side that attempts to force people (specifically women in this case) to serve the role that the conservative elite want them to serve, regardless of whether or not they consent to it.
In my opinion, the pro-life/anti-abortion ideology is fundamentally un-American, undemocratic, and has no place in a free and open society that values individual sovereignty.
Regardless of your abortion beliefs, the question stems from: if the idea of "choice" itself is a lie promulgated to push agendas, because this concept is used in other instances to avoid responsibility - ex: anti-covid vaccines.
The expansion of individual choice and sovereignty is one of the key outcomes of progress in civilization and society. Everything we've been doing for the past 12,000 years has been driven by the desire to be free to consume more, work less, and have more freedom to explore our selves and existence. Never before have there been so many people with the freedom to live such an intense variety of lifestyles.
Collectivist responsibility still exists, e.g. taxes, public health, rules of the road, because we will always live in resource constrained world where people necessarily must interact with each other. But more and more, we are able to carve out larger pockets of individual freedom.
It would be incredible to live in a world were we had such control over the spread of disease, that vaccination mandates becomes unnecessary. It would be incredible to live in a world where forced military drafts are long gone. Just like it is equally incredible that we now get to live in a country that doesn't allow chattel slavery.
I fail to see a legitimate reason as to why we must socially regress and revoke a woman's choice over the sanctity of her body.
Men effectively have this right. Why shouldn't women? We already do a lot to make this a viable lifestyle for everybody (namely, treating STDs inexpensively), why not make it equally available to all?
The difference in scale between having a financial responsibility you’d probably need to be taken to court over if you denied it vs. being legally required to have a permanently body altering, very risky, possibly emotionally devastating years-long medical ordeal is not remotely the same scale of responsibility.
Men aren't free from at least financial responsibility for their biological offspring. Some people actually make the argument that since women have the right to abort, men should have the right to their own "financial/legal abortion" of their parental rights and responsibilities if the woman chooses to keep the baby against his consent.
> men should have the right to their own "financial/legal abortion" of their parental rights and responsibilities if the woman chooses to keep the baby against his consent.
Up until what point—until the baby is born? Or in Texas, would they have to decide in the first 6 weeks? Or are you arguing that the man should have the right to do this when the child is 1, or 5, or 10 years old?
That is the first interesting argument on abortion that I've seen in decades. I'm not sure that I agree, but it's interesting. I'm going to have to think about that.
>From an ethical standpoint, the unborn child has a right to life that is not invalidated by the means or character of their parents.
Why would this situation differ from requiring people donate kidneys or a living liver donation when another humans life is at stake? Why don't I have a right to your kidney if you can go on living just fine after the procedure?
The situation is more like someone who has donated their organ demanding it back. The donation has already occurred. The recipient is already dependent on the donation. The donor is demanding a reversal. Do you think a donor has the right to their organ back after it has been donated?
This isn't really a very good analogy, because an organ donation is a one time event with no continuous, parasitic relationship between donor and receiver.
A much better analogy might be where you have a special blood type, and there's a person somewhere who needs regular transfusions of your blood in particular to continue living. No other blood will do, only yours.
In this analogy, we can first agree that the healthy person has no obligation to begin donating to the sick person, and this is strongly supported by legal precedent in the US at least. If there exists a frozen embryo, it is not legally justifiable to force some healthy woman to have it implanted.
We could also probably agree that if the healthy person is kidnapped and their blood taken against their will, they have no obligation to continue. This would give us an abortion exception for the cases rape and incest.
But the open question might be, if the healthy person consents to start donating, do they have the right to rescind their consent at anytime, say after 3 months of consistently donating blood? Do they have the right if they learn that donating blood so regularly is rapidly destroying their own health and is putting their own life at risk? Do they have the right revoke consent if the doctors are quite certain that the sick person will die in 3 months? Do they have a right to revoke consent just because they don't want to do it anymore, even though the sick person will die?
