Not likely... There's a good chance she's alone with the kids and has to take on multiple jobs. Don't you think she will have sacrificed a lot of her own life for unwanted kids? Do you know somebody who's happy with a situation like this? I'm sure they exist but if you'll ask me for odds in a tough country like the USA I'll tell you they're bad.
I find this whole thing so puzzling. In the UK, not so different from the USA, this is not really a thing at all. Even amongst Christians I have never heard it brought up. Is it a political thing, and if so how did it become so?
It's a wedge issue where neither side will give any ground, which makes it exploitable. If you figure out a way to tie a wedge issue to the rest of your political platform you're virtually guaranteed support from one side or another. IMO one side has been much, much better at exploiting this fact and has has achieved great power despite representing less than a plurality of voters.
It’s a divisive issue because it represents fundamentally different world views. As an asian, the idea that the government can’t regulate abortion, which is prevalent among a large minority of Democrats these days, is remarkable. Even if abortion was a moral issue, and not about preserving human life, nothing precludes states from legislating morality. It’s illustrative to compare to Japan or Germany, which have “liberal” abortion regimes insofar as it’s widely available. But in both countries it’s still technically illegal. The state has the power to regulate, but simply tolerates abortion under certain conditions.
When people deny that power altogether, you’re dealing with fundamentally different notions of how society works, and that predictably produces conflict. And people perceive that conflict as involving more fundamental issues than what the marginal income tax rate should be.
And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?” Republicans won a majority of the Congressional popular vote in 2016. They got a million and a half more votes than Democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_Re.... They’re on pace to do it again this year. They’re also a couple of points ahead in the generic Congressional ballot.
It’s an error to rely on the Presidential popular vote. Because it doesn’t count nobody is trying to win it. It’s easy for Democrats to campaign in big cities in red states, but the GOP has no incentive to spend resources in rural areas of blue states. But they can and do field Congressional candidates in those areas, which is reflected in the Congressional popular vote.
Your answer begs the question. Yes, abortion is a wedge issue, but why is it a wedge issue? Why are people against abortions in the US when most people aren’t against abortion access in other countries.
Right. It seems to me that both sides would be better off at advancing their so called goals if they could compromise and offer concessions, but that never happens.
It's just tacked on to identity politics. It doesn't really matter what the issue at hand is, only what stance is taken with the group the people identify with.
There is no logic on the issue itself at all, trying to find any logic will only result in conflicting results. (i.e. being against governmental influence, but wanting the government to control people's bodies; or having death penalties and weekly school shootings and not helping people to survive with basic living standards, but forcing childbirth wherever possible)
In the UK, the largest Christian denomination is the Church of England, with Her Majesty as the figurehead - and while they oppose abortion, their stance is [1]
"The Church of England's stated position combines principled opposition with a recognition that there can be strictly limited conditions under which abortion may be morally preferable to any available alternative. "
I assume that being an Established Church makes a difference too. We don't do separation of church and state the same way over here, after all that was one of the things the newly independent states of America decided to make very clear they were going to do differently from Britain, so the UK and USA are very different in this regard.
Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued roe v wade was a mistake because it placed abortion rights into constitutional law rather than letting democratic institutions decide an issue like this.
The reason it’s not an issue in Europe is because opposing sides all get a say in this and arrive at a compromise, namely abortion allowed up to 12 weeks which is fairly standard in most European countries.
But because row v wade basically said abortion has to be allowed in the US, the issue has had no real democratic debate just massively polarized arguing.
I’d argue the current situation will be better for almost everyone a few years down the line. Democracy works in resolving these issues. And why not have stricter laws in more Christian states? And free for all in California, if that’s what democracy decides?
> Even Ruth Bader Ginsberg argued roe v wade was a mistake because it placed abortion rights into constitutional law rather than letting democratic institutions decide an issue like this.
That's an oversimplification of a very nuanced and pragmatic view that is better explained here:
"What Ruth Bader Ginsburg really said about Roe v. Wade", Washington Post https://archive.ph/jJENv
It's not that she felt the rights granted by Roe were wrong to grant, she was worried that it would not be insulated from legal challenges.
