A Kentucky woman Friday filed an emergency class-action lawsuit, asking a Jefferson County judge to allow her to terminate her pregnancy. It’s the first lawsuit of its kind in Kentucky since the state banned nearly all abortions in 2022 and one of the only times nationwide since before Roe v. Wade in 1973 that an adult woman has asked a court to intervene on her behalf and allow her to get an abortion.
Bodily autonomy enshrined in a nation’s most important document? Yeah that sounds pretty good.
Enshrining it is fine. But taking a weak stance to link it to an amendment that never had it in mind, well, opens you up for its interpretation to get overturned.
Seriously! Remember how when they wrote the 2nd ammendmen, they absolutely had modern firearms in mind, right? How is bodily autonomy a “weak stance”?
The other side argues that the unborn child has rights and that the 14th amendment does not protect abortion.
You’re trying to tie abortion to ‘bodily autonomy’ because you want abortion to be protected by the constitution. That way, states don’t get to decide for themselves.
Abortion would have better protections with its own amendment, but you know how difficult (impossible?) that will be, so it’s imperative that you find a way to tie it to existing amendments.
In what universe are they not tied together? There’s no good-faith argument against this.
In the universe where people believe an unborn child has rights.
Should expectant mothers be allowed to engage in activities that harm their children?
What about in the universe where a pregnant woman has a non-viable pregnancy that will cause her lasting medical harm if she doesn’t get treatment?
Should governments be allowed to engage in activities that strictly harm their citizens?
I think the mother gets precedent over the child. Even if the pregnancy is viable and there is no elevated risk of harm to the mother, she should still be allowed to have an abortion.
Some people disagree with me though for the reasons I have mentioned.
Bodily autonomy means only you have the absolute right to do with your body what you want. The “unborn child” has no right to claim your body for its own use. Removing it from the body is always done as safely as possible; before 24 weeks this means an abortion, as the fetus is non-viable still. After 24 weeks, it’s called an induced birth and the baby gets to survive.
This without question ties the right to abortion to the right to bodily autonomy. The “rights of the unborn child” are respected by not killing it after 24 weeks.
That’s fair, I totally agree with you. An unborn child is just a collection of cells with no sense of self. I mean, it really calls into question what is a conscious being, imo, which they clearly are not. They’re far, far from developing the facilities to manifest consciousness.
That said, a lot of people cannot understand this. I think it’s unfair to misrepresent their argument and therefor misunderstand them. It’s not conducive to discussion. Even if they’re wrong, I think it’s important to acknowledge what their stance is, for what it is.
Do you get to harvest my organs without my consent, yes or no?
Mmm, is that a 1:1 analogy of abortion?
And yet the other side is calling for a federal ban.
The ‘states’ rights’ crowd waffles between arguing for state or federal control depending on which is more convenient to a particular conversation.
Yes. Both sides are happy to cry ‘slippery slope’ and then engage in it when it is favorable to them.
The difference is one side isn’t trying to force anything, they’re just saying “you have the choice”.
The other side is trying to force their choice on everyone?
Well, not exactly. If people want to live in a state where they don’t have the choice for an abortion, then making it federally mandatory takes that choice away from them.
If you don’t want an abortion you are under no obligation to have one. The only right they lost was the right to kill woman for the Christian blood god
You’re deliberately misunderstanding. You are conflating choice with people wanting the law to be a specific way. You don’t want an abortion? Don’t have one. That has nothing to do with me. My potential abortion has nothing to do with you. Once you decide to make it illegal for me to have an abortion, that is taking away all choice. The law allowing for either/or is not making a choice on your ability to not have an abortion; that doesn’t take away from you. You still get to decide to not have one.
Most 12 year old rape victims didn’t get to choose the state in which they were born. Most people living in poverty don’t have the luxury of just moving somewhere else. And what about the disabled or women with court orders preventing them from leaving the state for whatever reason? There are many, many situations where that isn’t feasible.
That view of the situation is pretty myopic and privileged.
And what’s wrong with that? It’s something, especially compared to your plan of doing essentially nothing until an amendment is ratified.
Well, your ruling might get overturned!
This is completely irrelevant. The 9th Amendment says a right does not need to be explicitly mentioned in the Constitution to be protected, nor are other rights lesser to those that are explicit.
SCOTUS has been spitting on the Constitution for a long time.
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It’s not weak. Originalism is weak. It basically asserts that the constitution and all amendments must have been written by psychics who could predict every situation that would arise in the future, forever.
Of course things written decades or centuries ago couldn’t predict what’s relevant today or five decades from now, so of course they should be open to interpretation as the needs of society change. It’s the difference between following the spirit or the letter of the law, and it’s why most laws aren’t merely prescriptive, but outline motivations and goals.
Not really. The constitution is a living document and was meant to grow with the times.
The problem is that it’s next to impossible to add amendments to the constitution now due to how divided the nation is. This means that in order for abortion to receive protection under the constitution, it would need to be tied to an existing amendment that was not drafted with abortion in mind.
That’s why it’s so crucial to make arguments like “abortion is bodily autonomy” rather than “abortion is a guaranteed right under the xth amendment.”
You are contradicting yourself all over the place in these comments.
Okay.
They were arguing against the term “originalist”. Guess you missed that bit.