On the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, 53% say abortion access nationwide has become too difficult, a new NBC News poll finds.
Physician here. There are too many possible issues with pregnancy, social situations, etc. to ever effectively be able to navigate that decision tree via legislation. It is barbaric to force women through a non-viable pregnancy. It is barbaric to withhold medical care from a woman whose life is threatened by her pregnancy. It is barbaric to force women into a devastating social situation.
Society will never agree on where the line should be placed or what is morally correct. The decision needs to be in the hands of the mother and their medical team.
Finally, for those who believe in “natural consequences”. No birth control is 100% effective. Not all sex is consensual. Non-viable pregnancies happen regardless of how careful you are. Bad outcomes aren’t always the result of bad choices.
It’s wild how many Americans seem to think the Supreme Justices are legislators.
True. Roe should’ve never happened, it needs to be decided by the states.
Roe should’ve never happened, it needs to be decided by the states.
Do you feel the same way about slavery?
Nah, unrelated issues, stop conflating.
Nah, [slavery and abortion bans are] unrelated issues, stop conflating.
They are related in that both legalized slavery and abortion bans are examples of regional legislative causes of needless human suffering. Furthermore, it’s many of the same states doing it. How much suffering should we allow states to inflict on their residents before the Federal government intervenes? What’s your metric here?
I wish you could share that sentiment with someone that actually was a slave.
I wish you could share that sentiment with someone that actually was a slave.
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I absolutely could. Read the 13th amendment carefully: “except as a criminal punishment.”
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You didn’t answer my question. I will repeat it: How much suffering should we allow states to inflict on their residents before the Federal government should intervene? Given that fetuses are incapable of sentience/suffering before 24 weeks, why should we allow states to make women and children needlessly suffer by forcing women to give birth against their will? Help us understand your point of view.
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If we don’t pass laws at the federal level, the southern states would still have slavery. These types of federal decisions push the entire nation forward. Leaving it to states is a cop out.
Bless your heart…you have no idea.
My government teacher in rural Missouri was literally a neo-confederate with posters of Confederate generals on the wall, who taught that Lincoln was an evil tyrant and that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery.
Forgive me if my view on the South’s ability to protect human rights is limited.
Fuck the states. My state would not have let me marry my wife if the federal government didn’t force them to. My brother is gay, he’d be doing hard labor in prison for that if my state had its way.
Centralized power is a bad thing. You will understand this when a group takes over that you are not aligned with.
I mean, states rights led to the civil war, right? All those men’s lives they threw away, for the right to rob others men of their freedom and dignity. Good riddance
I agree. That’s the whole premise of federation. It’s the whole premise of the US.
How about states and the fed just keep their fucking noses out of my sisters vagina?
Your rights should not be dependent on what state you reside in. It’s asinine to think that people who have the same citizenship you do deserve to have more or fewer rights than you just because of arbitrarily drawn lines on a map.
It wasn’t a good thing that this was overturned. but the protection for abortions should never have been based entirely on a ruling of the supreme court, When, and I really hope it’s when, they get an opportunity to next make abortion protected federally it must be codified that way something like this doesn’t happen again. As is the Supreme Court has two much power and influence for a group of 9 lifetime appointees.
And it is too easy for republicans - by hook and by shameless cynical crook - to ram their corrupt zealots into SCOTUS, squatting for an entire lifetime, whoring themselves to the highest right-wing corporate and church bidders.
Completely agreed, but something that needs to be noted - because I see people who have clearly been misled about this all the time - is that there has never been a majority in Congress that would pass law codifying abortion rights. Even during the brief Democratic supermajority in 2009, there were several pro-life Democrats that wouldn’t have supported it. Public opinion is moving in the right direction, especially now, and conservative Democrats are essentially archaic relics nowadays, but it’s still an uphill battle, though I am cautiously optimistic in the long-term.
I see people often say that the Democrats have never really cared about abortion, and that if they did they’d have gotten it done in 2009. This simply is not the case.
The idea that everything ever must be explicitly specified in the constitution overrides decades (maybe centuries) of legal precedent. That idea only popped up when a weaponized supreme court showed up to do what they were put in their position to do, aka violate everything the supreme court is intended to do
@AlternativeEmphasis I think it was a great decision. In general the federal government should be doing very little imo. Different people in different states overwhelmingly have different opinions. Now that can play out
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Genuinely curious as to why.
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In my experience, people with perspectives like yours tend to drastically overestimate how many abortions happen later in pregnancy. Nine out of ten happen before 12 weeks. And of those that do happen afterwards, the vast majority are due to the discovery of medical risks to the mother or fetus. Very very few people are just casually waking up and deciding that an abortion sounds like a fun way to spend the afternoon. I’d also remind you that a good 20% or so of pregnancies end in miscarriage. The Right likes to spin up this twisted fantasy of women and doctors going on baby killing sprees for fun and profit, and it’s simply not the case. “Post-birth abortion” is not a thing to any remotely significant degree. As I understand, there are some exceptionally rare cases where, upon birth, it’s discovered that the baby has an immediate severe health disaster that will result in it having perhaps a few days of miserable suffering before dying, and in those situations, it’s instead euthanized in what is naturally a life-defining trauma to the mother. To take one of the most tragic experiences a hopeful parent can possibly imagine and pervert it into a shallow political talking point is something that I will not dignify with any additional response.
