This will probably follow the same pattern as companies’ response to politicians who gave credence to the election lies: stop donations —-> some time passes —-> resume donations.
"Looking at the abortion law, or the gun law, or the voting law, it's a form of vigilante justice, where you're empowering individuals to enforce the law," said Tyson Tuttle, the CEO of Austin-based Silicon Laboratories (SLAB.O). "It's been a rough week in Texas and a harbinger of what's to come across the country."
I'm from across the pond, and have spent limited time in the US - none of it in Texas - but I always thought that I had a pretty good handle on things American. I went to a UK school, from age 7 to nearly 18, which was run by Americans.
I've never got the whole gun thing, but it's never bothered me. However, the recent stuff - abortion and voting rights being eroded - has just knocked me sideways. I'd have said they were un-American. Now, I don't know what to think. I really mean this. Was I always wrong?
The red states being pilloried for supposedly restrictive voting laws do not generally have more restrictions than blue states such as New York. The critics are motivated by a desire to discredit Republicans rather than a general interest in voting rights.
> supposedly restrictive voting laws do not generally have more restrictions than blue states such as New York
Can you give any examples to support this?
We have no ID requirement, no questions asked mail-in ballots, early voting, and paper ballots.
The Texas law isn’t all bad. Recording vote counting, paper trails and regulating the removal of voters from rolls is good policy. But the restrictions on early voting and ballot distribution & collection are bad. The limits on urban polling locations are blatantly partisan.
> Currently, counties with a population of 100,000 or more must provide at least 12 hours of early voting each weekday of the last week of early voting.
> SB 7 would lower that population threshold to 30,000 so more counties would be required to offer more early voting hours between the newly established window of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
You’re against this?
> But the legislation also sets a 12-hour cap on how long early voting can run during that week, so polling places that stay open until 9 p.m. would have to open up later in the morning.
Or you think only being open for 12 hours is too constraining for [in person, early] voting… nonetheless in towns of 30k people?
I mean, there’s going to be a mixed bag if I were to really dig in, and now that I’m not a TX resident anymore, I don’t really care to.
In Palo Alto, during the last presidential election, I had to hand my ballot to a person who before feeding it into the machine reviewed my votes. She was particularly concerned about me choosing to NOT vote on certain issues, asking me if I wanted to try again. I never had anything like that in Texas or Oklahoma.
At this point I feel like it's beyond ridiculous to try to defend the Republicans restrictive voting rights restrictions, because in many areas Republicans themselves have basically admitted they just don't like democracy. In Arizona the head of the GOP was lamenting there wasn't a statewide "Electoral College" (i.e. a way for the majority vote winner to be declared the loser), and in Georgia some in the GOP only toned down some of their voting rights restrictions when they realized it would hurt rural white voters. They don't even try to hide their cynicism in the BS "voting integrity" language anymore, because many of the restrictions (reducing early voting hours for example) just make it harder to vote with no benefit to voting security.
The GOP knows the only way they can keep power in Florida and Texas is by making sure people don’t move there unless they’re super conservative, hence all those stupid laws. The housing crisis in a lot of blue states has made a lot of middle class folks move to those states. Their electorate is mostly non-Hispanic white, non-immigrant and older and their numbers will continue to dwindle over time.
No, as much as I don't like it, he is correct. Especially South Texas.
A large factor is immigrants that went through the tedious years long drudgery that is the legal process for US citizenship being really pissed at the fact some may not have to go through the aforementioned like they did - misery loves company or something like that.
Another is that these immigrants and minorities are typically fairly uneducated and truly believe the man with the golden shitter is actually like them and is going to help them.
And some of it is trying to fit in with the preexisting community. If you're a brown person in a town of white religious/nationalistic fanatics that typically do not like brown people, vowing your loyalty to their guy is typically a quick way to fit in a bit better.
Yes, third generation Native with a house in urban Austin but currently near the Guadalupe Mountains out west.
I know reddit isn't representative of the state but both /r/austin and /r/texas have had this conversation many times.[0][1] I personally agree with the thesis that Texas GOP see's the demographic writing on the wall and want to limit to more liberal immigrants.
And because I already saw a comment mentioning it, I want to add that as a Mexican born and raised a border town I think the flipped Hispanic counties on the border are an anomaly. If you investigate the counties, like Zavala, that flipped, they are 1 largely blue collar men which love Trump (my roofer uncle), and 2 Zavala was actually one of the few counties that LOST population according to the 2020 census. The correlation is visible, the counties that had the highest population decline in Texas voted most heavily for Trump while the fast growing suburbs are now purple and blue. In this booming state the poor counties losing money and people are the ones voting GOP.
I think you're overthinking it, those states have been fighting to prevent abortion and restrict voting rights long before the current housing problems you're seeing in blue states. This is mostly just a continuation of that.
> Their electorate is mostly non-Hispanic white, non-immigrant and older and their numbers will continue to dwindle over time.
This is a dangerous fallacy. As has been widely reported, Trump increased his standing with minorities in 2020 vs 2016. In some heavily Hispanic areas along the Texas border the swing toward Trump in 2020 was over 40 points compared to 2016.
Texas has been growing rapidly in some areas, the thing is though is the political redistricting which means those voting power may skew towards those in rural areas. So if you see, for example, a technology company in a city like Austin trying to evangelize connecting to community to flip the vote, it might be effort done within a vacuum with less effectiveness than perceived.
Abortion is really a very simple issue, those who say it is about "regulating women" attack a straw man. Pro-lifers believe that abortion is murder of the baby. This trumps a woman's right for a medical procedure. So the question about whether it's a private medical choice or an issue of bodily autonomy doesn't even enter into the discussion. There are laws against murdering someone other ways that restrict bodily autonomy, but we aren't bothered by those; as the saying goes, your rights stop where your fist hits my nose.
On the voting law I think it's reasonable in most places. Poll-watching isn't a problem, and ID requirements aren't a big issue. I disagree with the law in that people should be able to distribute mail-in ballots since the new ID requirements make them more resistant to fraud. Not sure what you mean about removing electoral rights. I am, however, bothered by the fact that it (and most other voting laws) are driven by "stolen election" lies, which is almost worse than people trying to hang onto power (which they've done with re-districting/gerrymandering for a long time already).
Somehow the straightforward answer ("no at first, yes by the end") is anathema to the activists at either end of the spectrum here. But those are the ones you hear from.
They actually do discuss that on the pro-life side. They point out in that case, where's the line? Calling it "viability" is fuzzy because, are old people / disabled viable; and also because preemie babies are increasingly likely to survive earlier and earlier.
For example, just a few weeks ago, the world's most premature baby (with 0% chance of survival at the time, completely unviable) just had his 1st birthday.
I understand that's about the earliest viability will ever be, because if there aren't working lungs, it simply can't survive.
On the other hand, perhaps technology will advance to the point where even a fertilized egg could grow outside the womb. Then abortion might turn into "take this thing out of me and find somebody else that wants it."
This is a straw man, nails are obviously dead. If you want to cut off your finger, however, that's your right. If you cut off your child's, you should be tossed in jail.
Well, nobody thinks they "murder a cow" to eat a steak even though we kill animals for food. Though this is the case that we kill animals, it doesn't really cross most people's minds. I've killed, dressed, broken down, cooked, and eaten animals plenty of times and am unbothered. Different rules for animals; I don't have a problem with killing them, though don't do so needlessly.
The viability standard of Roe v Wade is not about personhood but about physical dependency.
In other words, it’s not murder, and is ethical, to pull the plug on someone who’s hooked to your body to survive, if there is no other way to save them.
This is a very enlightened stance imo, and inductively implies abortion will one day be both illegal and in low demand.
Does this imply then that, let's say a mother was in a position where breastfeeding her child was the only way the child would survive (in the wilderness for some reason, for example), that she should be acquitted if she refused to do so and the child died? The baby needed to be hooked on her body to survive.
If it's clear the mother went to the woods to create this environment to kill the child, then a state could consider prosecuting.
If there was a plane crash and it was clear that the mother was distraught and this was a side effect of the crash, I don't think most states with prosecute, but again, depends on the state.
A mother has a right to refuse to breastfeed but that doesn’t imply that she would be innocent of parental negligence for failing to find an alternative way to take care of the child. Once a child is born to legal guardians there are minimum standards for caregivers.
Abortion isn't analogous to pulling the plug on someone on life support. It's analogous to sending someone on life support on a guillotine. The fetus is violently killed during the process.
The point is if you decide a mother has a right to cut the umbilical at any time, the fetus will die regardless during most phases of pregnancy (the ones where abortion is legal in the US.) So now you get to decide given death is a certainty, what is the proper act. I could be persuaded the current mechanisms are the wrong choice. Would you propose to just cut the cord and let the fetus starve in the womb?
I'm pro-choice, but I imagine that a lot of pro lifers would be less horrified by abortion if that were the case. My point is that the body autonomy argument is in bad faith and simply meant to spread propaganda that conservatives are misogynists. Given the violent nature of abortion, one can only conclude that people think it's ethical because they don't consider the fetus a human life.
I believe you are right than many pro-choice advocates have lost the plot and think it’s about the right to choose to kill vs choose to cut, or that right comes from a lack of personhood.
However, that aside, my point is that once you take death as inevitable, then the mechanism to do may fall to minimizing suffering. And so, it stands to reason that a procedure which a) doesn’t result in long, perhaps painful starvation and b) doesn’t put the mother at risk by having a dead fetus inside of her are worthy considerations. I do think that you are right to think that the violence of current procedures, while perhaps ethical due to minimization of suffering, may be contributing to moral confusion about the right to cut vs right to kill or the dehumanization of the fetus. I do fear that as this moral confusion winds it’s way upward, the rights to abortion may expand beyond viability, which to me would flip my position on where I stand with regards to maintaining the legal status quo vs reversing it. I support Roe v Wade but would not support a law which gave a mother discretion to terminate past viability.
"When is a fetus considered a separate life?" or perhaps "When does a fetus become a baby?"
That's a lot harder to define than you might think. (At least that's the argument ...) Pro-life people tend to see a cut and dried answer to that, where Pro-Choice people tend see it as a bit more ambiguous.
The cynic in me believes that the ambiguity is intentional, because it allows us as adults to have a greater ability to escape the consequences of our actions. (Excepting rape, etc.)
I'm pro-choice, it just seems like a truth people don't want to acknowledge.
Either you're truly pro-life, and that mean no abortion even in the case of rape, or you're into punishing women for having unprotected sex (pro-sexual punishment does sound weird, we should find another word), and only those who chose to have unprotected sex [0] are punished.
My stance are controversial but hear me:
Their is two solutions. First: abortion law as they exist (abortion whenever you want during the first semester + if there is a disease until the middle of the second semester). Pro-lifes don't like this solution, i get it.
