It’s a problem because it reinforces the same dehumanization of people who seek and have abortions, which the anti-abortion movement relies on for its success.
As the other side of the argument goes, if there weren’t some dehumanisation going on then there wouldn’t be any abortion, would there?
The bill amounts to a near total ban precisely because of how early it cuts off legal abortion. At that stage in a pregnancy, most women don’t yet know that they are pregnant. Even those who do sometimes can’t access abortion care that early, as providers often prefer to wait until eight or 10 weeks of gestation to perform abortions, for safety reasons. Before that stage, it is difficult to rule out the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy, an unviable condition that can be fatal.
The answer to an ectopic pregnancy is abortion. There is therefore no reason to wait until an ectopic pregnancy is detected in order to have an abortion. Or rather, if abortion has been decided upon there’s no reason to wait.
If what is meant is that a 6 week ban means that ectopic pregnancies cannot be dealt with then that’s just confusing writing from this Guardian columnist. But then what actually happens is “treatment for an ectopic pregnancy” and assuming that that really is what is done then even the Catholic Church is fine with that.
Regardless of the realities, what do the American people want? No poll that I have seen has suggested that a significant majority desire other than the status quo. They want Roe v Wade upheld but they don’t support the full rights of women to procure terminations that I would advocate. The American majority, however, is not what is now represented on the Supreme Court.
Sigh.
Roe v Wade puts abortion in the rights part of the constitution. If Roe is overturned then abortion becomes a matter for the legislature of each state. At which point the majority get to have their say, right? That being how democracy works?
Well, for Amanduh at least:
Last week was Black Maternal Health Week, which reproductive justice activists started in 2018 to raise awareness of the grim fact that maternal mortality rates for Black women are up to three times higher than they are for white women.
OK:
It is true that Black women have higher abortion rates than white women,
No, of course she didn’t……
But calling fetuses “innocent” assumes that they are persons: “innocence” implies the potential for guilt, and that’s only true of persons.
Well, yes, but to deny they are persons is not a refutation of the claim that they are persons with the right to life etc. It’s a disagreement with it, sure, but not a refutation.
Reproduction without pregnancy: would it really emancipate women?
Jenny Kleeman
It may sound far-fetched, but a breakthrough in Israel has brought us a step closer to creating artificial wombs for humans
One worry is will women be allowed to have abortions – in the sense of killing, rather than removing the foetus, which is the true meaning – is removal can be done into an artificial womb?
Seems a little odd.
But the bigger mistake is to think that artificial pregnancy would free women from childcare. Not really, no, because we’ve a few million years of evolution pushing that idea. It might even, if we want to say so, not be necessary that women be the ones who do this. But we’re still built as a species that women are more disposed to than men…..
Shockability is a primal quality. Lose that, and you lose all humanity. Latest figures say there have been 93,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK. I am trying to imagine how high 93,000 stacked coffins would reach, or how deep a plague pit would be to hold 93,000 bodies. Because they are disposed of decorously out of sight, there are no such gruesome pictures to jolt the senses.
Would it be a taller pile, or a deeper pit, than the 8 million abortions since legalisation?
A Roman Catholic pro-life midwifery student who was banned from her hospital placement has won an apology and payout from her university.
Julia Rynkiewicz, 25, faced suspension from midwifery studies and a four-month fitness-to-practise investigation as a result of her involvement in pro-life society
They tried to throw her off her course because she’d joined SPUC or whatever it’s called these days.
Despite the NHS rules saying that you don’t have to do abortions if you think they’re wrong.
One more brick in that wall of argument about university. It’s, more often than not these days, a method of insisting upon a set of beliefs than anything else.
You know, the idea that people not part of the state could take state money to provide health care. Disgusting, isn’t it?
Last week Marie Stopes International, one of Britain’s biggest providers of NHS-funded abortions,
Ban this now!
It can feel uncomfortable to keep telling our abortion stories – but it is still essential
Emma Beddington
Depends what the stories are perhaps:
So: I had two abortions. In neither case was my life in danger; there were no foetal abnormalities; I could have supported another child. It was simply the right thing to do for me both times and I’m eternally grateful it was possible. They were not “good” abortions; they should not need to be. Many abortion stories are like mine: unexceptional, not “deserving” or “worthy”.
Because that’s not how a rather large number of people do feel about it. Put my vehement opposition aside. Take, say, Bill’s “Safe, legal and rare” thing. Pure lifestyle abortions aren’t quite what is meant there…..there are even some who might describe such actions as being, well, selfish….
Global feminism is like a tangle of cables, intertwined in complex knots. Those cables bind us to one another, transmitting our struggles in fractions of seconds. I have female friends who are Polish and Irish and American, and how they are treated by their home countries matters to me. But my solidarity stretches further than that, and is underpinned by a sort of simmering anger. I cried for American women when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and I applauded with joy for Irish women (and later, thank God, for Northern Irish women too) when abortion was legalised there. I stand with Polish women, because their fight is also our fight: it’s a fight to be recognised as fully human, and to obtain the rights that come with that.
