For a long time I’ve been dismissive of people calling for illegal or violent actions in the pursuit of left-wing causes, mostly because they deserve to be dismissed. The violence that attended some BlackLivesMatter protests in 2020 was directionless and had no positive effect, for example. Dreams of fighting the state are absurd on their face, as the technological advantage of the American government and security forces is so great that there’s no hope for victory. (This isn’t 1950s Cuba, comrades.) Going all the way back to my teenage years, definitely in my years in the Iraq war protest movement, during and after Occupy, in the heat of the 2020 uprisings - again and again I’ve been confronted by fellow travelers who wanted to “really do something” and I’ve been forced to point out that we would be doing nothing at all if we did.
Forced pregnancy is an abrogation of free will. I can think of nothing worse than bringing an unwanted child into the world. The child is always the one who pays for this coercion and for the moral posturers who need to feel good about themselves at the expense of the child's well-being. I know whereof I speak. I have suffered this fate and it's not pretty.
This is not an animating issue for me so I admit I may be underselling it, but I'm doubtful this will end up being the sea change it is represented to be. I mean, the Mississippi law made the basis of the challenge still allows abortion and is actually more liberal than most of western Europe. I suspect the vast majority of states will settle where most people seem to come down if polling is correct--legal in the first trimester or so.
The Mississippi law was written explicitly to challenge Roe's cutoff of 24 weeks and to give the Supreme Court the opportunity to overturn Roe, which they duly took advantage of.
Abortion is now completely illegal in Mississippi.
So, how did that come about? I'm assuming they did not pass a law in the last 48 hours outlawing abortion. Was there a trigger law? Do you know the name of it? Legitimately curious.
Brief google search did indicate there is a trigger law. While I think the Court was legally correct in its analysis and rightly returned the issue to the states, I do not like trigger laws. If this is to be an issue to be decided by the people, through its elected representatives, in my opinion, it needs to be voted on by current legislatures that are then accountable to their constituents for their legislation. Trigger laws allow legislatures to pass laws that most do not concern themselves with since they will not take effect at that time, and, if and when they do take effect, the representatives that passed them are often long gone. Decisions of this magnitude need to be debated and passed in the moment by representatives who will answer for their position. In my opinion, that's the only democratic way.
Its always really frustrating to me when someone says "I don't really see how this issue is that big a deal but also I don't really know that much about it."
In this case, 13 states had laws on the books that were designed to take effect banning abortion in their state should the Supreme Court overturn roe. These were on the books for years, some of them have now taken effect, others will soon. You have places like Texas that already had a six week ban in place that was being legally challenged but now has no cause to be overturned. You have states that have pre-Roe bans that were never taken off the books that some people argue automatically are now in effect.
So this is already the law now. Abortion is illegal several places, and in many of them there aren't any exceptions for rape, incest, or medical necessity of termination. So many stop assuming how reasonable the pro-life movement is going to be.
I don't disagree with your assessment of the current landscape. But, as you said, many of these have been dormant statutes for years if not decades. We'll see if the people of those various states still want that as the law of their state. Times change. If they don't, they will presumably vote for legislatures who will change the law.
Hopefully you are right, but attitudes towards abortion in this country have been remarkably consistent for fifty years and we haven't found a stable equilibrium yet. Most people think it should be legal in some fashion, but as long as there is a small but incredibly committed group of activists pushing for increasingly draconian penalties while everyone else remains casual, then in states with low active political participation and lots of partisan sorting things could continue to get worse.
Not sure I can agree that only the pro-life side has committed activists while the pro-choice side doesn't. I suspect the hardcore activists on both sides about even out. And if the general population skews pro-choice, I would expect their preference to show itself through the democratic process. We'll see.
I guess that I will be the first to say it, then: this is a terrible idea for a number of reasons.
If I were the pro-choice left, I would abandon the "abortion is awesome, and anything short of allowing third trimester abortions is misogyny" tack. There are a whole lot of people who would support European style abortion laws (typically twelve weeks, maximum) as a compromise, but would sooner ban abortion outright than allow abortion on demand at any point in time.
Abortion is certainly not awesome if you're the person who has to get one. Although it might be awesome in the sense of its social utility in reducing the amount of people who exist in the future. And given that our national pastime is hating each other, it surprises me that conservatives especially aren't more enthusiastic about the potential of abortion to reduce the numbers of future people whom they despise.
Sure, I'm just opining that conservatives, were they more enlightened, would also treat abortion with a fucked-up positivity because it will help reduce the number of people they despise, i.e. people who collect model trains. Though they would likely decline your wall-lobbing invitation regardless.
You very well may be correct that this is an extreme minority view, but there does seem to be a celebration of it that I don't think existed 20 years ago. The "rare" aspect of it appears to have been sidelined by its advocates. At least, that's my impression.
And I'll edit to add, the number of politicians I've heard in the last year or so advance abortion up until the literal time of birth suggests that they at least believe there is an audience for this.
Is there a “swing state” where optics matter? My state will be prohibiting it with the sole exception being for saving the mother’s life. We lost. There’s nothing to do politically.
Yes—combined with the mentality on the left Freddie has written about recently, that everything has to be good.
All else equal, it’s better if you don’t need an abortion just like it’s better to not need any medical procedures. It’s okay to admit this. We don’t have to say abortion is awesome and should be used as birth control (as some viral tweet said 🙄). We can simply support it as something women sometimes need.
We can imagine a thought experiment: a young woman is on her way to the clinic to get an abortion when she stumbles upon a rusty lamp. Naturally, she picks it up and gives it a good rub, as is required in such circumstances, until it emits a genie. "I have only one wish I can grant you," the genie says, "which is to make it so that your pregnancy never happened."
I think we all know, with almost mathematical certainty, that there has never been any woman, nor will there ever be any woman, who wouldn't accept that offer with great enthusiasm and relief.
So yes, it is ridiculous that some people adopt a celebratory stance towards abortion. But I guess that plays better on twitter than the more nuanced recognition that the legality of the procedure may be important to assure the bodily autonomy of women, but the procedure itself should still happen as infrequently as possible.
It could also be that, for a lot of women, the phrase `safe, legal, and rare' implies a certain amount of shame associated with the act or at the very least that it is a necessary evil. `Abortion on demand and without apology' can be seen as empowering: I will not be ashamed of my choice and you have no right to question me as I have considered the situation seriously and believe this to be in my best interests. That's the message I've heard at the protests.
I have no doubt that that is part of it. But that gets to a more broader social issue; namely, our repackaging of narcissism as virtue. The amount of people demanding that they must not only be accepted, but celebrated, in every single choice they make is staggering. We've essentially elevated lifestyle choices to protected classes, so anyone who doesn't affirm you can be called a bigot. So, you get to compliment yourself and put down anyone who dares not agree. This should be seen for what it is, and it largely is not virtuous.
I don't quite see how this is about affirmation, though. These women aren't going around the streets demanding that we celebrate their abortion. Rather, they're tired of the judgment associated with the act. A woman receiving an abortion, in the current milieu, is supposed to feel shame. How is it narcissism to say that we, as a group, won't be judged by a standard that society, writ large, holds?
And I explicitly said that framing is unhelpful. But we're talking about states where the procedure is always illegal or practically always illegal, and the vast vast majority of abortions are early term even in the most pro-choice states. Women just don't pursue late-term abortions in large numbers, and when they do it's because of profound durress - and if they're under profound durress they should have access to the procedure.
No. The baby is not a person until birth. That's why we celebrate birth days and not conception days, that's why date of birth and not date of conception goes on our tombstones, that's why the unborn do not get counted in the census, do not count as children on the parents tax return, etc etc etc. Everything we do as a society shows that we do not actually think of the unborn as people.
Say one were to remove the fetus from the womb and it's expected to survive with an excellent outcome and instead the baby is aborted, how would that be acceptable? It obviously becomes much more gray the closer you get to 22-24 weeks as the outcomes become worse and worse, but I have a hard time with the idea aborting a normal fetus at for example 35 weeks is ok.