No abortion at all, or the real pro-life solution: the woman should get a full salary from the state and her replacement training paid as well when she is pregnant and that state prevent her from functionning. If she is a student, she will receive the median salary of the state she live in, and have a sabbatical, allowing her to return with no penalities. Top medical aid provided free of charge to avoid complication, and if she can't take care of her child, a fully-funded child services will be in charge of finding a foster home once 6 month of breastfeeding (paid, of course) are done.
The only downside left is the lack of career evolution from a working woman who lost 2 year to scale up the corporate ladder, i agree, this is still punishment for unprotected sex, and cesarean can scar the body. I am not a woman, did not go through a pregnancy and childbirth, so a woman knowing this could add a lot more to the idea, but you understand, yes? If the State interfere to protect the foetus, it should do its best to protect the child-bearer for negative consequences of this interference.
[0] And by that i mean: birth control did not work, mister did not pull off quick enough, they wanted to have a kid but someone have had infidelity and now the couple want to split...Lot of nice cases.
Indeed, abortions are called for in cases of severe defects that will eventually kill the fetus anyway, and possibly the mother if left alone. Defects like triploidy, which generally are not detected before 11 weeks, are always fatal to the fetus, and risky for the mother.
Very simple. There is no societal agreement and hence no logical conclusion on this issue. So argument is for Pro-life vs Anti-life or Pro-freedon vs Anti-freedom. But Anti-life people call themselves pro-choice and Anti-freedom people call themselves pro-life.
More importantly, is a fetus 6 weeks after conception, after the development of the umbilical cord, a baby or not ?
We can take the view that as long as the child is inside the mother, then the mother's choice trumps the right of the child to exist. After all, the mother's body is hosting the child.
Or we can take the view that rights of life immediately after conception is sacred and must be upheld.
Or we can take the view, that the fetus is considered a human being after some X amount of time in the mother's womb. Maybe until the umbilical cord is developed and nutrient-transfer, pseudo-breathing begins ? Or maybe only within the first trimester ?
I actually don't know what is the right decision. Though I am personally more in the line of "My Body, My Choice", but that includes vaccination. (even if I am fully vaccinated).
I wish humanity developed artificial wombs and full social support system from baby to adulthood so this question goes away.
It is an interesting question. Clearly by the end of the term the baby can be forced out and live. It cannot live independently - but neither can a baby that has been born naturally. It takes like, five years for that. So dependence on the mother is not part of the definition of life.
So when does it start? When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother? No answer. Activists will shout "my body" all day but clearly there may be a second living entity that is not their body.
Nobody is willing to come propose a rational concept of when a baby's life begins. I suspect, these days, because it would result in a determination similar to Texas'.
Activists also say it's "men controlling women's bodies" but never acknowledge that half the voters are women.
I'm not even pro-life. But none of the pro-choice takes are in good faith. If you want to be perceived as rational and therefore be more convincing, (1) acknowledge that it is not a men-vs-women topic, and (2) propose a sane test for when life begins. Seems so bizarre that so many people supposedly believe in "science" but cannot figure out (2).
(1) Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes. I agree some of the mainstream rhetoric doesn't emphasize this in the interest of pithiness and such, but this strikes me as an odd complaint. (2) You seem to imply that some scientific definition of when life begins would offer a clear cut solution... but whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right? And anyway, e.g. most voters (of all stripes!) in the US support some right to choose in the first trimester and do not support it in the third trimester, so "first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there
> Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes
Yeah that's my point. I don't know why it's an odd complaint. "Men trying to control women's bodies" isn't true and turns an ethical debate into something about sexism, which means we don't get closer to an answer because we're not working on the right things.
> whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right?
This only seems true because it is already the case that the answer affects our lives as human adults having to take action based on the answer in our particular cases. If we lived in some other universe where abortions were impossible (e.g. they always kill the mother for some reason), it seems like we wouldn't have that difficult enough of a time identifying when life begins in the fetus.
What's funny is that because the answer affects us and we won't drill down into narrower ranges to identify specific criteria, this also makes our understanding of all other life more ambiguous. Because if we did identify when frogs, or elephants, or seedlings turn from cells into life, it would have obvious implications for humans.
> first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there
It seems like this is exactly what Texas has done. It went from there.
It is not women vs men. However, anti-choice policies do have outcomes that disproportionately burden women, which is another way of saying such policies are misogynistic, which is... sexism. You can argue sexism only counts as such if there's intent behind it, or you can argue the sexism here is less important than other considerations, but I don't think it's derailing or distracting from an ethical issue to point out this sexism. It's something worth considering when deciding on the ethical issue.
Again: even in "pure" science, you are generally making value judgments when studying stuff like "what makes something a member of a species", "what counts as a life for the purposes of this study", etc. E.g. a scientist may use the biological, ecological, or evolutionary species concept to study a population of organisms, depending on what question they're trying to answer. There is no "objective" answer to what a species is; it depends on what question you're trying to study. Similarly there is no "objective" answer to when life begins; someone can pick "at conception" or "at first breath" or whatever, and then we have to have a value discussion about why that, why not something else? See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma..., which argues well (in a different context) how this sort of thing works.
The Texas law is far more restrictive. Six weeks is much shorter than first trimester.
Sexism is not defined as things that disproportionally affect people based on sex. Are tampons sexist? Is the vagina itself, sexist?
Whether or not questions around abortion "disproportionally affect" women is not the question. Abortion also disproportionately affects aborted babies, if you believe they're alive. 1-year olds also disproportionally affect women. Should we be able to kill children until the age of 5? Why not?
I think your take from the perspective of categorization is one that tries to blur things intentionally. It may be the case that an organism does or does not "objectively" belong to a race. But that does not mean that the specific attributes of that organism are themselves not objectively measurable. You're just talking about what definitions are being used.
I think that argument is an attempt to derive ethics from words - rather than discovering the scientific process, deciding ethically what is appropriate or desirable, and identifying the language which should be used to describe it. It's backwards.
At some point a fetus goes from necessarily relying on the mother, to being self-sustaining (if fed) even if removed from the mother. That's a knowable thing. If the baby is removed it will either live or die and that is our answer. Call that life, or independence, or whatever. The lens you choose may change where the line is for you, but not when it is crossed.
I would say that if you believe that children should not be killed post-birth, then you are already cognizant of some kind of threshold that exists which is eventually crossed and cannot be undone, after which adults are obliged to attempt care and continued life of the child.
Because we don't have a way to test exactly when a fetus becomes independent, we use heuristics. For the most part, the first trimester we consider dependent; the last trimester we consider independent; in the ambiguous middle trimester we err on the side of the preference of the already-living, and in some places allow abortions through this time even though there may be a chance that the baby is alive and independent.
But these are just heuristics. "The Texas law is far more restrictive." Yes, it is. But you also said "Go from there" and that is what they did. Texas narrowed to a specific criteria that its people perceive to better approximate the threshold for life. "Life" being in this case a catch-all amalgamation of lots of peoples' concepts that mostly approximates the ability to self-sustain under care. It would seem on the surface at least that an organism without a heartbeat is dead-on-arrival while one with a heartbeat at least has a chance.
The way past this for a place like Texas is to propose a new testable threshold and explain why it is not possible for a self-sustaining baby to be exist before then.
My statement wasn't "things that disproportionally affect people based on sex"; it was specifically "policies [that] have outcomes that disproportionately burden women." This is a pretty common conception of the term "sexism" in policy-making circles; sometimes it's specifically explicated as "structural sexism" to distinguish it from interpersonal/individual sexism, but it's a valid use of the word.
I did not say the policy's disproportionate affect should be the sole consideration; I did say it's worth considering, because in practice the vast majority of ethical questions are not simple binaries; we have to weigh competing needs/desires/etc and decide what the best course based on all the factors at play.
My intention is not to "blur things intentionally" but to encourage thinking about this in a less black-and-white way, and explore some unexamined (arguably irrational!) assumptions that seemed present in your original post. For instance, you said:
> When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother?
...with the implication that answering this will give us a "rational" and correct answer to the ethical question. But there is nothing about <i>this framing itself</i> that is objective or rational. Knowing that a life <i>is</i> at some point (via whatever scientific definition we've chosen) doesn't tell us what <i>ought</i> be done about it; in general you can't derive an ought from an is; you could <i>easily</i> instead reframe the ethical question as "is there some point when a fetus's life is more important than the woman's bodily autonomy," and come up with a very different set of heuristics for answering the question. You can pick an objectively measurable line but the choice of what that line is, and what to do about it, are not a thing that can be objectively chosen.
My intended point wrt Texas is that, based on the discrepancy between polling data and the law as written, it seems like the representatives in Texas have passed a law that is in fact <i>more</i> restrictive than what the majority of voters want; ergo, I don't think it actually reflects the majority's intuitions on when abortion should be OK. But this really isn't my main point; I'm mainly trying to point out this isn't a question that can be solved solely by finding some science answer, and an attempt to sway voters solely on that type of argument seems not-correct based on everything we understand about how people in modern democracies make such decisions.
It seems a little odd to say that anti-choice policies disproportionately burden women when men has no choice at all beyond having half the vote of consent for the initial act of having sex. The whole issue is deeply sexist with very clearly defined gender roles with expectations and enforced obligations.
From an ethically perspective it would be significant if those expectations and obligations could be replaced with voluntary acts in an universal way.
We do not, in general, recognize that ordinary people have a legal non-emergency duty to save others.
Assuming that a foetus is a child, why should the mother have a legal obligation to keep it in her body? If it existed outside her, but required a kidney transplant to live, would she also be legally obligated to give it one? As far as I am aware that procedure is at lot less dangerous/damaging to a womans body than a pregnancy.
I can't see a logical argument against abortion that doesn't require any person to give up a kidney that a stranger need.
I think the kidney example is a little too technical for a good metaphor.
A parent does have an obligation to feed and keep healthy a child that cannot care for itself. There is such a concept as criminal negligence. For example, parents have been charged with manslaughter after they provided an insufficient diet for their child. [0]
> why should the mother have a legal obligation to keep it in her body?
I'm not sure that she does. She could theoretically take it out and raise it outside of her, but that would be quite bizarre and greatly increases the risk of criminal negligence and improper care. Babies are forced out early all the time, when the doctors recommend it if the baby is late.
There's a difference between not taking action that will save someone, and taking action that will intentionally kill someone. Also, parents have a duty of care towards their own children that doesn't exist between random strangers.
But it's not! Your simply-posted question has no simple answer. Categorization of "is this a baby" works well when deciding if a 1-year old is a baby (yes); if a rock is a baby (no). Is a 2 year old? Is a fetus? The "baby" categorization is unsuitable for this.
