To agree with the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v Wade?

[thereareotherways]

Obviously I can predict the voting already! Ha.

TL;DR (at the top!): I support abortion but think Roe v Wade (and later cases) are not legally sound, and there are better ways to secure women's rights that would have more public support.

I'm personally not opposed to abortion in most real-life circumstances. I think after viability I would prefer other options to be explored, but I think most women having later-term abortions are doing it for serious medical reasons and I don't think that should be prosecuted. That said, I also am okay in principle with regulating abortion and I'm not an absolutist re: women's control: I think the fetus/baby does have some rights (which I weight proportionally more as the baby grows).

As I understand it, Roe v Wade and Casey rely on a right to "liberty" in the US constitution (primarily the 14th amendment), which otherwise doesn't mention abortion. I'm not a lawyer at all, I find this tenuous at best. Liberty has always had implied limits based on what's acceptable in society, and abortion was illegal until fairly recently. I don't think there's any justification for claiming that there's an implied consent of the people that abortion is morally acceptable - and the polarisation of the US on this issue reflects that.

I think the decision in Roe/Casey to impose abortion via activist judges was a poor decision both legally and politically. This is a clear case where elected representatives need to pass legislation that reflects their constituents' positions. If that legislation differs from state-to-state, well, that's the whole point of a federal system. Pro-choice candidates need to get elected in red states and then they will have the actual consent of the people, not tenuous implied consent.

The decision in Dobbs is here and good reading: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

I also have a faint hope that now that this has been overturned, both Republicans and Democrats might now return their focus to legislation instead of Supreme Court nominees. The power of the Supreme Court is too dominating in US politics: we should be pleased to see them ceding some power back to the legislature, i.e., the people's representatives!

Women will die because of this ruling. If you think this is in any way securing women's rights you are fucking deluded

You made an absolutely ridiculous example to take it to the extreme to get your point across. What would more than likely happen is the poor 12 Yr old wouldn't know she was pregnant cos at that age she probably would know her body that well and would be in an extremely difficult state after what happened. So she would probably find out at about 8wks where the foetus would have a heartbeat and therefore abortion would be illegal.

That is the reality of it, not your stupid example!

That poor child would be forced to carry that baby to term and then give birth whilst having to deal with that fact she'd been raped......but yeah that 8wk old foetus has rights too.

OP, you do realise the decision has been delegated to individual state level - and 26 of them have already said they will ban abortion? Some of them even for rape, incest, or risk to the mother’s life?
How can you possibly defend such an outcome for women?

There may be better ways to establish women's rights in law, but let's not destroy whatever rights women do have in the hope of jam tomorrow.

How about protecting what women have while establishing firm, legal grounds for soothing even better?

Simple answer. All males over the age of puberty, should, by law have the snip, then it can be reversed when they are in a relationship with a woman and they both agree to have children.
They would, of course, have to be carefully screened before reversal to ensure neither was being coerced into an unwanted pregnancy.

Good idea, don't you think?

I'm saying that inherently abortion is a question of balancing two competing rights/interests
Not so. My body, my decision.
This opens the door to serious abuse of women, physically, coercivally, emotionally.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s wrong.

Your ignorance is overwhelming OP

The problem is that this decision is rooted in a hatred for women and women's autonomy. Its men wanting to control women. That's what this is about.

All I can see is blah blah in the opening post. I think some things are so fundamentally wrong that thought experiments are superfluous.

This!

OP, stop being so flippant about the very real (and terrifying) impact that this will have on women and girls. It's just another erosion of us as autonomous people with rights and power, and it's heartbreaking. It's also dangerous. Lives will be lost by this. And I'm not talking lumps of cells, or babies. Real, actual lives.

Liberty relates to bodily autonomy. If you need to use someone else's body to survive, there are no laws mandating that (unless you are a pregnant female). I cannot mandate that someone else donate blood or a kidney to me because it will save my life. Let alone demand such donations if it were to harm or even kill the other person. That is where liberty comes into it. Apparently in the USA it is only females who don't get to have bodily autonomy. But then females are not in the constitution anyway, so presumably less than human to start with.

I just can’t get my head around that this means even when the woman’s life is in danger she still can’t have an abortion. Or where a fetus has a medical condition incompatible with life and will suffer upon birth and die. I just can’t believe any western country believes this is fine. It sickens me.