It's much more like someone agreeing to be hooked up to someone else to use their kidney, while it's still in their own body, and then deciding they don't want to be hooked up like that anymore.
If your kid is starving and you don't feed them and they die, you go to jail. But if it is a stranger you met in the street, you don't go to jail. Why?
Because a parent has either implicitly or explicitly agreed to take a legal guardianship of the child. This is clearly not the case where mothers have decided to have an abortion.
It's deeper than that. The courts have ruled that others can't have your organs to survive even if you're dead. Hence why we have thousands dying every year on waiting lists and tons of useful organs, blood, and tissue being incinerated and buried.
One group of people see it as literally murdering a child; the other group see banning or restricting it as literally enslaving or murdering women.
You're right about the true nature of the debate: it's really at which point during the pregnancy is the unborn child to be considered a full human whose right to life it is imperative to respect?
How about when it’s viable outside the womb, which is earlier in the western world and later elsewhere (given the effort required to deal with preemies). Before this time, it’s a cellular construct. And, similarly, I see the commandment as thou shall not kill. There’s no asterisk that I’ve seen, so people are bending a commandment as they wish to have capital punishment. Various quotes in the New Testament about judging and vengeance suggest against capital punishment as well.
Women aren’t brood mares at the beck and call of others. There is no right to inflict one’s progeny on another.
And, if the unborn are so vital, then they should be protected before and after birth, possibly until they’re an adult. Don’t see anybody saying that they have to provide medical care to the mother and unborn child. Or, are others allowed to kill the child (pr permanently cripple it) just not the mother?
It's pretty simple, until the child is out of the womb, it's not a child. There is no overarching negative consequence if you abort that child.
There is an extremely negative consequence if you try to regulate a person who is a grown persons body.
I would only buy the argument of respecting a life if we also extend this to way beyond a child in the womb, and to everyone living. Until we do that, there's no excuse to control a person's body.
Just last night, my wife and I had a peek into the current home of our 15-week-along child. He or she was so active - wiggling and squirming, no doubt as a result of some of the prodding from the midwife. I saw arms and legs moving, fingers, feet and everything. Their heart beating at 140bpm. My other children live in the environment of our house, and this child lives in the environment of the womb. It is simple: this is a child. The consequence of killing him or her would be massive to them - ending the life which I was blessed enough to peek into for a few moments. The debate rages with passion because people are passionate about the subject - I know I am.
How would you feel if in week 16 a complication arose which meant that unless your child is aborted, your wife will die, along with your child? What choice would you make then? What if you couldn't make any choice at all, and you had to say goodbye to your wife knowing that if you lived under a different law, she'd be allowed to choose to live?
Again, this is why it's the choice of the person carrying it.
You don't want to, no one is forcing you to abort.
The discussion here is "who is forced to do something". This child in the womb would not be able to live without the life of the mother. Therefore their "choice", if you can even call it that, is irrelevant.
Why stop there? A child about to be born is structurally and functionally identical to a child that has just been born. And once it is born, there are, as you say, "extremely negative consequences" to forcing the mother to either care for it herself or make other arrangements.
The right to dispose of any unwanted child the mother cannot or will not care for herself is one that, like in vivo abortion, women will exercise irrespective of whether the law permits it. Poor indigenous women in Brazil allow their sickly babies to starve all the time.
Conclusion: any society that does not allow humane infanticide within the first year is literally Handmaid's Tale.
By the way, let me note that this means that all the "a woman's right to do what she wants with her own body" is a smokescreen. The issue isn't about her body, it's about the fetus, which is not her body.
When someone brings out the "her own body" line, they're begging the question about the fetus. It's a dishonest rhetorical device. We aren't going to solve this by yelling dishonest rhetoric at each other; that hasn't worked for 50 years. We have to actually address the real question.
So long as the fetus requires the woman's body to survive, let alone come to term, it absolutely has to do with the woman's body. The fetus can also kill the woman whose body it's inhabiting.