I'm in about the same place as most Americans are on abortion, but I gotta say, I fucking loathe the "magic birth canal" argument. You're not a person in one room and an unperson in another. That's not how anything works.
Literally no politician anywhere advocates "abortion up until the literal time of birth" except in very rare and extreme cases where the mother might die or the baby's health is not going to be viable, regardless. Literally no one is like, "If you have a healthy fetus and you're fine, but decide the day before you give birth you don't want it anymore, you should be able to abort." Saying that they do is to very intentionally misconstrue what people are saying.
You mean the pediatrician turned politician who talked about babies that had no hope of survival at birth? His comments were twisted, and it was awhile ago so I don't remember the specifics, but he was talking about what is accepted medical practice when a baby won't make it--they do what they can to make the infant comfortable and allow parents to hold/care for them until the end. Hooking a newborn up to machines to heroically "prolong" their lives is just torture.
As I understand it, the Reproductive Health Equity Act being advanced in Colorado explicitly denies any rights to the fetus and codifies a right to abortion up until the time of birth, without caveats. I also believe one of its sponsors acknowledged this. If I'm wrong, let me know.
Are there any incidents at all of elective third trimester abortions, as opposed to a medically necessary third trimester abortion? I find it implausible that there are women who go along their merry ways being pregnant for six months but then suddenly change their minds.
I admittedly don't know. But there are clearly laws being proposed that would make this an option. Presumably, these laws are not simply meant to be symbolic, but maybe so.
If there are none, then why not restrict them anyway? If all the law does is make people feel better because the thing it bans wasn’t occurring anyway, what’s the harm?
One major cause that has been cited to justify late-term abortions is mental health, something that increasingly makes its way into far-left ultra-permissive abortion regulations in places like NY and CO. I don't like it, but the line of reasoning goes something like "we must save the mother from suicide by terminating her viable offspring."
Colorado is an outlier. It's one of the few states to allow unrestricted third trimester abortions when the overwhelming majority of states ban the procedure except out of medical necessity.
"It doesn't exist except where it does exist" means that it does, in fact, exist. And because it exists, it has to be reckoned with seriously if you want to move the ball downfield on the issue.
They'd still have to find a doctor to do the procedure though...I believe
"aborting" a viable fetus is violating basic medical ethics. It might be legal, but yikes. I guess you can have performative legislating on both sides of the aisle.
As Canada has no law on the books criminalizing abortion at any point, *technically* you could get an abortion right before the baby is about to pop out. In practice, you aren't going to find any doctor in the country who'd do that for you unless you're dying or the baby is dying; many Canadian women actually have to go to the US for the procedure because it's so difficult to access.
That's well and good, but the debate is over how the issue is being framed politically and whether that is helping the cause. If these laws will never actually be used, but alienate people in the process, then why pass these laws in the first place?
If either baby or woman is dying, don't they just do an emergency C section? I can't imagine a doctor saying to a woman having seizures due to pre-eclampsia that they would recommend an abortion--they'd get her into the OR and get that baby out in the quickest way possible.
Kamala Harris and Biden both did, in response to a Florida bill banning abortion after 15 weeks with exceptions for the health of the mother and/or child, Harris called late term abortion for a viable unborn baby, (yes she was specifically asked that) "crucial reproductive healthcare" and "nonnegotiable".
"We must keep fighting to defend and expand on the progress made for women's rights and reproductive health, not pass a 20 week abortion ban. Add your name if you agree."
That's on Twitter.
As a presidential candidate she proposed the Women's Health Protection Act which not only provided unlimited access to abortion but nullified states ability to restrict.
California Senator Barbara Boxer said its not a baby until you bring it home. She thinks that its acceptable to euthanize the baby after birth.
Santorum asks:
“You agree, once a child is born, is separated from the mother, that that child is protected by the Constitution and cannot be killed? Do you agree with that?”
Boxer responds:
“I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born … the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights.”
I feel like there's other examples not listed yet, but I remember Adams comments raising my eyebrows at the time. I'm not saying his actual position isn't more nuanced and ethical, but if that is the case then he made a big misstep in this clip.
Have you considered that “celebration” is because so many women who’ve actually had abortions have spoken about how they positively affected their lives? The messaging when I was growing up was that abortion was traumatizing; my personal experience is that it isn’t. That’s not celebration, it’s just reality.
This is where I might remind people that the last two years have been spent mainstreaming positions that "the reasonable left" assured us were utterly fringe opinions (defunding the police, transgender activist maximalism, etc.). Pro-choice maximalism is hardly rare in "respectable" circles in the Acela Corridor, but is rarer outside of it. This is a huge reason why there are compromises that can be had.
I don't mean to speak for RW, but I don't get the sense that he and Freddie are that far off. They just disagree with the political impact a contingent of pro-choice advocates are having.
From my standpoint, I don't disagree with Freddie's position. But I also don't disagree with RW's position that some of the, let's say, noisier activists are not helping with those who are mildly pro-choice.
My point is simply this: how about getting serious about abortion politics before declaring that you must skip over politics entirely straight to "direct action". I was surprised by Freddie's stance here because he has usually been very consistent about the need and value of smart politics.
When the first draft was released Freddie suggested that pro-choice should become a litmus test for Democrats.
Which is ironic given how much he hates *other* litmus tests the Democrats set up, and correctly points out that shrinking your coalition is not a politically winning strategy.
Activists are getting new talking points--"pro choice" is out. "pro abortion" is in. In a meeting Friday I asked why we aren't talking about bodily autonomy at ALL? I mean it was just five minutes ago that the right was screeching about their right to refuse a shot and a scrap of cloth over their faces, and yet they expect women to carry a pregnancy for nine months?
I'm a pro-choicer and I think fetuses are people! I just think that pregnancy & childbirth are such a dramatic and extreme processes that no one should be forced to go through with it, even if ending it kills another person.
Ashley, you nailed it. That is the only question, if one can set emotions aside (which most can’t). Whose interests/rights trump whom’s is the awful question.
I would categorize myself as modestly pro-life, and I don’t think fetuses are people. I’m not even sure “are people” is a helpful framing. I actually think the better framing is that fetuses — and before them, the sperm and eggs — are on a journey away from being part of the parents’ bodies and toward being separate entities. That journey actually continues for a long while after birth — the nursing baby who can’t move around without assistance is deeply dependent on his parents bodies.
So there’s a whole range of places we could draw a line — all the way from Quiverfull to Catholic to the quickening/viability standard to Bill Cosby‘s joke about his kids that “I brought you into this world and I can take you out. Make another one just like you and nobody would ever know the difference.” There are practical arguments for and against each. I think many of us intuitively feel that there is something less than fully human about a tiny mass of cells early in pregnancy, and many of us are uncomfortable with the idea that a fetus at 37 weeks isn’t fully human. So many cultures, both modern and pre-modern, have drawn a line somewhere in the middle.
I say all this only to point out that if you think all “pro-life” folks believe “a fetus is a person no matter what,” and that all pro-choice people believe a fetus is NEVER a person, you’re missing the enormous middle of people who hold neither of those views. And that makes a rational politics very difficult.
The pro-abortion side is not using the bodily autonomy argument because they completely eviscerated it during the COVID panic. They don't even believe it anymore, so how could they convince others?
I don't know why you'd say that, when it's a 20% position in the general population, and since most of those are on the left,it's a higher percentage looking only at Dems and libertarians. Katherine Mangu Ward certainly holds that the woman should be ableto make the choice at every point.
