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Texas bans abortion.

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newyorkguy said:
I was in Dallas several years ago not long after the Texas law permitting women to leave a child at a firehouse -- no questions asked -- was passed. I was pleasantly surprised at the sensitivity local officials exhibited in terms of understanding the desperation that some young mothers obviously feel.

In fact while I was in Big D -- either on that trip or another -- a young woman was apprehended after she had murdered her infant child. It was a sad case. The woman was a low-wage earner who could barely support herself. The father, her boyfriend, ended their relationship as soon as he found out she was pregnant. When Dallas police took her for the 'perp walk' the woman seemed overwhelmed and distraught. Despite killing her infant it was very hard not to feel compassion for this woman.
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Clearly the slut shouldn't have had sex. Abstinence only FTW!
 
xjx388 said:
It was probably a bad way to phrase it. I mean only that a fetus is not something that was artificially and forcibly attached to the mother by some third party*. It grows in her uterus through mostly-well-understood biological processes as a result of sexual intercourse. I'm not assigning a value judgement to its "naturalness." Cancer is natural, after all.





*Given that raped women who get pregnant can get 1)Emergency contraception and 2) a legal abortion within the constraints of the law, I won't get into those nuances.
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Like patient who started to die that caused the Nun to be excommunicated, and fired, she should have known better than to go to a catholic hospital if she wanted to live. Once there you can't force them to abort the baby that is killing her. Best let the slut die after all, that is the most moral option after all.
 
xjx388 said:
*Given that raped women who get pregnant can get 1)Emergency contraception and 2) a legal abortion within the constraints of the law, I won't get into those nuances.
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Sorry, you can't do that. I do not think that those "nuances" are so inconsequential as to be trivially dismissed like you are trying to do. In fact, given that you are the one person here arguing that alleged* local community standards should rule all, these "nuances" cut to the core of your argument. The ability to get an abortion is the very thing we were trying to discuss in the first place (whether a pregnancy is the result of a rape or not).

You can't say, when you are arguing that (given certain community standards) you shouldn't be able to get an abortion because no one is forcing an obligate parasite on you, that the case of rape is not relevant because you could just get an abortion. Following your original argument to its logical conclusion, raped women should not be able to get a legal abortion within the constraints of the law given non-permissive local community standards (regarding fetal personhood) any more than women who have not been raped.

In practice, your alleged obligation of the mother/incubator would be the same for the blameless rape victim as for the slut who has carelessly allowed herself to become parasitized. This is what you are arguing for given a certain set of "community standards". You are arguing that if local community standards make it difficult enough (because no hospitals want the unwanted attention of a minority of loud, anti-abortion activists and they will thus decline to either permit abortion on hospital grounds or to grant admission privileges to abortion clinic physicians) it's perfectly fine that some affected women are forced to go the DIY route. That community standards should rule supreme and that Roe v. Wade should be mostly irrelevant is the argument you are making (if you are not arguing for an actual "should" you are at least arguing that you have absolutely no problem with this being the case).

You can't simultaneously say that it's OK to punish the slut with a pregnancy because of fetal personhood because... you know,... community standards; but that abortion is OK for blameless rape victims.



* I write "alleged" because I feel that reducing the Texas situation to a case of 'the people have spoken', like you are attempting to do, is disingenuous at best given the backdoor nature of the measures that are effectively attempts at eliminating abortion services in Texas.
 
cosmicaug said:
Mother Jones: Up to 240,000 Women Have Tried to Give Themselves Abortions in Texas.
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From the article:
A 2008 national study found that about 2 percent of women reported that they tried to terminate pregnancies on their own. In 2012, a year after Texas passed several new abortion restrictions, a study of Texas women seeking care at an abortion clinic found that about 7 percent reported attempting to end their pregnancies without medical assistance before seeking clinic care.

Reading that, it sounds like the women making the news were able to get abortions at abortion clinics after trying and failing on their own. Doesn't that put the lie to the idea that you can't get an abortion in Texas? The survey numbers come from abortion clinics.

It sounds like what I'd do when trying to save a couple bucks. Self treat first, and if that doesn't work, pay for a pro. With the availability of Plan B, it kinda makes sense.

ETA: I'm more suspicious of Momma Jones since that SJW rape kerfuffle in Rolling Stone. Maybe I shouldn't be. Also, if 7% of the women was 240,000, then the number of abortions performed in Texas would be on the order of 3 million. I had no idea abortion was so popular in Texas. I found one site that says there were 72,332 in Texas in 2011. If that's right, I don't understand where these numbers are coming from.
 
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marplots said:
Reading that, it sounds like the women making the news were able to get abortions at abortion clinics after trying and failing on their own. Doesn't that put the lie to the idea that you can't get an abortion in Texas?
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Yes. However, intelligent people understand that it is much, much harder to get an abortion so that is why the number is increasing.
 
thaiboxerken said:
Yes. However, intelligent people understand that it is much, much harder to get an abortion so that is why the number is increasing.
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How is Roe v Wade any different than Heller v DC or McDonald v Chicago?