Not considering the woman's point of view is treating her as if she's nothing more than an incubator, which comes back to "enslaving or murdering women".
And flushing her body of a fetus (or an embryo) is absolutely an action a woman may take upon her own body.
It has to do with the woman's body. But it is not only about the woman's body - the fetus exists also. The problem with the "woman's body" rhetoric is that it deliberately ignores the question of the fetus.
Just as the the pro-life stance ignores the question of the woman. There are the rights of two beings in play here, requiring compromise… something that is nowhere to be found in these discussions.
Compromise is made harder by three things, one is the parasitical relationship that only disadvantages a woman (who doesn’t want a child), the second is that a woman’s body flushing a fetus is a natural occurrence, and third is that occasionally the removal of the fetus, dead or alive, is medically required for the woman to survive.
The bans on abortions being proposed are not compromises.
"bmitc>Why is abortion literally a major topic in every presidential election over decades?
skizm>Abortion is a big issue ... because one group of people view it as literally murdering a child and another group see it as a minor medical procedure...<"
That is, it is a religious dispute and religious disputes are impossible to settle by negotiation or compromise.
Abortion is a great example of an issue where the resolution of discourse isn't adequate to actually address the problem. It's not a binary yes/no question and biologically cannot be, but somehow people are stuck debating as if it is.
In reality it is a matrix with time on one axis and extenuating circumstances on the other.
How is it not binary? There's no reason to obfuscate the issue. All you need to do is to answer two questions:
1. Are human beings _human beings_ beginning with conception?
2. Is it ever licit to kill an innocent human being intentionally?
W.r.t. (1), if you answer "no", then the second question is moot. It may still be the case that abortion would be morally illicit, but that would be a different question. If you answer "yes", then you must answer the second question. If you answer "yes", then you are a utilitarian/consequentialist. The conflict has largely shifted to the second question over time.
(For the sake of clarity, the word "intentionally" is important. Treating an ectopic pregnancy to save the mother by removing the affected implanted tissue will result in the death of the unborn, but this is not an intended consequence, only a tolerable side effect given what's at stake. These sorts of situations are not the subject of the abortion debate.)
> These sorts of situations are not the subject of the abortion debate
They are unavoidably entangled with the abortion debate, because so many of the legislators and public are ignorant of such fine distinctions, and allowing a total abortion ban in the US _will_ result in maternal fatalities in these situations.
First, most people don't have a single yes/no answer to point 1, and for better or worse they probably don't view "human being" as a binary state. Some of them believe that a fetus gradually becomes a human at some nebulous point in time, some believe that it's a "potential person", some believe that it's a person with caveats. Secondly, a decent chunk of them also believe that non-humans should have some moral right, and that there might be situations where the state has a compelling interest in preventing certain outcomes even where there is no clear individual harm (for example, a nontrivial number of people are uncomfortable with constructing high-level systems to allow abortions on the basis of neurodivergence, even if they believe that each individual abortion decision on its own is justified).
But lets say someone answers #1 with, "yes, and they should have full human rights". Then we go to point #2, and the short answer is that people who believe that it's literally never moral to intentionally kill someone are exceedingly rare (I've gotten to know maybe one person total in my entire life who I considered to be genuinely a strict deontologist). Utilitarianism is also not a binary conclusion for most people, most people believe that individual rights are worth protecting in at least some cases where they could intentionally be used to cause harm, but in other cases should be blocked because of the outcome -- and they often differ on where they draw those lines and what rights they think are most important to protect. The vast majority of people in the world tend to be somewhat utilitarian in some situations, and somewhat deontological in other situations.