I don't see how it matters whether the fetus is alive or not. If it can't survive outside the mother then the mother has the right to kill it.
If you caused a car accident which lead to the other person needing a kidney transplant that only you can provide should you be required to give up a kidney? I don't see how abortion is different. Either way you made a risky choice that you knew could cause someone's life to be dependent on you. That doesn't mean you're forced to save the person.
If you could be determined to be solely at fault, and if you're a match, and if there aren't other kidneys available, then I suppose that would make sense. The issue is that the mother (usually) made a choice to help create the fetus, or with the possibility of doing so (note that I am okay with abortions in case of rape for this reason).
I do think abortion is a complicated ethical issue and us discussing it here in a few paragraphs won't do it justice, but if the mother can choose to create it, why can't the mother choose to un-create it? I'm not sure why assigning responsibility to the mother for creating it doesn't come with the benefit of destroying it too. And this is not even getting into well ok fine you make a mother go through with it, now you pay taxes for it when the mother walks away and says "well I didn't want a baby in the first place, you deal with it".
You might say, well but then that means the mother could "abort" a baby that's 2 years old or was just born or something. Well I'd say sure in a state of nature. But since we have a society we don't have to kill the child and someone else can just take care of it.
I think there are some reasonable parameters. Conception? Not reasonable to call that murder. A week before birth? Yea that looks a whole lot like murder to me. I don't think most reasonable people who are ok with abortion would see the argument that the mother has an ultimate right to destruction when so close to birth. But where they give, anti-abortion proponents take and get to the point where you start banning contraceptives and don't allow someone who maybe is safely having sex and a condom breaking to get an abortion.
And this is saying nothing about the stupid website like it's some sort of intellectual purge under Maoist China or Stalinist Russia. This is exactly the kind of thing that authoritarian regimes love or would love to implement and it's easy to see the slipper slope toward, well, why don't we start reporting people who are suspected of being "white nationalists" or Christians?
What if you weren't solely at fault and the accident was because of you and another driver? However that driver wasn't a match. That is a better analogy.
I think it's useful to consider that many women may not be comfortable naming or formally accusing her rapist (for reasons that include, way more often than you'd think, that a family member is her rapist and she still lives at home). For this reason, anti-choice laws that have exceptions for rape often mean only a tiny minority of women can actually use the exception.
> I don't see how it matters whether the fetus is alive or not. If it can't survive outside the mother then the mother has the right to kill it.
This is a valid position to hold, but hardly a non-controversial one. We have, as a society, agreed that the state’s role is to step in to defend the defenseless in cases of large power asymmetry, as would be the case here. Indeed this general principle is usually a leftist position.
> Either way you made a risky choice that you knew could cause someone's life to be dependent on you. That doesn't mean you're forced to save the person.
Actually it does (speaking generally, not to your specific example). Criminal or civil negligence is a thing.
> I don't see how it matters whether the fetus is alive or not. If it can't survive outside the mother then the mother has the right to kill it.
I shuddered a bit reading this. By this logic, at any point where I am dependent on someone else for my survival in passage (say an airplane) the principle in the relationship (the pilot or airline) has a right to kill me?
If that’s the logic, then we can squarely see that we have chosen to punish those who have any responsibility in that situation. Re: wrongful death
Having sex is not agreeing to carry around another person for 9 months. Consent is important. I don't think society has agreed that we punish people who kill others in car accidents, but I'd love examples of when we have and the person at fault wasn't drunk.
A baby outside the womb can't survive without support either. Why is it OK to kill the child in the womb but not outside the womb based on that position?
Because other people are willing to give the baby support once it's born. If the options are force the mother to take care of the embryo or allow the mother to decide whether to take care of it then I think we shouldn't force people to take care of those they don't want to. But once the child is born the options change. Now the choices are between letting the mother kill something that other can care for or letting those others provide the care.
Yes, it's immoral to force someone to support a parasite. Once the child is born(even a bit before that as they can survive outside the womb with modern medicine at some point before birth) the child is longer a parasite since it doesn't need the mothers support to survive.
> it's immoral to force someone to support a parasite
Just stop digging this hole deeper, please. You are misusing the term "parasite" and I imagine you may, later in your own life, come back to these remarks with a distinct feeling of shame.
They use that argument (that it is murder) to appeal to the emotions of others so they can justify controlling the lives of nonreligious people who have premarital sex. Unless they also support social programs for that fetus when it actually becomes a baby, and eventually a child, it seems pretty disingenuous.
> Abortion is really a very simple issue, those who say it is about "regulating women" attack a straw man. Pro-lifers believe that abortion is murder of the baby.
Doubtful. So-called "pro-lifers" are also, generally, against other forms of birth-control, including pills and condoms.
Also, even if they did believe that an embryo is a baby, that doesn't make it so. What they "believe" (or say they believe) shouldn't matter; what matters is what is.
> So-called "pro-lifers" are also, generally, against other forms of birth-control, including pills and condoms.
You might need a source on this one. This certainly applies to some religious types, but is it a "general" truth for people who would pass the heartbeat law? A law which still allows abortion but identifies a test for when life begins? I don't think so.
Last time I tried to find a pro-life organization that wasn't also anti birth control, I couldn't find one. I suspect that's because they were funded mostly by the catholic church.
Well, maybe some do, but I don't see similar efforts to restrict access to pills and condoms. Mostly arguments on these involve access by youth, whether to give them away for free, and whether insurance should pay for them. Some nutty evangelicals may want them banned, I suppose.
I should have been clearer. What we are really questioning is what counts as a human life. These days many babies that would have died from premature birth can be delivered early and survive; that line moves further back in pregnancy every year.
Not true. My church and I have no beef with birth-control. It is the issue of whether the unborn are people in the eyes of God that drives conviction.
And things aren't so simple. You cannot demonstrate the unborn are sentient anymore than animals. We cannot demonstrate that either. We choose to err on the side of the unborn out of fear if we're wrong.
Even the Catholic view on birth control, which is essentially that it interferes with "putting your life in God's hands", isn't anywhere near it's stance on abortion, which is that life is sacred at the moment of conception.
Mmm, actually, are you saying that we should force people to be vegetarian by the law while preventing suffering from chicken and milk cows? Or should we let people to decide by themselves what to eat?
I actually know a farmer who only eat his pigs when they die of old age (he use them to find mushrooms, expensive mushrooms), pigs being very successfull in front of the mirror test and definitely sentient and more self-aware than a 4-year old, i wonder if he took that into consideration.
I for sure don't care, but if i was forced by the law, i would stop eating meat without protesting, so i guess win for the overall suffering and win for the climate? Maybe your church is onto something.
You are basically saying because some of you believe in God you have the right to force your beliefs on everyone else which is the biggest issue I have with so called pro-lifers. Pushing their religion and worse yet mixing that into policy making.
> Also, even if they did believe that an embryo is a baby, that doesn't make it so. What they "believe" (or say they believe) shouldn't matter; what matters is what is.
I understand that the things you believe are facts, and the things others believe are opinions?
Whether abortion is murder is a strictly philosophical question, not a scientific one: there are a lot of facts to consider (beyond religious principles and thinly veiled misogyny) but they are only as relevant and decisive as one considers them.
Anec-data, but I've seen pro-lifers both for and against birth control, so perhaps this is some variance here.
In any event, I don't think being against birth control suggests the belief that a fetus deserves the rights of a child is necessarily implies the belief is in bad faith. Or at least, no more so than believing that murder should be a crime but supporting policies that indirectly lead to more murders (e.g. supporting policies that increase poverty or gun violence).
The more interesting gotcha for me is when pro-lifers concede an exception for rape. I don't think they believe a child born of rape is somehow less deserving of life than a broken condom. So that suggests the belief is less about simple life and death and more about a person's sexual choices.
I have seen that argued a lot, but it doesn't hold up to any scrutiny for the general group that claim to hold these views[0]. If that was the case, they would be working to make condoms and BC, especially semi-permanent BC like IUDs, much more widely available and they would work hard (they are trying to save lives here) to ensure excellent sex education.
There also wouldn't be exceptions for women who had been raped (terrible fate, but the kid shouldn't be killed for it).
If on the other hand this is about punishing women for having sex, then they would try to prevent access to BC, as it removes the risk of pregnancy, and would have exemption for women who were raped because they didn't do anything worth punishing.
Of course I haven't seen anybody who is against abortions arguing that we should make spare kidney donations mandatory, despite the fact that people (who are, without a doubt, people) die waiting for a transplant. If you are not willing to make that argument, I don't see how you can logically argue against abortion.
[0]: I am not claiming that some individuals don't hold that belief.
> Abortion is really a very simple issue, those who say it is about "regulating women" attack a straw man. Pro-lifers believe that abortion is murder of the baby. This trumps a woman's right for a medical procedure.
That's a very weird take on the issue, specifically because I agree with you in many respects, but that is exactly why abortion is a very complex issue.
The fundamental question is "when does individual human life begin?" Yes, pro-lifers believe that it begins at conception, but why should their beliefs take precedence? I don't believe at all that an early embryo/fetus at 6 weeks is "an individual" in the human sense, where abortion would equal murder.
Of course, the problem is that when a fetus does become a full-fledged human is a gray line - pretty much everyone believes it occurs at some point between conception and birth, but where you draw that line is why this is a difficult, complex issue, not the "simple" one you seem to believe it is.
America is a huge country and we've been discovering over the last decade that we are a lot more divided than we realized. It's like combining France, Germany, England, Spain and Italy into one country and expecting them to agree on everything. Luckily in America we can just move to a state where reasonable people run things.
I don't understand this argument, though. You can make it about literally any group that includes more than two people.
If it means that you can't say anything about a large group of people, I'm not sure I agree, given that most countries can agree on enough things to be governed. I'm not exactly sure what the point of the argument is.
Yeah, the only odd one out here is England with it's US-like disdain for workers' rights, tenants' rights, paid college education, general idea that poor people deserve to suffer and raci^H^H^H^Hhate for immigration.
> America is a huge country and we've been discovering over the last decade that we are a lot more divided than we realized.
This is pretty much exclusively true of sheltered relatively affluent (“middle class” in popular use, but including the upper income end of the working class) people born around 1980 who reached social awareness in the brief local minimum of general social division (but an not of partisan political division, which was gearing up quite hard at the time) of the mid- to late-1990s.
Everyone else, pretty much, was already aware of the underlying divisions, even if they were enjoying the brief respite in the immediate palpability of them.
Doesn't that just encourage a positive feedback loop? On a large scale, fleeing a poorly run state increases the likelihood that those running the state continue to do so, while also increasing polarization. It often seems that the goals of both parties are to push so hard to their own side that the other party will magically capitulate. But as we've seen for at least the last 20 years, and likely much longer, every issue can be framed as an existential threat, where the only acceptable way forward is to double down.