IIRC you have no objection to restrictions on 2nd amendment rights enacted by state/local jurisdictions.
 
marplots said:
From the article:
A 2008 national study found that about 2 percent of women reported that they tried to terminate pregnancies on their own. In 2012, a year after Texas passed several new abortion restrictions, a study of Texas women seeking care at an abortion clinic found that about 7 percent reported attempting to end their pregnancies without medical assistance before seeking clinic care.

Reading that, it sounds like the women making the news were able to get abortions at abortion clinics after trying and failing on their own. Doesn't that put the lie to the idea that you can't get an abortion in Texas? The survey numbers come from abortion clinics.

It sounds like what I'd do when trying to save a couple bucks. Self treat first, and if that doesn't work, pay for a pro. With the availability of Plan B, it kinda makes sense.

ETA: I'm more suspicious of Momma Jones since that SJW rape kerfuffle in Rolling Stone. Maybe I shouldn't be. Also, if 7% of the women was 240,000, then the number of abortions performed in Texas would be on the order of 3 million. I had no idea abortion was so popular in Texas. I found one site that says there were 72,332 in Texas in 2011. If that's right, I don't understand where these numbers are coming from.
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Well, the reporting is sloppy, maybe intentionally so, but the number does not refer to any single year. The question was worded so that people responded based on their life experience. Have you ever known someone... have you ever...

It also doesn't account for the X% who knew someone who'd attempted to end their own pregnancy who may have known the same person.

But if they're asking reproductive age females, that broad a question could apply to 20/25 years of experience. It also doesn't say what, exactly, they did? Drink lemon juice in a graveyard at midnight. Pray to the big sky daddy? Morning after concoctions? Etc....
 
So a year after the supposed ban on abortions in Texas, women can still legally get abortions in Texas? What's up with that?
 
Planned Parenthood is suing Texas over attempts to block Medicaid payments.
 
Dessi said:
Another approach to the discussion, besides the pointless argument whether the word "human" includes fetuses or skin cells, is that laws against abortion are inconsistent with the view that people own their bodies, in so far that there is no other circumstance where one person is entitled to the blood, organs, and body of another person.

This is true despite kinship: no laws compels a parent to donate bone marrow, by virtue of being their parent.

And true despite medical need: no laws compel a parent to donate bone marrow, even if their child's life depended on it.

And true despite cause: no law compels a parent to donate their body parts to their child, even if that parents action or inaction (e.g. abuse, accident, genetic disorder) were the reason for their child needing some body part in the first place.

And true despite duration: no law compels a parent to donate a kidney to their child, even on the condition that they will get the kidney back in 9 months or so.

And true despite someone already using your body: if you woke up and discovered another person were hooked up to your body, using you as living dialysis machine, no law compels you to remain hooked together without your permission.

But laws against abortion, which grant unborn children (but not born children) a right to use their mothers blood and organs without her consent, do not make sense in a moral or legal framework where my bodily autonomy takes precedence over whatever life-saving-or-otherwise advantage another may gain by using it.

That's a problem and it needs to be addressed.

Pro-choicers address the problem by conceding that laws against abortion are not consistent with every other accepted norm concerning people using others blood and organs.

Pro-lifers fall back on the view that pregnancy be treated differently, which is special pleading. They might dispute this on the basis that removing a fetus is fatal and infringes on the fetuses bodily integrity; but pro-lifers do not carry that view over to born persons, as there is almost never a circumstance where they argue that mothers ought to be compelled to give up their blood and organs to their born children. We're right back to special pleading again.
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In the case of abortion, the vast majority of pregnancies are more like your example where you wake up with someone attached to your body, except you went to sleep in a bed where you knew there was a good chance of it.

In that case, one could argue an implied contract, and that you can no more walk out than a surgeon can walk out in the middle of a heart operation.

I think the proper reasoning is that you control your reproduction and can terminate it because the fetus is not a conscious human, and thus has no rights.
 
I'm solidly pro-choice in the matter, even though my ex-wife had one without my knowledge (I didn't find out until 20 or so years after we were divorced, when my ex-sister-in-law dropped a dime on her).
I do wonder if there should be some sort of cut off, however. I can see during the first trimester without question, but how about when the fetus is viable ( as in the last few weeks or whatever)? I honestly don't know.
 
Chuck Guiteau said:
I do wonder if there should be some sort of cut off, however. I can see during the first trimester without question, but how about when the fetus is viable ( as in the last few weeks or whatever)? I honestly don't know.
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I think that most countries do have a limit on the age of foetus that can be aborted and that this is based on the age at which foetuses are viable. Advances in medical science have meant that the limits may need to be revised.

In the UK the limit is (was ?) 24 weeks but there was comparatively recent pressure to reduce this to 20 weeks:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9582428/Abortion-24-week-limit-QandA.html

That said, as the article mentions, survival rates for 23 week foetuses have not improved so the whole exercise could have been a "slippery slope" argument by anti-choice proponents.
 
Chuck Guiteau said:
I do wonder if there should be some sort of cut off, however. I can see during the first trimester without question, but how about when the fetus is viable ( as in the last few weeks or whatever)? I honestly don't know.
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I also don't know what the right cut-off is, but I don't like using viability since it depends on technology. What happens when technology makes a fertilized egg almost immediately viable?
 
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