So now there's question #3 which you hint at but don't actually raise -- are abortions intentional deaths or are they closer to the scenario you describe with ectopic pregnancies, where the actual goal is just the removal of the unborn and protection of the mother and as a side effect the unborn dies? This is somewhat closely related to the privacy/autonomy argument that gets brought up; that trying to save unborn lives is great and if you can keep an aborted child alive you're welcome to do so, but that concern has to be subservient to preserving bodily autonomy and preserving the patient's health -- in other words, I've heard people argue that abortion is primarily about stopping pregnancy, and that the death of the unborn is just an unfortunate side effect. And once again, a lot of people don't have binary opinions about that either; it's not uncommon for me to see people who draw lines at very different places and based on very different criteria even when they at first say something that sounds like a simple yes/no answer. Culpability for harm in general on many issues can be complicated to talk about sometimes.
And then we go on to question #4, which wasn't brought up at all: regardless of the morality, how prudent is it to legislate abortion? And once again, there are a diversity of opinions on this, not just in regards to abortion, but in regards to the fundamental question of when and how our government should legislate morality even in situations where someone with moral value is getting hurt. In fact, a large number of US debates that are separate from abortion also intersect with this question. Some people believe that the state needs to preserve absolute autonomy regardless of the morality, some people believe that it would be reasonable for the state to impose morality in some cases, but that it's likely to get it wrong or have so many unintended consequences that it should only rarely impose morality. This also intersects a little bit with the privacy arguments people raise: is the government qualified to make broad rules about very individual health/parenting decisions, especially regarding risky pregnancies -- and is it reasonable to ask people to "prove" to the government that their pregnancies are risky?
And then of course question #5, which is whether abolishing abortion is the most effective way to reduce abortion. See also drug legalization, where you'll occasionally run into strict drug critics who believe that recreational drug use is harmful and should be discouraged, that still want to see it legalized. Once again, most people don't have a binary answer to this question because there are a lot of restrictions and regulations a government can impose beyond just banning/allowing something, and even people who are primarily concerned about reducing abortion rates might disagree about which policies actually work to reduce abortion rates.
All of those questions, on their own, will get you different answers if you ask different people. The problem is that saying no/yes to each question isn't enough on its own to create a perfectly logical policy that everyone in the world will just agree with based on first principles. There are a lot of possible answers someone might give to both questions that boil down to either "sometimes...", or to "yes/no, but..."
And that's not to say that there aren't better or worse answers to those questions, it's just to say that a lot of people claim the reason conversations about abortion are stalled is because there's nothing else to talk about and everyone knows perfectly what they believe and there's no way to sway anyone, and in reality it's more that conversation is stalled because public opinion isn't perfectly resolved and many people just feel really uncomfortable and confused talking about it because it's very contentious and has a lot of stigma -- which ends up being kind of self-reinforcing because the more that people reflexively avoid the topic the less they tend to learn about it and the fewer opportunities they have to try and nail down their views.
> In reality the debate should just be "how many weeks into pregnancy should it be allowed?", but that's hard to sell in a campaign so politicians will go hard one way or the other.
I've read the problem there was actually Roe v. Wade itself. The Supreme Court took it upon itself to prematurely decide the issue, which twisted the politics around it into a question of "how to control the Supreme Court" that is resistant to nuance (because the court is so insulated from normal politics).
Without Roe v. Wade, the debate would have probably eventually settled on the question you proposed in nearly all jurisdictions, though with some setting a number that Roe or Casey forbade.
This is also why the Democrats, when they get a majority, never bother to make a law ensuring the legality of the procedure or defining its limits.
It is too valuable to Left to fix, though the Right seems perfectly content to go forward and act. The Right isn't merely agitating, they're trying for policy. The Left aims for outrage and political energy.
"Clearly we have to pack the court!" No. Clearly you have to pass a law. Understandably, that's much harder, because you must actually engage the electorate and build consensus instead of passing the buck to judges to "detect" what the people want, or slant things in your favor by ignoring (or selectively upholding) the Constitution.
> "Clearly we have to pack the court!" No. Clearly you have to pass a law.
The reason people are suggesting packing the court is because there is a belief that a 6/3 SCOTUS can simply undo any laws you put in place. The irony here is that Roe v Wade is a perfect example of the court doing just that.
