[RD] Abortion, once again

[Cutlass]

I've never seen any least bit of evidence that the "late term abortion" part of the debate wasn't just flat out lying by the anti-abortion advocates. It makes a nice story to rile up the sheeple. But that's all it is. A story to rile up the sheeple.

 

[stfoskey12]

You don't need that to be a law, it's just the business of individuals involved. Decision making gets a little more involved as you move from medical abortion to simple surgeries then complex ones, but that's all just medical decisionmaking stuff. Making such laws implies there's a problem which doesn't actually exist, and creates barriers to access for those who need it.

Pretending there's a problem by banging on and on about "late term abortions" is also a big part of United States Republican propaganda, it's rhetoric designed to wedge people against this entirely imaginary spectre of people (read: wanton jezebels!) just killing nearly-formed babbies willy-nilly. Don't accept their framing, unfortunately that bias is so widespread people in the US often don't even realise the extent they've been marinating in it, but really this whole discourse about gestation limits needing to be tightly legislated and rigidly regulated is a furphy.

You actually just don't need such laws, it's not nearly the main issue. Where I live there are no gestation limit type laws, abortion is fully legal at any point, but there's still access issues because the nearest specialist who can do the complex late term surgeries is in Sydney (my understanding is it's a demand issue, there's only a handful of such delayed abortion cases each year here), so people have to travel 3 hours to a different clinic run by the same organisation as performs simple procedures here. The big focus needs to be resourcing and access, not punitive laws.

Sure, but if you follow my suggestion, it's a bone you can throw conservatives so they leave you alone, or you can trade it for increased welfare spending or something.

 

[GenMarshall]

Couldn't there be a compromise where late term abortions are restricted with an exception if the life or health of the mother is at risk or the fetus is non-viable?

I'd suspect this was the reasonable stance for a decade or two.

 

[Lexicus]

Sure, but if you follow my suggestion, it's a bone you can throw conservatives so they leave you alone, or you can trade it for increased welfare spending or something.

Nope, they get nothing. They won't leave it alone no matter what so they can't just piss off.

 

[Remorseless1]

I still don't understand why any American thinks what a citizen does with their body is the government's business. To me, that's the bottom line. All this other stuff is just a smoke screen for wannabe theocrats wanting to impose their twisted version of religion on everyone else.

 

[Lexicus]

I still don't understand why any American thinks what a citizen does with their body is the government's business. To me, that's the bottom line. All this other stuff is just a smoke screen for wannabe theocrats wanting to impose their twisted version of religion on everyone else.

Conservatives evidently believe that there is a cohort of women getting pregnant and then intentionally waiting until the third trimester to kill the baby just for lolz.

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

I still don't understand why any American thinks what a citizen does with their body is the government's business. To me, that's the bottom line. All this other stuff is just a smoke screen for wannabe theocrats wanting to impose their twisted version of religion on everyone else.

There are innumerable things that I do with my own body*, yet government sees it as their business to oversee it**. For some reason, this dynamic only seems to come up during discussions on abortions. I imagine it's because impugning others sexual organs is such a low-hanging fruit* to begin with.

*giggidy giggidy
**I don't think they should; just stating a fact

 

[JollyRoger]

It comes up quite a bit when a conservative doesn't want to take a jab

 

[Farm Boy]

As this has spiraled out of what seems to be the Ohio constitutional amendment, is anyone presently fighting over ground that isn't past viability, here? Or are we just pounding on the fleshlights we find convenient?

Helmet laws, and whatnot, smoking laws, the innumerable discomforts to self that we can imagine justifying day to day controls over others, much less ones in what seem to be stipulated as extraordinary circumstances?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Helmet laws tend to keep people in the gene pool. Making them optional everywhere might improve the species....

 

[Angst]

For some reason, this dynamic only seems to come up during discussions on abortions.

... not really. it's brought up all the time outside the discussion of abortion.

 

[Farm Boy]

Helmet laws tend to keep people in the gene pool. Making them optional everywhere might improve the species....

We do also say that about violent crime, unwanted children, and who we abort. Well. By "we" you do know who.

 

[Arwon]

Sure, but if you follow my suggestion, it's a bone you can throw conservatives so they leave you alone, or you can trade it for increased welfare spending or something.

My impression of the United States Republican Party is they would (already do) simply treat this "concession" as an invitation to demand more

 

[GenMarshall]

There are innumerable things that I do with my own body*, yet government sees it as their business to oversee it**. For some reason, this dynamic only seems to come up during discussions on abortions. I imagine it's because impugning others sexual organs is such a low-hanging fruit* to begin with.

*giggidy giggidy
**I don't think they should; just stating a fact

I still don't understand why any American thinks what a citizen does with their body is the government's business.

That's generally what I'm trying to understand myself. At most, the involvement the government should have are ensuring that the products we consume don't harm us. In the case of abortion, that the procedure is safe and done by a vetted and highly trained doctor in a clinic with set sanitary and health regulations to minimize risk of infection instead of a dirty back alley clinic with a dirty coat hanger.

Most of the opponents of abortons I’ve seen are mainly from the evangelical crowd.