It sounds like you do acknowledge that there’s a lot of nuance and complication here, and that there are legitimate reasons for abortion. Given that, I don’t see why there’s a compelling reason for the use of government power (amusingly, from people who claim to be for small and limited government) to interfere in complicated medical decisions between parents and their doctors.
In my experience, people with perspectives like yours tend to drastically overestimate how many abortions happen later in pregnancy.
It has nothing to do with frequency. I oppose elective late term abortions because I think it’s unethical. I think it’s unethical even if it only happens once. The polling on this is clear: most Americans oppose elective abortions in both the second and third trimesters. However I support late term abortions for medical reasons like saving the life of the mother.
The problem is with defining what “elective” is. Defining in legal terms, a “necessary abortion” is also equally difficult.
The best way to safeguard medical professionals against career, even freedom threatening legal battles, is to leave the discretion to medical boards who know ultimately better than anyone what they are dealing with.
This is why it’s dangerous to meddle in something like this. We can’t go on legislating depending on our personal morals and understanding of ethics. We can’t legislate from a position which assumes medical professionals are profit driven, soulless devils who’d do wrong unless prevented from doing so by the strong hand of the general society through government intervention.
This same principle is valid in both gender affirming care -yes, for minors too- and for access to abortions.
We legislate morality all the time. It is the premise of democracy. We ban murder because we believe it’s unethical.
I’m perfectly happy for medical boards to decide whether abortion is medically necessary. I also believe they are best suited to decide that. The issue is that activists are arguing for no such oversight. They want the mother to decide, not said medical board.
This is not actually the case. All medical procedures have to be signed off on by the doctor performing them. Maybe someone shops around for a doctor with a more accommodating perspective but it will always need to be signed off by a doctor. if done in a professional medical environment.
The entire point is that the government shouldn’t be deciding what medical procedures are necessary for you. The decision is between you and a doctor.
So the problem with a board is… Who is assigned that position? Elected? Chosen by the medical professionals at that hospital? Chosen by a single medical professional in the state? Who is allowed to be picked to that board? Only doctors? Admin? Hospital ownership? Licenced doctors that are not currently practicing, like the ones hired by insurance companies?
If you have the wrong set of people on that board, you can have a de-facto abortion ban in that area. Or a lot of expensive oversight on these boards.
We legislate morality all the time. It is the premise of democracy. We ban murder because we believe it’s unethical.
I’m perfectly happy for medical boards to decide whether abortion is medically necessary. I also believe they are best suited to decide that. The issue is that activists are arguing for no such oversight. They want the mother to decide, not said medical board.That’s not the only reason; a society where murder is legal wouldn’t just be unethical, is not tenable. It would quickly fall apart as every minor dispute is solved by killing those who disagree.
Unlike murder, there is no ethical cost to terminating a fetus <24 weeks, when it is not yet capable of sentience. There is no need for a medical board to intervene before this point. Allowing abortion access leads to a better society, not a worse one, in terms of crime, generational wealth, resources and attention per child, and the obvious benefits of simply not having a society filled with unwanted, unloved, and resented children. Forced-birther moralistic arguments rely on ignorance regarding fetal development and apathy regarding outcomes of both mother and child. They are not comparable, morally speaking.
I’m kinda splitting hairs here, but you seem to be using the terms “morality” and “ethics” interchangeably when they don’t mean the same thing.
Ethics are social norms. Morality is personal. You cannot legislate morality because everyone makes those individual decisions anyway, and we will all rebel against rules we consider immoral. Ethical practices are those that balance everyone’s divergent senses of morality in ways that allow us to actually function as a society. All legislation is ultimately legislating ethics.
Murder is unethical because we ban it. We ban murder because we believe it’s immoral. But at least where I live, we can have a little ethical murder sometimes, as a treat – if you call it capital punishment first. Many people, including myself, consider this immoral and would support changing the laws which inform (but do not define!) our system of ethics.
Also, I don’t think you understand that abortion clinics are run by groups of physicians who are playing the role of this “medical board.” It also seems you don’t understand that limiting the incidence of DIY/back alley abortions is [the] major reason for making abortions accessible/legal. Telling someone they can’t get an abortion in a clinic won’t stop them from getting an abortion. It’ll just stop them from getting an abortion in a clinic.
