Abortion megathread II

[Ben Kenobi]

Ben could you elaborate? Do you think the right to privacy is simply being misapplied, or that it shouldn't exist at all?

The tone and the attitude I get from Roe, and followed up by Casey is that when you have a nail, any hammer will do.

My concept of rights is that rights are not intended to be private. I believe in the right to life, to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Who among them would claim that one only has the right to liberty in private? All of these claims are very public assertions of freedom.

If one means by a freedom of privacy, a freedom of licentiousness, they already have that in liberty. The issue they have with liberty is that liberty is public. We do have liberty, and part of the exercise of liberty is that we are free to spend time away from other people to do as we see fit, provided that it doesn't infringe upon the rights of others. However, it also encompasses rights to worship in public, to speak in public, freedom of the press, freedom of movement.

To say that there is a right to privacy, does not assume a right to commit crimes without witnesses, merely an assertion that we have a right to time to ourselves, which is already included in liberty.

Now, with respect to abortion, we would not say it was an assertion of privacy to drown your children in secret. We would consider this to be murder. Privacy is not a defense in this argument, so why is it a defense in abortion?

Abortions are not private. You go out in public to meet with a doctor inside a clinic with nurses and staff who meet you, and then they perform the abortion. Abortions are no more 'private' then the birth of a child. To argue that abortions cannot be regulated because they fall into the private sphere, is a bad argument, because clearly we do regulate and investigate all surgical clinics. The only assertion they can be provided is that doctor-patient confidentiality must remain, even as the abortions do not appear on the medical records of those who have them. This is a serious issue wrt to treatment, as there are many complications that arise from abortion, that only occur years down the line. When a doctor is missing this relevant bit of medical history, it can lead to improper and harmful diagnoses.

Arguing that abortion falls in the penumbras and emanations of privacy, is harmful to women, and a serious threat to their health. The argument should be made, that abortions pose a serious risk to women, and ought to be regulated in accordance to their risk.

Secondly, abortion is an elective procedure. It is never medically necessary. It is a means of convenience, in preservation of a lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. No woman will die if they do not get a timely abortion, other then the well known cases of an ectopic pregnancy. To assert that women have the right to an elective surgical procedure is to put a burden on doctors which they ought not to bear. Do we argue that women have the right to cosmetic surgery, even in the cases where it would drastically improve their quality of life? No. So why the special treatment for abortion?

Finally, we get back to liberty. If privacy falls under the heading of liberty, it comes with the caveat, that we are not justified in trampling the rights of another in the assertion of liberty. Now, it is not proper to assert this applies only to moral actors. Those who are moral actors have the duty to recognise the rights of those without these facilities. This includes children and some elderly. Whereas they are not considered responsible for their own actions, we do consider the moral actors having a duty to respect the individual rights and freedoms that these non-moral actors possess. It is also notable that they possess these rights not because of their former status, or their potential to become moral actors, they possess these rights even if they will never become moral actors, simply because they are people.

Now, we can extend this to the unborn. Yes, they are not moral actors. However, we do have a duty to the unborn to respect the rights which apply to them. This means taking care of their health, and for a pregnant woman to be careful about what she eats and drinks to ensure that her baby is healthy. We do not consider it a violation of privacy to insist that a woman who is pregnant avoid alcohol, yet we think it's perfectly fine to have an abortion? This makes no sense to me. If we have the moral obligation to care for the health and welfare of the unborn by not drinking, then we also have a responsibility to respect the right to life of the unborn by rejecting abortion.

[ricketyclik]

Basically. Talking about abortion is like talking about the weather. Nothing you say will ever change it.

A person's a person, no matter how small. Some people don't care, and will kill people out of a simple desire for a more convenient life. Since we can't throw all those people in jail, and since some of them have sympathetic stories, we keep abortion legal.