Yeah I think the consensus is juuuust inside "abortion is marginally better than teenage girls dying horribly, in most cases" and even that's like, 70% of people at most
There are people in the anti-choice camp making the assertion that pro-choice advocates are/were advocating for post-birth abortions was yet another level of rhetorical disingenuousness. The problem is that the anti-choice camp had no desire to even meet a compromise position because they're absolutists. Even pro-choice people are willing to accept limits to how late is too late to have an abortion. It appears a majority of conservatives passing these abortion ban bills know very little about how the reproduction process works during pregnancy. The ignorance is astounding to say the least.
This seems like you didn't even read the write-up. Taking extralegal action on providing access to abortions has nothing to do with convincing people. It's about doing something in the short-term. Convincing people takes a long time.
Also I don't think there's much evidence that overturning Roe was a popular (or even particularly democratic) decision. Hell, Trump himself largely tried to stay ambiguous on the issue ("I don't think Roe's on the ballot") during elections. So I don't think the issue is "pro-choice is unpopular". The issue is that our system isn't democratic.
As someone who actually lives in Europe I don’t think you understand how loathed the laws are here (Germany) and how strong the movement is for them to be changed.
I was reading that one huge difference between 1973 and now is the existence of abolition drugs that can be easily and safely administered at home. They are also very easy to ship. With that being the case, the actual decline in abortions might be very minimal. All this fighting might end up being all for naught.
There are a lot of differences between now and 1973--medication abortions, long acting birth control, median age of women is far older so fewer women will think this directly affects them, travel is generally cheaper.
The one thing though that has NOT changed is that women should not have to put up with this shit.
That's an interesting framing. Is there a word or concept for an act that has effectively moved outside of the state's ability to legislate and enforce? I'm thinking of censorship and IP laws, which are absurdly hard to enforce anymore. Could abortion be headed in the same direction, with the state looking on helplessly in 99% of cases and going after the occasional flagrant violator to scare the rest?
I don't think this applies to the abortion issue. Nothing about the last several decades of intense, strategic work by the conservative movement indicates that they are happy to stop with a paper win.
Women don't talk about it or send out announcements, but often miscarriages have to be cleaned out of the uterus in a way that is technically abortion. You can't use the pills for ectopic pregnancies, which can be fatal. Late term abortions are often necessary for the mother's health. There are a bunch of cases where the pills won't do the whole job.
This is true but a D&C of a dead (miscarried) fetus has one fundamental difference: nobody is purposefully stopping a fetal heart, so I don't see how it applies.
Well, if you're trying to be logical, of course it shouldn't apply. Nor should "late term abortion" apply when a dead fetus is removed from the uterus in the 7th or 8th month. But they all fall under the same legal language.
I would appreciate a link to a legal or medical article which show this equivalence. I don't think there is an equal treatment anywhere between the care for a dead child, early delivery in case of an emergency, and deliberate killing of a healthy child.
And from reading the article, it's pretty clear that the issue was D&C on a baby that was still alive vs on one that was dead. This does not support the contention that outlawing elective abortion of healthy babies results in no health care for women.
While I do not agree with every point, I do agree that, if you are dissatisfied with a political outcome, it is not inappropriate to undertake a grassroots movement to:
1. Work within the framework of the law to take exceptional action to achieve desired outcomes; and
2. Put in the elbow grease to offer (hopefully!) cogent and reasonable arguments to win hearts and minds and, ultimately, change the Overton window and win politically.
I likewise agree that violence to advance a political cause is a means of last resort and carries with it a terrible toll that many currently exhorting others to it simply cannot comprehend. If those in both sides of the aisles work harder, maintained open minds, and offered more compelling argumentation, we would not even come close to entertaining those horrific consequences.
Thank you as always, Mr. deBoer, for offering a thought provoking exposition in this knotty subject, and for your complete candor. All too rare and I appreciate it!
I mean... The Overton Window sure wasn't excluding that manner of argument in, like, 1860. But that doesn't mean that the disagreements about slavery in 1860 were 'reasonable differences'. My hot take here is that bad things are in fact bad! Public opinion divides should be respected but they aren't an absolute.
"bad things are bad" is just question-begging. I mean, yes, whether abortion is murder, acceptable murder, or not murder at all is a definitional/axiomatic question. At the end of the day, public opinion (or more broadly, public acceptance), does in fact win the day.
Let's look at slavery. America couldn't resolve the tensions between the two sides, so we fought a very bloody civil war that did resolve that question. If pro-slavery side was truly committed, and had the numbers, then you would have seen them continue to fight and try and bring that issue back. They didn't.
The pro-life side is hoping that it can leverage it's disproportionate power and influence to win this fight. Which is why I support escalation from the pro-choice side (court-packing, adding additional states, etc.) I don't think we will end up in a violent civil war because, again, the pro-life side doesn't have the numbers if it actually came to that.
You assume: I’m Canadian, pro-choice and don’t watch TV. Just finished reading a defence of Dobbs at the post liberal order substack. You see, the other side exists, in extremis, just like the Freddie cohort takes a virulent stance. The question is simple: is it murder? The answer is equally simple: yes after viability and no before viability. This is effectively the law in every other country only Americans have fucked it up this badly .
As an atheist I feel no compunction to follow the dictates of catholic/ Christian doctrine, but nonetheless will concede a deep respect for the teachings of the Christian tradition. The post liberal order substack is I think my most important counterbalance to the braying nonsense.
This is the end of the beginning, and we are not going back to a "pre-Roe" status quo. Most abortions in the United States are now "performed" with pills, which makes this particular act of cruelty absurd on its face.
We are now entering a legal environment akin to the 1850s, where states in which the exercise of bodily autonomy is illegal will enact laws in a spiraling escalation of reach, severity, and cruelty in an attempt to stop abortions, and states that are still functioning democracies will enact an ascending staircase of laws to stop other states from interfering in their attempts to allow people to receive abortions. You think this is bad? Wait until the Supreme Court decides that Texas has the right to send the Rangers into Massachusetts to extradite people for sending mifepristone through the mail to someone in Texas.
This decision will also hasten the United States' decline as a world power. In 1973, the vast majority of countries outlawed abortion. This is no longer the case. When the prosecutions start, the world is going to see.
Donate to abortion funds. Get some Plan B and some mifepristone (they have a 4 year shelf life, IIRC.)
If the state uses its coercive power to prevent women from terminating their pregnancies when they so choose, then the state is effectively forcing women to give birth, i.e. a forced pregnancy.
The popular expression you're thinking of is "forced birth". No one believes in "forced pregnancy," the state inseminating you or whatever that would be. People believe the state is preventing them from accessing reasonable means to terminate a pregnancy and legally requiring the fetus to be carried to term--hence "forced birth".
This seems to me like a pretty low key measure. I have to wonder if something like pot tourism is already kind of a working precedent. Transporting weed back into a state where it's banned is one thing but has anybody ever been prosecuted for traveling to CA to get high?
Welcome to Papistan. The damage that Catholics have done to the progress of humanity is incalculable, and history has shown it takes a lot of time and effort to undo.
It's not prejudice, it's postjudice. Same church that burned women at the stake and concealed crimes by their 'priests'. Gorusch grew up Cat, Thomas, Roberts, Barett, Alito all practicing. 3 of them essentially 'lied for Jesus' to get confirmed. People like this should never be near the levers of power.
I don't know that it's bigotry, exactly, as the implication is more that the institution is bad vs. individual Catholics. That is, Ad Infinitum is asserting that the sum total of the Catholic church's actions have been a net bad for humanity. Maybe I'm just being generous.
You may tend to see Catholicism as benevolent but for a great many of us Father Arnall is more representative of the institution.
After seeing the headline, I'm relieved that you aren't calling for us somehow rise up against the Supreme Court like I keep seeing on Twitter -- "we don't have to obey them", "we can shut the court down", "let's go to their houses" etc. Just a bunch of nonsense from people who don't leave the couch.
Helping women travel to blue states is something I can get behind, though. I never should have doubted you.
Although somebody with much more legal expertise would have to comment on whether transporting somebody out of state for an abortion is "extralegal" in the first place.
