BREAKING: Roe v. Wade might be overruled or severely weakened by SCOTUS

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Anyways, both morally and politically, I hope this passes. Abortion is a form of murder and should only be protected federally for very specific situations.

Murder is the unlawful killing of another human being. If abortion is legal, it is explicitly not murder.

The state has no moral power to legalize abortion, just as it has no moral power to legalize any sort of human rights violations.

Weird take.

The state has no legitimate right to usurp bodily autonomy without overwhelming cause--and can never default to that as a blanket rule. That's the moral issue here. Government will never justly be able to regulate abortion because it lies so far beyond the bounds of legitimate collective power. The role of the state is to create guidelines for orderly society, preserve security, formalize the economy, protect individual rights, and provide certain services. Any action beyond that--for example, prohibiting abortion--is such an egregious act of tyranny that--no matter how popular it may be--it can never be just. If the state ventures into these areas, it loses all semblance of moral authority and is no different from a barbarous, uncivilized mob. Which, of course, would literally defeat the entire purpose of the American project.

Anyways, both morally and politically, I hope this passes. Abortion is a form of murder and should only be protected federally for very specific situations.

You have literally no moral authority on anything, ever.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Anyways, both morally and politically, I hope this passes. Abortion is a form of murder and should only be protected federally for very specific situations.

Murder is the unlawful killing of another human being. If abortion is legal, it is explicitly not murder.

The state has no moral power to legalize abortion, just as it has no moral power to legalize any sort of human rights violations.

Weird take.

The state has no legitimate right to usurp bodily autonomy without overwhelming cause--and can never default to that as a blanket rule. That's the moral issue here. Government will never justly be able to regulate abortion because it lies so far beyond the bounds of legitimate collective power. The role of the state is to create guidelines for orderly society, preserve security, formalize the economy, protect individual rights, and provide certain services. Any action beyond that--for example, prohibiting abortion--is such an egregious act of tyranny that--no matter how popular it may be--it can never be just. If the state ventures into these areas, it loses all semblance of moral authority and is no different from a barbarous, uncivilized mob. Which, of course, would literally defeat the entire purpose of the American project.

Anyways, both morally and politically, I hope this passes. Abortion is a form of murder and should only be protected federally for very specific situations.

You have literally no moral authority on anything, ever.

Even under a “bodily autonomy” analysis abortion still fails. The fetus has every much right to bodily autonomy as its mother.

Only to the extent that a fetus can be considered an actual human. And since no just government would make that determination based upon religious conceptions of souls, we are forced to turn to logic to figure out whether our social values consider fetuses human.

Clearly, we don't see the right to life as absolute--humans kill an awful lot of animals and mostly consider this moral. Similarly, the mere presence of pain has never been the threshold at which we decide something ought to be prohibited. What actually distinguishes human life from other forms--what we actually value--is human consciousness. We have assigned value to not killing something capable of complicated thought and which--crucially--possesses self-awareness. People are cognizant of "themselves" being a thing that exists in the world and to kill that is a uniquely immoral act.

Therefore, since bodily autonomy only applies to humans--and the line we have drawn between killing and murder is the line between mere life and actual self-aware consciousness, we can only conclude that killing is immoral if the being which is killed is aware that it exists as an individual person. Obviously, that trait does not appear for at least the first two trimesters of a pregnancy so unless we are to reevaluate how we assign moral value to the life of literally every other living thing, it would be hypocritical and unjust to conclude that a fetus before this time has personhood. Since a fetus does not have personhood, it therefore has no bodily autonomy which can be defended by the government. And since third trimester abortions happen basically exclusively to preserve the health and life of the mother (therefore, made acceptable under the universally accepted right to self-defense), the government has no moral authority to outlaw abortion.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Your emotions have once again caused to you lose sight of the point I was making. I did not draw an equivalency between the many scenarios I mentioned. My point was that it is possible to have feelings about something that does not exist or is not possible. In this case, you feel deep emotions for the brother you could have had. These emotions are real. But they are fundamentally different from a widow's grief for her husband, as I'm sure you understand on some level.

But in any case, please do not take this to mean that your emotions are invalid. We have all experienced tragedies in our lives when a wonderful possibility was torn away from us by fate. It is deeply sad that we live in a universe that is indifferent to our suffering, but at the very least, we can empathize with one another.  

I apologize if you don’t understand my point - these emotions are not fundamentally different from the pain of losing my infant cousin. It feels the bloody same. Perhaps it’s odd to you, but in the South it’s not unusual to “talk to” a mother’s stomach to the child. We don’t pretend to not know that, as any bioethicist will tell you, a new life begins at conception. What would it take for you to acknowledge my brother’s existence? Should I dig up his body from the ground? Do I need to count his toes out for you? Should I have preserved his brain and heart that you could see him? I have seen babies a couple weeks older than the age of my brother in the hospital - are they too young to be human, too? There was not some vague, potential that was halted for my baby brother or for my newborn cousin. They were real, living human beings.

Look, I get that you feel this way but I still don't understand your insistence on conception being the starting point for life. Regardless of how your perceive your brothers' existence in the universe, all the characteristics to life which you just described were objectively not present the moment a sperm and an egg united to created a zygote. Why is conception the cutoff? Why not later--or sooner? A zygote is not substantively different from an egg in its capabilities, experiences, or function. A clump of 10; 100; 1,000 cells is not a brain or a toe or a heart. Why are you so insistent on saying that life begins at conception when all the physical characteristics which define human life are completely absent? It just doesn't make sense. Maybe later on in a pregnancy, but at conception..surely not.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Dule , shouldn’t you as a libertarian support the individual states right to pass their own abortion laws

States rights is not a libertarian position at all. Almost all values are unverbalizable and I can't see why any principled libertarian would be okay with a government making a tyrannical decision just because it exists below the federal level.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Dule , shouldn’t you as a libertarian support the individual states right to pass their own abortion laws

States rights is not a libertarian position at all. Almost all values are unverbalizable and I can't see why any principled libertarian would be okay with a government making a tyrannical decision just because it exists below the federal level.

Isnt American libertarianism basically the types that take the interpretation of : if something isn't explicitly written in the constitution , than the federal government should have no power to make laws or regulations about it.

That would be a very reductionist way of interpreting their motivations.