“The abortion thing” has been a political wedge issue in American politics for generations.
Voting against our own interests because we’ve been whipped up into a frenzy by religious zealots and hardline partisans is very, very American. I don’t know exactly what you mean by “wrong”, but I suppose if you mean “should I have seen this coming?” I’d probably say “Yes. The writing has been on the wall for years.”
Human rights are a binary thing: either you are a human and you have them, or you are not a human and you don't have them. IMO it all comes down to when we define the bag of cells to be a human being. Once the bag of cells is a human being murdering it is obviously a crime.
IMO any view point between the first cells are already a human being to it becoming a human at birth are valid. Why not settle this in a referendum once and for all? If the vote is close to 50-50 maybe a more regional referendum would make sense to maximise happines with the outcome.
This frame is an error, and is leading to a lot of unnecessary division imo.
Unborn people are unique because they are entirely dependent upon a mother to survive in a way that cannot be replaced.
The human right to life is not absolute, at least under current law: a person who literally requires your body’s metabolical processes to survive is not entitled to that, and so we have decided the provider has the choice to cease providing it at anytime, with the stipulation that at the time the decision is made, they cannot choose mechanisms to end it which unnecessarily harm the recipient.
Why is it just metabolic support that is the qualifier here? A child is still very dependent on caregivers for years after exiting the birth canal, and in many cases a child remains dependent on the mother's metabolic processes when thy receive breastmilk. Why is it acceptable to kill the child before exiting the birth canal but not after?
I see the point that there is no single way to separate the unborn from its mother, while in all other cases there are ways that it can survive when separated (even though the separation might not be allowed).
Correct. In the future if we can extract a fetus safely (to both mother and child) and bring it to term then under current law abortion by termination would be illegal, is my understanding.
It does: the primacy is that a person always has the choice to cease providing metabolic support of another person. If you take this as primacy then consequential death as a side effect of exercising that choice is killing, for sure, but a distinct category of killing with regards to culpability. Analogies fail: abortion is a unique form of killing by ending internal biologically bound sacrificial life support, so it’s best to not reach for analogs.
I would say for full consistency with this it would imply abortion providers ought to take steps to not directly inflict harm, but practically speaking death is assured under this framework and so perhaps that falls onto questions of suffering vs painless death.
Edit: To be more direct, the killing is considered acceptable since the alternative is less acceptable: namely, that a person who is providing biologically, metabolically bound life support to another via an umbilical cord is not permitted to cut that cord of their own agency, under penalty of law.
That's an incredibly narrow definition of metabolic support. Providing food for children is also a form of metabolic support and it is certainly not acceptable to just stop feeding your children. That also discards the idea that there is another life in the balance here that has committed no crime that would be considered on the level of forfeiture of life and thus has as much right to life as the mother does.
I invented the term internal sacrificial biologically bound metabolic support in an attempt to describe the exact nature of the very specific fixed connection of a umbilical cord. Adjust the terminology to your liking, but anything short of a direct analog of a fixed, biological structure connecting the two persons in a host/dependent situation in which an act of agency would be necessary to sever it won’t be useful for the point of argument. I don’t know of any useful analog so this is why I think arguments around abortion should be had on their own terms without trying to draw on analogies.
Interesting standpoint, I've never heard that argument (I'm also not very deep into this issue just couldn't hold back my superficial 2 cents). But imo it does not really invalidate the opposite standpoint, it just rationalises one point of view.
In that same framework, wouldn't a hospital be also allowed to turn of life support as it sees fit?
This framework is relevant because it is the one used to regulate the legality of abortion under Roe v Wade. (Viability)
Also re: hospitals, this moral framework has no real analog given the nature of pregnancy being unique. If there were other phenomena where we could become biologically attached (without full intention) to others to sustain them through our own biological functions, then the same legal and moral frameworks seems like they would apply to those scenarios - but I am not aware of any such situations.
Is it an interesting way of looking at things. It certainly helps to explain why some people have a need to first 'dedumanize' a victim by attaching an appropriate label to ensure that what they are doing is not done to a human being. It is an interesting idea, but I am not sure it is accurate depiction of reality.
The Texas bill isn’t a blockade of the ballot box. The two most-cited provisions will ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, practices that weren’t even used until last year, when one county tried them in a pandemic. It isn’t crazy to think polling sites are likelier to attract trouble, or at least suspicion, at 3 a.m.
Early voting in Texas will be able to run from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., or Sundays from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. In some places, mandatory hours will go up. The bill says six Sunday hours will be required in counties with 55,000 people. The current rule is five hours in counties over 100,000. The new ban on drive-through voting has an exception for people with physical difficulties.
Texans using mail ballots will ID themselves by writing a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. That’s far less subjective than asking election workers to eyeball signatures. If the ID number is correct, the signature will be “presumed” valid. If the ID is wrong or there’s another problem, the bill provides a process to fix it. Goofs will be correctable until “the sixth day after election day.”
The bill is 75 pages, but here are some other bits that won’t make headlines but will help voter integrity: Every two years the state will audit four random counties. Ballot harvesting “in exchange for compensation” will be banned. Counties with more than 100,000 people will have to live stream video from their central counting location. Mail votes will be reported separately on election returns.
Election administrators will be barred from sending unsolicited absentee forms, though candidates and parties can do so. Courts will “instruct” newly convicted felons on their changed voting rights. Official correspondence with voting-system vendors will be deemed generally “not confidential.”
Democrats object that the bill empowers poll watchers. It also requires watchers to take a state “training program” and an oath that they won’t “disrupt the voting process.” The bill will make it a crime if an official “knowingly refuses to accept a watcher” or “knowingly prevents a watcher from observing an activity or procedure the person knows the watcher is entitled to observe.” The key word: “knowingly.”
>Goofs will be correctable until “the sixth day after election day.”
Too short of a timeline.
> Mail votes will be reported separately on election returns.
This is a poison pill you can't see.
Democrats have always been more likely to use mail in ballots because they are more likely to be in a position where going to poll isn't feasible.
So if the mail in votes lean one direction, and get reported separately (especially in a way that delays them) then republicans can attack the legitimacy of those votes.
Texas is gonna end up turning blue here soon and they want to make sure they can attack the legitimacy of that.
C'mon, you are misrepresenting it. The new bill makes it unlawful to have weekend voting except for the last weekend before the election. It ends voting at 9pm, not 10pm. It forbids voting in tents. It relieves city officials from most oversight, empowering county officials instead. It forbids driving three or more people to a polling place, and does not exempt bus drivers even.
It's a ridiculous expansion of restrictions clearly targeting the way city dwellers vote, while trying to leave alone the way rural people vote.
1) When did we start thinking that life doesn't begin at conception? Why is OK for a mother to end a life? By just about every definition that child growing inside of her is a unique life. Sure, it's dependent on mom for a while, but being dependent on a parent doesn't stop when the baby exits the birth canal. So why is it OK to kill the child in the birth canal but not outside of it?
2) What greater equalizer is there in a self-defense situation than a firearm? If you are an average woman being attacked by an average man, what out there is a greater equalizer and application of stopping force than a firearm? If you are a man being attacked by a stronger man what is a greater equalizer than a firearm? The US has in excess of 300 million firearms, an estimated 800,000 to 3,000,000 instances of defensive use of firearms a year. Each of those numbers is massive in comparison to the miniscule number of gun homicides (approx 14k) or even gun related suicides (30k) per year according to the last study the CDC did on guns. Maybe it's not the guns that are the problem. Maybe it's a very select set of people who use the guns that are the problem?
3) In the US, to do anything of larger consequence (buy/lease/rent a vehicle, purchase a house, rent an apartment, purchase alcohol, enter certain buildings, travel by plane, buy a firearm, in some cases file taxes) you need an ID. Why is so ludicrous to suggest that voting be something that unilaterally requires an ID? Over 3/4's of the nation's minorities support voter ID.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/194741/four-five-americans-supp...
It's starting to look like I will need a vax pass just to go to a restaurant. Why is this such an issue?
For abortion, it’s comes down to this: do you believe a fertilized egg is a baby, and it’s equivalent to murder? And if you do / don’t, at what point are you ok with it?
Lot of people here believe it’s a baby at moment of conception, so any abortion is murder. Lot of people also believe it’s the woman choice, it’s her body. These two opposite forces tug and pull and you end up with shit like after six weeks it’s illegal.
Most Americans are pro-choice and like being able to vote. This is an aberration, a bit of theater, which means it gets a lot of attention. There will be political blowback in response to this.
Because many poor and specific minority groups people don’t have IDs. These laws are specifically designed knowing that these groups rarely vote Republican yet are big enough group to make a dent.
so isn’t the main problem which need immediate fix is the fact that they don’t have an Id. You do already have to have an Id for many basic thing. Getting an Id should be very cheap (even free for some) and very easy.
Personally, when I came to US as an immigrant it was very cheap and easy for me.
And in my home country in Europe everyone needs an Id to vote and no one complains.
You have the right to vote as a US citizen. Every little thing you do to add friction to that disenfranchises such populations. We're not talking about urban, educated people with means. To get an ID you will need other forms of identification, which depending on who you are and what your background is, can mean you have nothing to present.
Much has been written on this topic. I encourage you to do a little research before jumping to conclusions.
From the top link to a simple google query [1]:
• Rates of identification-ownership are highest among White individuals, while other ethnic groups disproportionately lack necessary photo ID. Thirteen percent of Blacks, 10 percent of Hispanics, but only 5 percent of Whites lack photographic identification.
• Lower-income individuals are less likely to have photo ID. Twelve percent of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with over $150,000 annual income.
• Young adults are less likely to have photo ID: 15 percent of 17-20 year- olds lack photo ID, and 11 percent of those ages 21-24 lack photo ID.
The way you read this is - hey, we shouldn’t require voter ID.
The way I read this is - holy sh*t, the government must rush and make sure all these people can get an Id easily (has nothing to do with voting).
I think there is actually an obvious good compromise here - Require Id for voting if and only if 99.5% (should be set by specialists) of county’s population has an Id. If the county doesn’t meet this threshold (I’d imagine most poor and republican counties) - don’t require it until it meets the threshold. Obviously people not being able to get an Id is somewhat an urgent problem that needs fixing.
> However, the recent stuff - abortion and voting rights being eroded - has just knocked me sideways. I'd have said they were un-American. Now, I don't know what to think. I really mean this. Was I always wrong?
Anti-abortionism has always been a core pillar of the GOP's social policy because it's highly popular with the religious demographics that make up much of their base, even people who might otherwise not vote for them (e.g. some Catholics). After a Republican president had the chance to seat 3 judges, it's logical that red states would start a war against Roe v. Wade. We saw this coming as soon as Trump got his second SCOTUS judge, and when RBG died the writing was on the wall.
