Roe v. Wade is history

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Because, my friend, the majority isn't always right.

I represent what used to be a majority opinion against abortion. Now you seem to have a majority pro-choice, if you trust the polls. This means you have a tyranny of the majority against those of us who are more pro-birth and a need to protect the interests of us who are against it. The majority should easily expect to win legislation from state to state to allow abortion, thus there is no longer a need for SCOTUS to protect pro-abortion advocates.

I think things would be much, much different if no, zero, zilch, nada states would allow abortion, but in the wake of Dobbs vs JWHO women CAN still get access to abortion. And that leaves an opening for the federal congress and/or the states to make that choice. With there being a majority in support of abortion, it is now only a matter of time before abortion becomes fully legal. For the time being, it is a matter of whether the state has an interest in protecting the unborn, and a few states have clearly demonstrated that they do.

Broken record warning: the only interesting thing about overturning Roe and Caseu will be seeing what the dialogue is like a year from the official release of the SCOTUS opinion. Very, very few people will be affected in any meaningful way.

Restricting the human rights of one American is enough.
Regardless, all Americans will be affected because it changes the definition of personhood.

Nothing about the Dobbs decision redefines personhood.

Arizona is the only state I’m aware of that has taken up the mantle of personhood. It’s been blocked by the 9th Circuit.

And it won’t affect “all Americans.”

But this seems like a very non-democratic way of thinking and that in democracy, the majority vote counts. Telling the majority they voted wrong, just doesn't feel like a democratic way of thinking. If voting is not the way to decide anything, how is telling the majority voters they are wrong, if that is the majority vote?

The United States is not a democracy.

Majorities are subject to trends, whims, and panic attacks, knee jerk reactions that result in things that are ultimately harmful to the nation as a whole. That’s why we have branches of government that have the role of keeping the others in check.

We have a bicameral legislature. The lower house has a shorter term, less power than the upper house. Our reps are chosen based on population, and this is where most of your hotheaded lawyers are. The bills that come out of here can be real doozies, but the house represents more the zeitgeist of the nation. The senate has a longer term and represent the states as a whole. They tend to be older and more level-headed, and they have more political power. Since the house is population-based, they represent the interest of heavily populated areas, which means if the house gets their way, we end up at the mercy of New York and California. And sometimes what works for those states might actually be harmful for people in Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Arkansas. The Senate gives each state equal power by only allowing them two votes. Bills must pass both chambers to become law. The only thing that’s democratic about the USA is elections of representatives on the state level. Our president is not even elected by majority vote. Each state has a number of electors based on the number of representatives they have in congress (house members + 2 senators). Generally the rule is whichever candidate wins the state gets the electors for that state. So if you look at who wins California, New York, Ohio, Florida, and Texas, that’s pretty much who will be the President. The rest of the country is largely rural and agrarian and thus lack the numbers to make much difference in the election. So you take the original 13 colonies plus Texas, Ohio, Florida, and California, and the other states might add some margin to the presidential election. But…point being very little about the United States is actually democratic.

The strength of the American system lies in the willingness of our representatives to reflect the actual will of the people. We place a lot of trust in them. But we also have a political system that makes things really difficult to change things. I used to live in the Delta. Delta politics are really interesting. The Delta is predominantly black and consistently vote for liberal pols. But there are a lot of whites there, too, and sometimes pols have to rely on winning votes from both black and white districts to stay in office. Blacks know that if they run as Democratic, they won’t get the white vote. Whites don’t want to run as Republican because they won’t get the black vote. And that means at the local level very few pols identify with a party. They run either as independent or bipartisan.

And that goes a long way to keeping the peace in the Delta. But when you move up to state and federal level, you find that there is a deeply entrenched Democratic Party machine, powerful individuals within local communities who have a lot of influence over who is allowed to run for office. If you are a Democrat and want to run for state office, you pretty much have to make friends with these guys. At the state level, officials have a lot of pressure from party bosses back home, so if you’re a white delta farmer who wants the roads paved or protest eminent domain, you’ll likely be ignored for not being high enough on your rep’s donor list.

That’s a brief rundown of American politics. I mentioned how things work in the Delta to point out that Delta culture is unique and can often be downright straaaaaange, compounded by horrible living conditions and rampant mental illness. As you study the political climate, you’re going to find all these little enclaves throughout the nation that have unique qualities that don’t remotely reflect the nation as a whole. The challenge we have is to somehow bring all these people together under a single federal government to craft balanced legislation that benefits everyone.

The main problem we have right now is you have powerful pols who end up making decisions that benefit Sacramento but harm Northern California, or benefit California but harm Mississippi. We’ll complain that these pols should be voted out of office, but those aren’t our pols. They cause problems but keep winning elections. Why? Often it’s the case that that states know their pols suck. But what happens is they refuse to challenge an incumbent from within the same party. When you remove an incumbent from office, it’s extremely difficult to fight the opposing party candidate. Parties change hands when an incumbent gets challenged by his own party. So the states keep electing the same people to office cycle after cycle. It’s ineffective. It’s harmful to the people. Yet people insist on voting for their favorite candidates and incumbents. Until that changes (cough*termlimits*cough), the sad state of affairs in the USA won’t change.

