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a kind of death panel that holds the power to elevate the potential life of a fetus over the actual life of a patient.
Except it is every clear that they don't care about the life of the fetus either since the publicized cases pretty much all involve a fetus that would die within hours of birth.
6th Grade Biology taught us that an 'ectopic pregnancy' is, by definition, unviable. By their own Book, God creates ectopic pregnancies so They can have the pleasure of destroying an innocent soul.
Philosophically, the law should not involve itself in trading on lives. I actually find this heartless abortion position more consistent than the others and appreciate the soulless honesty of it.
The fact that nearly everyone agrees there should be at least some cases where abortions are legal means pretty much everyone believes that abortion should be legal and just hasn't fully thought out the underlying ethics.
Because it means basically no one really believes in the unconditional right to life of a fetus - if it has an unconditional right to life, it doesn't matter if it came from rape or incest and it doesn't matter if it's going to die within minutes of being born and it doesn't matter if it's life threatens the life of its parent. None of those factors should remove the right to life.
And so since pretty much everyone agrees there should at least be exceptions for some of these situations we must conclude that there is not an inviolable right to life. We clearly think that the right to life of a fetus is just fundamentally lesser from the right to life of an independent and viable living person.
Meanwhile the right to autonomy over your own body still looks pretty unimpeachable to me. Seems to be that the state continues to have no right to forcibly modify or control your body and that it can sooner limit basic freedoms like movement and association before it violates that. The only time we seem to think it's okay to violate body autonomy is if the person has a fetus in their uterus.
What conservatives really want is to be able to dictate the calculus. They want to be able to tell people with a uterus what to do. They want to pick and choose who is and isn't pregnant and offer as little agency as possible to the individuals. That's always been the most important motivation and goal to these abortion bans. They want a breeding slave class and they're just too dishonest with themselves to admit it.
A rape exception alone shows they are totally inconsistent on the question of "life" and "rights."
The thing is, even an exception for the life of the mother shows that same moral inconsistency. If allowing a mother to come to harm through intervention that preserves the life of the fetus is acceptable, the other way around -- allowing the fetus to come to harm through intervention that preserves the life of the parent -- is just as acceptable. And it makes no difference if that preservation of life is 85 years or 15 minutes -- the right to life isn't contingent on how long your life may be.
These fake ethicists try to claim there's a fundamental difference between performing an abortion and prohibiting an abortion, but both of these are positive actions taken by the state that engages in trading lives. If you want to order on the morality of what a doctor or pregnant person does, have at -- there's reasonably room for debate there -- but there must be no intervention from the state.
Many ethical stances around abortion aren't phrased around the right to life, because usually ethics has a pretty hard stance on that right. So the real ethical question isn't about the unconditional right to life, It's actually about your right to another person's body or bodily autonomy.
Generally it breaks down to, just because a person requires the use of your body to survive does not mean you have a moral or ethical requirement to provide sustenance (your body) for that person.
Qoute from a nytimes article:
The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, in 1971, put forth the most famous version of this argument as it related to abortion: Imagine that a woman woke in bed intravenously hooked up to a famous violinist, Thomson wrote in her seminal and controversial essay, “A Defense of Abortion.” The musician in this scenario suffered from a rare medical ailment, and only this woman’s circulatory system could keep him alive. His survival requires her to sacrifice her own bodily autonomy. Must she? Is she a murderer if she does not?
Phrasing it as right to life automatically discounts the real ethical question, does this being have a right to my body?
Thomson does directly address the right to life of the fetus in A Defense of Abortion, the underlying essay that the violinist parable comes from (it has several other allegorical arguments aside from this one that are, in my opinion, even better but weirdly don't get referenced much). The violinist story only really addresses rape, but the others do not require a starting act of violence to make similar arguments.
She outright grants the life-from-conception argument. And argues for why it's just not relevant by showing a series of examples that make plain the typical person's instinct -- that autonomy over your body is supreme to the right to life of another and refusing to be charitable to a stranger is not the same as murder.
In my mind, no one has ever come close to rebuking her argument, though many have tried. The fact that both pro-life and pro-choice people continue to argue about when abortion becomes unethical is very frustrating. I wish the whole "it's just a clump of cells" crowd would shut up because that's utterly unpersuasive to someone who believes in life from conception. It's just a moot point. Even if the fetus is a full human being with all relevant rights from the moment of conception, abortion is still not murder; it is permissible.
I recommend the essay, it's not a very challenging read (compared to the greater cannon of philosophical essays, at least). It's probably been 15+ years since I last read it and it still lives strongly in my mind.
And in any event, once it's out of the womb, it needs to get a job and pull itself up by its bootstraps and eventually stop eating avocado toast if it wants to afford a studio apartment.
Don't forget not owning a phone, having Internet/Netflix and/or a TV.
I still chuckle about an article called "boomer economics", or something like that, which demonstrated how much a certain set of people distort the costs of things like the above vs. the reality. Tvs are exceptionally cheap as compared to, say, 1970s prices, phones are nearly essential, as is the Internet and the cost of Netflix (and avocado toast) is negligible compared to making rent/mortgage.
People who believe in a sky god are creepy as fuck.
Maybe so, but the war against abortion isn't based on religious texts. It was ginned up by pieces of shit who tied it to the bible artificially by painting a complex issue as a black and white case of "murder". Which is bullshit to anyone remotely understanding of reality.
It may not be directly tied to religious works. However, religion is being used to prop it up, as usual. I still agree that people can practice what they wish, though I'm beginning to feel strongly that religion is a plague and we'd be better off without it. Yet, I suppose, evil fools would just find something else to cower behind.
Most of religion isn't based on religious texts. The texts are just the marketing material. Once you're inside they're largely ignored.
Tell that to the Catholics
They're wrong though. They pulled that shit out of their ass.