I think this completely ignores the moral issues of later term abortions. I am an atheist, and I am disturbed by the idea of a voluntary abortion after 20 weeks. Voluntary meaning no medical necessity.
I think Republicans have latched onto this issue and Christianity in America has adopted it, but there is far more at play here than just Christian nationalism.
My assumption is that it caused by the fact that democracy is broken in the US. They have only two parties, whereas most countries in Europe have many.
With only two parties the differences get exxagerated and causes polarisation. With only 2 parties is often a question of "them or us".
People are forgetting we're a union of fairly sovereign states. In 1969, as you have today, some states allowed abortions, and other prohibited or restricted them. Thus it was decided democratically, as it is in most of the rest of the world. But when the federal government can come in and preempt state law, because the USA as a whole has a different idea, or in the case of Roe v. Wade, the unelected judges had a different idea, that is going to cause friction.
Also, the power of the federal government to impost laws on all states is highly controversial, and its history full of other supreme court cases carving out the definition.
You see the same friction with EU freedom of movement laws and immigration.
Do you find it puzzling that some people think it's wrong to kill unborn babies? You might think it's fine, but anyone can understand that people can think it's wrong.
Just like I as a meat eater can obviously understand that there are vegetarians that oppose the killing of animals.
The USA is very different from the UK because of puritans.
American Christians are much more puritan than Brits (this is true for abortion, but also for tee-totaller movements, and other things)
A lot of American Christians are anti abortion, for the simple yet totally valid reason that they truly believe that embryos are human lives, and that as such they shouldn't be "murdered".
The question of the threshold is central here. Noone in their right mind is pro abortion past 30 weeks of pregnancy. Similarly, no one is really against the morning-after pill.
This issue has been whipped up by the right wing, but they did it IN ORDER TO get more voters (who deeply cared about that issue), and not the other way around.
Similarly, no one is really against the morning-after pill.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A lot of people, including elsewhere in these comments, believe that “life begins at conception” and that therefore any action taken to stop the process post-fertilization is murder. That includes the morning-after pill.
It also includes IUD’s and IVF technology. Ironically, the latter actually enables some couples to have children.
This goes back a long way. Many of the early American colonies were founded by religious extremist sects being pushed out of wherever they came from. The US and UK both experienced the First Great Awakening, but the Second Great Awakening was unique to the US. This led to entirely new sects like the Adventists and Latter Day Saints. It led to an extreme backlash against Enlightenment ideals. Post-millenialism spread rapidly and many Americans were convinced the return of Christ was imminent and American society needed to be purified, which resulted in the first tight intermingling of religion with politics. Religious organizations needed political clout to accomplish their social goals, which were not restricted to their own followers. This was heightened all the more by the reality that the outlying territories didn't have real governments and religious leaders were the only leaders around. Revivalism mixed with frontier folk libertarianism to produce what would eventually become prosperity gospel teaching that the strength of one's adherence to strict behavior and love of Christ would lead to material success, and thus the rich must be pious. The Third Great Awakening gave us American Christian organizations that became increasingly all about social reform in light of the belief that Christ's return was imminent, leading to the very earliest alliance of the Republican party with activist Christians, which was the effort to abolish slavery. That alliance eventually dovetailed quite nicely with the American GOP's post-New Deal long game to cut taxes, business regulation, and social welfare spending, thanks to those earlier seeds of prosperity gospel. This also explains the largely unique to the US "god and guns" phenomenon, which is more about identity politics than religious doctrine because revivalism was tied so tightly to the frontier, where personal firearms ownership and proficiency was all but mandatory.
All in all, I think you get a nice picture of how something well-intended can end up in a bad place. The righteous fervor to make society better resulted in ending slavery, fighting against tenements, but then they ran out of the most obvious evils and we got prohibition, anti-homosexual laws, and this mobilization of single-issue voters that judge all office holders solely by whether they'll try to abolish abortion and don't care about anything else they do. Tack that onto the naked charlatanism of prosperity gospel and you more or less get everything wrong with 20th-century American evangelicalism.