The way we have 9 rulers who are picked by whatever party happened to be lucky enough to have someone die is an absolutely stupid system. I hope every majority congress packs until the court is thousands of justices.
Overturning Roe v. Wade doesn't undo a law. The problem is there's no law in the first place. It overturns a precedent. It's the judicial branch's equivalent of countermanding an Executive Order with a new Executive Order.
If it were a law, it'd never get to the courts in the first place.
The original RvW did overturn a law -- Texas state law.
It absolutely would go to the courts. In the same way Obamacare went to the courts.
SCOTUS makes rulings on the constitutionality of laws written by both state and federal governments. If SCOTUS, for example, wants to argue a person is a fetus therefore deserves all the protections and rights ingrained in the constitution, they could easily dismiss a federal bill on abortion.
It's impossible for me to over-stress how toxic the GOP has been to any kind of productive conversation about fetal rights as a concept and how transparently opportunistic they've been about using abortion as a means to preserve power, lock in voters, and push back on progressive policies in general.
It makes it incredibly difficult to talk to many pro-life people about abortion in any context, because there's a huge effort happening to convince Evangelical voters that:
A) literally any sympathy for the parent, nuance, or lack of ferver is the same as wanting the unborn to die.
B) it's a primarily religious issue and that being an Evangelical means voting a certain way and aligning with a set of political issues, and that conversations about abortion must be approached through a religious lens.
C) that because it's a religious issue, there is one singular "correct" way to focus on reducing abortion, and any deviation from that specific strategy is literally a religious failing.
I see people just shut down during conversations about abortion, like even talking about it is itself a sin.
----
There is still a lot of nuance; I'm not trying to lump an entire group together or demonize people or say that Evangelical conservatives all collectively hate women. But there is (to me) a very obvious intentional push coming from some parts of the political spectrum and from some Church leaders to eliminate any nuance or openness that those people have -- to get people to approach abortion though a very specific lens and to only ever acknowledge or think about that specific lens, because those leaders/politicians see it as a really convenient way to create an identity that requires people to vote/associate in a certain way, to demonize people who those leaders/politicians would like them to demonize, and to go even further and tie that political identity to people's religious security in a way that is inherently dangerous for them to question or examine.
As a result, it then becomes easier for people to tie that religious identity to other political topics as well; the more that pro-life becomes shorthand for Christian, and the more that Christian becomes shorthand for "votes Republican", the easier it is to pick out other social/political issues (wealth inequality, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, even entirely amoral, purely practical questions about things like economic policy), and to say that deviation from the expected party position is literally a sin and that non-party positions are guilty by association with the enemy.
And again, definitely not all Evangelicals and absolutely not all Christians. I grew up in white Evangelical communities; I see their flaws and their occasional strengths. And regardless of the flaws I still care about people in that community. But it is a very concerning problem that the Church needs to grapple with; at some point something needs to break and white Evangelicals need to decide whether their primary identity is Christian or Republican.
> The middle class is getting absolutely hammered by taxes while the rich just keep on keeping on in a tax-free world not experienced by others.
Define middle class. If you make >$250k but <$2M - you're probably getting hammered. But I don't think many people consider that "middle class". The ones with the highest tax rates by far make around $400-$600k. You don't have enough income for it to make sense to spend a lot of money to avoid taxes (accountants, tax lawyers, shielding income through corporations, etc) - and most of your income is "earned" from an employer - so you don't have many strategies to avoid taxes realistically anyway. You're pretty much stuck with a relatively high tax rate. But this is the top 1% - that doesn't seem middle class to me.
If you make ~$100k - you're still in the top 15% - but your tax rate is really not THAT high. Middle class should probably center on FAMILIES earning between ~$40k and ~$100k. By no means are these FAMILIES being hammered with taxes - on the low end, you're looking at hardly any federal or state tax beside payroll (your pension).
