Fetal personhood

A close family member had an ectopic pregnancy. Because of its location in her body, it was not going to be aborted or rejected or miscarried or whatever you want to call that biological process for ending a pregnancy.

She had a procedure that under the laws now passed or pending would have been an illegal abortion. Had she not had the procedure, best case scenario was that the baby would have grown and they would have delivered it early by C-section, understanding that it would have lived a day or two at most. The c-section and carrying the baby would have necessitated procedures which would have rendered her sterile. That was the best case scenario.

Worst case scenario was that the body would have basically rejected the fetus but without a way to expel it. It would have become, for all practical purposes, a cancerous tumor which would have necessitated cancer survey and chemo therapy.

So, in a state with laws treating this fetus as a person and making abortion illegal, this relative’s potential outcomes would have been 1) an illegal abortion, 2) carrying their first “baby” and delivering a non-viable life that would have rendered her sterile, or 3) a cancerous mass in her body which would have required surgery and chemo therapy as a woman in her 20’s. Now, of course, because that cancerous mass started out as a fetus, removing it might well be murder under a ham-fisted law. If the chemo caused the body to expel the mass (not sure if that’s possible, just thinking out loud), that almost certainly would be considered an abortion.

Now, practically speaking, my relative had some money, her parents and in-laws had some money, so she would have gone to a state (or foreign country) where she could receive the care she needed.

I was sort of ambivalent on abortion until this happened and due to a job that I had working with low income people in Baltimore. I worked with a remarkably smart (much smarter than me) young African American woman. She grew up in a religious household at got pregnant in high school. Her parents wouldn’t let her have an abortion, let her spend two weeks at home with the baby, and kicked her out and cut her off.

This was a young woman who had been an honor role student and, because of an unwanted baby, became a high school drop out living on welfare and, in perhaps the cruelest irony of all, being placed in a position where she was expected to learn things from me. HA! I couldn’t have walked 100 yards in that woman’s shoes, much less a mile.

After I got to know her, she confided in me that she had asked God every day to take that baby from her, to end that pregnancy.

I will grant you, abortion was legal and fairly accessible in Baltimore when this woman was pregnant, so her story isn’t totally about abortion rights. Rather, it put a human side to the abortion issue in a way that hadn’t been done before. (This was before the incident with the relative).

My final anecdote is about a person that I went to school with. I am in my late 30s (we were the same age) and she committed suicide recently. Turns out, she had been raped by her youth pastor when she was in middle school and her parents made her carry the baby and deliver it. The family protected the pastor—he was married and had a young family of his own, wouldn’t want to ruin his life, after all. My classmate missed most of 8th grade (when she was showing) and, unbeknownst to us, had a brand new “sister” at home when our freshman year started. She was a drug using, self-mutilating, shell of her former self. I didn’t think of her since high school until I heard she had committed suicide and learned from friends what her story was.

Sure, these are anecdotes. Sure, there are women who use abortion as a form of birth control. Sure, our society probably should do more to respect the unborn and to celebrate motherhood.

But I reject whole-heartedly the premise previously argued that it is objectively better to err on the side of the life of the fetus. In so many cases, the choice or decision is not between life for a fetus and the termination of the pregnancy. The choice is between the life of the mother and the life of the fetus. I think it is objectively better to chose the life of the mother.

I will now radically alter the purpose of my post:

It has been mentioned that Alito included the section in the draft opinion about the overturning of Roe only applying to the abortion issue. It was argued that this was introduced as a consensus building measure. Respectfully, I disagree.

The reasoning in Roe was built on the implied right to privacy present in the 14th Amendment. Alito, I think, included that section because the Court cannot completely repudiate the privacy right. Why not? Consider the following:

In 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, the interpretation is typically that the 2nd’s binding upon the Federal Government is extended to the states by the working of the 14th Amendment’s implied privacy right. If you strike down that right whole-cloth, there would be nothing from preventing California and New York from banning the private ownership of firearms. There are many other examples, but I find this one the most interesting.

 

I think that's wrong. Unlike the right to privacy which has no explicit federal guarantee in the constitution but is a legal construct by the Supreme Court the federal right to keep and bear firearms is explicit. True, one can argue that the right applies to the States as part of due process but that is not the only available argument nor even the strongest one. One could easily adopt an "undue burden" test to show that State level restrictions unduely burden a federally guaranteed right. Yes, that's borrowing from previous abortion jurisprudence. Savor the irony.

 

Interesting anecdote! A miscarriage is defined as a "spontaneous abortion" even though it is often "naturally occurring." Miscarriage: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia

Ectopic pregnancies are very much life-threatening to the mother although naturally occurring. There has been a lot of conversation about "natural rights," "moral law," and "natural law." These types of issues will undoubtedly be debated. In this case, the natural law or right of the mother to save her life during pregnancy outweighs the "natural rights" of the unborn fetus. The logic follows that the unborn fetus will undoubtedly perish if the mother perishes.

 

In US there are protections in place to insure independent judiciary.