The entire conversation is about what is a human – is a fetus? At which point in development is it? – that accrues rights. It is, of course, entirely possible to differ over what that answer is. But you do have to have an exceptionally tin ear to put it the way Rhiannon just has done.
Poland abortion: Top court backs almost all terminations
Poland’s top court has ruled that abortions in cases of foetal defects are unconstitutional.
Poland’s abortion laws were already among the strictest in Europe but the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling will mean an almost total ban.
“Backs” should read “blocks”.
The BBC gets £3.8 billion a year of taxdayers’ money.
“The policy basically says that it’s normal for a baby with Down’s syndrome to be terminated right up until birth.
“The reason why this is important to me is because I have Down’s syndrome, I know what it is to have it, and my husband has it.”
Asked how she feels to have been given the go-ahead with her landmark legal battle, she added: “I feel amazing knowing that the case is going to be heard in the High Court.”
We’ve a certain contradiction in the law here.
Abortion is legal up until birth in cases of severe deformity. But only to 24 weeks in cases without deformity.
We have strict anti-discrimination legislation against the disabled. Hmm, perhaps in favour of the disabled.
So, abortion law is different for the disabled and the not so. This is discrimination that we have laws against.
Dunno about this specific case or any other but there is that contradiction there all the same.
Barrett’s body of rulings is not that large, making it difficult to extrapolate how she would rule on important issues if elevated to the supreme court. But we have ample reason to believe that Barrett, a conservative Catholic, is hostile to abortion rights and might overturn Roe v Wade when she had a chance. In addition to being a conservative Catholic, Barrett is a self-described legal “originalist” who almost certainly believes Roe was a legally shoddy opinion. (Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not that confident in the legal grounds for the ruling.)
The thing is, when considering constitutional law, what is being decided is whether abortion is a right. Rights stemming from the constitution and the bill of rights etc. Which is something that a judge on a constitutional court should have a view upon.
In the absence of rights as declared by said court then abortion becomes a thing of politics which is where it probably should be in my biased and unimportant view. Like it is all over Europe for example.
The very shouting about abortion rights and Roe is begging the question. Because the Roe question is whether it’s a right or not.
What will they do if that 6-3 court overturns Roe v Wade and bans abortion across the entire country?
Roe v Wade doesn’t make abortion legal and its absence wouldn’t make it illegal. The case makes abortion a constitutional right based upon a rather weird reading of the right to privacy.
You’ll note that here in the UK we do not have a constitutional right to abortion. We do have abortion. The French constitution does not announce a right to abortion – they have it too. And so on.
Abortion was legal in some parts of the US before Roe v Wade and becoming so in more of them.
If Roe v Wade were overturned – unlikely but it should happen because it was a shockingly bad piece of law even if excellent politics and possibly, dependent upon views, civil rights – then the legality or not of abortion would become a matter of democratic (no, not Democratic) politics in each state. Which is almost certainly where it should be too.
The legislatures – the mini-parliaments of each state – have the power to choose
Quite so. And why shouldn’t this be a matter of democracy?
‘Women always take the brunt’: India sees surge in unsafe abortion
There’s someone – OK, if you prefer, something – else which takes rather more of the brunt.
They’re coming for the eugenicists now:
Eugenics was the study of the selective breeding of humans to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.
-ish. -ish-ish.
Even if that’s a possible definition it did very rapidly become the selective breeding of humans to decrease the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as undesirable.
Like stopping the inform the disabled, the weak, actually the proles, from breeding. And if we’re going after the eugenicists then where is this going to end. Marie Stopes? How about abortion of the handicapped? And the Fabian Society is gonna have some ‘splainin’ to do as well…….
The UK’s current number of daily deaths from coronavirus is lower than the UK’s current average daily number of deaths from abortion.
Discuss
A man who stabbed to death 19 residents at a care home in Japan for people with disabilities has been sentenced to death.
Satoshi Uematsu, a former employee of the Tsukui Yamayuri En (Tsukui Lily Garden) facility in Sagamihara, south-west of Tokyo, carried out the attack in 2016, in which residents were targeted as they slept.
Twenty-four other residents and two care workers were injured in what is one of post-war Japan’s worst mass killings.
The 30-year-old admitted to the rampage during hearings at Yokohama district court but pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility, with his lawyers claiming he was suffering from a psychiatric disorder at the time of the attack.
He was sentenced to death by hanging.
Uematsu told the court last month he would not appeal against his sentence, no matter what it may be, newspaper Mainichi reported.
Police said Uematsu, described by neighbours as polite and helpful, was motivated by a deep-seated hatred of people with disabilities. He told police after his arrest that society would be better off if disabled people “disappeared”.
Certain of the Fabians – the Webbs perhaps – would be arguing for a medal for such actions.