1000 flies eat shit. 1000 flies can't be wrong.
That's their mentality.
It's more than that. You know all those stories of things God did in the Old Testament? The plagues and the disasters and famines and droughts? To them, those aren't just stories, that's shit that actually happened. That's shit that they think should happen to people they think are evil. They believe that God has an active and vibrant presence on His Creation, and that He would never allow evil to prosper in it. To this date, no plagues of boils or locusts has descended upon them. None of their leaders have been smote by bolts of lightning from the sky. None of their megachurches have been razed to the ground by pillars of flame. None of their firstborns have mysteriously died in the night. In the lack of all this divine punishment, what other conclusion can they draw but "We must be doing something right!"? I mean how many times have we heard one of them say something like, "If what I'm doing is evil, then may God strike me dead!"? And then, the smiting doesn't happen. What else could they think?
Nothing about the anti-choice movement is religious; it's tribalism. Same way as gun rights have nothing to do with the sky god either.
If we're being honest, the only strictly biblical argument on the topic of abortion leans heavily pro-choice and sometimes even pro-abortion-as-punishment. Throughout most of history most Christian branches have been neutral or passively negative on abortion, usually considering it a minor sin that it wasn't their job to prosecute (yes, occasionally either banning or encouraging it as well). The idea that life begins with conception is distinctly non-traditional (Judaism or firstgen Christianity) and was picked up from the Pythagorians.
It's important to differentiate cultural mores from religion. Organized Religion can make you convince yourself something is wrong when you are otherwise strongly predisposed to find it right (or vice versa). Cultural mores is more like "omg, you can't see my ankles how dare you!". They're like behavioral "dialects", much like happens in language. Technically, when I say something is wicked pissah, I "inhereted" that from the Mainers despite my not being from Maine. That doesn't mean it came from my religious ties with them. My parents and peers taught it to me. Same as all my fucked up knee-jerk morals I grew up with.
Wait wait wait….. wasn’t “death panels” what the right was screaming about with Obamacare?
Death Panels are only good when Insurance Corporations and Republicans are making the decisions.
You're thinking of the bad kind of death panels. Those are the good kind of death panels, obviously.
It's always projection with fascists.
Something needs to be done about the 5th circuit. They routinely make decisions that are directly counter to established law and the Constitution itself.
but do not counter state laws
the US has been letting states make decisions instead of making federal laws stick just like cannabis is federally illegal unless the state says so
State laws don't trump federal laws. Weed is still federally illegal and you can't own firearms if you smoke, regardless of what your state says.
I remember going through Roe v. Wade in law school and thinking how shaky the legal foundation was. This is a great case study of why we need to formally adopt laws in congress and not just rely on the whims of the court.
I remember how US conserves would look at euthanasia laws in the Netherlands and falsely claim that there are death panels there who decide when you will die.
Turns out they weren't just only lying, they were fantasizing
Yep. When DARVO-ists like Palin were bleating about "death panels" they were demonstrating their usual projection.
Conservatives and the Republicans are a death cult. They should never be allowed into office, ever.
What the actual fuck.
withholding the procedure until their condition deteriorates to the point of grievous injury or near-certain death.
Where an individual reasonably believes an attacker poses a credible, criminal, imminent, threat of death or grievous bodily harm, any person is justified in using any level of force - up to and including lethal force - necessary to stop the attack.
If the claims made in this article are accurate (and they very well might not be), then In setting the standard of care at the point where a person reasonably fears "grievous injury or near-certain death", the courts may have inadvertently justified the use of force in self-defense and/or defense of others against any executive using the power of their office to attack an individual.
Indeed, language like this puts a bullseye on healthcare professionals that already have/had one because of COVID and the fascists spreading wild conspiracy theories. This is almost a 2 birds with one stone stroke for them, you make abortion something any medical professional wants to distance themself from out of fear of their own life, but you also help undermine the whole medical field by would-be parents afraid to go to a hospital with complications as they may not come back out (or having suffered irreversible health effects).
While this would in theory work for justifying the actions of the mother it does nothing to help enable medical professionals in providing care. The court ruling basically tells all medical professionals that they may not perform abortions for any reason. It's a death sentence pure and simple and now the hospitals are only allowed to sit back and watch.
Why wouldn’t health care professionals be able to assist?
In Texas, the Castle Doctrine is codified under the Texas Penal Code, specifically in sections 9.31, 9.32, and 9.33. Key provision for this would be: The use of deadly force is justifiable if the individual reasonably believes it is necessary to protect themselves or someone else from imminent death or serious bodily injury, or to prevent the commission of a violent crime such as aggravated kidnapping, murder, sexual assault, or robbery.
You could shoot me in Texas if I were robbing the gas station store with a deadly weapon, I would think that OPs argument that a health care professional could help and cite the Castle Doctrine as a defense.
I'll fully admit that I was unaware of the Texas Castle Doctrine law. That would in fact be an interesting angle to pursue if hospitals had a backbone. But I will stick by my opinion that hospitals will refuse to treat these women as the laws stand now because they will never risk any chance at litigation to save a mother's life.
The conservative judges would have quite the quandary should a dying woman shoot her ectopic fetus.
This is going to put a lot of doctors and medical people in a dangerous spot.
Good luck hiding behind laws when you have a distraught husband who has just watched his wife, and the child he hoped to soon meet, die slowly and horribly.
But it's also illegal for our hypothetical heartbroken and angry husband to beat a doctor to death, or just shoot them because texas, right? That makes it all better I'm sure.
GOP love this outcome since it gives them more tragedy fodder to push even more extreme measures that fail to address the problem and only serves the wealthy or privileged.
Blatant, flippant traitors.
When did they try to hide this? They've been pretty explicit about this for a while now