RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

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honorentheos
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

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Chap wrote:
Mon Jul 04, 2022 4:20 pm
And that brings us to the point: we are talking about how law is to be written, not what one would say to a pregnant female friend who wanted to discuss her personal situation. And law is a very blunt instrument, but alas a necessary instrument.
Of the opinions shared in the Dobbs decision I think the most honestly engaged was that of Chief Justice Roberts when he pushed against the decision in Roe to use viability outside the womb as the threshold, but maintained there the debate is about this issue so Roe did not need to be swept aside as the majority opinion held. I disagree with Roberts on the obviousness of viability being flawed in the direction of arbitrary decisions made by a court on the grounds it's difficult to determine one that is better that a court could use. Could legislation improve on the threshold? I don't know. I personally think the bright line isn't there to be found so the best legislation would put the decision in the hands of the woman and her doctor, with a threshold beyond which the state does indeed take a stand on the fetus having personhood and therefore rights that need protected. Which sounds a bit like Roe. Huh.
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Some Schmo
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

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Chap wrote:
Mon Jul 04, 2022 3:48 pm
Everybody agrees, I think, that Case A is not murder. To radical anti-abortionists however, Case B is presumably murder, since I have ended a human life, and I should go to jail for a very long time.

Does that make a lot of sense?
I'm not sure everyone actually does agree that scenario A is not murder, especially in the manner you presented. In both cases, you're ending a potential life. I'm not sure why one wouldn't take this to its logical conclusion that letting sperm and ova die is akin to murder.

Since we're rebranding English words, it seems we have other needs to compensate. I'm going to coin a new term: progenicide. It's the murder of your progeny, i.e. every one of your potential decedents, by having any male orgasm. I mean... since we're suddenly so concerned about the very idea of strangers' potential babies, this is an issue of which everyone needs to take notice. It deserves a proper word.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

Some Schmo wrote:
Mon Jul 04, 2022 7:10 pm
Chap wrote:
Mon Jul 04, 2022 3:48 pm
Everybody agrees, I think, that Case A is not murder. To radical anti-abortionists however, Case B is presumably murder, since I have ended a human life, and I should go to jail for a very long time.

Does that make a lot of sense?
I'm not sure everyone actually does agree that scenario A is not murder, especially in the manner you presented. In both cases, you're ending a potential life. I'm not sure why one wouldn't take this to its logical conclusion that letting sperm and ova die is akin to murder.

Since we're rebranding English words, it seems we have other needs to compensate. I'm going to coin a new term: progenicide. It's the murder of your progeny, i.e. every one of your potential decedents, by having any male orgasm. I mean... since we're suddenly so concerned about the very idea of strangers' potential babies, this is an issue of which everyone needs to take notice. It deserves a proper word.
That’s actually not a bad term. I was trying to think of an apt term last time we had this conversation, and I used ‘killing future humans’ as a way to frame killing fertilized eggs and fetuses, but it didn’t really have a snappy, tv soundbite quality to it, though.

Progenicide.

That’s good. Imma use it.

- Doc
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Some Schmo
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

Post by Some Schmo »

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:
Mon Jul 04, 2022 7:19 pm
That’s actually not a bad term. I was trying to think of an apt term last time we had this conversation, and I used ‘killing future humans’ as a way to frame killing fertilized eggs and fetuses, but it didn’t really have a snappy, tv soundbite quality to it, though.

Progenicide.

That’s good. Imma use it.

- Doc
It scares me a little. I was thinking about it last night and a whole dystopian scenario occurred to me akin to the Handmaid's Tale, but for men. Basically: sex is no longer legal because of the inevitable progenicide. Unsupervised masturbation is punishable by death. All orgasms have to be supervised to ensure all sperm is preserved. All babies are created in vitro. Parental rights no longer exist.

