One more https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...d-nLjo0xcRhRU-vMTcNFcpR4dk7Hn4YVRY9T7hCCCzfdw A person’s interiority—your sense of youness—is typically understood to be situated in the mind, yet the mind and the body are inextricable. What, then, must it mean to be in possession of a body in America? This is, we are told, a land of tremendous abundance, of self-reliance, of liberty, and of invention. The promise America makes to its people, the covenant that we Americans can feel in our bones and in our blood and in our beating hearts, is the guarantee that we are free. Liberty is given to us by God, by nature, by our own humanity—not by government. I am American and so I am free to speak, free to publish, free to worship, free to assemble, free to keep and bear arms. It is to me self-evident that I am free to pursue the life I choose, without interference from the state. Freedom of mind does not come without freedom of body. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, as now appears likely, the very definition of what it means to be American will change for women and girls in the United States. If the state makes a claim to your body—a claim therefore to your self—you can no longer be American, not truly. To allow the state to control the body of a citizen is to deny her full personhood. To allow the state to control the body of a citizen is to undermine the very notion of what America is, the core promise it makes. ...... American women are now attempting to process what this loss of freedom will mean for them, both in principle and in practice. I wanted to hear from people in positions of power—women who are vibrating with rage in this moment, women who remember well what living in a pre-Roe world was like, women who might do something about it. I asked Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts, to try to recall the last time she was this angry. “I’m going back to my divorce,” she said with a laugh. Then, more serious: “How far will we go in letting an extremist majority [on the Supreme Court] determine the personhood of every other being in this nation? … There is a fringe group in this country that is trying to impose its own self-referential values on everyone else.” She wasn’t the only U.S. senator to mention to me a comparison circulating among feminists: What if, instead of legislating abortion, the state decided that “all adolescent males should be given vasectomies, and then when they are older and they can establish that they are ready to be fathers … the vasectomies can be reversed,” she said. “If this makes you uncomfortable, then how do you think women feel about laws passed to say that their bodies are something just to be manipulated by men?” The example is useful in its improbability—such a law should never and would never be enacted. It is useful, too, in revealing the failure of imagination among those who see the state-led denial of women’s most basic freedoms as acceptable, or at least tolerable, precisely because only women are subject to it. This same mentality casts the demise of Roe as a “women’s issue” rather than an attack on human rights. Yet this is a human-rights emergency. Alito, in his draft opinion, went looking for abortion in the Constitution, and used its absence as proof that abortion lacked constitutional protection. He went looking in a document from an era in which women could not hold public office, could not vote, and, as the writer Jill Lepore recently pointed out, legally “did not exist as persons.” The men who wrote the Constitution wholly and deliberately excluded women, and neglected to imagine them as part of their polity. No wonder Alito dismissed “attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy.” His refusal to consider autonomy as a constitutional principle spins us backwards in time, to an era in which the Constitution couldn’t perceive of women as equal citizens. The thing is, the Constitution does not need to spell out that American virtue is derived from the ability to self-govern, that self-governance requires individual freedom, and that individual freedom requires bodily autonomy. We know that it is so. The moral questions posed by the reality of abortion are intricate, and the government already interferes with people’s bodies in many ways for many reasons—the state requires people to get life-saving vaccines; the state incarcerates people. But any conversation about abortion needs to begin with the recognition that bodily autonomy is a prerequisite for freedom. When the state is willing to seize the bodies of its citizens, it does so at an enormously steep price. For women, the price is freedom: the very essence of what it means to be American. It has been fashionable to say that American history is an arc bending triumphantly upward, a trajectory of progress toward justice. But I prefer an image set forth by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who once wrote about society as a wave—never advancing, only receding and gaining in equal measure, taking on the contours of barbarism, civilization, and science to match the times. “The wave moves onward,” he wrote, “but the water of which it is composed does not.” We need not consult the Founders to understand that if America denies freedom to some of its citizens, our great experiment is doomed. It is easily apparent that our collective freedom is premised absolutely on
Assuming this is an attempt at British trolling, I'm sure you're aware that on average residents of the UK have more of their teeth than the USA.
Also @TheLonelySquire I'm confused. You keep saying abortion is murder, yet also say you'd be fine with some states having it legal. Does that also mean you'd be fine with some states legalizing murder of adults?
What I'm saying is that I'm fine with each state deciding how to best handle it. I would hope it wouldn't be legal anywhere, but I sincerely doubt that'll happen.
You can't catch them out with questions like this, because they don't feel shame about it. Fundies like @Chaos Descending have gleefully celebrated the idea of 11 year olds being forced to carry a rape fetus because it's what Jesus wants.
What's "it" in that response? Murder of adults? You would be fine with each state deciding how to best handle it?
Since you think it's obvious, and you've described abortion as murder, I figure you'd be consistent about it so wouldn't want to overrule states who legalized murder of adults.
When someone posted an article about a lawmaker who was proposing a bill to put the same kind of restrictions on Viagra as were on abortion in a FB group I'm in, one dude freaked the fuck out. He was like, "This isn't the kind of thing to joke about! I'm a vet and because of injuries I sustained in Iraq, I have to take Viagra! This will do real harm to people like me!" And everyone else was like, "Now you know how it feels to be a woman."
