Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ One It sure is mighty convenient timing for all political and electoral energy in the United States to suddenly get sucked up into a single issue which affects the powerful in no way, shape or form. I wouldn't have thought it would be possible for everyone's attention to get diverted away from inflation and the looming likelihood of
I have been saying for a while now, from the unprecedented release of an opinion draft to the news media around that leak leading right up into the actual decision. All of it seems like a planned release intended to directly pit the two sides of the abortion wedge issue against each other in the streets just before the mid terms. In 2014 when the gay marriage decision was announced Obama and the bipartisan leadership were signing the modification to the STOCK act to make it legal fopr congress critters to use insider trading again.
There is a long history of socially powerful but governance irrelevant decisions used to distract the populace.
While I know that this isn't your focus, here, I feel obliged to add a bit of fundamental biological science to the entire scenario. It's the gigantic pile of crap that some folks want to use as an argument about "when human life begins". Biologically, this is all uninformed rubbish. At the most basic level, life is always CONTINUED (after it began around 3 billion years ago). Metabolism -- the use of chemical-potential energy in foods to power the myriad biochemical and biophysical processes required for cells to sustain their functionality is the most basic (although admittedly reductionist) measure of any animal cell that is alive. Both sperm (not so much) and eggs (bigtime) have a vigorous metabolism, using food energy to power their lives. In other words, they are very much alive, especially the egg, a giant cell with a considerable metabolic rate. In their combination during fertilization, life is therefore continued. I raise this because the "life begins" argument is, among several others, one of those anti-scientific tropes that one regularly hears in defense of the anti-body-autonomy position. It's reminiscent of the autocrats who rubbished that I should get vaccinated for the good of society -- with a vaccine that had a negligible efficacy of preventing transmission. Beware --- the know-nothing science crowd with its autocratic pronouncements seems to be everywhere, these days.
Biology is a thing. Parenting of small children falls on the mother's shoulders because biology has prepared her, and not the father, for that. Ideological wishful thinking doesn't change that.
If a man ejaculates into a woman, he has implicitly agreed to take responsibility for the child that may result. This is why society formerly encouraged monogamy, and required men who got their girlfriends pregnant to marry and provide for them. Part of the argument above is that women should be allowed to have consequence-free sex, and not have to take responsibility for their actions. Responsibility goes both ways.
The argument that a fetus is essentially a parasite on the mother's body can be easily extended - children are essentially parasitic these days until their 20s. This line of reasoning would therefore entitle mothers to kill their children at any age, not just in the womb. Pretty soon you're essentially back at the old pagan law, where the paterfamilias (although in this case, the materfamilias) has power of life and death over their children throughout their lives.
Taking it further: if the baby counts as parasitic upon the mother's resources, it also counts as parasitic on the father. After all, even if the father doesn't marry the mother, the state will enforce child support payments - extracting resources from the father to feed the child. If the issue is to be framed in terms of bodily autonomy, and the fetus is to be considered to have no rights in the matter, then surely the father gets a say? Therefore, by this logic, should the father not be entitled to demand an abortion? Or does bodily autonomy only apply to women?
When it comes to children, bodily autonomy is simply the wrong frame. At any age. Aborting a "clump of cells" by tearing apart a nearly fully formed baby in the womb during the third trimester is murder. One's desire for a career or whatever is not a valid reason to deprive another of their life. The fact that the left so rapidly dropped "my body my choice" as a principle in order to force needles in everyone's arms just demonstrates that they never really believed this.
The "my body, my choice" argument is not invalidated by vaccine mandates. Abortions are not contagious. You can't contract abortion and spread it like you can COVFEFE-45.
The irony of those who resist containing the pandemic. These are the same people who claim the wealthy elite want to depopulate the world and there is no better way to do it than to spread a pandemic far and wide. Talk about Useful Idiots.
These fools think the Zionists in Israel would murder their entire population? Seriously? You are idiots to believe this. Israel being the first to board the vaccine train should tell you that these claims from the anti-vaxxers simply are not true. Considering many of them are anti-semites and believe the Jews intelligent enough and capable enough to control the world, they then contradict themselves and claim the Jews are so stupid they are suiciding themselves by receiving the vaccine.
AFAIC, the question answers itself: Since the woman bears the pregnancy, it ought to be her choice, and I doubt a referendum of women (only) on that question would ever be defeated.
As for the male role in all of this, I make a point of asking before engaging, and if the answer isn't to my liking I move on. A woman can also change her mind - she has that right - and since we both participated, then the responsibility is shared. Everything in life comes with a cost, including getting laid. Don't like that? Get a vasectomy.