No matter how strongly I feel about abortion, the election stuff is more acutely concerning after seeing the degree to which powerful state- and local-level politicians were willing to kowtow to Trump and repeat his baseless lies in the fallout from the 2020 election. These are political hacks with zero regard for the integrity of our electoral process, and with some changes to local election law (like we've been seeing across the country, predicated on lies about election fraud), they may just accomplish in 2024 what they were trying to do in 2020. I would call it a relatively new trend, and it is fucking frightening. They are learning that the more they corrupt the process, the less anybody is able to hold them to account, and their mendacity and depravity seem to know no bounds.
>... powerful state- and local-level politicians were willing to kowtow to Trump and repeat his baseless lies in the fallout from the 2020 election. These are political hacks with zero regard for the integrity of our electoral process, ...
>I would call it a relatively new trend, and it is fucking frightening. They are learning that the more they corrupt the process, the less anybody is able to hold them to account, and their mendacity and depravity seem to know no bounds.
Yes, this.
It is something that I would never have expected in the US, because, to me, "unAmerican".
When I was growing up, I was extremely conscious that although I was British by birth, my entire family was Irish (from the republic). I fielded a lot of crap from people on account of my parents' accents etc; there were lots of problems in the UK because of IRA attacks etc.
My go-to place, my haven in my head, was that the US (although I realised even when growing up that many Irish-Americans were pro-Republican and supported extremism in the cause of a united Ireland) was bigger, better and as a nation above partisanship, seeing a world picture and being the leader in championing rights and fairness. Yes, a bit cut-throat and market-driven, but always in pursuit of equal opportunity and fairness.
I'd imagined that the US would lead the world into a higher plane - by example, and by sheer economic force: "you need our money, you toe the line".
Anyhow, I still cling to my childhood dream of America and Americans coming through for the rest of the world. In simplistic terms, as I saw that dream, that everyone deserves the same degree of respect because of our common humanity.
To restate my original sentiment, perhaps I was just wrong.
What you probably don't realize is how culturally diverse America is, maybe more so than any other country. The thinking and culture varies wildly. Rural Texas could not be more different than urban California.
I care deeply about rights, but I suppose I cannot count myself among the enlightened; I cannot condone abortion since there is no way to ascertain beyond reasonable doubt that the unborn are not sentient people. And in my opinion, showing an ID to vote is just reasonable considering all it's other uses.
Erosion of rights in America is occurring recently through draconian executive orders that mandate behavior without due process. If Texas passes a law through due process, that's your problem not theirs. I don't mean to surmise what across the pond means, but if you're looking for dramatic erosion of rights look to Australia.
> What you probably don't realize is how culturally diverse America is, maybe more so than any other country.
Visiting the US the first few times did demonstrate a cultural diversity that I hadn't actually realised until I was there. However, I grew up in London and, the UK being tiny, spent time in Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford and many other places that were culturally diverse - if by culturally diverse one means race, religion, cuisine etc.
I thought that America had an overarching sense of being American that transcended its constituent cultures - in a far more concrete sense than "Britishness", whatever that means.
Let's be honest. An Indian, Chinese, Pakistani - French person, even - arriving in Britain in my youth had little expectation of aspiring to "Britishness". There really isn't such a thing. But those people heading to the US had something almost tangible - again, overarching - the idea of Americanness that transcended everything. Class, culture, status, no matter. The American dream.
Or, perhaps, I just watched too many films - ahem, movies - as a kid that advertised this message to the world.
But even discarding the rose-tinted goggles of youth, I still think that there was a genuine spirit of an American ideal that held true until, perhaps, only a few years ago. I can't imagine the American people just sitting idly by and watching it be torn apart from within.
Before this week the most restrictive state law in the US was more permissive of abortions (24 weeks by request without cause) than the most liberal European countries (22 weeks by request without cause -or- 24 weeks with 1-2 or more medical doctors good faith declaration of risk).
Other European countries are more conservative. And the vast majority of jurisdictions outside Europe are even more conservative than that.
But that info is nowhere in the news, or even on the Wikipedia page that just lumps all countries together that allow any abortions by request.
This is 100% a media-driven issue.
Until this week, Europe was more "Red State" on the issue than Texas. All other red states continue to be.
Yes, due to Roe and against the concerted effort of their Republican politicians. If the Texas law cannot be challenged then Roe is done, and those red states follow Texas’ suit.
The point is that if it weren't for judicial activism, there might have been a more moderate middle ground reached, and that the perception of that anything more conservative than the status quo is radical is disingenuous.
More conservative than roe or casey is made out to be radical, and based on the laws of the rest of the world, that's absolutely not the case.
No it wouldn't. Companies can choose who they wish to do business with except for certain protected classes, and being a politician or anti-abortion are not protected classes. Lots of companies refused to do business with Trump or Parker following the insurrection and that was all legal (and continues to this day).
Those who enact law against abortion should have to Google "trisomy 13 cyclops" (warning: NSFL) on a large projector in public and have their reactions broadcast. I can't even find the worst image in an older case study I'm thinking of right now, but damn has Google images of it gotten worse since I last looked.
It is with regards to their view of any abortion being flat out murder. Which is the side that a large amount of the older religious populace falls on.
In essence, you can in fact get some of them to agree with the things like abortions in extreme circumstances such as trisomy 13, but then they're just being hypocrites, because they earlier stated that any abortion is murder. In the end, they show their true colors of mostly just wanting to control women and minorities, and the politicians just keeping a downtrodden and uneducated voter base that they can dangle a "vote for me and I'll help you" carrot in front of for life.
Most companies will put up with whatever regressive social policies are put in place as long as the locales in which they're enacted are suitable for them to do business.
This is not a political discussion site. Please don't submit stories like this. They just provide yet another anonymous place for people to argue and talk past each other.
As someone who lives in Texas, this is very relevant to HN readership. I wouldn't move to Texas now if this law were in place, and if I needed people in the state I work think twice about creating a startup here these days.
There are innumerable other places to have political discussions. This topic is indisputably a lightning rod and catalyst for flamewars. Can we have one single place where we agree not to disagree like this? Without that we will never agree on anything.
This community has a lot of people in positions that can have a big impact on the direction of society. Going in to an echo chamber somewhere else achieves nothing.
When did we decide corporations need to have a stance on most political issues? It seems some are genuine but more are trying to simply appease stakeholders.
One way to look at this law is that it uses an "escape hatch" to prevent people from having the standing to sue the state over it. Let's use it to ban hate speech -- anybody who aids and abets the publication of hate speech is fair game, not just the person who wrote it. Let's use it to ban all guns -- everybody from the gun shop to the gun range employees are fair game for aiding and abetting the use of firearms. Let's use it to replace taxes -- if somebody has 10x more money than you, sue them and their bank, financial advisors. Let's use it to ban gas vehicles -- lawsuits for everybody that's ever been driven somewhere. Let's use it for Sharia law -- every violation is a lawsuit, and the state pays handsomely to the lawyers who enforce it.
If this citizen enforcement truly is an end run on the constitution, there's no reason not to use that. And just like this Texan law, jurisdiction doesn't matter. If Washington State bans guns, hate speech, wealth,cars and implements Sharia law, it can be enforced around the country. If there's nothing unconstitutional about the way this Texan law is implemented, then the constitution is little more than a tissue in a tornado.
Read up on the 9th amendment, protections need not be explicitly mentioned to exist.
> Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
This has been reaffirmed in many subsequent rulings.
Edit: but look at that language. "Without excessive government restriction." Sounds like "Congress shall make no law," doesn't it? Constitution doesn't say I can't sue you for exercising your rights, eh? Limitations are for governments.
And the 10th leaves the determination of that in the hands of the States, barring an amendment to the US Constitution.
Then there's the rabbit hole that is judicial review. And if constitutional protections need not be explicitly mentioned, why can't States assert that the right of judicial review is theirs, without the need to overturn or continue to respect Marbury v Madison.
Speech and bearing arms are only constitutionally protected in criminal law this is civil law, which the Constitution doesn't apply to[0]. And the supreme did rule that abortion is constitutionally protected, at least thats my understanding of roe v wade.
So parent's arguments stand, if this law stands, free speech and gun rights could be aborted (hehe) by just making them civil cases and giving people the right to sue.
edit: In fact, democrats have tried to do just that, by giving gun violence victims the right to sue the gun shop and gun manufacture. I (and bernie) have opposed such bills, for the same i (and bernie) oppose this bill. its a shortcut around the constitution that shouldn't be allowed to exist.
[0]: its not as simple as this, but thats the jist of it. this is why a civil case can result on the state forcing you to give up money/property without a ruling by a jury, and why the state can force you to pay if you want a jury in such civil cases, but can't in criminal cases. As another example, civil asset forfeiture gives the state the power to take your property without a ruling by a court, let alone a jury, with no need to prove anything, instead requiring you to prove legality. criminal asset forfeiture already exists and requires both of those things, but isn't used in favor of the civil version.
How in the hell in the same paragraph do you claim speech and firearms aren't protected civilly (which is false), but figure privacy and/or non-explicit abortion rights aren't?
Democrats have tried to do just that, to a degree, by giving gun violence victims the right to sue the gun shop and gun manufacture. I (and bernie) have opposed such bills, for the same i (and bernie) oppose this bill. its a shortcut around the constitution that shouldn't be allowed to exist.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadCompanies halt political donations.
"Not like that!"
I'm from across the pond, and have spent limited time in the US - none of it in Texas - but I always thought that I had a pretty good handle on things American. I went to a UK school, from age 7 to nearly 18, which was run by Americans.
I've never got the whole gun thing, but it's never bothered me. However, the recent stuff - abortion and voting rights being eroded - has just knocked me sideways. I'd have said they were un-American. Now, I don't know what to think. I really mean this. Was I always wrong?
Can you give any examples to support this?
We have no ID requirement, no questions asked mail-in ballots, early voting, and paper ballots.
The Texas law isn’t all bad. Recording vote counting, paper trails and regulating the removal of voters from rolls is good policy. But the restrictions on early voting and ballot distribution & collection are bad. The limits on urban polling locations are blatantly partisan.
Vaccine passports are not a voting restriction in New York, or anywhere else in the US.
They really don’t seem draconian to me.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/21/texas-voting-restric...
> Currently, counties with a population of 100,000 or more must provide at least 12 hours of early voting each weekday of the last week of early voting.
> SB 7 would lower that population threshold to 30,000 so more counties would be required to offer more early voting hours between the newly established window of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
You’re against this?
> But the legislation also sets a 12-hour cap on how long early voting can run during that week, so polling places that stay open until 9 p.m. would have to open up later in the morning.
Or you think only being open for 12 hours is too constraining for [in person, early] voting… nonetheless in towns of 30k people?