Makes for a chilling story backdrop, and yet it doesn't seem that far removed from reality if certain nut-jobs got their way.
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

Post by Chap »

Some Schmo wrote:
Mon Jul 04, 2022 7:50 pm
Basically: sex is no longer legal because of the inevitable progenicide. Unsupervised masturbation is punishable by death. All orgasms have to be supervised to ensure all sperm is preserved.
The essentials are set out in this instructive Monty Python video. If you have not yet seen it, I assure you that is is a must. Lasts only 4:16.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

Post by Gunnar »

Kristi Noem PROVES Republicans Do NOT Care About Children's Lives
Cenk and Ana remind us again that the pro-choice blue state with laws protecting the reproductive and health care rights of women and minorities have the lowest infant mortality rates and poverty rates, while red states with the most extreme anti-abortion laws have both the highest infant mortality and highest poverty rates. As Cenk stated it, it is a "stone cold fact" that those blue, pro-choice states are in actuality far more pro-life than the red states with the most extreme anti-abortion laws!
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

Post by Chap »

Gunnar wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 1:11 pm
Kristi Noem PROVES Republicans Do NOT Care About Children's Lives
Cenk and Ana remind us again that the pro-choice blue state with laws protecting the reproductive and health care rights of women and minorities have the lowest infant mortality rates and poverty rates, while red states with the most extreme anti-abortion laws have both the highest infant mortality and highest poverty rates. As Cenk stated it, it is a "stone cold fact" that those blue, pro-choice states are in actuality far more pro-life than the red states with the most extreme anti-abortion laws!
In another thread, Hawkeye has told us that a million Americans dying is insignificant compared to the damage to the economy caused (in his view) by precautions against the spread of COVID.
Hawkeye wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 8:50 pm
I tested positive 4 days ago. So far the experience has been like a mild to moderate cold. But over a million Americans who died had a very different experience.
1 million Americans is still just 0.31% of the entire population. Even if it were 10% of all Americans I don't see it as having been worthy of inflicting this kind of inflation and economic devastation that we have unleashed upon ourselves. This was a horrible overreaction at best or partisan economic sabotage at worst.
So presumably the deaths of aborted embryos and early term fetuses can be discounted because of the economic benefits of the reduction in poverty in blue states where women are given reproductive and health care rights?

Sounds reasonable to me.
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Mayan Elephant:
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

Post by Gunnar »

It's just like Republicans nowadays are in a competition or race to say the most irrational and outrageous nonsense. They don't even try to back up their claims with any kind of evidence anymore. Evidence and reality seem totally irrelevant to them. There are too many MAGA idiots like Couy Griffin, who was convicted of illegally entering restricted U.S. capitol grounds. He said all he had was his gut feeling and intuition, and that that was all he needed! Like him, they readily admit that they don't have and can't find evidence to support their conspiracist claims. All they need is their "gut feeling and intuition." If that is all one requires, it becomes possible to fall for any nonsense conceivable, no matter how stupid or dangerous!
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

Post by Gunnar »

As if things were not already bad enough, Influential Right-Wing Group Is Fighting To Make It Illegal for Us To Write About Abortion
When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the abortion protections laid out in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, about a dozen states already had “trigger laws” on the books that would immediately, or very quickly, make abortion illegal or heavily restricted in those states. But Republicans weren’t even close to done. They’ve introduced a slew of new anti-abortion laws since the fall of Roe. Some are straightforward bans. Some are modeled after Texas’ unique brand of cruelty that deputizes regular citizens to enforce the bans under the promise of lucrative civil suits.

One new potential bill hits particularly close to home for those of us whose job it is to write about abortion and the larger landscape of reproductive justice. The proposal would make it a crime to give “instructions” on how to obtain an abortion over the internet (or the telephone or other means of communication). Other crimes include “hosting or maintaining a website, or providing internet service, that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion.”

Under this proposed bill, these acts would all constitute “aiding or abetting an illegal abortion.” The proposed punishment is the same as it would be for anyone actually performing the abortion, which can be, depending on the laws in your state, a second-degree felony that carries a penalty of usually up to about 10 to 25 years in prison.

To be clear, this is not a bill yet proposed by any state legislature. Rather, it’s been written by the general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), a powerful anti-abortion group that, among their other means of trying to deprive us of our bodily autonomy, has their attorneys craft what’s known as “model legislation” and then lobbies it to state legislators to pick up and introduce into the actual legislative system. It’s not like those Republicans are doing their own research into these things—this is how many bills get started, by groups like the NRLC, who have been doing this for decades, in states across the country.

What’s at risk?

