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Roe vs Wade overturned

Paul R said:
Why do you draw a distinction at 'being born'? That's purely a transition from one support environment to another.

Termination at birth is clearly 'killing a child', termination shortly after conception equally clearly not. At some point in time between the status changes. Almost everybody, including most American voters, agrees broadly with this and while they might disagree with where the cut off should be, agree there should be a cut off and terminations should be freely available before. It's entertaining to see someone so clear about their opinion, most 'pro-choice' extremists, cannot quite bring themselves to articulate it. And you find yourself at odds with Roe-v-Wade, which is quite ironic.

FWIW I think the Roe-v-Wade and Casey update were bad, because they created law that should have been written by legislatures in conjunction with medical and scientific advice and then tested for constitutionality. The court found a right to termination, which is fair enough, and that the state had an interest in the foetus, which is also fair enough, and then it tried to reconcile the contradiction. Properly a job for politicians accountable to the electorate.

FWIW2 we're on the way to similar controversy. The UK law needs revision to make it clear a pregnant woman has a right to a termination, and to bring the time limit back below viability. This would also bring the UK more into line with the rest of Europe, so I would expect wide support....
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It seems so sensible to set a reasonable time limit. Yet once this is established, the right wing in this country have demonstrated that they will continue to whittle away away at the cut-off age (no pun intended) until it becomes a de facto ban. e.g. the Texas 6-week limit.

Let the woman determine when it's reasonable. She's more qualified than a legislature full of old white men. With no limit in effect, so few women seek late-term abortions (for purposes of birth control) that it's a non-issue. For most of the past fifty years there have been only one or two doctors at a time who would even do it.
 
ks.234 said:
Any fool can see that I was not talking about termination at birth. That’s a particularly sick twisting of words coming from someone who once said that babies of left wingers should be aborted on the NHS!
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That's terrible ks, imagine he posted something similar on an abortion thread

ks.234 said:
People who start a post with “So…” should be shot at birth.
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Woops
 
I read the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling to see what we lost. Everyone should
Francine Prose
What I admire most is how the ruling, at once profound and lyrical, describes the atmosphere surrounding the issue of abortion. It is beautiful

"“At the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy that she does in most States today.” It tracks the centuries-old debate over when life begins, and dismisses the argument that a fetus is a person guaranteed the protections afforded US citizens."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/01/roe-v-wade-1973-ruling-supreme-court
 
CarrotMan said:
And just in case anyone was doubting the real-world impact of the restrictions on abortion in the US and the utterly deranged logic of the people defending them...
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The long-term damage this Taliban-grade Christian fundamentalism is going to do to child rape victims such is this poor girl is incomprehensible. This should be a breach of international human rights. It is bigger than the idiocy of one country.

This ruling allows random rapists to choose the mothers of their children. By removing the basic human right of reproductive choice it places all the power at exactly the wrong place.
 
Katherine Stewart is a long-time observer of the religious right. In today's NYT, she wrote a truly scary article:

Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next

Some excerpts:
The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights that American women have enjoyed over the past half-century will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.

It is also a mistake to imagine that Christian nationalism is a social movement arising from the grassroots and aiming to satisfy the real needs of its base. It isn’t. This is a leader-driven movement. The leaders set the agenda, and their main goals are power and access to public money. They aren’t serving the interests of their base; they are exploiting their base as a means of exploiting the rest of us.

Christian nationalism isn’t a route to the future. Its purpose is to hollow out democracy until nothing is left but a thin cover for rule by a supposedly right-thinking elite, bubble-wrapped in sanctimony and insulated from any real democratic check on its power.

It was interesting to see the "seven mountains" cropping up in this article. This is part of Dominionism theology, the idea that "Christians" should take over the "seven mountains" of the nation, family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government.This was a fringe idea for a long time, but it's becoming more popular. Can it succeed in a country that, by all acccounts, is becoming increasingly secular? Well, since the Republicans already exert a sort of minority rule, why not?
 
tones said:
Katherine Stewart is a long-time observer of the religious right. In today's NYT, she wrote a truly scary article:

Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next

Some excerpts:
The Supreme Court’s decision to rescind the reproductive rights that American women have enjoyed over the past half-century will not lead America’s homegrown religious authoritarians to retire from the culture wars and enjoy a sweet moment of triumph. On the contrary, movement leaders are already preparing for a new and more brutal phase of their assault on individual rights and democratic self-governance. Breaking American democracy isn’t an unintended side effect of Christian nationalism. It is the point of the project.