Minimum wage is ~$15k nationally. Also - IIUC - West Hollywood, CA voted for the highest minimum wage in the country, and it's lower than $40k. Where is minimum wage $40k??
Anyway - there's a lot of minimum wage workers who make below $40k - probably the majority make less than half that - many minimum wage workers do not work full-time.
And, yes, considering how many single-parent HHs there are, and how many HHs with only 1 person on a small SS check - two working adults making minimum wage would be considered close to low end for middle class.
Median HH income is $67k - meaning only 50% of HH make more than that. So the bar for middle class is obviously going to be lower than that. It's subjective - maybe your bar is at $50k? The tax rate is still quite low at that point (~14% with ~7% of that being your pension - SS & Medicare - even lower if this is a family instead of a single person - which, statistically, is likely).
If this is considered hammered - I don't know how low people expect taxes should be, yet we still have a functioning society.
And, regardless, you're getting significantly more hammered the more income you make until you're deep into the 1% and can afford to avoid taxes. The top 10% are not skimping out on taxes. People making >$5M are.
I don't know that I've ever thought about my bar, but when I was a kid my dad was making around 80-90k and we considered ourselves low-solid middle class. But that was 30-40 years ago, my understanding is that real wages have not kept up with inflation so I'd expect the bars on middle class to be higher today.
Of course we also had the idea that "middle class" was more of an aspirational lifestyle goal and not a moving target. I guess if we just define it accurately as the median of real incomes we can see this range drop alarmingly. Thanks for the perspective.
So, a few reference points. In 1980: the median household income was $17.7k. The median income for one individual was $12k. $80k in 1980 is roughly equivalent to $240,000 in 2020.
$240,000 in Bay Area California is immensely different than $240,000 in the hills of West Virginia. Middle class is more of a lifestyle than a particular income number. It is entirely possible that middle class in a particular city includes people whose incomes are in the top 5% nationally, but still live barely comfortably because their high cost-of-living area.
I'd argue median income is irrelevant when it comes to assessing whether or not someone is living a middle class lifestyle.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. 40 hours for 50 weeks makes for $14,500 annually (before taxes). Around 21 states use this value as their minimum wage.
The largest state minimum wage can be found in New York and Washington, DC, at $15. That is $30,000 annually.
>> Bloomberg reports that the world’s richest 500 people have lost a total of $1 trillion this year.
> I can't view the article, but aren't those "losses" likely to be paper losses, i.e., unrealized losses?
Yup, these kind of articles are just padding. They're very cheap to write, and there's almost always "news" since stock prices always move. Most of the richest people (that we know of) hold the vast majority of their wealth in shares of public companies, so the richest got X-trillion richer/poorer in the past months/years is pretty much synonymous with the stock market went up/down by Y-%.
You can probably write a script that fetches stock returns and autogenerates the article. Heck, someone at Bloomberg probably already did.
>These reversions, due to in effect religious fundamentalism and pandering to what I only hope are minority crowds emboldened by gerrymandering and the electoral college, are concerning. The U.S. will continue to stagnate if all we ever discuss and rabble about are fringe issues. Why is abortion literally a major topic in every presidential election over decades? Abortion is a tough issue no matter what, and so a compromised is needed. There will never be a totally clean solution. Why are people so damn concerned with decisions others make? In Texas, last time I looked, anybody can initiate a lawsuit against a doctor on abortion related issues, making doctors frozen due to legal worries and even reverting to communicating on paper notes that they then throw away. It's insane. We're taking decision making from the educated and giving it to the uneducated.
RvW was a compromise that made both sides feel shafted, like most good compromises. The rise in extremism on both sides is fueling this, not religious fundamentalism. For states like Texas, where most people still hold to vaguely Christian values and new life is valued over choice, they feel like they are forced to allow murder. For other places like California who have a more secular egalitarian leaning, and value choice over life, they feel as though being limited to before viability is too much restriction.