The obvious question here is one of what exactly this bill, as proposed, would outlaw. Well, I probably couldn’t write that abortion funds exist to help people find and access abortion services in their areas and beyond. I also probably couldn’t write the recent story that the Texas-based reproductive healthcare clinic system Whole Women’s Health (which was at the center of the Supreme Court case that effectively banned abortion in the state last year) is packing up and moving to New Mexico, because that could technically be information that would help Texas women seek abortion care across state lines. (Oh, and I probably shouldn’t direct you to their GoFundMe to help with the costs of such a massive and essential move.)

I definitely couldn’t write that INeedAnA.com is a great resource for anyone looking for information and help regarding abortion care at any stage (and doesn’t store data), and that Plan C is dedicated to making sure everyone in every state has access to abortion pills. (And obviously, those sites would be at extreme risk themselves.)

So what could happen if I did write those things? Well, it’s hard to say, which is bascially the point. These sorts of bills have some hard-fact language in them, but they also heavily rely on vagueness, confusion, and fear. If a person or institution doesn’t know if something is legal, they are likely to avoid it and only do things they’re sure they won’t be prosecuted for, leaving a big gray area of things they might, legally, be allowed to do but that they’d rather not find out the hard way. Right now, abortion funds in a lot of states are on pause until they can know how to move forward. (Which is not a reason not to consider donating to them!) This is why a lot of pharmacists are refusing to fill certain prescriptions, including but not limited to Plan B—not because they’ll definitely be in legal trouble for it, but because they’re not willing to take the chance, which is exactly the chilling effect anti-abortion forces want, in order to extend their reach even beyond the letter of the law.

What’s the worst that could happen?

In the case of this bill, it’s definitely a direct threat to myself, as I live in Missouri, and some of my colleagues who live in Texas, both states that have governors and attorneys general just itching to prosecute anti-abortion offenses. But beyond that, what about my colleagues who live in “safer” states like New York or California, but whose work is read in states where abortion is banned? Are they at risk if this law gets passed in a reader’s state?

Meanwhile, The Mary Sue was recently acquired by a parent company based in Australia, but in addition to having mostly state-side writers, I believe our hosting platform is an American company. Even if they’re operating in Australia, they could be subjected to American bans—or they at least might fear they could be. And what about platforms like Substack or MailChimp, or even Facebook or Twitter? Could they be liable for “hosting” content that “encourages” abortion in states where that’s illegal? Remember, the proposed text even includes “providing internet service” in a way that supports abortion as a crime. Could Google Fiber shut down my home’s wifi for fear of a lawsuit or prosecution? I don’t know, but again, the question—and the confusion and fear it elicits in the face of no real answer—is the entire point.

You would think that this proposed bill would be a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment. But if, hypothetically, it were to make its way to the Supreme Court (which one could assume is the entire goal), we’ve already seen that this current court is happy to trample those protections when it suits conservative causes, and these cases that come before the court involve real people putting themselves at risk, and through a lot of difficult legal proceedings over a long span of time, to find out what the answer will be—not to mention what happens to them in the event of a bad outcome.

Hopefully the NRLC’s terrible model bill doesn’t get picked up. But realistically, it sounds like the exact kind of atrocity that any red-state Republican looking to make a name for themselves would be itching to get their name on. And beyond that, it’s good to know that this is the kind of thing influential anti-abortion advocates have their eye on. Know thy enemy, right? Because my enemy wants to put me and maybe a lot of other people in prison for up to 20 years for writing this.
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Re: RvW Overturned - Abortions Now Illegal

Post by Some Schmo »

Gunnar wrote:
Fri Jul 08, 2022 2:38 am
Like him, they readily admit that they don't have and can't find evidence to support their conspiracist claims. All they need is their "gut feeling and intuition." If that is all one requires, it becomes possible to fall for any nonsense conceivable, no matter how stupid or dangerous!
This is why I think of religion as cerebral AIDS. If you allow yourself to believe in religious claims based on gut feelings, you are susceptible to any outrageous claim. Your immunity to BS is compromised.

The entire GOP philosophy these days relies on this simple fact. They'd be nowhere without religious types. Without their base's willingness to believe damned anything, the GOP would never retain power.

The GOP actually depends on the stupidity and gullibility of their base. Normal people are insulted by how stupid GOP politicians treat the electorate. Idiotic Republican pols excel with their base strictly because they speak "in a relatable way" (i.e. idiotically). They don't have to fake it. The game is determining which GOP pols really are that stupid and which ones are putting on a show.
Religion is for people whose existential fear is greater than their common sense.

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