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

[GALeftist]

Only people who voted for Hillary Clinton on 11/8/2016 get to complain if they overturn Roe v. Wade.

I was not eligible to do so but I voted for Biden can I still complain please

[GALeftist]

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

This is wrong, but it's at least wrong in a somewhat interesting way, so I thought I'd respond. To explain, let's consider a hypothetical scenario in which you're walking with me beside a dangerous river or something. I trip and fall into the river, and I'm a poor swimmer, so I will die if you don't attempt to save me, but by the same token saving a poor swimmer from a dangerous river is an inherently risky course of action. You're faced with a moral dilemma: do you attempt to save me, at risk to your own life and health, or not? For our purposes, though, the answer to this dilemma is basically irrelevant. The real question is "should the state mandate that you save me from the river, even at risk to your own life and health?"

The obvious answer to this question is, in my estimation, of course not (even if we assume you're a strong swimmer and there's no chance of your drowning, just to provide an analogue for exemptions in cases where the mother's life is threatened). For one thing, there are any number of factors which the state can't always foresee. Maybe, for instance, you have a family who relies on you to put food on the table, and injuring yourself either temporarily or permanently in the course of rescuing me would not be an acceptable risk. More fundamentally, though, the morality of it doesn't really factor into it. The state allows us to do many immoral, even gravely immoral, things, but it simply does not have a right to force us to use our bodies that way, even in pursuit of laudable goals. Whether you take that risk to save me, however admirable it may be, is and ought only to be your choice. I think most people would agree with this principle. In the same way, whether an individual undergoes the harm (which is what it ought to be called) pregnancy entails is and ought only to be their choice, regardless of what the moral answer to the dilemma might be.

Your argument would seem to imply that, in a situation like the one I've described, my right to bodily autonomy would justify state action forcing you to save me, but that doesn't follow. I mean, perhaps state action would be justified in compelling the river to quit violating my bodily autonomy by drowning me, but a river is a river, it isn't accountable to the law. Despite the fact that my plight might be unjust in some theoretical sense, that doesn't imply that the state has a right to unjustly use your body to rectify my injustice. Similarly, until the state can get fetuses to stop needing to inflict harm on the parent to survive, the fetus's bodily autonomy is sadly mostly theoretical and irrelevant.

One common counterargument that I hear to this is that the individual who got pregnant is responsible for the circumstances of the fetus and that there is therefore an obligation to that fetus on the part of the pregnant individual. However, I honestly don't think agency is an important part of this analogy. For example, even if you tripped and pushed me into the river, I don't think that would justify state action forcing you to rescue me. There might be a better argument if you actively pushed me in, especially if you intended to kill me, or if your negligence somehow led to my drowning but I still have a couple of issues with this. Firstly, in that case, the actual crime would not be that you declined to rescue me, it would be that you killed me. Secondly, I suspect you'll find that the vast majority of abortions occur in cases where the pregnancy was accidental. Thirdly, for the court to find which pregnancies legitimately did occur due to malicious intent or gross negligence is, I daresay, an impossible task.

Finally, yes, I would still agree with this position even if it was a baby drowning, even if it was a baby you accidentally pushed in, and even if it was a baby the state merely couldn't prove you pushed in intentionally or due to gross negligence. In my opinion, this argument is a fairly robust defense of abortion based on bodily autonomy up until the child can live without inflicting harm upon the pregnant individual.

[GALeftist]

I'm nervous about this ruling but I'm also not going to be too quick to say Roe is DOA. If upholding this 15 week ban does in fact overturn Roe, I see Roberts siding with the liberals and getting one of Kavanaugh or Gorsuch (most likely the former ironically) to side with him on it, as I don't think he'd let that happen given how bitterly divided the country is on the issue and given how dangerously polarized we are as a country at the moment. I think if Roberts is gonna kill Roe v Wade, he's gonna do it by a slow death of a thousand cuts rather than in one ruling. I don't think he wants to further erode people's already eroded faith in the court.

Thanks to RBG's appalling hubris, these decisions are no longer up to John Roberts. Yeah, her legacy will be her personal responsibility for every insane 5-4 rightwing decision moving forward. She was a terrible person (yeah, putting yourself above ~300 million others is the very definition of the the concept) and hopefully, the destruction of her reputation is enough to convince Stephen Breyer not to repeat the same mistake.

I think the only justices that guaranteed to kill Roe outright are Thomas, Alito, and the Handmaid. Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch are a toss up, and even if they were to do it (and by no means do I want Roe overturned), I think it would be done in a way that leaves the legal status of abortion to the states.

