SCOTUS overturns Roe megathread (pg 53 - confirmed)

[patzer]

And there you have it. We'll see how this turns out, but at least there are states that people can go to for abortion services, and there is also medical abortion if women choose to go that route.

Make no mistake, women will find a way to have an abortion if she deems it necessary. That's a fact.

This is why I'm disappointed they just left it to the states. Having said that, I'm sure many mothers in states which protect life who would otherwise have been pressured into abortion will choose against it now, so this is still a big step forward.

Hopefully in the future there'll be a case to legally recognize fetal personhood.

[patzer]

As a Catholic, glorious news. Abortion was always an abhorrent practice. Leave it up to the states.

If abortion is so abhorrent, why should a state be allowed to legalize it?

Exactly, I don't know how anyone pro-life is able to think sub-national units should be able to permit this.

People may be celebrating today but the fight is far from over.

[patzer]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/illegal-abortion-pill-network/

I got through some of it, it was quite long. But very interesting. I am reminded of the prohibition days of our history and no matter how much they tried to ban alcohol, all they did was create an "alternative" network of delivery for the product. And I'm sure many people died in the process.

And then they found out that you can't regulate something as fundamental as drinking alcohol. People will do it no matter what. Same with abortions. Women will have them no matter what. We can do it the safer way, or the prohibition way -- which we know doesn't work. But some people in our society have the need to reinvent the wheel, and the rest of us are stuck in their warped thinking until we find a way out.

Feels somewhat sexist to me to talk about “women” as a monolith here, as if all women are just clamoring to kill their kids and will do anything they can to make sure they still can. It’s only a minority of women who’ve done that.

But the more general point does have accuracy insofar as you can’t just legally ban a thing and expect people to stop doing it. You need actual societal change. And that comes with providing resources, advocacy, etc, not just policing.

It’s similar to murder of adults insofar as you’re always going to get it and even in deprived communities you’d have a hard time cracking down on gangs with solely police effort– you need to tackle the problem at the root, obviously crack down on the crime but also tackle the causes behind people turning to it in the first place. In the case of cracking down on murder of babies, that sort of “root cause” intervention would take the form of better healthcare and financial support for mothers, easy access to contraception, and an easy adoption process (give both mother and father an easy way to relinquish all rights and responsibilities over their child, and if both parents do so and nobody they know wants the baby, they go into the adoption system).

And also better education– there are too many people completely convinced that babies have no rights when unborn and it’s okay to kill them. Actually have education in schools about this, go into the biology, share stories of babies who survived attempted abortion, stories of babies who survived highly premature birth, etc.

[patzer]

On one hand, propaganda doesn’t work and unless your opinion of humanity is that low (I’m getting there so who knows with you!), it’s very difficult to believe that the issue is as simple as you are letting on.

Education can sometimes work but even with this which is one of the most blatant present day injustices, it’s very hard for public opinion to change solely on activism.

I’m not optimistic, but I still hope. Very easy to grow cynical about how arbitrary human empathy is. An unborn baby can be either a precious life to be cherished or a clump of cells that it’s okay to brutally end the life of; an animal being held under atrocious conditions raised to be killed would receive empathy if it’s a dog but not if it’s a pig; for people in general there’s the pure luck of where you’re born in the world...

But there have been activism and education campaigns before which have seen genuine change. So maybe there’s still hope, we’ll see.

[patzer]

My personal opinion is that, while I am on the fence from a personal standpoint, a ban is not the answer for the following reasons:
1. A ban will not stop abortions, only bring them to less safe means
2. When Life Begins is not a settled moral question, and people can be of different belief systems in that regard

A ban won't stop everyone, but it will certainly save some lives; not everyone will go to the effort of lawbreaking in this regard. Even if only 10 percent of babies whose mothers try to kill them are saved by a law like this, that would still be a massive number of lives saved and absolutely worth it.

As for the second point, the science is pretty clear on it. You don't base laws on the fact that some people disagree, else you'd never get anywhere.