All I know is that it's very important to delete my period tracker app. If you stop tracking and there's no baby, a SWAT team will descend on the house.
The app contains data that can be subpoenaed in a theoretical court case against you. That is an actual, founded fear if you live in a state with a trigger law that looks like they’ll be proactive about enforcement- your medical records can prove your story false if push comes to shove.
The meme is stupid, but that is because the danger only exists if you live on specific patches of American dirt and is nonexistent in blue bubbles; the threat of having your privacy violated to secure a conviction in the course of enforcing anti-abortion laws is certainly present for some people.
You joke but McJunker is right. If you give a shit about the right to have an abortion or not be jailed for a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, you shouldn't mock women for being fearful of the very real state violence that's now in the offing. It may not be a SWAT team but it's a distinction without a difference when you're talking about jailing women for seeking various types of reproductive healthcare.
It's not. If it were, people would be prosecuted in Texas for going to Colorado to enjoy a weed-soaked weekend. Gambling and divorce used to only be available in Nevada, and people traveled there in order to gamble and get divorced because they weren't able to at home.
I suppose some state legislators could try that. They won’t get very far with it in the courts (and Kavanaugh signaled as much). No state can declare activities in another state illegal. The federalism door swings both ways.
There is potentially some risk of a FEDERAL law regarding transporting people across state lines, akin to the Mann Act (which prohibits transporting people for prostitution). But my guess is there aren’t votes for that in Congress. (For one thing, everyone in Congress is rich, or is influenced by the rich — and the rich are not interested in completely cutting off abortion access for their own daughters. Just Les Poors.)
That enforcement hasn't come under serious scrutiny yet and once the first case comes forward it will likely fail. Its ability to fuck with *every* right is unbounded.
Yeah I was wondering the same thing. Im a lawyer but no experience on something like this.
But Laws differ from state to state over just about everything. Other than, oddly, transporting liquor into a dry town, I can’t think of anything that would fit this definition.
Freddie’s idea is a good one, but I don’t think it’s extra legal, though I suppose that could change.
Some states will try to make it illegal to cross state lines in order to get an abortion, but I expect that aspect of the laws to be struck down even by the current Supreme Court. As I recall Kavanaugh's opinion confirmed that there's a constitutional right to interstate travel.
Free travel between the states is an incredibly well-founded right.
A state *might* be able to charge a woman on getting back from an abortion, but 1) most laws are against doctors, not women, and 2) even if they do go after the woman, charging for crimes committed outside of borders is a very very complicated subject.
People seem to be moving toward a norm of ignoring or flouting laws they do not like, rather than making lawmakers change them. And now, increasingly, even those in power are simply picking and choosing what they want to enforce, while ignoring what is politically inconvenient to change. Proceeding down this path will not end well if the goal is truly to have rule by law, but maybe that is the point. By conditioning the public to selectively ignore laws rather than changing them, it can eventually be trained to tolerate rule by decree.
One big reason so many of our institutions are dysfunctional is because it suits various influential and well-heeled special interests to have them that way. Another is that by failing to fix the issue, the public can be kept divided and distracted, hence more easily manipulated.
The increase in the number of homicides from 2019 to 2020 was the biggest one year increase in the history of modern record keeping, and the largest increase in at least a century. Flouting the law has always been the province of a minority of the population. The size of that minority is on the rise over the last couple of years.
I think the 2020's are going to be a lot like the 1920's. Maybe if everybody gets miserable enough we'll have an event like the 1932 election where all the bums are tossed out up and down all levels of government.
If, as widely expected, SCOTUS says that the EPA can't regulate air quality any more, that is going to piss off even more suburban people who just assume they are entitled to clean air and water.
I guess those horrible traitors who were part of the Underground Railroad were actually on the wrong side of history. Slavery is bad of course, but rule Rule of Law trumps every other moral question.
This seems accurate and not necessarily a bad thing.
To take an obvious example, Texas and California have very different "on the ground" realities for:
-Marijuana possession
-Purchase and transport of firearms
-Covid lockdown protocols
-Immigration and asylum
regardless of what the federal statues say. Regardless of Roe, abortion had become dead letter in much of the south before this decision and regardless of the Supreme Court decisions, firearms are still dead letter in New York.
Is this bad though? I mean, if California wants marijuana delivery apps and Texas wants open carry in public, why not just let them do that? In an increasingly divided nation, why not just let local people decide their own policies?
Which I guess would be the critique of Freddie's proposal, which is that it undercuts de facto, if not de jure, federalism. Like, millions of Californians regularly give their driver's license to their weed dispensary when committing, technically, a federal crime, and Republican presidents, so far, have just left that alone.. If you like federalism, if you like California having one set of norms and Texas having different ones, then California kind of needs to leave Texas alone and vice versa.
That seems like clickbait spin. From my perspective the gap has never been smaller. Indeed the that there is so little difference is driving the clickbait hysterics.
Yeah, there's an unfortunate CW angle and tenor to this which is hard to remove.
If you hear something like that in my writing, my apologies, I'm trying to refer directly to immediate physical realities. There were immediate, obvious, and critical differences to daily life and experience in Blue vs Red states in the 2020-2021 lockdowns, there are now powerful and material differences for pregnant women in Blue vs Red states, and there are immediate and obvious differences in what goods and services I can purchase. There are multiple weed delivery apps competing for my business in Cali while I'm reasonably sure marijuana is still de facto illegal in, say, Utah. Those material realities are what I'm trying to focus on.
Forced pregnancy is an abrogation of free will. I can think of nothing worse than bringing an unwanted child into the world. The child is always the one who pays for this coercion and for the moral posturers who need to feel good about themselves at the expense of the child's well-being. I know whereof I speak. I have suffered this fate and it's not pretty.
Bullshit, indeed!
That second paragraph is incoherent
So is the first.
http://abortionfunds.org/
The best strategy going forward is to tell the pro-life Blacks and Hispanics to stop voting. That will work.
This is not an animating issue for me so I admit I may be underselling it, but I'm doubtful this will end up being the sea change it is represented to be. I mean, the Mississippi law made the basis of the challenge still allows abortion and is actually more liberal than most of western Europe. I suspect the vast majority of states will settle where most people seem to come down if polling is correct--legal in the first trimester or so.
The Mississippi law was written explicitly to challenge Roe's cutoff of 24 weeks and to give the Supreme Court the opportunity to overturn Roe, which they duly took advantage of.
Abortion is now completely illegal in Mississippi.
Interesting. I was admittedly not aware of this.
So, how did that come about? I'm assuming they did not pass a law in the last 48 hours outlawing abortion. Was there a trigger law? Do you know the name of it? Legitimately curious.
Yes, there was a trigger law in Mississippi. No, I don't know the name of it.
Brief google search did indicate there is a trigger law. While I think the Court was legally correct in its analysis and rightly returned the issue to the states, I do not like trigger laws. If this is to be an issue to be decided by the people, through its elected representatives, in my opinion, it needs to be voted on by current legislatures that are then accountable to their constituents for their legislation. Trigger laws allow legislatures to pass laws that most do not concern themselves with since they will not take effect at that time, and, if and when they do take effect, the representatives that passed them are often long gone. Decisions of this magnitude need to be debated and passed in the moment by representatives who will answer for their position. In my opinion, that's the only democratic way.
Its always really frustrating to me when someone says "I don't really see how this issue is that big a deal but also I don't really know that much about it."
In this case, 13 states had laws on the books that were designed to take effect banning abortion in their state should the Supreme Court overturn roe. These were on the books for years, some of them have now taken effect, others will soon. You have places like Texas that already had a six week ban in place that was being legally challenged but now has no cause to be overturned. You have states that have pre-Roe bans that were never taken off the books that some people argue automatically are now in effect.
So this is already the law now. Abortion is illegal several places, and in many of them there aren't any exceptions for rape, incest, or medical necessity of termination. So many stop assuming how reasonable the pro-life movement is going to be.