RvW was always on shaky ground legally and morally speaking [1]. Making it a federal issue was always going to lead to this. States are different, some so different they might as well be separate countries. California, for example has already toyed with the idea of making abortion part of their state constitution. With Roe gone, it's much easier to do that, not harder.
Acting like this was done out of a lack of education is reductive and pointless. The justices know what they are doing and what it means. Just because you happen to be against this particular decision does not make it wrong. Abortion rights are not going away, they are being given back to the states where they belonged in the first place. Activists on both sides will just have to deal with the fact that they can no longer dictate how the entire country lives, just because their local bubble agrees with them.
> In Texas, last time I looked, anybody can initiate a lawsuit against a doctor on abortion related issues, making doctors frozen due to legal worries and even reverting to communicating on paper notes that they then throw away. It's insane. We're taking decision making from the educated and giving it to the uneducated.
.. as you've pointed out yourself.
> The rise in extremism on both sides is fueling this,
There is no pro-abortion "extremism". There never has been anything comparable to the anti-abortion bombings.
> For states like Texas, where most people still hold to vaguely Christian values and new life is valued over choice, they feel like they are forced to allow murder.
Texas has the death penalty to show how much they value life.
“We're taking decision making from the educated and giving it to the uneducated.”
I can’t find the quote, but someone said something like “democracy is the system of government where the stupid lead society” (implying that the majority of people are stupid, so rule by majority is rule by the stupid). I tend to agree a little, but every other system seems so much more dangerous (including trying to only let “smart people” make decisions).
Reminds me of this clip[1] (trigger warning: R-word). Probably the worst feature of democracy is that morons vote for morons, and once they're the solid majority, we're doomed.
I for one hope the Roe decision diffuses the abortion question in the long term. At least theoretically, having the decision state by state means more people can agree with their local legislation
The senate minority leader already started talking about banning abortion across the entire US [0]. The states are gearing up to fight each other when they pass laws banning abortion for their citizens in other states like Texas either has done or is doing [1]. And on the other side you've got Connecticut allowing their citizens to counter-sue [2].
So no matter what side you're on it doesn't seem like it's about to be diffused. It seems like without federal law one way or the other states are going to be fighting each other. It sounds like chaos.
Edit: Also, although it's tempting to think of "red" and "blue" states, the minority party in each state is humongous. Almost 40% of New York state voted for Trump in 2020 [3]. Desantis in Florida only won his election by 49% [4]! And a higher minority percentage in Mississippi voted for Biden in 2020 than minority in New York voted for Trump [5]. As much as it is easy to think of there being separate political halves of the US it's just not the case. There is huge Democrat and Republican presence in every state.
Congress almost certainly does not have the power to ban abortion due to the tenth amendment. The supreme court ruling that the constitution gives no right to abortion means the power to create legislation about abortion is no longer granted to congress, which means it's reserved to the states under the tenth.
This seems a little naive considering Congress has found plenty of ways to coerce states into implementing laws (national speed limit which was later repealed, national drinking age, etc.) by threatening to withhold funding and these laws have stood up to a tenth amendment challenge. Similarly the GOP could threaten Medicaid funding for states if they don’t restrict abortion, which would be disastrous for the state and thus impossible to ignore.
National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius disagrees. I believe all the highway funding stuff worked because they could claim interstate commerce.
In the case of Medicaid funding, I thought the outcome of that case was that the Federal government couldn't threaten existing Medicare funding but it was allowable that any future Medicaid expansion be denied to states if they didn't comply with the ACA. The makeup of the court has changed since then though and in general the conservative portion of the court did generally vote to say that coercive use of federal funding was unconstitutional, so hopefully that remains the same when the ideological nature of the case is reversed.
A "federal law" will go back and forth between ban and allow until which point the corrupt SCOTUS steps in and says the federal government is only empowered to ban it across the country, but cannot allow it across the country.
> I for one hope the Roe decision diffuses the abortion question in the long term.
That is obvious and absolute nonsense. The only thing it does is make the issue worse.