I mean, there’s going to be a mixed bag if I were to really dig in, and now that I’m not a TX resident anymore, I don’t really care to.
In Palo Alto, during the last presidential election, I had to hand my ballot to a person who before feeding it into the machine reviewed my votes. She was particularly concerned about me choosing to NOT vote on certain issues, asking me if I wanted to try again. I never had anything like that in Texas or Oklahoma.
https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_ID_in_New_York
https://www.elections.ny.gov/VotingRegister.html
(Yeah, parent comment has changed.)
A large factor is immigrants that went through the tedious years long drudgery that is the legal process for US citizenship being really pissed at the fact some may not have to go through the aforementioned like they did - misery loves company or something like that.
Another is that these immigrants and minorities are typically fairly uneducated and truly believe the man with the golden shitter is actually like them and is going to help them.
And some of it is trying to fit in with the preexisting community. If you're a brown person in a town of white religious/nationalistic fanatics that typically do not like brown people, vowing your loyalty to their guy is typically a quick way to fit in a bit better.
I know reddit isn't representative of the state but both /r/austin and /r/texas have had this conversation many times.[0][1] I personally agree with the thesis that Texas GOP see's the demographic writing on the wall and want to limit to more liberal immigrants.
And because I already saw a comment mentioning it, I want to add that as a Mexican born and raised a border town I think the flipped Hispanic counties on the border are an anomaly. If you investigate the counties, like Zavala, that flipped, they are 1 largely blue collar men which love Trump (my roofer uncle), and 2 Zavala was actually one of the few counties that LOST population according to the 2020 census. The correlation is visible, the counties that had the highest population decline in Texas voted most heavily for Trump while the fast growing suburbs are now purple and blue. In this booming state the poor counties losing money and people are the ones voting GOP.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/phszk7/anyone_sudde...
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/pgjze1/anyone_else_g...
This is a dangerous fallacy. As has been widely reported, Trump increased his standing with minorities in 2020 vs 2016. In some heavily Hispanic areas along the Texas border the swing toward Trump in 2020 was over 40 points compared to 2016.
Texas has been growing rapidly in some areas, the thing is though is the political redistricting which means those voting power may skew towards those in rural areas. So if you see, for example, a technology company in a city like Austin trying to evangelize connecting to community to flip the vote, it might be effort done within a vacuum with less effectiveness than perceived.
On the voting law I think it's reasonable in most places. Poll-watching isn't a problem, and ID requirements aren't a big issue. I disagree with the law in that people should be able to distribute mail-in ballots since the new ID requirements make them more resistant to fraud. Not sure what you mean about removing electoral rights. I am, however, bothered by the fact that it (and most other voting laws) are driven by "stolen election" lies, which is almost worse than people trying to hang onto power (which they've done with re-districting/gerrymandering for a long time already).
For example, just a few weeks ago, the world's most premature baby (with 0% chance of survival at the time, completely unviable) just had his 1st birthday.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/06/23/prematur...
On the other hand, perhaps technology will advance to the point where even a fertilized egg could grow outside the womb. Then abortion might turn into "take this thing out of me and find somebody else that wants it."
I’m just telling you the terms for what a developing human is called. The OC said fetus, which is a term that has a specific meaning.
Funny how no one cares they're murdering billions of baby fish by eating pregnant fish and caviar.
In other words, it’s not murder, and is ethical, to pull the plug on someone who’s hooked to your body to survive, if there is no other way to save them.
This is a very enlightened stance imo, and inductively implies abortion will one day be both illegal and in low demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_(criminal_law)
If it's clear the mother went to the woods to create this environment to kill the child, then a state could consider prosecuting.
If there was a plane crash and it was clear that the mother was distraught and this was a side effect of the crash, I don't think most states with prosecute, but again, depends on the state.
The point is if you decide a mother has a right to cut the umbilical at any time, the fetus will die regardless during most phases of pregnancy (the ones where abortion is legal in the US.) So now you get to decide given death is a certainty, what is the proper act. I could be persuaded the current mechanisms are the wrong choice. Would you propose to just cut the cord and let the fetus starve in the womb?
However, that aside, my point is that once you take death as inevitable, then the mechanism to do may fall to minimizing suffering. And so, it stands to reason that a procedure which a) doesn’t result in long, perhaps painful starvation and b) doesn’t put the mother at risk by having a dead fetus inside of her are worthy considerations. I do think that you are right to think that the violence of current procedures, while perhaps ethical due to minimization of suffering, may be contributing to moral confusion about the right to cut vs right to kill or the dehumanization of the fetus. I do fear that as this moral confusion winds it’s way upward, the rights to abortion may expand beyond viability, which to me would flip my position on where I stand with regards to maintaining the legal status quo vs reversing it. I support Roe v Wade but would not support a law which gave a mother discretion to terminate past viability.
The question seems to be:
"When is a fetus considered a separate life?" or perhaps "When does a fetus become a baby?"
That's a lot harder to define than you might think. (At least that's the argument ...) Pro-life people tend to see a cut and dried answer to that, where Pro-Choice people tend see it as a bit more ambiguous.
I'm pro-choice, it just seems like a truth people don't want to acknowledge.
The pro-abortion side just doesn't like the answer.
My stance are controversial but hear me:
Their is two solutions. First: abortion law as they exist (abortion whenever you want during the first semester + if there is a disease until the middle of the second semester). Pro-lifes don't like this solution, i get it.
No abortion at all, or the real pro-life solution: the woman should get a full salary from the state and her replacement training paid as well when she is pregnant and that state prevent her from functionning. If she is a student, she will receive the median salary of the state she live in, and have a sabbatical, allowing her to return with no penalities. Top medical aid provided free of charge to avoid complication, and if she can't take care of her child, a fully-funded child services will be in charge of finding a foster home once 6 month of breastfeeding (paid, of course) are done.
The only downside left is the lack of career evolution from a working woman who lost 2 year to scale up the corporate ladder, i agree, this is still punishment for unprotected sex, and cesarean can scar the body. I am not a woman, did not go through a pregnancy and childbirth, so a woman knowing this could add a lot more to the idea, but you understand, yes? If the State interfere to protect the foetus, it should do its best to protect the child-bearer for negative consequences of this interference.
[0] And by that i mean: birth control did not work, mister did not pull off quick enough, they wanted to have a kid but someone have had infidelity and now the couple want to split...Lot of nice cases.
That's the only option for men who want to be sure to avoid legal obligations for the act.
We can take the view that as long as the child is inside the mother, then the mother's choice trumps the right of the child to exist. After all, the mother's body is hosting the child.
Or we can take the view that rights of life immediately after conception is sacred and must be upheld.
Or we can take the view, that the fetus is considered a human being after some X amount of time in the mother's womb. Maybe until the umbilical cord is developed and nutrient-transfer, pseudo-breathing begins ? Or maybe only within the first trimester ?
I actually don't know what is the right decision. Though I am personally more in the line of "My Body, My Choice", but that includes vaccination. (even if I am fully vaccinated).
I wish humanity developed artificial wombs and full social support system from baby to adulthood so this question goes away.
Courts have zero problems legally binding men to that act.
So when does it start? When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother? No answer. Activists will shout "my body" all day but clearly there may be a second living entity that is not their body.
Nobody is willing to come propose a rational concept of when a baby's life begins. I suspect, these days, because it would result in a determination similar to Texas'.
Activists also say it's "men controlling women's bodies" but never acknowledge that half the voters are women.
I'm not even pro-life. But none of the pro-choice takes are in good faith. If you want to be perceived as rational and therefore be more convincing, (1) acknowledge that it is not a men-vs-women topic, and (2) propose a sane test for when life begins. Seems so bizarre that so many people supposedly believe in "science" but cannot figure out (2).
Yeah that's my point. I don't know why it's an odd complaint. "Men trying to control women's bodies" isn't true and turns an ethical debate into something about sexism, which means we don't get closer to an answer because we're not working on the right things.
> whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right?
This only seems true because it is already the case that the answer affects our lives as human adults having to take action based on the answer in our particular cases. If we lived in some other universe where abortions were impossible (e.g. they always kill the mother for some reason), it seems like we wouldn't have that difficult enough of a time identifying when life begins in the fetus.
What's funny is that because the answer affects us and we won't drill down into narrower ranges to identify specific criteria, this also makes our understanding of all other life more ambiguous. Because if we did identify when frogs, or elephants, or seedlings turn from cells into life, it would have obvious implications for humans.
> first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there
It seems like this is exactly what Texas has done. It went from there.
Again: even in "pure" science, you are generally making value judgments when studying stuff like "what makes something a member of a species", "what counts as a life for the purposes of this study", etc. E.g. a scientist may use the biological, ecological, or evolutionary species concept to study a population of organisms, depending on what question they're trying to answer. There is no "objective" answer to what a species is; it depends on what question you're trying to study. Similarly there is no "objective" answer to when life begins; someone can pick "at conception" or "at first breath" or whatever, and then we have to have a value discussion about why that, why not something else? See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma..., which argues well (in a different context) how this sort of thing works.
The Texas law is far more restrictive. Six weeks is much shorter than first trimester.
Whether or not questions around abortion "disproportionally affect" women is not the question. Abortion also disproportionately affects aborted babies, if you believe they're alive. 1-year olds also disproportionally affect women. Should we be able to kill children until the age of 5? Why not?
I think your take from the perspective of categorization is one that tries to blur things intentionally. It may be the case that an organism does or does not "objectively" belong to a race. But that does not mean that the specific attributes of that organism are themselves not objectively measurable. You're just talking about what definitions are being used.
I think that argument is an attempt to derive ethics from words - rather than discovering the scientific process, deciding ethically what is appropriate or desirable, and identifying the language which should be used to describe it. It's backwards.
At some point a fetus goes from necessarily relying on the mother, to being self-sustaining (if fed) even if removed from the mother. That's a knowable thing. If the baby is removed it will either live or die and that is our answer. Call that life, or independence, or whatever. The lens you choose may change where the line is for you, but not when it is crossed.
I would say that if you believe that children should not be killed post-birth, then you are already cognizant of some kind of threshold that exists which is eventually crossed and cannot be undone, after which adults are obliged to attempt care and continued life of the child.
Because we don't have a way to test exactly when a fetus becomes independent, we use heuristics. For the most part, the first trimester we consider dependent; the last trimester we consider independent; in the ambiguous middle trimester we err on the side of the preference of the already-living, and in some places allow abortions through this time even though there may be a chance that the baby is alive and independent.