Opposition to abortion in the USA was originally largely driven by Catholics. Which, incidentally, meant that most American Protestants didn’t especially object to it, including the majority of the Justices who issued the Roe decision. Eventually, for a number of reasons, many other Christian denominations, especially the poorer extra-urban ones, came to agree with the Catholics that maybe killing unborn babies really is murdering an innocent human life.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Catholics haven’t been a major political power in the UK since the Jesuits were expelled.
As for why it’s a “political thing” in the USA? Ironically, that’s largely because of Roe. Roe removed the abortion debate from the elected branches so that instead of working something out in a healthy democratic fashion, we got a naked exercise of judicial fiat.
This next bit is personal. I hope people will read it as a desire to satisfy curiosity rather than an attempt to debate a subject that, frankly, has adequate firebrands. For Catholics and those others who agree with our moral reasoning[1], abortion, the killing of smaller helpless innocent human beings, is an intolerable enormity. It’s completely impossible for us to knowingly condone it without falling from a state of grace. And doing nothing is condoning.
[1]. Premise 1: killing innocent human persons is wrong. Premise 2: pre-born babies are innocent human beings. Conclusion: killing pre-born babies is wrong.
The argument is simple enough to follow. Note that, due to the structure of the argument, adding additional premises like “the father is a rapist” doesn’t change the moral calculus unless we add an additional premise like “at least some offspring of rapists are not innocent merely due to their paternity.” Since the argument is structurally sound, we must challenge the premises. Challenging 1) is possible, but permitting killing innocent human beings opens a big door to all manner of atrocities. Challenging 2) is the more seemingly reasonable approach. Catholics believe that the human person comes into existence at fertilization, when the diploid human organism begins. One can reasonably use some other event like heartbeat, or some more vague concept like viability, and claim the human person doesn’t begin until then. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument though. I personally lean toward the fertilization point, because when getting the call wrong means murdering an innocent person I prefer to err on the side of caution.
The most popular arguments against protecting an innocent and dependent human person though are completely unprincipled and not properly even arguments at all. Rather, they they reduce to some kind of hedonic assertion on the level of “I’ll do what I want!”
Edit: Please don't reply trying to goad me into some low-brow argument. I am not interested in poorly thought out analogies or any other simulated ratiocination. For the purposes of this discussion I am only interested in the ethics. So by all means please provide clear moral reasoning about why it's OK to kill innocent human persons sometimes but not others. Please explain why it's OK to make it a legal requirement to care for some vitally dependent human persons but not others. And please fully think it through and discuss the potentially unintentional consequences of adopting that ethical system.
An accident occurs and I need 5 litres of blood and a new kidney. You are in the hospital in a coma, should the state be able to require doctors to take your kidney and blood and put it my body without your consent?
It’s because the Supreme Court has imposed for 50 years an extremely liberal abortion regime on an extremely conservative country. Roe guarantees elective abortions up to viability, which is around 22-24 weeks. But by 13-14 weeks, the fetus looks like a baby—it has hands and feet and a face. It can suck its thumb and kick. Most of Europe draws a line for elective abortions (absent exceptions) around that timeframe: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268439/legal-abortion-t.... The UK is an outlier in this by the way, in drawing the line at 24 weeks. That’s the longest in Europe.
Meanwhile, the US is vastly more religious than Western Europe. In terms of people who pray every day, it’s up there with Poland and Iran (both countries where abortion is illegal). On the religiosity front, the United States is more like the rest of the Americans (minus Canada) than like Western Europe.
Sounds like nonsense. Can you explain how it was ‘imposing a regime’, when nobody was forced to do anything? If you didn’t want an abortion you just…didn’t have one.
Kinda sounds like religious people are the ones actually trying to impose a regime to me. Because I couldn’t possibly care less what anyones preferred god thinks, yet religious beliefs are being used to drive political changes that affect everyone.
I bet these places will start to threaten folks now that their state likely lets them.
