Reply to NYT story: Trump administration could strike abortion almost immediately using Comstock law

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t get why republicans are so anti abortion when ending it just makes the country less white on a proportional basis [/quote]

I don't know, maybe because that is the pinnacle of evil: "Let's kill millions of babies so that our race will have proportionately more people."[/quote]
I am one of the many women who has had a miscarriage. It was an incredibly sad experience. But it was not a death - there was no funeral and no death certificate. Anybody who equates an abortion and killing a baby is not arguing in good faith.[/quote]

Completely disagree, and I could just as easily say that anyone who doesn't believe abortion is "killing" a human being is not arguing in bad faith.

I honestly have never understood that argument.  If you want to say, sure, it is a human being being killed, but I believe other interests, etc. outweigh it.  But to argue that it literally is not killing a human being is simply anti-science and bad faith. It is, by definition, a human being, just in the early stages of life.  If you are arguing that it is not killing a baby, then what is it?  Are you saying it magically becomes a human being for "value" purposes once it just happens to exit the woman, which would mean five seconds earlier it had no value?  If someone kills a baby inside a woman by punching the woman's stomach, would you say that it was not murder or even not a crime as to the baby?  And if you say abortion should not be legal after a certain point, why?  Why is abortion "killing a baby" at 30 weeks, but not at 10 weeks?[/quote]

[b]I don't think arguing live vs not alive or human vs not human is productive. [/b]
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.

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