Yeah, that's what the destruction of Roe v Wade means — it's up to the states. Thanks to RBG. Who knows, maybe Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will surprise us. But the broader point is that I trust Roberts to attempt to preserve the legitimacy of the Court (too late), assuming the issue isn't nonwhites voting. Unfortunately, thanks to RBG, he no longer has veto power. Terrible justice, terrible person. All the RBG fans need to buckle up, because she's about to be dragged for the next ~20 years.

And for the next ~20 years, we'll point out that society would rather blame the loss of womens' rights on a woman for dying rather than the three/four misogynistic men who made the decision. RBG's "mistake" would never have been a mistake if the person 56% of women voted for -- Hillary Clinton -- was rightfully elected.

It's not her fault for dying, it's her fault for not retiring when Obama could have put some relatively liberal justice on the bench. Frankly, even if Hillary Clinton had been elected, I would still be mad at her for waiting so long and exposing the United States to unnecessary risk, especially if the Republicans held the Senate somehow. She had an opportunity to retire safely and she should have taken it, that's all there is to it. This doesn't absolve the other ghouls on the court by any means, but it's true nonetheless.

[GALeftist]

Everyone here is mad at RBG, but who you should REALLY be mad at is Anthony Kennedy. That asshole is still alive, but voluntarily retired KNOWING that Donald f--king Trump would appoint his replacement.

I agree RBG should have retired while Obama was still president, but I can't totally blame her for wanting to hold out for the poetry of being replaced by the first female president (and also the wife of the man who appointed her!). Was it worth the risk? No. Can I at least see why she did it? Yeah. Especially considering few thought Trump actually could win at the time.

Kennedy however just completely threw the social liberals he had been helping under the bus, basically. He did it knowingly and deliberately, seemingly with no care at all for whether all the decisions he had passionately defended would be undone or not. Makes you question his entire motives from start to finish.

So an octogenarian isn't allowed to retire now?

Not that octogenarian. I'm still half convinced Trump had dirt on him or something but more likely he was just another horrid individual

[GALeftist]

For the record, I agree with John Dule's take regarding fetal personhood, but I'd like to add that, due to the bodily autonomy argument I mentioned earlier, it is simply not satisfactory for pro-lifers to just insist that fetuses are equal to humans and leave it at that. Even if true, that would not really mean anything of consequence (beyond my moral assessment of a given mother), and it certainly wouldn't mean that abortion ought to be banned. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that even if Christ himself descended from heaven and told me that fetuses are human beings with thoughts and feelings equal to those of an adult human being, I would not consider that to be reason to change our abortion policy in the slightest until He also sees fit to allow fetuses to live without inflicting harm upon the mother. In a way, I think we've already lost the debate when we start arguing over fetal personhood, because pro-lifers' minds will simply never be changed on this. However, all too often we allow them to get away with simply saying "I believe fetuses are people" without explaining why that should affect policy even if it were true.

As far as I'm concerned, whether fetuses are or are not people is a matter of personal opinion which is none of my concern. If you believe they are people, more power to you. I grew up in a Southern Christian family myself, so I understand that this belief can be deeply held. I'd encourage you to consider that educating women of how to avoid unwanted pregnancies and making birth control as widely available as possible would be among the most effective methods of preventing abortions, if you truly do see them as tragedies. However, this is state policy, and to be legitimate it must be subject to certain rules about when it is and isn't appropriate, and it seems pretty clear that this is not one of those times.

[GALeftist]

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

I'm torn. I do believe that Roe was poorly decided (as lfromnj noted), and I understand that whatever threshold the law establishes for "personhood" will be fundamentally arbitrary on some level (not unlike the age of consent). However, Blairite is also right in noting that libertarians should not endorse any government taking away people's rights, whether that is a federal, state, or local government. In fact, smaller governments are often more prone to wild reactionary conservatism than the federal government, so in some ways I trust them less to preserve people's rights.

That said, I am ok with certain states passing certain abortion restrictions-- but the idea that a zygote is equivalent to a living person is fundamentally insane and any attempt to legislate to that effect should be resisted. I personally think the cutoff for abortion should come when the fetus becomes viable, but unlike certain people, I understand that there is no exact moment when a fetus becomes a person. Personhood isn't something that happens in a split second. It is a gradient scale, and while either end of that gradient is clearly defined, there is no naturally occurring delineation in between that we can use as a basis for legislation.

Worth noting here that, unless I'm mistaken, abortions after the fetus is viable are quite rare, and in circumstances when someone's life isn't at risk they're almost unheard of. More frequently doctors will simply induce birth in a woman who does not wish to be pregnant anymore at that stage.