"Well, now that we have your data, we'll track you since births are public knowledge. If we don't see a birth, we'll turn it over to the police, and make your identity public (no private medical data needed, just that we have reason to believe you had an abortion) so that anyone in a state with a Texas-style law can sue you for $10,000 apiece, making your losses unlimited. Are you sure you want that abortion now?"
Regardless, Texas cannot hold you liable for an abortion that you get performed in another state.
So Texas can try all they want, but they have no jurisdiction over what happens in California, so they will never be able to write legislation that makes it illegal to travel to another state for an abortion.
> Regardless, Texas cannot hold you liable for an abortion that you get performed in another state.
Texas can do whatever the US Supreme Court allows them to do, and if you think well-established Constitutional precedent is a firm guide on that...how do you think they have the ability to ban abortion in Texas in the first place?
But even under established precedent, I don't think it's at all clear that they cannot punish you for anything you do while in Texas with the intent of getting an abortion, even if the actual abortion is performed outside of Texas.
And even if they can't (based on what the courts will eventually decide) punish you, they can arrest you, charge you, try you, convict you, sentence you, and send you to prison, possibly awaiting execution, before your case is even ripe for appeal.
I was under the impression that the Texas-style 10k lawsuit law was mostly meant as a way to circumvent the protections protected by Roe v. Wade, and that Texas might enact something more direct now.
Texas actually has a criminal trigger ban that has already automatically gone into effect because of Roe falling, but that doesn't repeal the private enforcement law.
I find it disgusting that any place that purports to be an "abortion clinic" has nothing to do with medicine, and is actually a thinly veiled evangelical NGO that pressures young women to have children.
What are these resources and support you talk of? Do they provide housing for a homeless mother? How able food to make sure the mother and child is healthy? Health care during or after birth?
No? Sounds like these places are just predatory abuse centers, masquerading as "help"
Bluntly, "we" warned "them". We said, "hey, maybe you don't want to encourage mass surveillance of your life in exchange for 'free' stuff; it could go poorly." It's now going poorly and I don't know that it's even possible to undo the damage now...
Are you asking, "aren't left-wing groups saving the information of right-wingers to the later deploy state power against them after changing relevant laws", or "doesn't every ideological group occasionally dox it's opponents"? I think those are different questions.
Doxing wasn't my question; I was just presuming aloud that everyone made use of the tools that Big Tech was selling. I don't see just one side being aware of the possibilities of buying data (nor do I think there are only two sides... it's a spectrum with many fronts).
The cheapest somewhat predictive model for the other humans is that they're just you.
This is why young children fail the Smarties test. They now know the tube has a pencil in it, therefore under this simplified model other children know the tube has a pencil in it and that's the assumption they report when asked.
But under this model if I believe something then that's what you believe too, and if you deny it then you are definitely lying. Loads of Americans resolutely believe that all humans know the Christian God is real, and it follows (under the too simple model) that whatever it is they believe about that God is necessarily apparent to everybody in the world, therefore anybody who says otherwise must be lying.
- If you live in a state with the ability to report abortions, gather a Republican list and report random names. This creates a lot of noise in the system.
- Do what these clinics are doing. Take pictures of people who work at them, create a page on the location listing all employees, and put it in a searchable database. I'm normally against doxxing or public shaming, but this is actually dangerous and deceptive.
- I am pretty sure what they're doing is also a HIPPA violation.
Readit News
These scummy tactics work, or people wouldn't do them.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
When people deny that power altogether, you’re dealing with fundamentally different notions of how society works, and that predictably produces conflict. And people perceive that conflict as involving more fundamental issues than what the marginal income tax rate should be.
And which side “represents less than a plurality of voters?” Republicans won a majority of the Congressional popular vote in 2016. They got a million and a half more votes than Democrats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_House_of_Re.... They’re on pace to do it again this year. They’re also a couple of points ahead in the generic Congressional ballot.
It’s an error to rely on the Presidential popular vote. Because it doesn’t count nobody is trying to win it. It’s easy for Democrats to campaign in big cities in red states, but the GOP has no incentive to spend resources in rural areas of blue states. But they can and do field Congressional candidates in those areas, which is reflected in the Congressional popular vote.
