• @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlM
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    2 years ago

    Kids, if you’re ever worried that you’ll flunk school because you keep leaving your essays to the last minute, just know that you can still be a US politician!

    • @electrodynamica
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      112 years ago

      They’re only doing it because they know it won’t pass

  • @TheConquestOfBed@lemmy.ml
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    72 years ago

    Won’t their ratings tank if it fails? I know they’ve basically given up at this point, but Republicans will hit a homerun with the “Do-nothing Democrats” line if they can’t even hit the bare minimum.

    • @electrodynamica
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      72 years ago

      On the contrary. This will give them another chance to claim they are trying. “This is why you need to elect more Democrats, so we have a (bigger) majority.”

      And the sheeple will fall for the theatre for the 10 millionth time.

  • @Peter1986c@lemmy.ml
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    52 years ago

    Wait, Roe v. Wade was never turned into an actual law? What kind of unorganised mess is the US government?

    • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      It gets a little complex and IANAL, but I’ll give my understanding. The US has different types of law. There’s the text of the US Constitution (original + amendments). There’s statutory law, passed by the legislative branch aka Congress. The executive branch creates regulatory law to carry out statutory law (e.g. Congress says “regulate pollutants” and the EPA writes rules). Then the judicial branch has case law, which interprets the Constitution and statutory law. Case law builds on itself in a process called precedent in which previous decisions inform new decisions.

      Roe v. Wade was a Supreme Court decision (so case law) that recognized certain rights to an abortion based on a right to privacy. In constitutional law, “right to privacy” essentially means that personal matters are none of the government’s business. That is in turn heavily based on a previous case, Griswold v. Connecticut, that ruled that a Connecticut law banning contraception was unconstitutional.

      Usually decisions like this have a great deal of staying power. The principle of stare decisis (Latin for let the decision stand) is that except under certain extreme circumstances, a decision should remain case law. One such exception would be Brown v. Board of Education, which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy ruled that racial segregation was legal as long as facilities were equal, which Brown found that such segregation was instead inherently unequal.

      As for why it’s being overturned now? Well, the anti-abortion right has basically spent the last 50 years engineering a takeover of the judicial branch by right wing judges. The SCOTUS especially has had a massive rightward shift, helped along recently by a power play by Mitch McConnell in 2016 to block Barack Obama’s SCOTUS nominee for a year and in 2020 to quickly approve the right wing Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg a week before an election.

      We now have a court that is incredibly unrepresentative of the country. The makeup of the entire court has centered around this one question, and now the right wing has so much sway that it can start chipping away at these decisions it has long hated. It wasn’t because the county as a whole supports this conclusion, or because their arguments were better, or anything like that. It’s because conservatives got lucky with when SCOTUS nominations came up, and were particularly ruthless in making power plays.

    • seahorse [Ohio]
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      162 years ago

      Have you tried non-existence though? I might try it depending on how bad things get here.

    • Pax
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      152 years ago

      If you never existed, you wouldn’t know the difference.

    • @CountryBreakfast@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 years ago

      My mother was advised to abort me by doctors and peers. She stood by her decision to have me.

      And you know what? I dont give a fuck.

      Im not going to be emotionally manipulated into backwards and reactionary sanctimony just so I can express a currated self importance and narcissism all to demonize healthcare advocates. The people who suggested aborting me are not malicious, but the narrative that I have to champion anti abortion sensibilities because I could have been aborted absolutely is.

    • @pingveno@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      I get what you’re saying from an emotional standpoint, but the logic just isn’t all that sound. We are all here due to a chain of causality. I have some cousins where I love them and my aunt dearly, but my uncle never should have been a father. If he had made different decisions, the world would probably be a better place. Closer to the subject at hand, the same logic can (and is) applied to contraception. Abortion has just gained extra weight in some people’s thinking.

      • @electrodynamica
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        -12 years ago

        Closer to the subject at hand, the same logic can (and is) applied to contraception. Abortion has just gained extra weight in some people’s thinking.

        But that’s it exactly. The pro-abortion argument is a pro contraception argument. They want to normalize abortion as contraception. And they’ve largely succeeded.

        To the point where they equate being “burdened” with a child as life-ruining, and having choice to undo that as essential to women’s freedom.

        Never once do they think that maybe if having a kid screws up a woman’s life that means she never had freedom in the first place.