I don't disagree with your assessment of the current landscape. But, as you said, many of these have been dormant statutes for years if not decades. We'll see if the people of those various states still want that as the law of their state. Times change. If they don't, they will presumably vote for legislatures who will change the law.
Hopefully you are right, but attitudes towards abortion in this country have been remarkably consistent for fifty years and we haven't found a stable equilibrium yet. Most people think it should be legal in some fashion, but as long as there is a small but incredibly committed group of activists pushing for increasingly draconian penalties while everyone else remains casual, then in states with low active political participation and lots of partisan sorting things could continue to get worse.
Not sure I can agree that only the pro-life side has committed activists while the pro-choice side doesn't. I suspect the hardcore activists on both sides about even out. And if the general population skews pro-choice, I would expect their preference to show itself through the democratic process. We'll see.
I guess that I will be the first to say it, then: this is a terrible idea for a number of reasons.
If I were the pro-choice left, I would abandon the "abortion is awesome, and anything short of allowing third trimester abortions is misogyny" tack. There are a whole lot of people who would support European style abortion laws (typically twelve weeks, maximum) as a compromise, but would sooner ban abortion outright than allow abortion on demand at any point in time.
Try starting there first.
"abortion is awesome"
An opinion found pretty much nowhere outside of Tumblr and Oberlin College
Oberlin has done a lot to deserve its rep:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson%27s_Bakery_v._Oberlin_College
Abortion is certainly not awesome if you're the person who has to get one. Although it might be awesome in the sense of its social utility in reducing the amount of people who exist in the future. And given that our national pastime is hating each other, it surprises me that conservatives especially aren't more enthusiastic about the potential of abortion to reduce the numbers of future people whom they despise.
Sure, I'm just opining that conservatives, were they more enlightened, would also treat abortion with a fucked-up positivity because it will help reduce the number of people they despise, i.e. people who collect model trains. Though they would likely decline your wall-lobbing invitation regardless.
Too bad your momma didn't have the same view.
And it’s too bad your momma didn’t teach you some manners.
Funny how the impoliteness raised your hackles, when the throwing babies at walls thing didn't...
You very well may be correct that this is an extreme minority view, but there does seem to be a celebration of it that I don't think existed 20 years ago. The "rare" aspect of it appears to have been sidelined by its advocates. At least, that's my impression.
And I'll edit to add, the number of politicians I've heard in the last year or so advance abortion up until the literal time of birth suggests that they at least believe there is an audience for this.
The celebrating is likely caused by tribalistic internet politics: the bad people hate this thing; therefore, we, the good people, must celebrate it.
No doubt that is absolutely part of it. But it is not the best optic for those of us who are mildly pro choice.
Is there a “swing state” where optics matter? My state will be prohibiting it with the sole exception being for saving the mother’s life. We lost. There’s nothing to do politically.
Yes—combined with the mentality on the left Freddie has written about recently, that everything has to be good.
All else equal, it’s better if you don’t need an abortion just like it’s better to not need any medical procedures. It’s okay to admit this. We don’t have to say abortion is awesome and should be used as birth control (as some viral tweet said 🙄). We can simply support it as something women sometimes need.
We can imagine a thought experiment: a young woman is on her way to the clinic to get an abortion when she stumbles upon a rusty lamp. Naturally, she picks it up and gives it a good rub, as is required in such circumstances, until it emits a genie. "I have only one wish I can grant you," the genie says, "which is to make it so that your pregnancy never happened."
I think we all know, with almost mathematical certainty, that there has never been any woman, nor will there ever be any woman, who wouldn't accept that offer with great enthusiasm and relief.
So yes, it is ridiculous that some people adopt a celebratory stance towards abortion. But I guess that plays better on twitter than the more nuanced recognition that the legality of the procedure may be important to assure the bodily autonomy of women, but the procedure itself should still happen as infrequently as possible.
It could also be that, for a lot of women, the phrase `safe, legal, and rare' implies a certain amount of shame associated with the act or at the very least that it is a necessary evil. `Abortion on demand and without apology' can be seen as empowering: I will not be ashamed of my choice and you have no right to question me as I have considered the situation seriously and believe this to be in my best interests. That's the message I've heard at the protests.
I have no doubt that that is part of it. But that gets to a more broader social issue; namely, our repackaging of narcissism as virtue. The amount of people demanding that they must not only be accepted, but celebrated, in every single choice they make is staggering. We've essentially elevated lifestyle choices to protected classes, so anyone who doesn't affirm you can be called a bigot. So, you get to compliment yourself and put down anyone who dares not agree. This should be seen for what it is, and it largely is not virtuous.
I don't quite see how this is about affirmation, though. These women aren't going around the streets demanding that we celebrate their abortion. Rather, they're tired of the judgment associated with the act. A woman receiving an abortion, in the current milieu, is supposed to feel shame. How is it narcissism to say that we, as a group, won't be judged by a standard that society, writ large, holds?
And I explicitly said that framing is unhelpful. But we're talking about states where the procedure is always illegal or practically always illegal, and the vast vast majority of abortions are early term even in the most pro-choice states. Women just don't pursue late-term abortions in large numbers, and when they do it's because of profound durress - and if they're under profound durress they should have access to the procedure.
If the baby is viable then you are killing a person. Duress don’t excuse that!
No. The baby is not a person until birth. That's why we celebrate birth days and not conception days, that's why date of birth and not date of conception goes on our tombstones, that's why the unborn do not get counted in the census, do not count as children on the parents tax return, etc etc etc. Everything we do as a society shows that we do not actually think of the unborn as people.
That’s a good argument.
Ever met a woman who had a late-term miscarriage?
When did foetuses become people in the days before we celebrated birthdays? It's only been a couple of hundred years, I think.
And if we started celebrating conception days in the future, would foetuses start being people then?
If you injure a pregnant woman and the baby dies, you're guilty of murder. Then that must have been a human all along.
Simple logic states either it is a human all along, or never was a human. You can't have it both ways.
Say one were to remove the fetus from the womb and it's expected to survive with an excellent outcome and instead the baby is aborted, how would that be acceptable? It obviously becomes much more gray the closer you get to 22-24 weeks as the outcomes become worse and worse, but I have a hard time with the idea aborting a normal fetus at for example 35 weeks is ok.
I'm in about the same place as most Americans are on abortion, but I gotta say, I fucking loathe the "magic birth canal" argument. You're not a person in one room and an unperson in another. That's not how anything works.
Literally no politician anywhere advocates "abortion up until the literal time of birth" except in very rare and extreme cases where the mother might die or the baby's health is not going to be viable, regardless. Literally no one is like, "If you have a healthy fetus and you're fine, but decide the day before you give birth you don't want it anymore, you should be able to abort." Saying that they do is to very intentionally misconstrue what people are saying.
You mean the pediatrician turned politician who talked about babies that had no hope of survival at birth? His comments were twisted, and it was awhile ago so I don't remember the specifics, but he was talking about what is accepted medical practice when a baby won't make it--they do what they can to make the infant comfortable and allow parents to hold/care for them until the end. Hooking a newborn up to machines to heroically "prolong" their lives is just torture.
As I understand it, the Reproductive Health Equity Act being advanced in Colorado explicitly denies any rights to the fetus and codifies a right to abortion up until the time of birth, without caveats. I also believe one of its sponsors acknowledged this. If I'm wrong, let me know.
Are there any incidents at all of elective third trimester abortions, as opposed to a medically necessary third trimester abortion? I find it implausible that there are women who go along their merry ways being pregnant for six months but then suddenly change their minds.
Kermit Gosnell went to prison for performing abortions pretty late in the game.
I admittedly don't know. But there are clearly laws being proposed that would make this an option. Presumably, these laws are not simply meant to be symbolic, but maybe so.