But these are just heuristics. "The Texas law is far more restrictive." Yes, it is. But you also said "Go from there" and that is what they did. Texas narrowed to a specific criteria that its people perceive to better approximate the threshold for life. "Life" being in this case a catch-all amalgamation of lots of peoples' concepts that mostly approximates the ability to self-sustain under care. It would seem on the surface at least that an organism without a heartbeat is dead-on-arrival while one with a heartbeat at least has a chance.
The way past this for a place like Texas is to propose a new testable threshold and explain why it is not possible for a self-sustaining baby to be exist before then.
I did not say the policy's disproportionate affect should be the sole consideration; I did say it's worth considering, because in practice the vast majority of ethical questions are not simple binaries; we have to weigh competing needs/desires/etc and decide what the best course based on all the factors at play.
My intention is not to "blur things intentionally" but to encourage thinking about this in a less black-and-white way, and explore some unexamined (arguably irrational!) assumptions that seemed present in your original post. For instance, you said:
> When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother?
...with the implication that answering this will give us a "rational" and correct answer to the ethical question. But there is nothing about <i>this framing itself</i> that is objective or rational. Knowing that a life <i>is</i> at some point (via whatever scientific definition we've chosen) doesn't tell us what <i>ought</i> be done about it; in general you can't derive an ought from an is; you could <i>easily</i> instead reframe the ethical question as "is there some point when a fetus's life is more important than the woman's bodily autonomy," and come up with a very different set of heuristics for answering the question. You can pick an objectively measurable line but the choice of what that line is, and what to do about it, are not a thing that can be objectively chosen.
My intended point wrt Texas is that, based on the discrepancy between polling data and the law as written, it seems like the representatives in Texas have passed a law that is in fact <i>more</i> restrictive than what the majority of voters want; ergo, I don't think it actually reflects the majority's intuitions on when abortion should be OK. But this really isn't my main point; I'm mainly trying to point out this isn't a question that can be solved solely by finding some science answer, and an attempt to sway voters solely on that type of argument seems not-correct based on everything we understand about how people in modern democracies make such decisions.
From an ethically perspective it would be significant if those expectations and obligations could be replaced with voluntary acts in an universal way.
Assuming that a foetus is a child, why should the mother have a legal obligation to keep it in her body? If it existed outside her, but required a kidney transplant to live, would she also be legally obligated to give it one? As far as I am aware that procedure is at lot less dangerous/damaging to a womans body than a pregnancy.
I can't see a logical argument against abortion that doesn't require any person to give up a kidney that a stranger need.
A parent does have an obligation to feed and keep healthy a child that cannot care for itself. There is such a concept as criminal negligence. For example, parents have been charged with manslaughter after they provided an insufficient diet for their child. [0]
> why should the mother have a legal obligation to keep it in her body?
I'm not sure that she does. She could theoretically take it out and raise it outside of her, but that would be quite bizarre and greatly increases the risk of criminal negligence and improper care. Babies are forced out early all the time, when the doctors recommend it if the baby is late.
[0] https://www.news-journalonline.com/zz/news/20191121/vegan-fl...
If you caused a car accident which lead to the other person needing a kidney transplant that only you can provide should you be required to give up a kidney? I don't see how abortion is different. Either way you made a risky choice that you knew could cause someone's life to be dependent on you. That doesn't mean you're forced to save the person.
You might say, well but then that means the mother could "abort" a baby that's 2 years old or was just born or something. Well I'd say sure in a state of nature. But since we have a society we don't have to kill the child and someone else can just take care of it.
I think there are some reasonable parameters. Conception? Not reasonable to call that murder. A week before birth? Yea that looks a whole lot like murder to me. I don't think most reasonable people who are ok with abortion would see the argument that the mother has an ultimate right to destruction when so close to birth. But where they give, anti-abortion proponents take and get to the point where you start banning contraceptives and don't allow someone who maybe is safely having sex and a condom breaking to get an abortion.
And this is saying nothing about the stupid website like it's some sort of intellectual purge under Maoist China or Stalinist Russia. This is exactly the kind of thing that authoritarian regimes love or would love to implement and it's easy to see the slipper slope toward, well, why don't we start reporting people who are suspected of being "white nationalists" or Christians?
This is a valid position to hold, but hardly a non-controversial one. We have, as a society, agreed that the state’s role is to step in to defend the defenseless in cases of large power asymmetry, as would be the case here. Indeed this general principle is usually a leftist position.
> Either way you made a risky choice that you knew could cause someone's life to be dependent on you. That doesn't mean you're forced to save the person.
Actually it does (speaking generally, not to your specific example). Criminal or civil negligence is a thing.
I shuddered a bit reading this. By this logic, at any point where I am dependent on someone else for my survival in passage (say an airplane) the principle in the relationship (the pilot or airline) has a right to kill me?
If that’s the logic, then we can squarely see that we have chosen to punish those who have any responsibility in that situation. Re: wrongful death
Just stop digging this hole deeper, please. You are misusing the term "parasite" and I imagine you may, later in your own life, come back to these remarks with a distinct feeling of shame.
Doubtful. So-called "pro-lifers" are also, generally, against other forms of birth-control, including pills and condoms.
Also, even if they did believe that an embryo is a baby, that doesn't make it so. What they "believe" (or say they believe) shouldn't matter; what matters is what is.
You might need a source on this one. This certainly applies to some religious types, but is it a "general" truth for people who would pass the heartbeat law? A law which still allows abortion but identifies a test for when life begins? I don't think so.
I should have been clearer. What we are really questioning is what counts as a human life. These days many babies that would have died from premature birth can be delivered early and survive; that line moves further back in pregnancy every year.
And things aren't so simple. You cannot demonstrate the unborn are sentient anymore than animals. We cannot demonstrate that either. We choose to err on the side of the unborn out of fear if we're wrong.
I actually know a farmer who only eat his pigs when they die of old age (he use them to find mushrooms, expensive mushrooms), pigs being very successfull in front of the mirror test and definitely sentient and more self-aware than a 4-year old, i wonder if he took that into consideration.
I for sure don't care, but if i was forced by the law, i would stop eating meat without protesting, so i guess win for the overall suffering and win for the climate? Maybe your church is onto something.
Funny, that's the exact same strawman OP was talking about.
I understand that the things you believe are facts, and the things others believe are opinions?
Whether abortion is murder is a strictly philosophical question, not a scientific one: there are a lot of facts to consider (beyond religious principles and thinly veiled misogyny) but they are only as relevant and decisive as one considers them.
In any event, I don't think being against birth control suggests the belief that a fetus deserves the rights of a child is necessarily implies the belief is in bad faith. Or at least, no more so than believing that murder should be a crime but supporting policies that indirectly lead to more murders (e.g. supporting policies that increase poverty or gun violence).
The more interesting gotcha for me is when pro-lifers concede an exception for rape. I don't think they believe a child born of rape is somehow less deserving of life than a broken condom. So that suggests the belief is less about simple life and death and more about a person's sexual choices.
I don't think it's that, but rather a realpolitik reason: a new bill that contains such an exception is easier to pass into law.
If on the other hand this is about punishing women for having sex, then they would try to prevent access to BC, as it removes the risk of pregnancy, and would have exemption for women who were raped because they didn't do anything worth punishing.
Of course I haven't seen anybody who is against abortions arguing that we should make spare kidney donations mandatory, despite the fact that people (who are, without a doubt, people) die waiting for a transplant. If you are not willing to make that argument, I don't see how you can logically argue against abortion.
[0]: I am not claiming that some individuals don't hold that belief.
That's a very weird take on the issue, specifically because I agree with you in many respects, but that is exactly why abortion is a very complex issue.
The fundamental question is "when does individual human life begin?" Yes, pro-lifers believe that it begins at conception, but why should their beliefs take precedence? I don't believe at all that an early embryo/fetus at 6 weeks is "an individual" in the human sense, where abortion would equal murder.
Of course, the problem is that when a fetus does become a full-fledged human is a gray line - pretty much everyone believes it occurs at some point between conception and birth, but where you draw that line is why this is a difficult, complex issue, not the "simple" one you seem to believe it is.
If it means that you can't say anything about a large group of people, I'm not sure I agree, given that most countries can agree on enough things to be governed. I'm not exactly sure what the point of the argument is.
I bet my life it wouldn't have happened if the UK gov implemented the same workers protections and immigration rules as Germany, for example.
This is pretty much exclusively true of sheltered relatively affluent (“middle class” in popular use, but including the upper income end of the working class) people born around 1980 who reached social awareness in the brief local minimum of general social division (but an not of partisan political division, which was gearing up quite hard at the time) of the mid- to late-1990s.
Everyone else, pretty much, was already aware of the underlying divisions, even if they were enjoying the brief respite in the immediate palpability of them.
Wait 4 years, or 2 years for a recall…
Voting against our own interests because we’ve been whipped up into a frenzy by religious zealots and hardline partisans is very, very American. I don’t know exactly what you mean by “wrong”, but I suppose if you mean “should I have seen this coming?” I’d probably say “Yes. The writing has been on the wall for years.”
IMO any view point between the first cells are already a human being to it becoming a human at birth are valid. Why not settle this in a referendum once and for all? If the vote is close to 50-50 maybe a more regional referendum would make sense to maximise happines with the outcome.
Unborn people are unique because they are entirely dependent upon a mother to survive in a way that cannot be replaced.
The human right to life is not absolute, at least under current law: a person who literally requires your body’s metabolical processes to survive is not entitled to that, and so we have decided the provider has the choice to cease providing it at anytime, with the stipulation that at the time the decision is made, they cannot choose mechanisms to end it which unnecessarily harm the recipient.
I would say for full consistency with this it would imply abortion providers ought to take steps to not directly inflict harm, but practically speaking death is assured under this framework and so perhaps that falls onto questions of suffering vs painless death.
Edit: To be more direct, the killing is considered acceptable since the alternative is less acceptable: namely, that a person who is providing biologically, metabolically bound life support to another via an umbilical cord is not permitted to cut that cord of their own agency, under penalty of law.
In that same framework, wouldn't a hospital be also allowed to turn of life support as it sees fit?
Also re: hospitals, this moral framework has no real analog given the nature of pregnancy being unique. If there were other phenomena where we could become biologically attached (without full intention) to others to sustain them through our own biological functions, then the same legal and moral frameworks seems like they would apply to those scenarios - but I am not aware of any such situations.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-really-in-the-texas-votin... What’s Really in the Texas Voting Law Progressives are crying ‘voter suppression,’ but here are the facts. By The Editorial Board Wall Street Journal Sept. 1, 2021 6:38 pm ET
...
The Texas bill isn’t a blockade of the ballot box. The two most-cited provisions will ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, practices that weren’t even used until last year, when one county tried them in a pandemic. It isn’t crazy to think polling sites are likelier to attract trouble, or at least suspicion, at 3 a.m.