There is no logic on the issue itself at all, trying to find any logic will only result in conflicting results. (i.e. being against governmental influence, but wanting the government to control people's bodies; or having death penalties and weekly school shootings and not helping people to survive with basic living standards, but forcing childbirth wherever possible)
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/04/1096154028/the-movement-again...
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/06/1103372543/abortion-was-once-...
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/22/1106863232/evangelicals-didnt...
I assume that being an Established Church makes a difference too. We don't do separation of church and state the same way over here, after all that was one of the things the newly independent states of America decided to make very clear they were going to do differently from Britain, so the UK and USA are very different in this regard.
[1] https://www.churchofengland.org/news-and-media/news-and-stat... (2019)
The reason it’s not an issue in Europe is because opposing sides all get a say in this and arrive at a compromise, namely abortion allowed up to 12 weeks which is fairly standard in most European countries.
But because row v wade basically said abortion has to be allowed in the US, the issue has had no real democratic debate just massively polarized arguing.
I’d argue the current situation will be better for almost everyone a few years down the line. Democracy works in resolving these issues. And why not have stricter laws in more Christian states? And free for all in California, if that’s what democracy decides?
That's an oversimplification of a very nuanced and pragmatic view that is better explained here:
"What Ruth Bader Ginsburg really said about Roe v. Wade", Washington Post https://archive.ph/jJENv
It's not that she felt the rights granted by Roe were wrong to grant, she was worried that it would not be insulated from legal challenges.
The 1st and 14th Amendments of the constitution, for starters.
I think Republicans have latched onto this issue and Christianity in America has adopted it, but there is far more at play here than just Christian nationalism.
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Also, the power of the federal government to impost laws on all states is highly controversial, and its history full of other supreme court cases carving out the definition.
You see the same friction with EU freedom of movement laws and immigration.
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Just like I as a meat eater can obviously understand that there are vegetarians that oppose the killing of animals.
The USA is very different from the UK because of puritans.
American Christians are much more puritan than Brits (this is true for abortion, but also for tee-totaller movements, and other things)
A lot of American Christians are anti abortion, for the simple yet totally valid reason that they truly believe that embryos are human lives, and that as such they shouldn't be "murdered".
The question of the threshold is central here. Noone in their right mind is pro abortion past 30 weeks of pregnancy. Similarly, no one is really against the morning-after pill.
This issue has been whipped up by the right wing, but they did it IN ORDER TO get more voters (who deeply cared about that issue), and not the other way around.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A lot of people, including elsewhere in these comments, believe that “life begins at conception” and that therefore any action taken to stop the process post-fertilization is murder. That includes the morning-after pill.
It also includes IUD’s and IVF technology. Ironically, the latter actually enables some couples to have children.
All in all, I think you get a nice picture of how something well-intended can end up in a bad place. The righteous fervor to make society better resulted in ending slavery, fighting against tenements, but then they ran out of the most obvious evils and we got prohibition, anti-homosexual laws, and this mobilization of single-issue voters that judge all office holders solely by whether they'll try to abolish abortion and don't care about anything else they do. Tack that onto the naked charlatanism of prosperity gospel and you more or less get everything wrong with 20th-century American evangelicalism.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Catholics haven’t been a major political power in the UK since the Jesuits were expelled.
As for why it’s a “political thing” in the USA? Ironically, that’s largely because of Roe. Roe removed the abortion debate from the elected branches so that instead of working something out in a healthy democratic fashion, we got a naked exercise of judicial fiat.
This next bit is personal. I hope people will read it as a desire to satisfy curiosity rather than an attempt to debate a subject that, frankly, has adequate firebrands. For Catholics and those others who agree with our moral reasoning[1], abortion, the killing of smaller helpless innocent human beings, is an intolerable enormity. It’s completely impossible for us to knowingly condone it without falling from a state of grace. And doing nothing is condoning.
