It took my state all of less than a year following Roe’s overturn to put it into our state constitution. And now we’re cleaning up bullshit laws like waiting periods or “hallways must be X feet wide” that were made only to make abortions harder.
2 Likes
I agree with Roe.
And I agree, now that it has been overturned and turned back into a state-level issue, that it should be voted on by voters instead of by self-interested state legislatures who need to avoid getting primaried by money-backed MAGA upstarts.
Starting with Texas.
And to that point, i think we can argue it is one thing to override the popular vote through a supreme court ruling.
it is another to use heavily gerrymandered legislatures to override the popular vote. and this after a supreme court heavily changed through mcconell’s senate actions and the minority president trump.
the former seems like part of the natural story toward us recognizing more rights for repressed groups, mainly women. even if roe is wrong, it would seem an honest mistake as part of that process.
the latter seems politically craven. and based on a propaganda effort since the 80s to build a political agenda for which abortion was really the means, and not the ends. and now it is out of control.
In one sense our constitution is the result of votes. Since it ultimately determines what our political rights are, regardless of what one thinks of as our rights, a series of supermajority votes can take away any of our rights.
1 Like
I’m seeing chatter online that the compromise between “life begins at conception” and the desire for IVF, is we should allow IVF but only fertilizing 1 egg at a time.
So, pay $50k, have a procedure to extract an egg, fertilize it, implant it, and hope.
When it likely fails, pay $50k, extract an egg, fertilize it…
No problem extracting multiple eggs, just disposal of zygote/embryos.
Is there some sort of compromise available between ivf and wholesale embryo experimentation farms?
1 Like
Except that built into our founding document is the statement that we do have inalienable rights.
So as a matter of process, any rights can be taken away. But it cannot do that justly. In a sense, it must destroy itself to do that because it would lose its legitimacy.
Many (most) embryos are not viable.
Every implantation is very hard in the woman, emotionally and physically, not to mention the expensive, and it often fails with the best embryos. Using every one is simply not feasible.
I think this in part reflects the scientific reality that an embryo is nothing like a developed person.
That is the irony, really, in my mind at least, about arguing an embryo is a person because it is genetically human. It is radically reductive because it says the essence of a person is its genes and basic cellular structures. In a way, it is as reductive as any biologist who claims we are nothing but evolved chemical machines.
1 Like
Yeah, but that is not a legal document regarding US Laws. We were simply breaking away from a “Rights For Me, not For Thee” World Power.
And, it’s more, like, Jefferson’s opinion, man!
I mean, at the time, there were rulers all over the world who ran their countries and colonies as if common men (and all women and all non-white folk) had zero rights.
Except that it is much more than jefferson’s opinion.
It is america’s entire justification for being.
Why create ones that might not be used? Seems a matter of lab cost, not surgery. I thought multiple simultaneous implantations wasn’t common anymore. Is that inaccurate?
This bring up a good question why IVF is even legal under an anti-choice perspective. Looking online, it’s a 41.4% chance of success on the first try.
Why the hell would we allow a voluntary operation with a 58.6% chance of killing an innocent human being, for the elective privilege of having a child, when adoptions are already available?
I cannot see a single anti-choice argument for making the conscious choice to, most likely, knowingly murder another human just because you emotionally desire a baby.
(Though most likely this would be involuntary manslaughter - the killing was reasonably foreseeable due to your actions but you didn’t actually intentionally murder it, you just caused the death of a human.)
Edit: Though most of you would know this, I am strongly pro-choice and completely fine with IVF.
1 Like
What about the fact that is it is just a differently-aged human? Everyone you know was that size once.
How is saying age 0 is human and zygote is not radically reductive based on abilities?
Maybe splitting hairs, but I think it’s commonly believed that zygotes are, in fact, human organisms. I believe those cells are all human, anyway.
We can debate whether those ~100 human cells get rights or not, but as a pro-choicer I recognize it’s a human zygote.
No, it’s still an opinion. We take it as self-evident, even though at the time it wasn’t.
And the King at the time said, “No, we do not believe you have these rights, or any.” Then we had a war, and we won, and the King still believed what he wanted to, though he lost a fourth of a continent.
We are still existing on that opinion, which is pretty amazing.
Lots of shitty conclusions are made when starting with shitty assumptions. The argument of whether abortions should be legal or not is about when humans have these alleged rights.
1 Like
My understanding is that many embryos are created, found to be damaged in some way or otherwise less likely to be viable, and discarded.
You are right, all of the embryos are made at once. I don’t know if that is necessary to see which ones are ok. But i see no reason to increase the cost of the process.
But i haven’t heard any remotely convincing argument that an embryo has a human soul. Even the official roman catholic position is that we cannot know. the catholic encyclopedia uses the word “probable”, which in that context usually means not impossible rather than the more modern meaning. That seems a poor justification for state coercion.
I think if you look at a developed person, you can identify a brain structure that allows us to think and feel as we do. You can then argue that the relationship of the different atoms, chemicals, cells, etc., makes the sum more than the parts. Additionally, that human brain is part of a body, which is part of a society. Again, more than the whole. All of that is what make us human. That doesn’t have to eliminate god. That human person is able to be more than its parts because the idea exists in god’s mind, so to speak. but neither is it just a bit of matter that god has grafted a soul to, by brute force as it were.
thomas aquinas makes a similar argument, i believe. the soul is the animating force of the human body. and the soul must be rational. it has agency. but that agency depends on the body. no structure for rationality means no ability to have a rational human soul.
the enlightenment switched to a reductive, mechanical view of things in which whole is no more than the parts. the important “parts” here seem to be a human genetic code. have that, and you are human. it is also seems non-biblical because it makes the human body no longer essential to human nature.
I’d call it more than an opinion. It is a call to a transformative mission. And sometimes it becomes a justification to selfishly seize power.
I agree that this is an issue that should be decided by direct democracy at the state level.
I’m not sure the abortion opponents are primarily worried about getting primaried by money-backed MAGA upstarts. I think a lot of them actually are anti abortion.
A third of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Maybe no one should get pregnant because they have a third of a chance of causing a human to exist, then die. 
A human is its consciousness in my view. Where an organism permanently has no consciousness, we may still treat them as human out of respect for what they were (someone in a permanent coma). But it’s not the same. It seems extremely doubtful that embryos at the early stages of IVF have consciousness. And until they are implanted, they permanently have no consciousness. A seed is not a tree and nothing can call it a tree until it is planted.
1 Like