Early voting in Texas will be able to run from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., or Sundays from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. In some places, mandatory hours will go up. The bill says six Sunday hours will be required in counties with 55,000 people. The current rule is five hours in counties over 100,000. The new ban on drive-through voting has an exception for people with physical difficulties.
Texans using mail ballots will ID themselves by writing a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. That’s far less subjective than asking election workers to eyeball signatures. If the ID number is correct, the signature will be “presumed” valid. If the ID is wrong or there’s another problem, the bill provides a process to fix it. Goofs will be correctable until “the sixth day after election day.”
The bill is 75 pages, but here are some other bits that won’t make headlines but will help voter integrity: Every two years the state will audit four random counties. Ballot harvesting “in exchange for compensation” will be banned. Counties with more than 100,000 people will have to live stream video from their central counting location. Mail votes will be reported separately on election returns.
Election administrators will be barred from sending unsolicited absentee forms, though candidates and parties can do so. Courts will “instruct” newly convicted felons on their changed voting rights. Official correspondence with voting-system vendors will be deemed generally “not confidential.”
Democrats object that the bill empowers poll watchers. It also requires watchers to take a state “training program” and an oath that they won’t “disrupt the voting process.” The bill will make it a crime if an official “knowingly refuses to accept a watcher” or “knowingly prevents a watcher from observing an activity or procedure the person knows the watcher is entitled to observe.” The key word: “knowingly.”
Too short of a timeline.
> Mail votes will be reported separately on election returns.
This is a poison pill you can't see.
Democrats have always been more likely to use mail in ballots because they are more likely to be in a position where going to poll isn't feasible.
So if the mail in votes lean one direction, and get reported separately (especially in a way that delays them) then republicans can attack the legitimacy of those votes.
Texas is gonna end up turning blue here soon and they want to make sure they can attack the legitimacy of that.
It's a ridiculous expansion of restrictions clearly targeting the way city dwellers vote, while trying to leave alone the way rural people vote.
2) What greater equalizer is there in a self-defense situation than a firearm? If you are an average woman being attacked by an average man, what out there is a greater equalizer and application of stopping force than a firearm? If you are a man being attacked by a stronger man what is a greater equalizer than a firearm? The US has in excess of 300 million firearms, an estimated 800,000 to 3,000,000 instances of defensive use of firearms a year. Each of those numbers is massive in comparison to the miniscule number of gun homicides (approx 14k) or even gun related suicides (30k) per year according to the last study the CDC did on guns. Maybe it's not the guns that are the problem. Maybe it's a very select set of people who use the guns that are the problem?
3) In the US, to do anything of larger consequence (buy/lease/rent a vehicle, purchase a house, rent an apartment, purchase alcohol, enter certain buildings, travel by plane, buy a firearm, in some cases file taxes) you need an ID. Why is so ludicrous to suggest that voting be something that unilaterally requires an ID? Over 3/4's of the nation's minorities support voter ID. https://news.gallup.com/poll/194741/four-five-americans-supp... It's starting to look like I will need a vax pass just to go to a restaurant. Why is this such an issue?
EDIT to try and make more readable
For abortion, it’s comes down to this: do you believe a fertilized egg is a baby, and it’s equivalent to murder? And if you do / don’t, at what point are you ok with it?
Lot of people here believe it’s a baby at moment of conception, so any abortion is murder. Lot of people also believe it’s the woman choice, it’s her body. These two opposite forces tug and pull and you end up with shit like after six weeks it’s illegal.
Personally, when I came to US as an immigrant it was very cheap and easy for me.
And in my home country in Europe everyone needs an Id to vote and no one complains.
Much has been written on this topic. I encourage you to do a little research before jumping to conclusions.
From the top link to a simple google query [1]:
• Rates of identification-ownership are highest among White individuals, while other ethnic groups disproportionately lack necessary photo ID. Thirteen percent of Blacks, 10 percent of Hispanics, but only 5 percent of Whites lack photographic identification. • Lower-income individuals are less likely to have photo ID. Twelve percent of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with over $150,000 annual income. • Young adults are less likely to have photo ID: 15 percent of 17-20 year- olds lack photo ID, and 11 percent of those ages 21-24 lack photo ID.
[1] http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...
I think there is actually an obvious good compromise here - Require Id for voting if and only if 99.5% (should be set by specialists) of county’s population has an Id. If the county doesn’t meet this threshold (I’d imagine most poor and republican counties) - don’t require it until it meets the threshold. Obviously people not being able to get an Id is somewhat an urgent problem that needs fixing.
Anti-abortionism has always been a core pillar of the GOP's social policy because it's highly popular with the religious demographics that make up much of their base, even people who might otherwise not vote for them (e.g. some Catholics). After a Republican president had the chance to seat 3 judges, it's logical that red states would start a war against Roe v. Wade. We saw this coming as soon as Trump got his second SCOTUS judge, and when RBG died the writing was on the wall.
No matter how strongly I feel about abortion, the election stuff is more acutely concerning after seeing the degree to which powerful state- and local-level politicians were willing to kowtow to Trump and repeat his baseless lies in the fallout from the 2020 election. These are political hacks with zero regard for the integrity of our electoral process, and with some changes to local election law (like we've been seeing across the country, predicated on lies about election fraud), they may just accomplish in 2024 what they were trying to do in 2020. I would call it a relatively new trend, and it is fucking frightening. They are learning that the more they corrupt the process, the less anybody is able to hold them to account, and their mendacity and depravity seem to know no bounds.
>I would call it a relatively new trend, and it is fucking frightening. They are learning that the more they corrupt the process, the less anybody is able to hold them to account, and their mendacity and depravity seem to know no bounds.
Yes, this.
It is something that I would never have expected in the US, because, to me, "unAmerican".
When I was growing up, I was extremely conscious that although I was British by birth, my entire family was Irish (from the republic). I fielded a lot of crap from people on account of my parents' accents etc; there were lots of problems in the UK because of IRA attacks etc.
My go-to place, my haven in my head, was that the US (although I realised even when growing up that many Irish-Americans were pro-Republican and supported extremism in the cause of a united Ireland) was bigger, better and as a nation above partisanship, seeing a world picture and being the leader in championing rights and fairness. Yes, a bit cut-throat and market-driven, but always in pursuit of equal opportunity and fairness.
I'd imagined that the US would lead the world into a higher plane - by example, and by sheer economic force: "you need our money, you toe the line".
Anyhow, I still cling to my childhood dream of America and Americans coming through for the rest of the world. In simplistic terms, as I saw that dream, that everyone deserves the same degree of respect because of our common humanity.
To restate my original sentiment, perhaps I was just wrong.
I care deeply about rights, but I suppose I cannot count myself among the enlightened; I cannot condone abortion since there is no way to ascertain beyond reasonable doubt that the unborn are not sentient people. And in my opinion, showing an ID to vote is just reasonable considering all it's other uses.
Erosion of rights in America is occurring recently through draconian executive orders that mandate behavior without due process. If Texas passes a law through due process, that's your problem not theirs. I don't mean to surmise what across the pond means, but if you're looking for dramatic erosion of rights look to Australia.
Visiting the US the first few times did demonstrate a cultural diversity that I hadn't actually realised until I was there. However, I grew up in London and, the UK being tiny, spent time in Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford and many other places that were culturally diverse - if by culturally diverse one means race, religion, cuisine etc.
I thought that America had an overarching sense of being American that transcended its constituent cultures - in a far more concrete sense than "Britishness", whatever that means.
Let's be honest. An Indian, Chinese, Pakistani - French person, even - arriving in Britain in my youth had little expectation of aspiring to "Britishness". There really isn't such a thing. But those people heading to the US had something almost tangible - again, overarching - the idea of Americanness that transcended everything. Class, culture, status, no matter. The American dream.
Or, perhaps, I just watched too many films - ahem, movies - as a kid that advertised this message to the world.
But even discarding the rose-tinted goggles of youth, I still think that there was a genuine spirit of an American ideal that held true until, perhaps, only a few years ago. I can't imagine the American people just sitting idly by and watching it be torn apart from within.
Other European countries are more conservative. And the vast majority of jurisdictions outside Europe are even more conservative than that.
But that info is nowhere in the news, or even on the Wikipedia page that just lumps all countries together that allow any abortions by request.
This is 100% a media-driven issue.
Until this week, Europe was more "Red State" on the issue than Texas. All other red states continue to be.
Yes, due to Roe and against the concerted effort of their Republican politicians. If the Texas law cannot be challenged then Roe is done, and those red states follow Texas’ suit.
What a disingenuous comment.
More conservative than roe or casey is made out to be radical, and based on the laws of the rest of the world, that's absolutely not the case.
That would be a real first step in fighting this law.
Some life is simply incompatible with life.
In essence, you can in fact get some of them to agree with the things like abortions in extreme circumstances such as trisomy 13, but then they're just being hypocrites, because they earlier stated that any abortion is murder. In the end, they show their true colors of mostly just wanting to control women and minorities, and the politicians just keeping a downtrodden and uneducated voter base that they can dangle a "vote for me and I'll help you" carrot in front of for life.
Oh, wait.
You can't escape politics.
If this citizen enforcement truly is an end run on the constitution, there's no reason not to use that. And just like this Texan law, jurisdiction doesn't matter. If Washington State bans guns, hate speech, wealth,cars and implements Sharia law, it can be enforced around the country. If there's nothing unconstitutional about the way this Texan law is implemented, then the constitution is little more than a tissue in a tornado.
> Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
This has been reaffirmed in many subsequent rulings.
Edit: but look at that language. "Without excessive government restriction." Sounds like "Congress shall make no law," doesn't it? Constitution doesn't say I can't sue you for exercising your rights, eh? Limitations are for governments.
Then there's the rabbit hole that is judicial review. And if constitutional protections need not be explicitly mentioned, why can't States assert that the right of judicial review is theirs, without the need to overturn or continue to respect Marbury v Madison.
So parent's arguments stand, if this law stands, free speech and gun rights could be aborted (hehe) by just making them civil cases and giving people the right to sue.
edit: In fact, democrats have tried to do just that, by giving gun violence victims the right to sue the gun shop and gun manufacture. I (and bernie) have opposed such bills, for the same i (and bernie) oppose this bill. its a shortcut around the constitution that shouldn't be allowed to exist.
[0]: its not as simple as this, but thats the jist of it. this is why a civil case can result on the state forcing you to give up money/property without a ruling by a jury, and why the state can force you to pay if you want a jury in such civil cases, but can't in criminal cases. As another example, civil asset forfeiture gives the state the power to take your property without a ruling by a court, let alone a jury, with no need to prove anything, instead requiring you to prove legality. criminal asset forfeiture already exists and requires both of those things, but isn't used in favor of the civil version.
Companies Stay Quiet on Texas’ New Abortion Law https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/business/companies-texas-...