As early as possible, as late as necessary.

I’m not interested in the repeal of Roe v Wade because it is an American issue being played out in their society & polity which will have zero effect on the UK.

If sufficiently large numbers of the American electorate care enough about this issue to make it a major factor in how they decide to vote in the mid-term elections this year, pro-choice candidates will be elected as lawmakers. That’s democracy.

Their county, their constitution, their laws, their jurisdiction.

Women will die. Other women will be prosecuted for pursuing healthcare. This decision is an outrage.

I’m no expert on US politics. But surely the problem with your “let democracy decide” line is that up to two dozen right wing states would never vote for a Democrat President running on an a freedom of personal choice ticket.

Hence when they lose any given future election, with a Democrat then “enforcing” US wide abolition rights, they would then feel disenfranchised etc. THEN you will have a Republican Presidential candidate promising to bring back the US wide ban if he gets voted into office. And on and on and on.

What was once an issue of human rights will now just be a political football, with women’s right to an abortion being the football. The whole point of Roe vs Wade was, surely, (to put it somewhat bluntly) to stop the possibility of religious extremists from deciding a vital policy/human right for everyone.

There's already a long running thread about this, why not post your ant-choice shite there?

Wow. Just wow

Today is not the day.

There is no balancing of rights. Even if we weren't discussing a small bundle of cells (which for most abortions we are) no-one else should have rights to your body. But today America joined the countries where women do not have bodily autonomy. If some States pass the legislation they threatened a woman's husband would be able to sue her doctor for saving her life if she has an ectopic pregnancy. A rapist will be able to sue his victim for not continuing a forced pregnancy.

It matters here. If you want to talk about dodgy legal grounds, how about the fact that abortion is regulated under criminal rather than healthcare law.

It matters because the same organisations that funded pro life campaigns in America fund protests and legal challenges to exclusion zones here (see 40 days for life).

It matters because despite 90% of the population being pro choice, our Government is not. They tried to stop women being able to access medication from home (despite NICE guidance recommending it) and Jacob Reese-Moggs has said the fact women can access abortion is the saddest part of modern British life.

Seriously no surgeon is going to perform a termination at 37 weeks, without exceptional reason. This isn't the time to worry about extreme what ifs, there's plenty of real stuff to worry about.

That it was poor case law isn’t really in dispute. The issue should have been decided under equal protection and sex discrimination. It would have been stronger, more settled case law.

The Supreme Court has the power to decide which cases it will hear. It could have waited for a better case that would have secured abortion rights forever. It took this case and made this decision, not as a neutral decision on case law, but as a political action, an assault on women’s rights.

I can see the point you're making OP: you say that by ruling on the issue, the US Supreme Court involved itself in something that is really the job of legislators.

In reality that ship has sailed now and because opposition to abortion is so entrenched, reversing Roe v Wade won't undo the damage.

I'm saying that inherently abortion is a question of balancing two competing rights/interests, and different people have different ideas on where the balance should fall.

And Roe vs Wade gave different people the opportunity to make their own decisions based on their own personal ideas.

The overturning of it will deny millions of women that choice, resulting in severe illness, death, and countless children being brought up in terrible circumstances due to lack of money, parenting skills and poor mental health...in many cases as a direct result of their mother's being forced to continue a pregnancy that is detrimental to their own health and wellbeing.

This opens the door to anti abortionists and religious groups to prevent women exercising reproductive rights. It is an absolute travesty.

You are allowed to struggle with it - if it's you. Otherwise it isn't your business. But this is the USA, and "rights" are all too often determined not by law and more often by money and skin colour.

You chose today to have this intellectual exercise? Fucking hell. The GOP has waited for this day for decades, go find some Evangelicals to celebrate with! It's a shit day for women and women's rights.

Well actually that is how it works. In the UK anyway. You can have an abortion for medical reasons up to term. That means the baby is killed before it is born. Of course it's only ever done very rarely and in cases where the baby would not survive long and would suffer greatly. But it is wrong to say that an abortion at 37 weeks is the same as induced labour.
In the UK it is highly unlikely that a healthy foetus would be aborted that late, regardless of the circumstances of its conception so that is not relevant.