Let's be realistic here. Women of means always have a choice. The burden of this nonsense falls squarely on the poor and abused as Caitlin pointed out. Bottom line: no one is denying ANYONE the right to bear a child, however, this argument tilts very hard towards forcing one's will on others, and on that basis alone, I reject it. I am NOT my sister's keeper.
I had a man tell me that women were being big cry babies about abortion not being available in Texas, when they could just travel to another state.
He didn't know the Texas law aims to prosecute anyone who enables or assists with an abortion, so that includes the person who might ride with you to another state, or do anything to assist you in finding an out-of-state provider.
He doesn't know that a Texas representative has sent "cease and desist" letters to advocacy groups who were providing travel funds to poor women. This representative has vowed to go after these groups legally because of a pre-Roe Texas law still on the books.
He also doesn't know that Texas obstetricians have reported they are no longer providing the normal standard of care for pregnant women with wanted pregnancies. The ones who develop complications that require a life-saving abortion are now being sent home until they develop deadly sepsis . . . because the doctors are so afraid of making a timely decision and being accused of performing an unneeded abortion.
He doesn't know that in Texas, 3/4 of the women seeking abortions are poor or low-income.
BTW, this same man ASKED ME IF HOSPITALS KEEP BABY FOOD (jars) ON HAND TO FEED NEWBORNS. This man was 69 years old when he asked this. I had to compose myself before informing him that newborns can only drink milk for several months, and that they are not capable of eating baby food. And while I was at it, I told him that breastfeeding takes many hours per day.
Points One and Four are particularly relevant today. I may disagree somewhat with some of your moral arguments, but agree that, legally speaking, abortion should be a private decision between doctor and patient, especially during the time before a developing baby is "viable."
It's worth noting that, in the absence of any state "trigger" law making abortion illegal as soon as Roe is reversed, the recent SCOTUS decision does not make abortion illegal. It returns the decision-making to the states, and realistically it's unlikely to be overturned anytime soon.
What can be achieved now is to protect the doctor-patient relationship and medical privacy at the state level. This needs to include both issues of pregnancy and the right of doctors to prescribe drugs "off-label" to treat conditions other than those originally approved by the FDA.
A doctor's right, nee obligation, to treat and prescribe under the Hippocratic Oath and right to free speech must not be restricted by the bureaucratic decisions of an employer, hospital, licensing board or certifying agency absent a long-standing pattern of malpractice, incompetence or abuse. Doctors must not be subject to challenge by such bureaucracies based on complaints by politically motivated entities or people who are not the doctor's patients. Individuals must not be subject to coercion of any sort to get them to accept any medical procedure.
I think you are way ahead of the game by noticing the Empire has again wiggled out of public scrutiny; the abortion push is just the degradation of the poorest and does nothing to affect the powerful, as you said. Pumping more oil, starving more people, selling more arms and controlling more of us by manipulation is the game to watch.
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-212) is a United States law that recognizes an embryo or fetus in utero as a legal victim, if they are injured or killed during the commission of any of over 60 listed federal crimes of violence. The law defines "child in utero" as "a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."
If they are only clumps of cells how can they be a victim of violence as a member of the species Homo sapiens ?
again, biology and politics are like oil and water. they do not mix. like religion and science. one can't validate nor invalidate the other. physical/biological/chemical/geological science and mathmatical numbers are apolitical. sure, science and math can be and have been used for financial gains or political agenda, and the scientists as members of a society are as political -- with stakes in political debates -- as the clergymen or the teachers or anyone else. a communist biologist and a capitalist biologist can agree on what the life form, the fetus, the baby, etc are.
what we as a society are willing to accept is the domain of political discussion, not a scientific/biological discussion. this is why "pro-life" and "pro-choice" as two sides of the capitalist-individualist coin -- like the damns and the repugs, no substantive difference -- never excites me into participating in the debate and the fight. in communism, the debate will be entirely different. in capitalism, many women "choose" to go through abortion because they are on their own and want to survive. no one in the same system is qualified to blame them. mind you, that doesn't make those women righteous angels or super smarter heroes. just human beings caught in the machine.
The kidney argument is a good one, and honestly one I had never considered before I first saw it in the Narrative Matrix post a day or two ago.
To continue the analogy, if the person who needed your kidneys--or mine or whoever's--ended up dying, that would be bad. But it would also be bad to force somebody to basically be joined at the hip to someone else for nine months. Assuming that at some point before birth a fetus grows a brain that gives it the ability to think--changing it from simple "life" to "intelligent life"--then past that point, there is no "good solution", and IMHO it then becomes a question of which solution is less bad, of who matters more. Ideally, there would be no unwanted pregnancies in this world and nobody would ever have to make such a decision.