When you legislate what is and what is not “elective” you tie doctors hands. Politicians are not medical professionals, and laws are rigid. When laws restricting abortions to emergency/ saving the mothers life are put in place, doctors have been forced to wait even when they knew that an emergency was inevitable. Women have died because the doctors had to wait until the legal department was satisfied that the mothers life was in danger.
When you legislate what is and what is not “elective” you tie doctors hands.
We tie the hands of doctors in many ways. There are literally millions of lines of laws and codes of ethics by which doctors are required to abide. I agree that there is the risk of edge cases where life saving medical care could be withheld. I do not consider that a good reason to make elective late term abortion legal. Instead I believe that risk can be overcome with better training.
And three months it’s enough time to decide
That makes an assumption that the person is aware they are pregnant the entire time.
I didn’t know I was pregnant until I was roughly 11 weeks because I was using birth control. Except this was before the more recent shouting-from-the-rooftops news that antibiotics can render birth control pills ineffective. I’d been on antibiotics for two weeks around Christmas time and here I was in March, at my doctor, trying to figure out why I was sick when he asked me to do a pregnancy test.
I didn’t get 3 months to decide. I had to wait 2 weeks before I could get an appointment for an abortion for a pregnancy I absolutely did not want and had been doing my best to avoid by being on birth control.
I’m not the only woman with this story or a similar one. Many women simply don’t know they’re pregnant until several weeks in, especially when they are using birth control and don’t have an abundance of symptoms.
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Here’s the thing - I am not a special case or circumstance. This happens with some regularity and I’m someone who has chosen to share these intimate details with you to convey that an arbitrary date line isn’t helping anyone. At the end of the day, the discussion and decision should be between the pregnant person and their medical provider, and the pregnant person’s partner, if applicable and requested. It’s literally no one else’s business or concern.
I personally supported first trimester abortion, but unless it’s for the health of the mother, after that, I’m kind of against it
Fetuses are not capable of sentience until ~24 weeks. There is no ethical cost to abortion before this point. Forcing them to give birth to unwanted children only serves to make both mother and child suffer. It is incredibly unethical.
The science conclusively establishes that a human fetus does not have the capacity to experience pain until after at least 24–25 weeks. Every major medical organization that has examined this issue and peer-reviewed studies on the matter have consistently reached the conclusion that abortion before this point does not result in the perception of pain in a fetus. source
Fetal person hood is a red herring anyway. Should you be forced to donate blood to keep another person alive? What about organs? Is not giving your kidney to someone murder?
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Until a fetus can live outside of the mother, then any anti-abortion legislation is objectively cruel.
The actual human that is living and 100% exists should take priority over the potential human.
When people seek an abortion after 3 months it’s almost always not by choice. And it’s almost always not done lightly.
Where do you draw the line on “health of the mother ”?
Perhaps you mean a mild cold? Or perhaps you mean that it’s likely there will be extreme complications? Or perhaps you mean they should wait until those extreme complications crop up?
Or do you mean that the mother must be literally fucking dying on the operating table? Because that’s what a lot of people mean by it.
It is impossible to ethically legislate abortion, because any law that is able to accommodate every justifiable and in fact ethical abortion is going to be too complicated and too unwieldy. It will have the same chilling effect as any blatantly restrictive law.
For one to thing, the ethics are not at all clear, especially when you take into consideration social and economic impacts of a child (or indeed, another child.) or that there is broad disagreement between religions (and indeed, the christian scriptures flatly disagree with the belief that is a human inside you- scriptures say the soul enters on the first breath- a child who has never taken that breath has no soul to worry over. Further, OT, includes directions to abort a pregnancy resulting from infidelity- and the recipe for abortion.)
Finally you begin to see the disingenuousness in these arguments when you consider that that most effective way to prevent elective abortions is to provide broad access to contraceptives- something that the same people who are apposed to abortion are equally apposed to. I can only assume the suffering is the goal.
If you are in favor of abortion or opposed, I think it is time to recognize that the Roe ruling wasn’t written to last the test of time. They punted on the question of when human life and human rights begin and said, lacking any understanding of that question, the issue becomes a privacy issue. At some point society is going to have to deal with the question of the genesis of human life and human rights and what to do when there’s a conflict. I would have thought the result was going to be drawing the line somewhere and then creating some sort of due process when an abortion is requested after that drawn line. Instead, we have what’s also not a well-written tossing of Roe that punts the question to the states instead. I strongly believe that the issue will be revisited in the courts in our lifetime.
Then 61% of the 61% also insists that bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe and neglects (for the nth time) to vote. Sitting on their intellectually lazy asses at home, fondling their so-called purity, then lovingly sniffing their fingers.
But they are both the same. They’re just doing good cop bad cop
Yup. When Hilary lost the election, they tried to overthrow the government, too!
Oh and everybody is selling secrets to the saudis!
And, uh…demonic child sacrifice!
I don’t care what your stance on abortion is, this is shitty behaviour.
Good for the American voters.