I find the hard line pro-life* viewpoint more appealing than the hard line pro-choice. I can understand a person getting worked up over the death of an innocent. I have a tougher time understanding why someone would take the right to a medical procedure so seriously. One is a fundamental human right, and the other is something that ought to be reigned in.

As a matter of public policy, I think the government should define life as the presence of brain activity, and it should be committed to protecting humans that exhibit brain activity. That fits with a common medical definition of death (the ending brain activity) and it gives plenty of time (a few months) for the sympathetic cases to work out their problems before running into a time limit.

*Not including the clinic bombers

I kind of agree with the general thrust of this post, ie, that a human can be defined thus by a complete set of DNA.

However, I lean more toward the pro-choice side of the argument. I'm not that articulate on the subject, but I'll give it a go...

As a general principal, I think people ought to be able to do what they like, as long as it doesn't hurt other people. (I realise the qualifier there is in contradiction with my opening statement).

• I think there are more than enough people on the planet.

• It's hard enough being a good parent if you plan for and want children, let alone if you accidentally have one.

• Mammals commonly practice infanticide when times are lean - from a group perspective this makes sense. For this reason I'm quite sympathetic to mothers who abandon or kill their newborns as well, although of course I don't condone or encourage it.

• Criminalizing abortion just drives it underground where it is practiced far more dangerously than it need be (apply same argument to prohibition generally here).

Now don't get me wrong - I am a fan of humanity and the fact that we're able to rise above our instincts to a large degree in order to create and maintain a civilization - but it just seems to me that on balance the pro-choice position is a better one than the pro-life.

Having re-read the above, I guess my central thesis is that in nature species should not be too successful, both for their own and the eco-system's good. In the case of an extremely successful species like ours, self-selecting attrition done in a relatively humane way, while yes impinging upon human rights to some extent, is still in this case for the greater good.

Having said all of the above, I acknowledge the pro-life point of view as valid, and I do understand it, I just personally disagree. If I were in a position to legislate any of this, I would definitely sit down and talk to people of other attitudes, listen carefully and think long and hard on the subject.

[Monk]

Hey Ben,

I'll happily admit I'm not an expert on the law stuff, and I haven't studied the case in question, but I assume the privacy part comes into place out of the fact that whether we're supposed to label it a human or just a cluster of cells, you have to take into account that it's still within the body of a person and as such subject to that person's rights.

[Elok]

Criminalizing abortion just drives it underground where it is practiced far more dangerously than it need be (apply same argument to prohibition generally here).

A rather shaky argument for two reasons:

A. If you believe the fetus is a person, which is pretty much the only reason to oppose abortion, the banning of abortion only terminates more human life if more than 50% of all women who would have had legal abortions have illegal ones and die as a result. Otherwise it's a net gain, albeit less tidy since half the mangled bodies aren't put in baggies and tossed in a biohazard bin at Planned Parenthood.

B. Prohibition was a failure not just because people continued to drink, but because their thwarting the law led to the development of vast organized crime empires. Does anyone believe there will be turf wars between underground abortionists named Larry the Forceps and Big Joe Saline?

[mrmitchell]

Now, with respect to abortion, we would not say it was an assertion of privacy to drown your children in secret. We would consider this to be murder. Privacy is not a defense in this argument, so why is it a defense in abortion?

Abortions are not private. You go out in public to meet with a doctor inside a clinic with nurses and staff who meet you, and then they perform the abortion. Abortions are no more 'private' then the birth of a child. To argue that abortions cannot be regulated because they fall into the private sphere, is a bad argument, because clearly we do regulate and investigate all surgical clinics. The only assertion they can be provided is that doctor-patient confidentiality must remain, even as the abortions do not appear on the medical records of those who have them. This is a serious issue wrt to treatment, as there are many complications that arise from abortion, that only occur years down the line. When a doctor is missing this relevant bit of medical history, it can lead to improper and harmful diagnoses.