[1]. Premise 1: killing innocent human persons is wrong. Premise 2: pre-born babies are innocent human beings. Conclusion: killing pre-born babies is wrong.
The argument is simple enough to follow. Note that, due to the structure of the argument, adding additional premises like “the father is a rapist” doesn’t change the moral calculus unless we add an additional premise like “at least some offspring of rapists are not innocent merely due to their paternity.” Since the argument is structurally sound, we must challenge the premises. Challenging 1) is possible, but permitting killing innocent human beings opens a big door to all manner of atrocities. Challenging 2) is the more seemingly reasonable approach. Catholics believe that the human person comes into existence at fertilization, when the diploid human organism begins. One can reasonably use some other event like heartbeat, or some more vague concept like viability, and claim the human person doesn’t begin until then. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument though. I personally lean toward the fertilization point, because when getting the call wrong means murdering an innocent person I prefer to err on the side of caution.
The most popular arguments against protecting an innocent and dependent human person though are completely unprincipled and not properly even arguments at all. Rather, they they reduce to some kind of hedonic assertion on the level of “I’ll do what I want!”
Edit: Please don't reply trying to goad me into some low-brow argument. I am not interested in poorly thought out analogies or any other simulated ratiocination. For the purposes of this discussion I am only interested in the ethics. So by all means please provide clear moral reasoning about why it's OK to kill innocent human persons sometimes but not others. Please explain why it's OK to make it a legal requirement to care for some vitally dependent human persons but not others. And please fully think it through and discuss the potentially unintentional consequences of adopting that ethical system.
Meanwhile, the US is vastly more religious than Western Europe. In terms of people who pray every day, it’s up there with Poland and Iran (both countries where abortion is illegal). On the religiosity front, the United States is more like the rest of the Americans (minus Canada) than like Western Europe.
Kinda sounds like religious people are the ones actually trying to impose a regime to me. Because I couldn’t possibly care less what anyones preferred god thinks, yet religious beliefs are being used to drive political changes that affect everyone.
"Well, now that we have your data, we'll track you since births are public knowledge. If we don't see a birth, we'll turn it over to the police, and make your identity public (no private medical data needed, just that we have reason to believe you had an abortion) so that anyone in a state with a Texas-style law can sue you for $10,000 apiece, making your losses unlimited. Are you sure you want that abortion now?"
So Texas can try all they want, but they have no jurisdiction over what happens in California, so they will never be able to write legislation that makes it illegal to travel to another state for an abortion.
Texas can do whatever the US Supreme Court allows them to do, and if you think well-established Constitutional precedent is a firm guide on that...how do you think they have the ability to ban abortion in Texas in the first place?
But even under established precedent, I don't think it's at all clear that they cannot punish you for anything you do while in Texas with the intent of getting an abortion, even if the actual abortion is performed outside of Texas.
And even if they can't (based on what the courts will eventually decide) punish you, they can arrest you, charge you, try you, convict you, sentence you, and send you to prison, possibly awaiting execution, before your case is even ripe for appeal.
No? Sounds like these places are just predatory abuse centers, masquerading as "help"
(Isn't everyone doing this?)
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/28/1108107718/instagram-and-face...
This is why young children fail the Smarties test. They now know the tube has a pencil in it, therefore under this simplified model other children know the tube has a pencil in it and that's the assumption they report when asked.
But under this model if I believe something then that's what you believe too, and if you deny it then you are definitely lying. Loads of Americans resolutely believe that all humans know the Christian God is real, and it follows (under the too simple model) that whatever it is they believe about that God is necessarily apparent to everybody in the world, therefore anybody who says otherwise must be lying.
Aren't left-wing groups changing relevant laws, then saving the information of right-wingers, then deploying state power against them?
- If you live in a state with the ability to report abortions, gather a Republican list and report random names. This creates a lot of noise in the system.
- Do what these clinics are doing. Take pictures of people who work at them, create a page on the location listing all employees, and put it in a searchable database. I'm normally against doxxing or public shaming, but this is actually dangerous and deceptive.
- I am pretty sure what they're doing is also a HIPPA violation.