If there are none, then why not restrict them anyway? If all the law does is make people feel better because the thing it bans wasn’t occurring anyway, what’s the harm?
One major cause that has been cited to justify late-term abortions is mental health, something that increasingly makes its way into far-left ultra-permissive abortion regulations in places like NY and CO. I don't like it, but the line of reasoning goes something like "we must save the mother from suicide by terminating her viable offspring."
Colorado is an outlier. It's one of the few states to allow unrestricted third trimester abortions when the overwhelming majority of states ban the procedure except out of medical necessity.
I was responding to a poster that said "literally no politician anywhere" was doing this. I gave them one.
"It doesn't exist except where it does exist" means that it does, in fact, exist. And because it exists, it has to be reckoned with seriously if you want to move the ball downfield on the issue.
They'd still have to find a doctor to do the procedure though...I believe
"aborting" a viable fetus is violating basic medical ethics. It might be legal, but yikes. I guess you can have performative legislating on both sides of the aisle.
As Canada has no law on the books criminalizing abortion at any point, *technically* you could get an abortion right before the baby is about to pop out. In practice, you aren't going to find any doctor in the country who'd do that for you unless you're dying or the baby is dying; many Canadian women actually have to go to the US for the procedure because it's so difficult to access.
That's well and good, but the debate is over how the issue is being framed politically and whether that is helping the cause. If these laws will never actually be used, but alienate people in the process, then why pass these laws in the first place?
If either baby or woman is dying, don't they just do an emergency C section? I can't imagine a doctor saying to a woman having seizures due to pre-eclampsia that they would recommend an abortion--they'd get her into the OR and get that baby out in the quickest way possible.
Kamala Harris and Biden both did, in response to a Florida bill banning abortion after 15 weeks with exceptions for the health of the mother and/or child, Harris called late term abortion for a viable unborn baby, (yes she was specifically asked that) "crucial reproductive healthcare" and "nonnegotiable".
I don't know if that's true. I've been scouring articles on Google (I wanted to see what I could find before I responded), and I could find nothing that indicated what you're saying. I did, however, find this:https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/09/mike-pence/fact-checking-pences-claim-democrats-and-abortion-/
And I found this:https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/04/statement-by-vice-president-kamala-harris-on-florida-house-bill-5/
"We must keep fighting to defend and expand on the progress made for women's rights and reproductive health, not pass a 20 week abortion ban. Add your name if you agree."
That's on Twitter.
As a presidential candidate she proposed the Women's Health Protection Act which not only provided unlimited access to abortion but nullified states ability to restrict.
This stuff is all over the place.
California Senator Barbara Boxer said its not a baby until you bring it home. She thinks that its acceptable to euthanize the baby after birth.
Santorum asks:
“You agree, once a child is born, is separated from the mother, that that child is protected by the Constitution and cannot be killed? Do you agree with that?”
Boxer responds:
“I think when you bring your baby home, when your baby is born … the baby belongs to your family and has all the rights.”
Q “Do you think there should be any limitation on abortions?”
Eric Adams “No, I do not.”
Q “None? Day of birth, totally fine?”
Adams: “No, I do not. Women should have a right to choose”
https://youtu.be/J6yQPvpSEsQ
I feel like there's other examples not listed yet, but I remember Adams comments raising my eyebrows at the time. I'm not saying his actual position isn't more nuanced and ethical, but if that is the case then he made a big misstep in this clip.
Have you considered that “celebration” is because so many women who’ve actually had abortions have spoken about how they positively affected their lives? The messaging when I was growing up was that abortion was traumatizing; my personal experience is that it isn’t. That’s not celebration, it’s just reality.
You forgot Twitter.
This is where I might remind people that the last two years have been spent mainstreaming positions that "the reasonable left" assured us were utterly fringe opinions (defunding the police, transgender activist maximalism, etc.). Pro-choice maximalism is hardly rare in "respectable" circles in the Acela Corridor, but is rarer outside of it. This is a huge reason why there are compromises that can be had.
I don't mean to speak for RW, but I don't get the sense that he and Freddie are that far off. They just disagree with the political impact a contingent of pro-choice advocates are having.
From my standpoint, I don't disagree with Freddie's position. But I also don't disagree with RW's position that some of the, let's say, noisier activists are not helping with those who are mildly pro-choice.
My point is simply this: how about getting serious about abortion politics before declaring that you must skip over politics entirely straight to "direct action". I was surprised by Freddie's stance here because he has usually been very consistent about the need and value of smart politics.
When the first draft was released Freddie suggested that pro-choice should become a litmus test for Democrats.
Which is ironic given how much he hates *other* litmus tests the Democrats set up, and correctly points out that shrinking your coalition is not a politically winning strategy.
Activists are getting new talking points--"pro choice" is out. "pro abortion" is in. In a meeting Friday I asked why we aren't talking about bodily autonomy at ALL? I mean it was just five minutes ago that the right was screeching about their right to refuse a shot and a scrap of cloth over their faces, and yet they expect women to carry a pregnancy for nine months?
Pro-choicers believe fetuses are people now? Did I miss a memo?
I'm a pro-choicer and I think fetuses are people! I just think that pregnancy & childbirth are such a dramatic and extreme processes that no one should be forced to go through with it, even if ending it kills another person.
Why not extend that to orphans in that case?
Ashley, you nailed it. That is the only question, if one can set emotions aside (which most can’t). Whose interests/rights trump whom’s is the awful question.
I would categorize myself as modestly pro-life, and I don’t think fetuses are people. I’m not even sure “are people” is a helpful framing. I actually think the better framing is that fetuses — and before them, the sperm and eggs — are on a journey away from being part of the parents’ bodies and toward being separate entities. That journey actually continues for a long while after birth — the nursing baby who can’t move around without assistance is deeply dependent on his parents bodies.
So there’s a whole range of places we could draw a line — all the way from Quiverfull to Catholic to the quickening/viability standard to Bill Cosby‘s joke about his kids that “I brought you into this world and I can take you out. Make another one just like you and nobody would ever know the difference.” There are practical arguments for and against each. I think many of us intuitively feel that there is something less than fully human about a tiny mass of cells early in pregnancy, and many of us are uncomfortable with the idea that a fetus at 37 weeks isn’t fully human. So many cultures, both modern and pre-modern, have drawn a line somewhere in the middle.
I say all this only to point out that if you think all “pro-life” folks believe “a fetus is a person no matter what,” and that all pro-choice people believe a fetus is NEVER a person, you’re missing the enormous middle of people who hold neither of those views. And that makes a rational politics very difficult.
The pro-abortion side is not using the bodily autonomy argument because they completely eviscerated it during the COVID panic. They don't even believe it anymore, so how could they convince others?
Tumblr and Oberlin College own the mainstream media and corporate HR Departments now.
It was misspelled: they mean “pwn.”
I don't know why you'd say that, when it's a 20% position in the general population, and since most of those are on the left,it's a higher percentage looking only at Dems and libertarians. Katherine Mangu Ward certainly holds that the woman should be ableto make the choice at every point.
Yeah I think the consensus is juuuust inside "abortion is marginally better than teenage girls dying horribly, in most cases" and even that's like, 70% of people at most
There are people in the anti-choice camp making the assertion that pro-choice advocates are/were advocating for post-birth abortions was yet another level of rhetorical disingenuousness. The problem is that the anti-choice camp had no desire to even meet a compromise position because they're absolutists. Even pro-choice people are willing to accept limits to how late is too late to have an abortion. It appears a majority of conservatives passing these abortion ban bills know very little about how the reproduction process works during pregnancy. The ignorance is astounding to say the least.
"If I were the pro-choice left"
Well, good thing your opinion doesn't mean shit since you aren't!
I can see why your nom-du-substack is "losingstreak" now.
Because you finally gave Opiate Sun a spin?
This seems like you didn't even read the write-up. Taking extralegal action on providing access to abortions has nothing to do with convincing people. It's about doing something in the short-term. Convincing people takes a long time.