Arguing that abortion falls in the penumbras and emanations of privacy, is harmful to women, and a serious threat to their health. The argument should be made, that abortions pose a serious risk to women, and ought to be regulated in accordance to their risk.

Wikipedia disagrees with you. According to them abortion up to the sixteenth week has been shown to be less risky for women than carrying the baby to term. Is abortion really not put on a woman's medical record? If so I gotta say that yeah it should be. To me the whole point of the privacy argument was that criminalization makes the state intrude into a private decision between the woman and her doctor which is protected by patient confidentiality. As long as patient confidentiality remains protected (ie only medical staff see the records), I think the abortion should be on record. Does patient confidentiality mean information should be restricted to that specific doctor which the patient worked with?

Secondly, abortion is an elective procedure. It is never medically necessary. It is a means of convenience, in preservation of a lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. No woman will die if they do not get a timely abortion, other then the well known cases of an ectopic pregnancy. To assert that women have the right to an elective surgical procedure is to put a burden on doctors which they ought not to bear. Do we argue that women have the right to cosmetic surgery, even in the cases where it would drastically improve their quality of life? No. So why the special treatment for abortion?

"Burden on doctors"? I'm also not sure that abortion is something women can go to the ER for. It's not like a woman on a plane who needs an abortion will make the plane land to get one (as opposed to having a heart attack for example). You also have to pay for abortion, so I really don't see what burden is being placed on doctors. Anyone who works in an abortion clinic is doing it on purpose, they know what they're doing.

Finally, we get back to liberty. If privacy falls under the heading of liberty, it comes with the caveat, that we are not justified in trampling the rights of another in the assertion of liberty. Now, it is not proper to assert this applies only to moral actors. Those who are moral actors have the duty to recognise the rights of those without these facilities. This includes children and some elderly. Whereas they are not considered responsible for their own actions, we do consider the moral actors having a duty to respect the individual rights and freedoms that these non-moral actors possess. It is also notable that they possess these rights not because of their former status, or their potential to become moral actors, they possess these rights even if they will never become moral actors, simply because they are people.

Now, we can extend this to the unborn. Yes, they are not moral actors. However, we do have a duty to the unborn to respect the rights which apply to them. This means taking care of their health, and for a pregnant woman to be careful about what she eats and drinks to ensure that her baby is healthy. We do not consider it a violation of privacy to insist that a woman who is pregnant avoid alcohol, yet we think it's perfectly fine to have an abortion? This makes no sense to me. If we have the moral obligation to care for the health and welfare of the unborn by not drinking, then we also have a responsibility to respect the right to life of the unborn by rejecting abortion.

Is it illegal for a pregnant woman to drink? There's a difference between a public health campaign that says "Hey don't drink for two if you're eating for two" and making it a crime to provide expectant mothers with alcohol.

Also the SCOTUS has not judged fetuses to have the rights of real people under the US constitution. I'm not aware of any lesser courts that have, either.

Right now abortion makes me uneasy personally, but the way I see it, the laws of the United States certainly allow for it. BK does have one point in that privacy is not at all the most efficient path to go from the specifically defined rights to the abortion right.

[ricketyclik]

A rather shaky argument for two reasons:

A. If you believe the fetus is a person, which is pretty much the only reason to oppose abortion, the banning of abortion only terminates more human life if more than 50% of all women who would have had legal abortions have illegal ones and die as a result. Otherwise it's a net gain, albeit less tidy since half the mangled bodies aren't put in baggies and tossed in a biohazard bin at Planned Parenthood.?

Premise is incorrect, in terms of what I meant. I believe the foetus is a person, but am arguing that less people is a net gain. What I'm saying there is that the abortion would occur either way, without prohibition safely, with prohibition more likely to be unsafe.

B. Prohibition was a failure not just because people continued to drink, but because their thwarting the law led to the development of vast organized crime empires. Does anyone believe there will be turf wars between underground abortionists named Larry the Forceps and Big Joe Saline?