I wanted to respond to the statement about motherhood being more worthwhile than your career according to the guy on Twitter, so I stopped reading to comment on that too:
In addition to it being unreasonable to ask anybody to give up their livelihood in order to raise a child (and yes, it's worth asking why men are never encouraged to do so--I do happen to have an uncle in San Diego who raised the children full-time while their mother worked, but I think that was more a case of "She was working at the time and he was between jobs, so it just made sense" than anybody pressuring him to do so), I'm a man who understands something that evidently lots of other men do not, and I hope that doesn't sound like bragging. But I understand that being a parent is hard, and being pregnant is even harder.
I know I'm not cut out to be a parent, because I don't believe I could strike that perfect balance between not being too strict and not spoiling the kid rotten. I don't think I'm patient enough to respond to a child making a lot of noise or doing something else to get on my nerves without overreacting. I think that if I consistently missed getting a full night's sleep and was woken up again and again during the night because the baby needed something, I'd be a complete wreck. There are probably a bunch of other things I'd need to do or at least do half of that I haven't thought of, but yeah, it would be really hard work. Even if I had no career to give up, I wouldn't look forward to it. And I'm betting that of those people who do think it's worth it and that the joy of having a child makes up for all of it, they'll still acknowledge that yes, taking care of a baby and later a child can often be frustrating.
And all of that is before I even think about what it would be like to carry a baby to term for nine months before all of that hard work starts. Do I like the idea of throwing up in the morning? Of carrying the extra weight and not being able to move around as well as I used to? Of giving up booze and caffeine and anything else I'm accustomed to ingesting that would be bad for the fetus? Of cramps? What about the pain of actual labor, and having to endure that somehow for dozens of hours?
I don't know how anybody who's pregnant gets through it without losing their minds. I highly doubt I could do it. And so I will never tell anybody else they are *obligated* to do this thing that I'm sure would be too much for me.
“Men are never forced to sacrifice successful careers to raise their children.” I’m sure with 7 billion people on earth we could find one man that sacrificed his career to raise his children. Just saying.
I have been saying for a while now, from the unprecedented release of an opinion draft to the news media around that leak leading right up into the actual decision. All of it seems like a planned release intended to directly pit the two sides of the abortion wedge issue against each other in the streets just before the mid terms. In 2014 when the gay marriage decision was announced Obama and the bipartisan leadership were signing the modification to the STOCK act to make it legal fopr congress critters to use insider trading again.
There is a long history of socially powerful but governance irrelevant decisions used to distract the populace.
While I know that this isn't your focus, here, I feel obliged to add a bit of fundamental biological science to the entire scenario. It's the gigantic pile of crap that some folks want to use as an argument about "when human life begins". Biologically, this is all uninformed rubbish. At the most basic level, life is always CONTINUED (after it began around 3 billion years ago). Metabolism -- the use of chemical-potential energy in foods to power the myriad biochemical and biophysical processes required for cells to sustain their functionality is the most basic (although admittedly reductionist) measure of any animal cell that is alive. Both sperm (not so much) and eggs (bigtime) have a vigorous metabolism, using food energy to power their lives. In other words, they are very much alive, especially the egg, a giant cell with a considerable metabolic rate. In their combination during fertilization, life is therefore continued. I raise this because the "life begins" argument is, among several others, one of those anti-scientific tropes that one regularly hears in defense of the anti-body-autonomy position. It's reminiscent of the autocrats who rubbished that I should get vaccinated for the good of society -- with a vaccine that had a negligible efficacy of preventing transmission. Beware --- the know-nothing science crowd with its autocratic pronouncements seems to be everywhere, these days.
"Men are never forced to sacrifice successful careers to raise children."
Would love to see solid evidence to support this claim. Please take a crack at it. You wrote "never."
"Men are never forced to sacrifice successful careers to raise children."
Wrong.
WRONG
Biology is a thing. Parenting of small children falls on the mother's shoulders because biology has prepared her, and not the father, for that. Ideological wishful thinking doesn't change that.
If a man ejaculates into a woman, he has implicitly agreed to take responsibility for the child that may result. This is why society formerly encouraged monogamy, and required men who got their girlfriends pregnant to marry and provide for them. Part of the argument above is that women should be allowed to have consequence-free sex, and not have to take responsibility for their actions. Responsibility goes both ways.