 

[EgonSpengler]

That's generally what I'm trying to understand myself. At most, the involvement the government should have are ensuring that the products we consume don't harm us. In the case of abortion, that the procedure is safe and done by a vetted and highly trained doctor in a clinic with set sanitary and health regulations to minimize risk of infection instead of a dirty back alley clinic with a dirty coat hanger.

Well, conservatives want to roll back regulations of every kind. That's the pro-business angle. They want to live in a "caveat emptor" society, where people can take advantage of one another, more or less at will, and the apex predators will naturally rise to the top. There has to be a clash between the laissez-faire capitalists and the religious zealots, on a philosophical level, because the former would by definition be pro-choice, but I never hear about it. I think that's because the wealthy don't really need to defend a political opinion, because they know their money will always grant them choice. If my boss or her daughter or anyone in her life needed an abortion, she would get one, in a gleaming, state-of-the-art clinic staffed by top people in their field. If that clinic is in Toronto or Geneva or Mexico City, then so be it. So in that sense, the capitalists probably don't see it as a hill worth dying on, because the result of the battle won't affect them too much anyway.

Most of the opponents of abortons I’ve seen are mainly from the evangelical crowd.

Certainly, the concerted efforts to roll back this particular right come from a religious base, but it wasn't always entirely so.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/07/abortion-movement-roe-wade/

The former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, W.A. Criswell, who ran the First Baptist Church in Dallas, had argued that a child became an individual only after birth when “it had a life separate from its mother.” In both 1971 and 1974, Southern Baptists passed resolutions asking evangelicals to work for legal abortion in cases of rape, incest and fetal deformity, as well as cases where there was “carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental and physical health of the mother.”

That permissiveness among pastors was about to run headlong into a cultural rebellion against the liberal social movements of the 1960s. “Women’s libbers are promoting free sex instead of the ‘slavery’ of marriage,” the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly wrote in a 1972 essay opposing the Equal Rights Amendment. “They are promoting abortions instead of families.”

Originally, the "pro-life" movement was very explicitly anti-feminist. And 'feminism' back then meant things like allowing women access to birth control, not letting husbands force themselves on their wives, things like that. When Schlafly referred to "free sex", she was talking about birth control; when she mocks the "slavery" of marriage, she's talking about women being able to have their own bank accounts without their husband's signature and being able to tell their husbands 'not tonight, dear, I have a headache.' Of course the "pro-life" movement is still anti-feminist, they just deny it today. It reminds me of the Americans who will try to claim that the Confederacy of 1861 wasn't about preserving slavery, but then you go and read the declarations of secession from back then, and at least some of them were perfectly explicit that it was about slavery. They literally went on the record. (As far as 'promoting families', I wonder what Phyllis Schlafly would have said about same-sex married couples adopting children? No, wait, I don't have to wonder, she was on the record about that, too...)

 

[Farm Boy]

conservatives want to roll back regulations of every kind.

Spoken as the exemplar thereof, no doubt?

What would be the takeaway to return here? "Nothing less reliable in this world than a liberal man? Even unto your nascent days?" Or something like that.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Spoken as the exemplar thereof, no doubt?

What would be the takeaway to return here? "Nothing less reliable in this world than a liberal man?"

I have no idea what you're saying. But cheers, man.

 

[Farm Boy]

I was aiming for a similar degree of accuracy on the topic. I'm not going to skin myself to defend either thing that I think is not really the answer.

 

[stfoskey12]

My impression of the United States Republican Party is they would (already do) simply treat this "concession" as an invitation to demand more

I think they would demand more either way. A lot of conservative states basically banned abortion in all cases except when the life of the mother is at risk. And some of them are trying to punish women who travel to other states to get abortions. If you genuinely view abortion as murder, like many religious conservatives do, I can see why they do it. However, I don't view abortion as equivalent to murder and think they're in the wrong.

 

[Angst]

Well, conservatives want to roll back regulations of every kind. That's the pro-business angle. They want to live in a "caveat emptor" society, where people can take advantage of one another, more or less at will, and the apex predators will naturally rise to the top. There has to be a clash between the laissez-faire capitalists and the religious zealots, on a philosophical level, because the former would by definition be pro-choice, but I never hear about it. I think that's because the wealthy don't really need to defend a political opinion, because they know their money will always grant them choice. If my boss or her daughter or anyone in her life needed an abortion, she would get one, in a gleaming, state-of-the-art clinic staffed by top people in their field. If that clinic is in Toronto or Geneva or Mexico City, then so be it. So in that sense, the capitalists probably don't see it as a hill worth dying on, because the result of the battle won't affect them too much anyway.

personally, the discrepancy present between moral doctrines and laissez-faire is pretty much solved by the fact that conservatives generally like hierarchy, at least by historical structure. yesyes there's plenty of libertarians that like freedom and whatever, that's not the kind of hierarchy i talk about. you note the apex predator; the idea that some people are better than others and should be allowed to naturally rise in power and to have influence over people that are inherently less competent, and therefore less valuable. og conservatives (like way back) recognized that the monarchy was going away, so they looked to the patrician class as a method to preserve an order of sharks. economic opportunity and disparity allows for sharks to rise to the top. for the zealots, they also appeal to a hierarchy, so there's not really a discrepancy there. it's not really about money. it's about what money can do in society; divide people after their competence. hierarchy is the base structure there, everything else is an asterisk.