Again, wrong premise. Prohibition drives the practice underground, causing the unsafe varieties of practice. Eg, illegal stills producing poisonous liquor. Whether prohibited or not, the practice still occurs.

[Elok]

? It seems you didn't read my post correctly. Prohibition was a huge mistake at least in part because it led to a stunning growth in mob violence. That did not and would not happen with abortions, so the situations are not comparable. And as I said, unless you don't believe the fetus is a person--in which case you have no reason to oppose abortion in the first place--illegal abortion is actually "safer" in the sense of causing fewer casualties, unless a massive number of women choose to have abortions anyway and/or a massive number of women die as a result.

[Ben Kenobi]

Wikipedia disagrees with you. According to them abortion up to the sixteenth week has been shown to be less risky for women than carrying the baby to term.

We don't really know because statistics regarding abortion complications are not officially kept by an independent body, especially not long-term abortion complications.

Is abortion really not put on a woman's medical record? If so I gotta say that yeah it should be.

No, it's not. Abortion clinics will not release their records to other physicians under any circumstances. Privacy perhaps for the clinic, but not of any sort that would benefit the woman.

To me the whole point of the privacy argument was that criminalization makes the state intrude into a private decision between the woman and her doctor which is protected by patient confidentiality.

Again, privacy explicitly does not protect illegal actions. You cannot kill people in private, and expect that the crime will be treated differently. If abortion is determined to be illegal, then the privacy argument fades with the wash. This is why one cannot argue that privacy is the reason to make abortion legal, when the question is, "should abortion be legal or not". Privacy is irrelevant to this question.

As long as patient confidentiality remains protected (ie only medical staff see the records), I think the abortion should be on record. Does patient confidentiality mean information should be restricted to that specific doctor which the patient worked with?

It's also available for recordkeeping. Say I'm a medical researcher and I want to know the incidence of breast cancer among women who have had an abortion at any point of their life. I cannot get those statistics. The release with the names is only available to the woman's physician, but the data without identifying information would also be available to researchers just as it is with any other medical procedure. Arguing that it would demonise the surgery is NOT an argument against it.

"Burden on doctors"? I'm also not sure that abortion is something women can go to the ER for.

If you are saying that a woman has a right to an abortion, then that has a corresponding burden on the doctor to provide an abortion, or to refer to someone who will provide the abortion. It is a restriction on his conscience rights to decline to refer for an abortion. This is why if abortion is truly an elective procedure that is medically unnecessary, why it is wrong to force doctors to refer for abortion, and it is a limitation on his freedoms.

It's not like a woman on a plane who needs an abortion will make the plane land to get one (as opposed to having a heart attack for example). You also have to pay for abortion, so I really don't see what burden is being placed on doctors.

That's not the way it works up here, and there are people working to change that in the US too, who argue that women have a right to an abortion, and shouldn't have to pay, using Roe's arguments. If it is a constitutional right, then it makes sense to me.

Is it illegal for a pregnant woman to drink? There's a difference between a public health campaign that says "Hey don't drink for two if you're eating for two" and making it a crime to provide expectant mothers with alcohol.

There is a difference between FAS and abortion.

Also the SCOTUS has not judged fetuses to have the rights of real people under the US constitution. I'm not aware of any lesser courts that have, either.

Doesn't matter. Rights exist regardless of whether SCOTUS declares on them or not. Slavery was wrong even when it was constitutionally legal.

BK does have one point in that privacy is not at all the most efficient path to go from the specifically defined rights to the abortion right.

Which is why Casey used a different argument altogether.

[ricketyclik]

? It seems you didn't read my post correctly. Prohibition was a huge mistake at least in part because it led to a stunning growth in mob violence. That did not and would not happen with abortions, so the situations are not comparable.

No, I didn't misread your post, you misread mine. They are comparable, because of another aspect of prohibition, which is that it drives the practice underground, making it more dangerous.