The argument that a fetus is essentially a parasite on the mother's body can be easily extended - children are essentially parasitic these days until their 20s. This line of reasoning would therefore entitle mothers to kill their children at any age, not just in the womb. Pretty soon you're essentially back at the old pagan law, where the paterfamilias (although in this case, the materfamilias) has power of life and death over their children throughout their lives.
Taking it further: if the baby counts as parasitic upon the mother's resources, it also counts as parasitic on the father. After all, even if the father doesn't marry the mother, the state will enforce child support payments - extracting resources from the father to feed the child. If the issue is to be framed in terms of bodily autonomy, and the fetus is to be considered to have no rights in the matter, then surely the father gets a say? Therefore, by this logic, should the father not be entitled to demand an abortion? Or does bodily autonomy only apply to women?
When it comes to children, bodily autonomy is simply the wrong frame. At any age. Aborting a "clump of cells" by tearing apart a nearly fully formed baby in the womb during the third trimester is murder. One's desire for a career or whatever is not a valid reason to deprive another of their life. The fact that the left so rapidly dropped "my body my choice" as a principle in order to force needles in everyone's arms just demonstrates that they never really believed this.
The "my body, my choice" argument is not invalidated by vaccine mandates. Abortions are not contagious. You can't contract abortion and spread it like you can COVFEFE-45.
The irony of those who resist containing the pandemic. These are the same people who claim the wealthy elite want to depopulate the world and there is no better way to do it than to spread a pandemic far and wide. Talk about Useful Idiots.
These fools think the Zionists in Israel would murder their entire population? Seriously? You are idiots to believe this. Israel being the first to board the vaccine train should tell you that these claims from the anti-vaxxers simply are not true. Considering many of them are anti-semites and believe the Jews intelligent enough and capable enough to control the world, they then contradict themselves and claim the Jews are so stupid they are suiciding themselves by receiving the vaccine.
AFAIC, the question answers itself: Since the woman bears the pregnancy, it ought to be her choice, and I doubt a referendum of women (only) on that question would ever be defeated.
As for the male role in all of this, I make a point of asking before engaging, and if the answer isn't to my liking I move on. A woman can also change her mind - she has that right - and since we both participated, then the responsibility is shared. Everything in life comes with a cost, including getting laid. Don't like that? Get a vasectomy.
Let's be realistic here. Women of means always have a choice. The burden of this nonsense falls squarely on the poor and abused as Caitlin pointed out. Bottom line: no one is denying ANYONE the right to bear a child, however, this argument tilts very hard towards forcing one's will on others, and on that basis alone, I reject it. I am NOT my sister's keeper.
I had a man tell me that women were being big cry babies about abortion not being available in Texas, when they could just travel to another state.
He didn't know the Texas law aims to prosecute anyone who enables or assists with an abortion, so that includes the person who might ride with you to another state, or do anything to assist you in finding an out-of-state provider.
He doesn't know that a Texas representative has sent "cease and desist" letters to advocacy groups who were providing travel funds to poor women. This representative has vowed to go after these groups legally because of a pre-Roe Texas law still on the books.
He also doesn't know that Texas obstetricians have reported they are no longer providing the normal standard of care for pregnant women with wanted pregnancies. The ones who develop complications that require a life-saving abortion are now being sent home until they develop deadly sepsis . . . because the doctors are so afraid of making a timely decision and being accused of performing an unneeded abortion.
He doesn't know that in Texas, 3/4 of the women seeking abortions are poor or low-income.
BTW, this same man ASKED ME IF HOSPITALS KEEP BABY FOOD (jars) ON HAND TO FEED NEWBORNS. This man was 69 years old when he asked this. I had to compose myself before informing him that newborns can only drink milk for several months, and that they are not capable of eating baby food. And while I was at it, I told him that breastfeeding takes many hours per day.
But he has opinions, y'all.
Points One and Four are particularly relevant today. I may disagree somewhat with some of your moral arguments, but agree that, legally speaking, abortion should be a private decision between doctor and patient, especially during the time before a developing baby is "viable."
It's worth noting that, in the absence of any state "trigger" law making abortion illegal as soon as Roe is reversed, the recent SCOTUS decision does not make abortion illegal. It returns the decision-making to the states, and realistically it's unlikely to be overturned anytime soon.
What can be achieved now is to protect the doctor-patient relationship and medical privacy at the state level. This needs to include both issues of pregnancy and the right of doctors to prescribe drugs "off-label" to treat conditions other than those originally approved by the FDA.
A doctor's right, nee obligation, to treat and prescribe under the Hippocratic Oath and right to free speech must not be restricted by the bureaucratic decisions of an employer, hospital, licensing board or certifying agency absent a long-standing pattern of malpractice, incompetence or abuse. Doctors must not be subject to challenge by such bureaucracies based on complaints by politically motivated entities or people who are not the doctor's patients. Individuals must not be subject to coercion of any sort to get them to accept any medical procedure.