> At least theoretically, having the decision state by state means more people can agree with their local legislation
Not only will you always have people which do not agree with their legislation (even more so when that legislation is in no way representative thanks to voter suppression and gerrymandering), the GOP is already pivoting to trying for federal bans.
And that's ignoring the regressive states also already looking to push things further. Contraceptive bans are already coming up more and more as well.
Read the section that I linked to specifically. The state's implementation ensured that in practice, most felons wouldn't have their voting rights restored because they hadn't paid fees and fines. And in many cases, had no way to know how much they owed.
The idea of restoring voting rights was wildly popular (65% in favor) yet it didn't actually happen.
OK, I see what you are getting at now. I was expecting to see something about the public support for the implementation where voting is contingent on paying fines.
> I for one hope the Roe decision diffuses the abortion question in the long term.
If this is what you hope I don't think you've been paying attention. They're gutting the right to privacy with Roe, so they're coming after gay marriage and contraception next; their legality is predicated on exactly the right to privacy that the supreme court is about to gut. Religious conservatives are salivating at the thought of making Plan B and IUDs illegal. There's no diffusion going on; they lit a match next to a powder keg. Roe is just the beginning.
And if you think this is going to be left up to the states, Republicans are already talking about a nationwide ban on abortion. This has never been about leaving it up to the states, when one side believes they are fighting for the rights of unborn defenseless babies in the name of God.
The connection to the constitution was a lot more clear in the case of interracial or gay marriage than that of Roe.
For Roe it took the 14th amendment:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This was intepreteted in Roe to mean abortion bans are OK in the 1st trimester, conditional in the 2nd, and prohibited in the 3rd trimester.
Loving took this and said that means interracial couples and gays get equal legal protection and treatment to everyone else.
The recent supreme court appointments underline the idea that the constitution says what the court says. If they can reinterpret it for Roe they can reinterpret it for Loving.
Anything is "possible". My point is that there is a much more difficult case for reinterpretation of Loving.
On a practical level, I also think there is public support for gay an interracial marriage today in a way that there never was for Roe and later Casey. Most Americans cant even articulate what the abortion standards are.
I think your data more or less supports my conclusion.
The idea that the conservative supreme court is about to overturn Loving is absurd. 94% of the population supports it and Clarence Thomas is in an interracial marriage himself for heavens sake.
Time since decision is a factor as you mention, but the rates of change are an order of magnitude different. Support for gay marriage has increased about 40% in 20 years. Interracial marriage increased 90%! in 70 years. For abortion, "legal under any circumstances" has seen the biggest change and increased ~10% in 50 years. The pro-live/pro-choice chart is even more telling showing stagnation for the last 20 years.
Abortion is a complex decision tree with 100s of options and 71% of people fall between the extremes of no-exception legal or illegal [1], and dissatisfaction with current laws is at an all time high [2]. I just don't see the same motivation to overturn Loving and Obergefell which are binary issues the overwhelming majority are happy with.
Education in the country is a major concern and has domino effects that take decades to correct, but the more the less educated come into power, the harder it gets to revert. And we're trending in the wrong direction.
I also think the section on inequality is greatly misleading. Inequality keeps getting worse and worse by basically any measure. Picking out any data over the past two years is likely to be very, very biased, because the economy has been wildly swinging back and forth. Data can be picked to basically back up any position. The middle class is getting absolutely hammered by taxes while the rich just keep on keeping on in a tax-free world not experienced by others.
> Bloomberg reports that the world’s richest 500 people have lost a total of $1 trillion this year.
I can't view the article, but aren't those "losses" likely to be paper losses, i.e., unrealized losses? When lower and middle class people have losses, they are realized. People lose jobs, money, homes, etc. Rich people "losing" money in the various markets and their investments continue to reap dividends and other monetary gains and will eventually recuperate.
Articles like this are akin to burying one's head in the sand and consist of cherry-picked data to say everything's okay.