And as I said, unless you don't believe the fetus is a person--in which case you have no reason to oppose abortion in the first place--illegal abortion is actually "safer" in the sense of causing fewer casualties, unless a massive number of women choose to have abortions anyway and/or a massive number of women die as a result.

Yes, I see what you're saying, but I'm arguing that the safety of the foetus is less important than that of the mother, if the feotus is unwanted. As for the women choosing to have abortions anyway, well, yes, I believe they will (and do) do exactly that.

[mrmitchell]

We don't really know because statistics regarding abortion complications are not officially kept by an independent body, especially not long-term abortion complications.

No, it's not. Abortion clinics will not release their records to other physicians under any circumstances. Privacy perhaps for the clinic, but not of any sort that would benefit the woman.

That definitely needs to change. As far as protecting women in the event of abortion being recriminalized in the future, first of all, they can't be prosecuted under an ex post facto law, and secondly, when SCOTUS went with stare decisis they made it pretty clear that abortion isn't going anywhere.

Again, privacy explicitly does not protect illegal actions. You cannot kill people in private, and expect that the crime will be treated differently. If abortion is determined to be illegal, then the privacy argument fades with the wash. This is why one cannot argue that privacy is the reason to make abortion legal, when the question is, "should abortion be legal or not". Privacy is irrelevant to this question.

If you are saying that a woman has a right to an abortion, then that has a corresponding burden on the doctor to provide an abortion, or to refer to someone who will provide the abortion. It is a restriction on his conscience rights to decline to refer for an abortion. This is why if abortion is truly an elective procedure that is medically unnecessary, why it is wrong to force doctors to refer for abortion, and it is a limitation on his freedoms.

Conscience rights are bull**** don't go there. People that become doctors by choice (all doctors) know what they're getting in to. Nobody joins the military and then says "oh hey I don't believe in fighting stop trampling my rights!"

That's not the way it works up here, and there are people working to change that in the US too, who argue that women have a right to an abortion, and shouldn't have to pay, using Roe's arguments. If it is a constitutional right, then it makes sense to me.

I can't really believe that is happening unless under the general umbrella of socialized healthcare. If it's under those terms, I can understand, but otherwise that argument is just retarded. Women have the right to own Jaguars too but they can't demand them to be free.

There is a difference between FAS and abortion.

Why did you bring it up?

Doesn't matter. Rights exist regardless of whether SCOTUS declares on them or not. Slavery was wrong even when it was constitutionally legal.

Things can be wrong but still legal. What I'm saying is I don't see how abortion can be made illegal without a constitutional amendment.

[Ben Kenobi]

I'll happily admit I'm not an expert on the law stuff, and I haven't studied the case in question, but I assume the privacy part comes into place out of the fact that whether we're supposed to label it a human or just a cluster of cells, you have to take into account that it's still within the body of a person and as such subject to that person's rights.

That's really the crux. Privacy is irrelevant. If it is a child, then privacy doesn't make it right. If it's just a blob of tissue, then you could do it legally in public.

This is why Roe is such bad law. Roe explicitly says, unless there is consensus on when life begins that privacy must protect the right of a woman to have an abortion. The problem with this argument is apparent when we look at Dred Scott. Just because some people believed they should be able to own slaves, doesn't mean that it is right to do so. If the slave is equally a person, then slavery is wrong because it denies that fundamental equality.

This is why abortion is so similar. Abortion denies that the unborn child is a person, that everyone once lived inside their mother and that the same person in the womb is the same person on the outside. We know this and the law knows this because it asserts that paternity begins with conception. We hold DNA tests to determine the identity, and yet we deny that the existance of a unique genetic code is an indicator of the fundamental humanity of the unborn.

[St Jon]

Eh, what's to discuss? That humanity/"personhood" begins with conception is quite self-evident to me, and the idea that physical location or development have anything to do with human rights plainly silly. I haven't yet met a pro-choicer who can seem to understand that, and there's not much point in trying with the Supremes sitting on the issue.