Also I don't think there's much evidence that overturning Roe was a popular (or even particularly democratic) decision. Hell, Trump himself largely tried to stay ambiguous on the issue ("I don't think Roe's on the ballot") during elections. So I don't think the issue is "pro-choice is unpopular". The issue is that our system isn't democratic.
As someone who actually lives in Europe I don’t think you understand how loathed the laws are here (Germany) and how strong the movement is for them to be changed.
I was reading that one huge difference between 1973 and now is the existence of abolition drugs that can be easily and safely administered at home. They are also very easy to ship. With that being the case, the actual decline in abortions might be very minimal. All this fighting might end up being all for naught.
There are a lot of differences between now and 1973--medication abortions, long acting birth control, median age of women is far older so fewer women will think this directly affects them, travel is generally cheaper.
The one thing though that has NOT changed is that women should not have to put up with this shit.
That's an interesting framing. Is there a word or concept for an act that has effectively moved outside of the state's ability to legislate and enforce? I'm thinking of censorship and IP laws, which are absurdly hard to enforce anymore. Could abortion be headed in the same direction, with the state looking on helplessly in 99% of cases and going after the occasional flagrant violator to scare the rest?
Legislators often pass laws knowing that precious little bandwidth is available to enforce them.
I don't think this applies to the abortion issue. Nothing about the last several decades of intense, strategic work by the conservative movement indicates that they are happy to stop with a paper win.
Women don't talk about it or send out announcements, but often miscarriages have to be cleaned out of the uterus in a way that is technically abortion. You can't use the pills for ectopic pregnancies, which can be fatal. Late term abortions are often necessary for the mother's health. There are a bunch of cases where the pills won't do the whole job.
This is true but a D&C of a dead (miscarried) fetus has one fundamental difference: nobody is purposefully stopping a fetal heart, so I don't see how it applies.
Well, if you're trying to be logical, of course it shouldn't apply. Nor should "late term abortion" apply when a dead fetus is removed from the uterus in the 7th or 8th month. But they all fall under the same legal language.
I would appreciate a link to a legal or medical article which show this equivalence. I don't think there is an equal treatment anywhere between the care for a dead child, early delivery in case of an emergency, and deliberate killing of a healthy child.
This is just a news article.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/roe-v-wade-anti-abortion-legislation-limit-miscarriage-care-rcna27349
And from reading the article, it's pretty clear that the issue was D&C on a baby that was still alive vs on one that was dead. This does not support the contention that outlawing elective abortion of healthy babies results in no health care for women.
How? There’s no distinction between a living and a dead fetus?
Well, it took a shit-awful decision off the books and reverts control back to the states. For many, that's good enough.
https://idesa.org/article_english/abortion-rates-decrease-once-it-is-legalized/
While I do not agree with every point, I do agree that, if you are dissatisfied with a political outcome, it is not inappropriate to undertake a grassroots movement to:
1. Work within the framework of the law to take exceptional action to achieve desired outcomes; and
2. Put in the elbow grease to offer (hopefully!) cogent and reasonable arguments to win hearts and minds and, ultimately, change the Overton window and win politically.
I likewise agree that violence to advance a political cause is a means of last resort and carries with it a terrible toll that many currently exhorting others to it simply cannot comprehend. If those in both sides of the aisles work harder, maintained open minds, and offered more compelling argumentation, we would not even come close to entertaining those horrific consequences.
Thank you as always, Mr. deBoer, for offering a thought provoking exposition in this knotty subject, and for your complete candor. All too rare and I appreciate it!
Is abortion a service, as Freddie says, or murder as the opponents say?
Imagine applying that logic to slavery
I mean... The Overton Window sure wasn't excluding that manner of argument in, like, 1860. But that doesn't mean that the disagreements about slavery in 1860 were 'reasonable differences'. My hot take here is that bad things are in fact bad! Public opinion divides should be respected but they aren't an absolute.
I don't think you're arguing with my point, which is just that 'The Overton Window' is really insecure grounds for any kind of right
"bad things are bad" is just question-begging. I mean, yes, whether abortion is murder, acceptable murder, or not murder at all is a definitional/axiomatic question. At the end of the day, public opinion (or more broadly, public acceptance), does in fact win the day.
Let's look at slavery. America couldn't resolve the tensions between the two sides, so we fought a very bloody civil war that did resolve that question. If pro-slavery side was truly committed, and had the numbers, then you would have seen them continue to fight and try and bring that issue back. They didn't.
The pro-life side is hoping that it can leverage it's disproportionate power and influence to win this fight. Which is why I support escalation from the pro-choice side (court-packing, adding additional states, etc.) I don't think we will end up in a violent civil war because, again, the pro-life side doesn't have the numbers if it actually came to that.
It’s not me saying it. This is the public discourse at large.
Dead end, enjoy the superiority.
You assume: I’m Canadian, pro-choice and don’t watch TV. Just finished reading a defence of Dobbs at the post liberal order substack. You see, the other side exists, in extremis, just like the Freddie cohort takes a virulent stance. The question is simple: is it murder? The answer is equally simple: yes after viability and no before viability. This is effectively the law in every other country only Americans have fucked it up this badly .
As an atheist I feel no compunction to follow the dictates of catholic/ Christian doctrine, but nonetheless will concede a deep respect for the teachings of the Christian tradition. The post liberal order substack is I think my most important counterbalance to the braying nonsense.
Shouldn't the bulk of public opinion play a role? If US law perfectly followed the majority viewpoint then abortion would be illegal after 12 weeks.
This is the end of the beginning, and we are not going back to a "pre-Roe" status quo. Most abortions in the United States are now "performed" with pills, which makes this particular act of cruelty absurd on its face.
We are now entering a legal environment akin to the 1850s, where states in which the exercise of bodily autonomy is illegal will enact laws in a spiraling escalation of reach, severity, and cruelty in an attempt to stop abortions, and states that are still functioning democracies will enact an ascending staircase of laws to stop other states from interfering in their attempts to allow people to receive abortions. You think this is bad? Wait until the Supreme Court decides that Texas has the right to send the Rangers into Massachusetts to extradite people for sending mifepristone through the mail to someone in Texas.
This decision will also hasten the United States' decline as a world power. In 1973, the vast majority of countries outlawed abortion. This is no longer the case. When the prosecutions start, the world is going to see.
Donate to abortion funds. Get some Plan B and some mifepristone (they have a 4 year shelf life, IIRC.)
11 states have already made all abortions illegal.
Which 11 states have made 'all abortions' illegal?
There is no forced pregnancy short of rape. Unwanted pregnancy is a miscalculation or a change of mind.
The opponents would say it’s a bit more than pedantry - over attention to small details - they assert murder.
KT, love it, a call to arms!
Praise be to Allah.
If the state uses its coercive power to prevent women from terminating their pregnancies when they so choose, then the state is effectively forcing women to give birth, i.e. a forced pregnancy.
True, secondary but true.
Forced parenthood, not forced pregnancy.
The popular expression you're thinking of is "forced birth". No one believes in "forced pregnancy," the state inseminating you or whatever that would be. People believe the state is preventing them from accessing reasonable means to terminate a pregnancy and legally requiring the fetus to be carried to term--hence "forced birth".
True and well said.
This seems to me like a pretty low key measure. I have to wonder if something like pot tourism is already kind of a working precedent. Transporting weed back into a state where it's banned is one thing but has anybody ever been prosecuted for traveling to CA to get high?
Welcome to Papistan. The damage that Catholics have done to the progress of humanity is incalculable, and history has shown it takes a lot of time and effort to undo.
I know he doesn't read everything, but I wonder if Freddie will tolerate this kind of bigotry in his comments.
It's not prejudice, it's postjudice. Same church that burned women at the stake and concealed crimes by their 'priests'. Gorusch grew up Cat, Thomas, Roberts, Barett, Alito all practicing. 3 of them essentially 'lied for Jesus' to get confirmed. People like this should never be near the levers of power.