Curious timing I would say. Just before an election. Anyone think a Republican majority is a shoe-in now?
I think you are way ahead of the game by noticing the Empire has again wiggled out of public scrutiny; the abortion push is just the degradation of the poorest and does nothing to affect the powerful, as you said. Pumping more oil, starving more people, selling more arms and controlling more of us by manipulation is the game to watch.
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-212) is a United States law that recognizes an embryo or fetus in utero as a legal victim, if they are injured or killed during the commission of any of over 60 listed federal crimes of violence. The law defines "child in utero" as "a member of the species Homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."
If they are only clumps of cells how can they be a victim of violence as a member of the species Homo sapiens ?
again, biology and politics are like oil and water. they do not mix. like religion and science. one can't validate nor invalidate the other. physical/biological/chemical/geological science and mathmatical numbers are apolitical. sure, science and math can be and have been used for financial gains or political agenda, and the scientists as members of a society are as political -- with stakes in political debates -- as the clergymen or the teachers or anyone else. a communist biologist and a capitalist biologist can agree on what the life form, the fetus, the baby, etc are.
what we as a society are willing to accept is the domain of political discussion, not a scientific/biological discussion. this is why "pro-life" and "pro-choice" as two sides of the capitalist-individualist coin -- like the damns and the repugs, no substantive difference -- never excites me into participating in the debate and the fight. in communism, the debate will be entirely different. in capitalism, many women "choose" to go through abortion because they are on their own and want to survive. no one in the same system is qualified to blame them. mind you, that doesn't make those women righteous angels or super smarter heroes. just human beings caught in the machine.
The kidney argument is a good one, and honestly one I had never considered before I first saw it in the Narrative Matrix post a day or two ago.
To continue the analogy, if the person who needed your kidneys--or mine or whoever's--ended up dying, that would be bad. But it would also be bad to force somebody to basically be joined at the hip to someone else for nine months. Assuming that at some point before birth a fetus grows a brain that gives it the ability to think--changing it from simple "life" to "intelligent life"--then past that point, there is no "good solution", and IMHO it then becomes a question of which solution is less bad, of who matters more. Ideally, there would be no unwanted pregnancies in this world and nobody would ever have to make such a decision.
I wanted to respond to the statement about motherhood being more worthwhile than your career according to the guy on Twitter, so I stopped reading to comment on that too:
In addition to it being unreasonable to ask anybody to give up their livelihood in order to raise a child (and yes, it's worth asking why men are never encouraged to do so--I do happen to have an uncle in San Diego who raised the children full-time while their mother worked, but I think that was more a case of "She was working at the time and he was between jobs, so it just made sense" than anybody pressuring him to do so), I'm a man who understands something that evidently lots of other men do not, and I hope that doesn't sound like bragging. But I understand that being a parent is hard, and being pregnant is even harder.
I know I'm not cut out to be a parent, because I don't believe I could strike that perfect balance between not being too strict and not spoiling the kid rotten. I don't think I'm patient enough to respond to a child making a lot of noise or doing something else to get on my nerves without overreacting. I think that if I consistently missed getting a full night's sleep and was woken up again and again during the night because the baby needed something, I'd be a complete wreck. There are probably a bunch of other things I'd need to do or at least do half of that I haven't thought of, but yeah, it would be really hard work. Even if I had no career to give up, I wouldn't look forward to it. And I'm betting that of those people who do think it's worth it and that the joy of having a child makes up for all of it, they'll still acknowledge that yes, taking care of a baby and later a child can often be frustrating.
And all of that is before I even think about what it would be like to carry a baby to term for nine months before all of that hard work starts. Do I like the idea of throwing up in the morning? Of carrying the extra weight and not being able to move around as well as I used to? Of giving up booze and caffeine and anything else I'm accustomed to ingesting that would be bad for the fetus? Of cramps? What about the pain of actual labor, and having to endure that somehow for dozens of hours?
I don't know how anybody who's pregnant gets through it without losing their minds. I highly doubt I could do it. And so I will never tell anybody else they are *obligated* to do this thing that I'm sure would be too much for me.
And now I will read thoughts 6-10...
“Men are never forced to sacrifice successful careers to raise their children.” I’m sure with 7 billion people on earth we could find one man that sacrificed his career to raise his children. Just saying.
Ms. Johnstone, this is some great writing. Several deeply though-through opinions I've not heard before. Many thanks.