Even though we are a Republic most people use the “democracy” colloquially. The instinct is if we vote we must be a democracy.

You are correct in that the Founding fathers deliberately set the Republic up in a way such that change happens incrementally(checks and balances). The system worked a half century ago because both the legislature and executive branches might call each other names during the day in public but at night over drinks at the bar compromise and make deals. In our hyper partisan tribal era the system is dysfunctional.

This has effected SCOTUS. In the now dead way of thinking approving supreme court nominees the President wanted was an unwritten privilege granted to the President. Unless the nominee was not qualified or corrupt approval was automatic. In return SCOTUS thought of themselves as above the partisan and ideological fray often surprising and disappointing the Presidents who nominated them. While ideology has dominated the nominating process for a long time now SCOTUS has still until this court been incremental. With this court the inevitable has happened and they are not incremental no more. They are openly perusing an agenda that says if it is not literally in the constitution it is not a right.

https://jezebel.com/louisiana-woman-was ... &fs=e&s=cl

Republican politicians contributed to this incident occurring…….

Oh I see. Well I guess I just believe that the majority vote is the only way to decide on the issue, and the idea of some people seeing the majority vote as 'wrong', and then wanting to come in to overrule it, is problematic in my opinion, but that is just my opinion.

Or one can view it from a more biological/scientific perspective...embroys and fetuses are not the same thing as babies and vast majority of abortions take places in those stages. The only time a baby would be aborted is in an emergency where that is safer for the woman than giving birth.

You are exactly right...there's a lot of posturing that goes on in public and in the media. I also believe that public debates on the congressional floor are authentic and well-meaning.

But no, all these people are good friends. It's exactly like faces and heels in professional wrestling. They nail down their storylines and gimmicks, they practice throughout the week, and then they just do their thing in the ring being sure that the fight starts and ends the way they want. Occasionally someone goes off the rails. Occasionally you get a surprise, but by far they and their fans count on things turning out a certain way.

The role of SCOTUS is when the oval office changes hands and when congress is pure chaos, our laws don't have to be so volatile that people can't adapt. Occasionally one branch of government can be in the wrong for so long that the way to move forward is the path that seems the most regressive. It's not that abortion should have been banned the whole time. It's not that abortion should be legal. It's that USA voters could have, at any time, decided that on their own. And after 50 years and there's STILL as much opposition to abortion as there is, it might be worth considering that we can turn the clock back 50 years, put everything back the way it was, and then push forward by deciding on our own what abortion should look like in this country,

Ah yes read about that.

There was also a woman in Texas who was forced to carry a dead fetus for two weeks.

Killing an innocent human being is wrong and never considered legal without just cause and due process. Killing the unborn, regardless of stage, is a disproportionate application of justice when it would never be considered appropriate to kill someone who'd committed an equivalent crime. They get prison time. The problem is babies can't exactly commit crimes. So they can't exactly go to prison, but they don't have to stay with mothers who don't want them.

If you view it from biological/scientific perspective, abortion is barbaric and antiquated.

Appeal to the majority is a logical fallacy. Illogical thinking won't necessarily result in physical or emotional harm. But it certainly doesn't make positive outcomes any easier. If a majority of Americans wanted to reinstitute slavery, would it be right to own slaves just because the majority says it's ok?

Justice doesn't really factor into abortion, as fetuses are not sentient people. They are organisms that live inside of their host, the rights of the host trump the rights of the organism inside. No one thinks of abortion as a sentence for an unwanted fetus for it's 'crimes' it is seen as medical care women need sometimes.

And from a scientific perspective not allowing access to safe abortions is far more barbaric than abortion. Maybe if far in the future they find a way to safely remove an embro or fetus and put it in an incubator or something where it can continue developing, they would see it as barbaric but no such technology exists.

A baby in the womb has the relationship of child to a parent, not a parasite to host.

Killing a human being when that human being hasn't killed another human being is a disproportionate application of justice. Nowhere else in western law is anyone legally put to death for no other reason than they exist. Sentencing someone to die always happens when the crime he commits justifies the punishment, and even then only after due process. Any other time a human being destroyed another human being and was not prosecuted for it was when doing so was necessary and warranted for the killer to preserve his own life. I firmly believe such a justification exists for killing the unborn. If there is no such justification, then the baby shouldn't be killed.

Then, are unimplantable fertilized eggs and spontaneous/accidental abortions counted as criminal negligence causing death?

Last edited by SkinnedWolf on 20 Jul 2022, 3:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.