It is also a mistake to imagine that Christian nationalism is a social movement arising from the grassroots and aiming to satisfy the real needs of its base. It isn’t. This is a leader-driven movement. The leaders set the agenda, and their main goals are power and access to public money. They aren’t serving the interests of their base; they are exploiting their base as a means of exploiting the rest of us.

Christian nationalism isn’t a route to the future. Its purpose is to hollow out democracy until nothing is left but a thin cover for rule by a supposedly right-thinking elite, bubble-wrapped in sanctimony and insulated from any real democratic check on its power.

It was interesting to see the "seven mountains" cropping up in this article. This is part of Dominionism theology, the idea that "Christians" should take over the "seven mountains" of the nation, family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government.This was a fringe idea for a long time, but it's becoming more popular. Can it succeed in a country that, by all acccounts, is becoming increasingly secular? Well, since the Republicans already exert a sort of minority rule, why not?
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Can we please stop calling them 'Christians'? They are anything but.
 
Anyne who aligns themselves with Piers Morgan on Abortion issues need to take a long hard look in the mirror.
 
On the subject of minority rule this is a very interesting observation (IMO)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/democracy-could-die-2024/619390/

Electoral competition is thought to be a natural corrective for political extremism: Parties that stray too far from the average voter’s positions lose votes, which compels them to moderate and broaden their appeal to win again.

We believe that the U.S. Constitution, in its current form, is enabling the radicalization of the Republican Party and exacerbating America’s democratic crisis. The Constitution’s key countermajoritarian features, such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, have long been biased toward sparsely populated territories.

By allowing Republicans to win power without national majorities, this constitutional welfare allows the GOP to pursue extremist strategies that threaten our democracy without suffering devastating electoral consequences.
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It is quite obvious that the GOP benefits from the makeup of the Senate, but perhaps less obvious that this constitutional advantage is dangerous in that it enables the party to become more extreme than it otherwise could.
 
Nick_G said:
Can we please stop calling them 'Christians'? They are anything but.
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Agreed.

They are christianists.*

In the same sense we use islamist.


Both sets are headbanging nutjobs utterly-divorced from the tenets of the faith they ...'use' in that classic failure of Logic , the Appeal to Authority.

* Actually I've only just started appreciating our @tones prior description on occasions as (New) Pharisee-ism. That's superb.
 
Nick_G said:
Can we please stop calling them 'Christians'? They are anything but.
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Hence the use of quotes. The US view of itself appears to be very much an Old Testament view, a nation uniquely blessed by God, a successor to ancient Israel, and, like ancient Israel, punished nationally when it gets it wrong. Jerry Falwell said that 9/11 was divine punishment for the tolerance of homosexuality. The US sees itself as a Christian nation, a thing that, by definition, cannot exist, as individuals, not nations, are saved in Christianity (the real thing).
 
gingermrkettle said:
Harsh on Pharisees, they at least tried to do things right generally.
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Their problem was that, like holy "Christian" Americans, they were holier than thou, and made sure that everyone saw this. They were also harshly judgmental to people perceived as lesser individuals. Jesus was theologically on the side of the Pharisees (as opposed to the aristocratic Sadducees, from whose ranks the High Priest was always selected), but was bitterly critical of their hypocrisy, and they returned the favour, as they saw this interloper potentially upsetting their applecart with the despised Romans. However, they did pick up the pieces of Judaism after Titus destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in AD 70 and founded the Judaism we now know.
 
martin clark said:
Matthew 6:5-8? Seems alive and well in the GOP.



(to be clear - said as someone def not of any faith, just, an ..ineluctable/ inherited knowledge-of.)
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Matthew 5-7 is the Sermon on the Mount, a passage that is the very heart of the Christian message, a radical, even revolutionary, reinterpretation of the Old Testament message. Jesus majored in the love of God, and anything that got in the way of that was kicked violently out of the way. The passage in Matthew 7 hints that Jesus foresaw Monty Python, so ridiculously exaggerated is the situation:

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Yet these fundamental lessons from the one whom the "Christians" profess to follow are the ones that are most often ignored by them.
 
tones said:
Hence the use of quotes. The US view of itself appears to be very much an Old Testament view, a nation uniquely blessed by God, a successor to ancient Israel, and, like ancient Israel, punished nationally when it gets it wrong. Jerry Falwell said that 9/11 was divine punishment for the tolerance of homosexuality. The US sees itself as a Christian nation, a thing that, by definition, cannot exist, as individuals, not nations, are saved in Christianity (the real thing).
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Dangerous line that last one. Does it not lead to "everyone, without exception, must be 'Christian' so that we are indeed a 'Christian' nation under God" ?
 
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