NYT story: Trump administration could strike abortion almost immediately using Comstock law
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Anonymous
Per wording in his written campaign platform, "we will oppose late term abortion" (which he doesn't define by weeks in the actual platform) there is nothing about exceptions for life/health of mother, fatal abnormalities, rape, etc. He will not have my vote without that written into his policy. I'm a mother to a daughter and no politician is getting my vote without those exceptions at minimum. |
Anonymous
+1. Plus, anyone who is truly “pro-life” (anti-abortion) is not interested in just leaving it up to the states. They want to save the fetuses in blue states too. This was just the starting point. The “states rights” people are more concerned with political wins. There’s a really feverish, rabid group of right-wingers who will not stop there. It doesn’t matter what Trump says in public right now, he needs their buy in. And he’s already put a lot of the right judges in place should laws get challenged in the courts. He’d appoint even more in a second term. |
Anonymous
I don't think arguing live vs not alive or human vs not human is productive. The question is legal personhood, not whether an embryo might turn into a turtle vs a toddler whose parents dream of Harvard. So: egg gets fertilized. It's not implanted yet. That is going to take anywhere from a little more than a week to just under 3 weeks. An estimated 30 to 75 percent of those fertilized eggs will never implant. Yet it has the same genetic uniqueness of any embryo or fetus or infant or adult. Is it a person yet? If it is, that IVF business becomes enormously problematic. Meanwhile, that fertilized egg is undergoing cell division. By the way, sometimes that egg eventually turns into two embryos, genetically identical. If being biologically alive and genetically unique defines a person, are the resulting twins one person or two people? Does physical separateness define them as two people? If so, the implanted embryo is not physically separate from the woman (using woman in a purely biological sense), so that definition does not make the embryo and the person whose uterus it sits in two human beings. Many of those embryos are lost, often before there are physical signs of pregnancy. Between this stage and birth, a lot of things can happen. OB-Gyns have been telling us, especially since Dobbs, what the vast range of those things is, and how quickly a pregnancy complication can go from a minor concern to an extremely critical scenario that can cause death or permanent profound impairment of the woman or of the fetus. Sometimes an egg is fertilized in the fallopian tubes and stays there, resulting in ectopic pregnancy. Sometimes (rarely) a molar pregnancy results, with a genetically unique and alive growth of cells (not necessarily even an embryo) that is deadly. Is that genetically unique and alive clump of cells, with no capacity to develop into anything remotely resembling a fetus, a human being? Then, of course, we have those horrific conditions--embryos with no brain and maybe not even a brain stem, or other conditions for which medical intervention is simply not possible and which result in the death of the delivered infant within hours or minutes, possibly in pain, possibly struggling for breath. Society can have an interest in pregnancy and fetuses. But endowing a fertilized egg, an implanted embryo, or a fetus with LEGAL personhood is extremely problematic. The right to one's body is a legal right when it comes down to a society's laws. It may be a natural or sacred right depending on your belief system, but what matter here are legal rights. The legal right to one's own body is not absolute. Someone else can legally end the life of your body because they are afraid for their own, or as the result of a collective decision making process before judge, carried out by someone authorized by law to do so. Someone else can legally end your life if you are no longer able to communicate, fully dependent on technology to keep that body alive, and another person has been given the legal authority to remove those machines. For that matter, if the life of your body requires extreme medical intervention that is not included in your state's medicaid coverage or your insurance coverage, your right to your body is moot. So, I agree. This jibberish about clumps of cells and potential life is ridiculous. The question is legal personhood and when it is established. We establish that status at birth. Prior to birth, we do have laws aimed at protecting the fetus (such as criminal charges for assault resulting in the death of a fetus). The question is how far those laws go, and at what point they interfere with the legal right of the person carrying that biological, genetically unique life. The anti-choice movement has this notion that it is easy to set up guard rails so no pregnant woman will die or become disabled if a pregnancy complication becomes serious. What we are seeing is how thoroughly that impairs medical care for pregnant women in general. OB-Gyns are leaving states with draconian laws, and many doctors in any specialty (especially women or those married to women) have decided they will never consider practicing in those states. There are clinics that refuse to see pregnant women until they have reached 12 weeks gestation and the biggest risks of miscarriage have passed, because miscarriage care, it turns out, is very problematic if there is any hint of heartbeat. So, if society wants to establish legal personhood for the result of conception (even when it itsn't even possible to know how many legal persons are even present, if any) we're going to see a ton of consequences of that. |
Anonymous
He said EVERYBODY is fine with that. |
Anonymous
Ectopic pregnancies Sepsis Infection due to PPROM Extreme cases of HG Cancers discovered during pregnancy Heart conditions discovered during pregnancy Pre-existing heart or kidney conditions or other health conditions for which pregnancy poses extreme risks Placental abruption Pre-eclampsia Etc Etc Etc All of the above can be fatal to the mother. All can result in life-altering consequences to the mother and limit or prohibit her ability to carry future pregnancies or take care of children she already has. Have you never known anyone in your life who has had a life-threatening pregnancy? How fortunate. |
Anonymous
Then don’t have sex I guess? These are like the arguments made against ending slavery before machinery and electricity. Working a farm by hand in the hot summer sun is way deadlier than pregnancy. The abuse of the helpless for the convenience of the strong is wrong in every age. |
Anonymous
WTAF? 
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Anonymous
When Human Life Begins American College of Pediatricians – March 2017 ABSTRACT: The predominance of human biological research confirms that human life begins at conception—fertilization. At fertilization, the human being emerges as a whole, genetically distinct, individuated zygotic living human organism, a member of the species Homo sapiens, needing only the proper environment in order to grow and develop. The difference between the individual in its adult stage and in its zygotic stage is one of form, not nature. This statement focuses on the scientific evidence of when an individual human life begins. https://acpeds.org/position-statements/when-human-life-begins |
Anonymous
Oh, you mean aim for being a childless cat lady? I'm sure JD Vance and others of his ilk would just LOVE it if their wives started denying sex for fear of getting pregnant and losing their own right to life should a potential complication occur. |
Anonymous
ACPEDS is an anti-abortion conservative organization and is not the official voice of the medical community. What you posted is useless. And if you're the person posting about women working in fields. Look, you can have whatever opinion you want. But your opinion goes against the will of the American people. You can disagree with others, but you do not get to impose your personal definitions and will AGAINST the will of the American people. You are anti-democratic, authoritative, and seem to prefer to be a dictator. Go live in North Korea, you'll be happier there. |
Anonymous
Women can be protected by using the stand your ground defense against the fetus that could kill her |
Anonymous
The bolded is not true. But, for the sake of argument, substitute “the woman” for “its host” and then tell me what’s wrong with the logic. |
Anonymous
The American College of Pediatricians is a anti-abortion advocacy group and is not the American Academy of Pediatrics which is the actual professional association of pediatricians. |
Anonymous
Biologists from 1,058 academic institutions around the world assessed survey items on when a human's life begins and, overall, 96% (5337 out of 5577) affirmed the fertilization view. The Scientific Consensus on When a Human's Life Begins https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36629778/#:~:text=Peer%2Dreviewed%20journals%20in%20the,%22the%20fertilization%20view%22). |
Anonymous
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Question for the rigid anti-abortion person: If an adult person is terminally ill with poor prognosis, in a vegetative state, but kept alive on a ventilator, do you consider it murder to remove them from that ventilator?
At this point, they are a fully formed person with a beating heart and we can keep them alive as long as they are on the ventilator. We can keep them staring at a ceiling in that vegetative state into old age in a hospital bed. |