It's liberty and self-determination.

Would you wish a raped woman to carry the result of that crime to birth?

There is no arguement on this as to argue with a pro-lifer is just the same as arguing with a creationist or flat-worlder.

[Elok]

No, I didn't misread your post, you misread mine. They are comparable, because of another aspect of prohibition, which is that it drives the practice underground, making it more dangerous.

No, they are NOT. A certain percentage of women may choose to abort anyway, but many might very well be deterred by the illegality of it, thus sparing the life of the child. Unless more than fifty percent of all women who would have aborted legally abort illegally AND die as a consequence, which sounds unlikely to me, the practice is actually less dangerous underground. It's safer for the mother, but if you only consider the mother's life worth saving the whole argument is meaningless from the get-go.

And to ignore the whole organized-crime aspect of prohibition is a serious mistake. We didn't repeal prohibition because some people were dying from bootleg liquor. Even today, very few people talk about legalizing commonly-abused drugs out of concern that some hophead will shoot himself up with bad smack and die. In both cases the main arguments for legalization revolve(d) partly around wasted resources on ineffectual enforcement, but of course mostly on the growth in violent crime. While brandishing a wire coat-hanger is a popular pro-choice argument of sorts, that was not really a major factor in prohibition, making comparisons faulty at best. You might as well say, "modern coal power plants, like the furnaces of Hitler's death camps, churn massive amounts of pollution into the atmosphere." Technically it's true, but it sounds monumentally silly to make such a comparison.

[Elok]

It's liberty and self-determination.

Would you wish a raped woman to carry the result of that crime to birth?

There is no arguement on this as to argue with a pro-lifer is just the same as arguing with a creationist or flat-worlder.

If you were the product of a rape, would your mother be justified in shooting you now? Maybe people are more than just illustrations of their parents' good or bad choices

IOW, I see your self-righteous smugness and raise you double

[Ben Kenobi]

Conscience rights are bull**** don't go there. People that become doctors by choice (all doctors) know what they're getting in to. Nobody joins the military and then says "oh hey I don't believe in fighting stop trampling my rights!"

Bad analogy. Where does it explicitly say that a doctor must be trained to perform an abortion? The Oath that doctors do explicitly rejects abortion by saying "primum non nocere" First do no harm. The oath and the purpose of a doctor is to heal, not to kill. How does abortion heal a woman? What medical condition does abortion cure?

The analogy to the military would be slaughtering innocents under order. If your commander ordered you to shoot unarmed civilians, would you not consider that a violation of what you signed on for as a soldier? There have always been codes of warfare, just as there are for doctors.

I can't really believe that is happening unless under the general umbrella of socialized healthcare. If it's under those terms, I can understand, but otherwise that argument is just retarded. Women have the right to own Jaguars too but they can't demand them to be free.

They don't have the right to own Jaguars. See, this is the problem with the terminology. You are permitted to smoke, but you do not have the right to smoke, not in the same sense as you have the right to liberty. Someone can curtail your access to a Jag, without violating your fundamental liberties, either through cost, or something else. But you cannot curtail someone's freedom of speech.

The same is true of abortion. What you really believe is that abortion ought to be permitted, not that a woman has a fundamental right to an abortion. This also presumes that society may curtail abortion as it sees fit, just as it can with Jags. There isn't even a fundamental right to drive, let alone own a Jag.

Why did you bring it up?

It's like saying, we don't execute litterbugs. Abortion is worse then drinking while pregnant. Therefore, even if all we had is a public action campaign against drinking while pregnant, it doesn't stand to reason that there should not be harsher penalties for abortion. The two are not proportionate to each other.

Things can be wrong but still legal. What I'm saying is I don't see how abortion can be made illegal without a constitutional amendment.

Abortion was made law without one. It can be undone the same way it was done. Majority of the SCOTUS to overturn.