A very adept turn of phrase ... since the only people in the U.S. whose rights are "deeply rooted in history" are straight, cisgender, Christian, white men. Anyone whose human rights were recognized more recently ... well, those aren't "deeply rooted in history," so fuck 'em.
Huh, this is a dumb take @TheLonelySquire? It seems like the only alternative is that you don't actually think that abortion is murder.
Ah, how naive you are. Did you know that until as recently as the 1950s pornography was illegal in the US? Ayup. Up until almost the same period of time it was illegal to send medical textbooks that had illustrations of reproductive organs in them, thanks to the Comstock Act. Alito's opinion is so poorly worded (and trust me, when it is finally officially published, it won't be significantly different) every fucking right that we've recognized since at least the Civil War is in danger. Every. One. And don't think that those in the Bill of Rights are safe, either. They can, and will, twist things in order to ensure that those rights are stripped away from people they don't like. I'll just give two examples to illustrate this: 1.) You make abortion a felony, and then a whole lot of women will be stripped of their right to vote. Oopsie. 2.) You make assisting someone in getting an abortion a felony, and in many states, felons can't own guns. That's both the Second Amendment and the 19th Amendment gone for a large group of people. They'll also find ways to strip the 5th Amendment (as well as the right to privacy, which isn't specifically enumerated in the Constitution) from people. Roe isn't the canary in the coalmine warning us about the erosion of our rights, it's fucking Centralia, PA on goddamned steroids. I don't expect some folks here to recognize that but trust me, if there's not real opposition to this ruling things are going to get uglier in the US than most people can imagine.
And where do you stand on abortions related to saving the life of the mother? Before you answer that, let's narrow it down just a bit, to situations like ecotopic pregnancies where there's zero chance of survival for the mother and the fetus, and that the mother might be able to successfully carry future pregnancies to term?
This is a template for how Obergefell will be dismantled. Sure, it won’t happen overnight. And you might even get some Supreme Court decisions supporting it a la Casey for abortion rights. But make no mistake, as long as there is a 5-4 conservative majority paid for by the Federalist Society and every right wing religious group they will be coming for marriage equality.
To me it would depend on the chance of survival for the child. If it's at 50% or more I'd save him/her. But each situation is different. The most important thing to me is we should be defending these children as best we can.
We thank you on your sacrifice giving up a kidney for a child who almost certainly exists near you needing one. x
Just to be clear it is 6-3 R appointed v D appointed (with 4 of the Rs appointed during terms of a non-popular vote winning President) court. It is just that Roberts doesn’t want to burn the whole mother fucker down.
Okay, I understand that. 50% is a good number (we'll ignore that such determinations are an inexact science, because even under the best conditions for someone to give birth things can go horribly wrong and lead to the death of the child or parent, so your stance on such an instance isn't at all unreasonable, IMHO). Now, let's factor in the quality of life the child could expect if they were born. I'm not talking about things like socioeconomic status (because even if you're born poor, there's a chance that you can have a good life), but the physical experience. Say that the child will never be able to have a coherent thought and will spend the entirety of their life (regardless of whether it's a few minutes after being born, or decades) be in constant pain, unable to do anything at all other than screaming in agony due to the amount of pain that they're in. How do you feel about aborting such a child? Yea or nay?
Fun fact: The best organ transplant center for livers in is TN. Steve Jobs bought a house near Memphis so that he'd be close to the hospital and would have the best possible outcome for getting a transplant. A few things to think about when it comes to liver transplants. One is that we've never been able to come up with a replacement for them like we have for things like kidneys. If your liver goes and there's not a donor available, you're SOL. Another is that someone can donate half their liver as easily as they might donate a kidney. You see, it doesn't take more than a month for the liver to grow back. So you can give up half your liver now, and a month later, you've got one that's the same size as the one you had before your donation. All of which means that idiotboy, who lives in TN, really ought to be making himself available to donate part of his liver at least a couple of times a year. Not only will it save lives, but he lives in a state that has one the best liver transplant hospitals in America, meaning that the person getting a portion of his liver has a better chance of survival than folks in other parts of the US. Anybody wanna bet what the odds of Idiotboy donating a hunk of his liver every few months is better than zero? Another fun fact is that when it comes to organ donation, the French (who practically have Abort-O-Matics on every corner, according to some folks) have an "opt-out" system, in contrast to the US "opt-in" system. What this means is that if you die in France, the odds of your organs getting donated to someone who needs them are pretty close to 100%. In contrast to the US where even if you sign an organ donor card, that doesn't mean you can expect your organs to be given to someone who needs them. All that has to happen to throw a wrench in your wishes is for someone you're related to objecting.
A little late for that, I'm afraid. The match has not only been lit but tossed. All we're doing is arguing about is if we should slow down how fast things burn or not.
I admire you wanting to defend children as best we can So where do you stand on restricting gun ownership? Over 4300 children aged 1-19 died as a result of guns in the USA in 2020 https://news.sky.com/story/guns-now...en-and-teenagers-in-us-data-suggests-12595878 Thats more than died from vehicle accidents! Surely your concern for the children would put you in the anti gun camp, right? Consistency is important
Just read the good point that if Kavanaugh doesn't like the protests outside his house that's easy, because he can simply drive or relocate to a different state.