Judicial independence is under threat in Britain and also Poland.
With claims that judges intrude too much into politics are wrong and dangerous

"In UK the ministers never like seeing their decisions overturned.
But in a rules-based system, they must usually live with it.
Yet Britain’s government has concluded that such reversals happen too often—and wants to change the rules to curb one purported cause, an obstructive judiciary.
This raises constitutional concerns."

Exhibit one is a bill now going through Parliament that seeks to curb judicial reviews, in which senior judges consider the legality or otherwise of a public body’s actions. They have certainly become more common in recent decades.

https://www.parliament.uk/business/news/2022/february-2022/lords-debates-judicial-review-and-courts-bill/

Will UK put gov above the law ?

 

The UK is a different situation. The very concept of "judicial review" was foreign to their system until the Supreme Court replaced the ancient Law Lords as the Court of final appeal. I am not sure that it exists even now.

 

Technically in the UK The People aren't sovereign as they are in the U.S. Sovereignty resides in the Queen who exercises her ultimate authority upon advice of her ministers. There is no written constitutional document upon which to rely spelling out rights and duties. This isn't a mere quaint tradition. It has real and immediate effects on the rights of all citizens.

 

It's this kind of insane, fanatical nonsense that harms the pro-life movement, especially those in the movement who have no religious or political reasons for opposing non-medically necessary abortions but simply believe it is morally and ethically wrong.

 

Yet, they'll keep doing it. Oklahoma has also signed a similar bill into law, protecting the "fetus" as soon as it's fertilized. At least the Oklahoma bill makes exceptions for saving the life of the mother, but I'm pretty sure that at least some doctors will err on the side of letting the mother die rather than be accused of performing an unnecessary abortion. I'm comfortable in saying that because those exact situations happened in the past. They'll start happening again.

 

Well, folks, they did it. Apparently there's little difference between the leaked draft and the actual opinion and order. Possibly important language that is still in the opinion is the statement that the Court's ruling applies to abortion only and will not extend to other "right of privacy" based rulings. Hm. Not so sure about that but we shall see. That comment is not necessary to the decison and so is non-binding dicta.

It is crucial that people understand that the Supreme Court has NOT outlawed abortion! That decision now belongs to the State Legislatures (and maybe Congress; I'm not so sure about that, though.) There will be a flurry of lawsuits about placing burdens on the right to travel between states (for example) and the right to preserve a woman's life, two rights that are explicitly in our constitutional law.

Famous nosborne48 political prognostication: You heard it here first! This decision will have almost zero effect on the November elections.

I think so because abortion causes a great deal of sound and fury among two smallish groups of people, militant pro-life and militant pro-choice. To the majority of American voters, it's much less important than inflation and the ongoing Covid pandemic. That middle majority would really rather not think about abortion at all. Of course, now that Roe is dead, we may HAVE to think about it.

 

By the way, as always, I recommend strongly that anyone wanting to voice an opinion needs to read the Supreme Court's order first. No one will, of course.

 

I don't know. Wouldn't be surprised if he did, though.

 

https://www.businessinsider.com/justice-thomas-said-the-court-should-reconsider-rulings-on-same-sex-marriage-2022-6?amp

 

Yes it does. And it harms women specifically - and many women could be victims of this harm - at an already low and vulnerable point in their lives. To me, that's what makes it insane, fanatical and nonsense, by definition.

 

I think the Supreme Court should reconsider Justice Thomas.

 

The reasoning for protecting interracial marriage and contraception was a bit different I think in that both things were widely understood to exist since ever. (Good thing for insurrectionist Ginni Thomas, too).

Same sex marriage however has no more a history of legal acceptance in our jurisprudence than did abortion. If the Supreme Court does decide to reverse other privacy based rights after this, same sex marriage will be the first reversal I imagine.

Another reason for thinking so is that there isn't the kind of groundswell organized opposition by state governments to contraception and interracial marriage that there still absolutely is to same sex marriage. Nobody much cares about the first two but people are willing to go to jail for opposing the last.

 

Colorado’s law protects the right to have an abortion and does not make distinctions or regulations around a time or stage during pregnancy.
Abortions that occur later in a pregnancy — at 21 weeks gestation or later — are rare. But legal,
With CO becoming potential travel destination the % of late term abortions will rise.

 

Our governor just signed an executive order protecting providers and patients from out of state prosecution. from prosecution. Not sure it's all legal.

 

Sounding like things we need to hear now.

PRESIDENT REAGAN:" I think all of us should have a respect for innocent life. With regard to the freedom of the individual for choice with regard to abortion, there’s one individual (chuckles) who’s not being considered at all. That’s the one who’s being aborted, and I’ve noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born. … And yet our opponents tell us not to interfere with abortion, they tell us not to “impose our morality” on those who wish to allow or to participate in the taking of the life of infants before birth. Yet no one calls it “imposing morality” to prohibit the taking of life after a child is born. We’re told about a woman’s right to control her own body, but doesn’t the unborn child have a higher right — and that is to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?"