Homie what? Are you saying?
Birds and snakes and aeroplanes, and Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Oh ok ty
I do feel dominated to a certain degree by the theological underpinnings to this ruling. So, I get you.
I don't know that it's bigotry, exactly, as the implication is more that the institution is bad vs. individual Catholics. That is, Ad Infinitum is asserting that the sum total of the Catholic church's actions have been a net bad for humanity. Maybe I'm just being generous.
You may tend to see Catholicism as benevolent but for a great many of us Father Arnall is more representative of the institution.
Your ignorance of the history of Catholic social justice activism around the world is encyclopedic.
After seeing the headline, I'm relieved that you aren't calling for us somehow rise up against the Supreme Court like I keep seeing on Twitter -- "we don't have to obey them", "we can shut the court down", "let's go to their houses" etc. Just a bunch of nonsense from people who don't leave the couch.
Helping women travel to blue states is something I can get behind, though. I never should have doubted you.
Although somebody with much more legal expertise would have to comment on whether transporting somebody out of state for an abortion is "extralegal" in the first place.
All I know is that it's very important to delete my period tracker app. If you stop tracking and there's no baby, a SWAT team will descend on the house.
An willful misframing of the meme.
The app contains data that can be subpoenaed in a theoretical court case against you. That is an actual, founded fear if you live in a state with a trigger law that looks like they’ll be proactive about enforcement- your medical records can prove your story false if push comes to shove.
The meme is stupid, but that is because the danger only exists if you live on specific patches of American dirt and is nonexistent in blue bubbles; the threat of having your privacy violated to secure a conviction in the course of enforcing anti-abortion laws is certainly present for some people.
You joke but McJunker is right. If you give a shit about the right to have an abortion or not be jailed for a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, you shouldn't mock women for being fearful of the very real state violence that's now in the offing. It may not be a SWAT team but it's a distinction without a difference when you're talking about jailing women for seeking various types of reproductive healthcare.
It's not. If it were, people would be prosecuted in Texas for going to Colorado to enjoy a weed-soaked weekend. Gambling and divorce used to only be available in Nevada, and people traveled there in order to gamble and get divorced because they weren't able to at home.
I suppose some state legislators could try that. They won’t get very far with it in the courts (and Kavanaugh signaled as much). No state can declare activities in another state illegal. The federalism door swings both ways.
There is potentially some risk of a FEDERAL law regarding transporting people across state lines, akin to the Mann Act (which prohibits transporting people for prostitution). But my guess is there aren’t votes for that in Congress. (For one thing, everyone in Congress is rich, or is influenced by the rich — and the rich are not interested in completely cutting off abortion access for their own daughters. Just Les Poors.)
Actually, his concurrence specifically states that he wouldn't support this. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-24/kavanaugh-says-states-may-not-bar-travel-to-obtain-an-abortion#xj4y7vzkg
That enforcement hasn't come under serious scrutiny yet and once the first case comes forward it will likely fail. Its ability to fuck with *every* right is unbounded.
Thanks. I was just going to point this out.
Yeah I was wondering the same thing. Im a lawyer but no experience on something like this.
But Laws differ from state to state over just about everything. Other than, oddly, transporting liquor into a dry town, I can’t think of anything that would fit this definition.
Freddie’s idea is a good one, but I don’t think it’s extra legal, though I suppose that could change.
Some states will try to make it illegal to cross state lines in order to get an abortion, but I expect that aspect of the laws to be struck down even by the current Supreme Court. As I recall Kavanaugh's opinion confirmed that there's a constitutional right to interstate travel.
Yes. I posted this above as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-24/kavanaugh-says-states-may-not-bar-travel-to-obtain-an-abortion#xj4y7vzkg
Free travel between the states is an incredibly well-founded right.
A state *might* be able to charge a woman on getting back from an abortion, but 1) most laws are against doctors, not women, and 2) even if they do go after the woman, charging for crimes committed outside of borders is a very very complicated subject.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3536720-the-right-to-travel-to-seek-an-abortion-in-a-post-dobbs-world/
The real challenge with this kind of action/support is making it known/accessible/easy to use for the most vulnerable.
The internet makes that a lot easier too.
Yes - how you do an effective digital strategy for a diverse audience is always the key.
People seem to be moving toward a norm of ignoring or flouting laws they do not like, rather than making lawmakers change them. And now, increasingly, even those in power are simply picking and choosing what they want to enforce, while ignoring what is politically inconvenient to change. Proceeding down this path will not end well if the goal is truly to have rule by law, but maybe that is the point. By conditioning the public to selectively ignore laws rather than changing them, it can eventually be trained to tolerate rule by decree.
One big reason so many of our institutions are dysfunctional is because it suits various influential and well-heeled special interests to have them that way. Another is that by failing to fix the issue, the public can be kept divided and distracted, hence more easily manipulated.
"People seem to be moving toward a norm of ignoring or flouting laws they do not like, rather than making lawmakers change them."
You think that is something new?
Numbers wise? Yes.
The increase in the number of homicides from 2019 to 2020 was the biggest one year increase in the history of modern record keeping, and the largest increase in at least a century. Flouting the law has always been the province of a minority of the population. The size of that minority is on the rise over the last couple of years.
But it’s still dramatically lower than it was 30 years ago. So again, no.
Trick question: is it dramatically lower than it was 26 years ago?
If you need a lifeline for that question you can call Chesa Boudin. Or Eric Adams.
That’s why I said 30.
2020 was worse than 2019. 2021 was worse than 2020. Every indication that I can find suggests that 2022 so far is worse than 2021.
Give it time, give it time.
I was just going to write this. Thank you!
I think the 2020's are going to be a lot like the 1920's. Maybe if everybody gets miserable enough we'll have an event like the 1932 election where all the bums are tossed out up and down all levels of government.
If, as widely expected, SCOTUS says that the EPA can't regulate air quality any more, that is going to piss off even more suburban people who just assume they are entitled to clean air and water.
I guess those horrible traitors who were part of the Underground Railroad were actually on the wrong side of history. Slavery is bad of course, but rule Rule of Law trumps every other moral question.
This seems accurate and not necessarily a bad thing.
To take an obvious example, Texas and California have very different "on the ground" realities for:
-Marijuana possession
-Purchase and transport of firearms
-Covid lockdown protocols
-Immigration and asylum
regardless of what the federal statues say. Regardless of Roe, abortion had become dead letter in much of the south before this decision and regardless of the Supreme Court decisions, firearms are still dead letter in New York.
Is this bad though? I mean, if California wants marijuana delivery apps and Texas wants open carry in public, why not just let them do that? In an increasingly divided nation, why not just let local people decide their own policies?
Which I guess would be the critique of Freddie's proposal, which is that it undercuts de facto, if not de jure, federalism. Like, millions of Californians regularly give their driver's license to their weed dispensary when committing, technically, a federal crime, and Republican presidents, so far, have just left that alone.. If you like federalism, if you like California having one set of norms and Texas having different ones, then California kind of needs to leave Texas alone and vice versa.
“ In an increasingly divided nation”
That seems like clickbait spin. From my perspective the gap has never been smaller. Indeed the that there is so little difference is driving the clickbait hysterics.
Yeah, there's an unfortunate CW angle and tenor to this which is hard to remove.
If you hear something like that in my writing, my apologies, I'm trying to refer directly to immediate physical realities. There were immediate, obvious, and critical differences to daily life and experience in Blue vs Red states in the 2020-2021 lockdowns, there are now powerful and material differences for pregnant women in Blue vs Red states, and there are immediate and obvious differences in what goods and services I can purchase. There are multiple weed delivery apps competing for my business in Cali while I'm reasonably sure marijuana is still de facto illegal in, say, Utah. Those material realities are what I'm trying to focus on.