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Apparently, the UKGBNI is set to completely decriminalize abortion in England and Wales when performed by the woman (not when performed by a doctor). According to Reuters and BBC, under existing law abortion by a doctor is legal up to 24 weeks and a woman can perform an abortion on herself with prescribed pills up to 10 weeks. In contrast, the new law—approved by 73 percent of the House of Commons—appears to permit abortion right up to the point of birth when it is performed by the woman.
Text of the law (on pages 108–109 of the PDF; part of a much larger bill):
Is there an actual justification for this anywhere or is this just "women can do no wrong" crystallizing into law?
The transcript of the debate appears to support your uncharitable description. Antoniazzi:
"Women can do no wrong" is an extremely uncharitable reading of this transcript. It seems fairly obvious to me that it's much closer to @MadMonzer's interpretation above: the author does not spend any particular thought on any negative moral valence of deliberately induced abortions at all (whether because he does not think they are morally negative, or because he does not think they are relatively common enough to matter), and is more concerned about the circumstance that women who miscarry would be treated as criminal suspects.
You could imagine a similar justification being fielded in a hypothetical world in which some subset of people is greatly concerned about the evil of pet owners murdering their pet dogs, and so every time a dog dies police have to investigate if the owner may have killed it deliberately. Someone might hold against it that the set of dog owners who are devastated by the death of their dog dwarfs the set of dog owners who would have deliberately killed their dog, and the harm done to the former by such an investigation just matters more than whatever cases of the latter the investigation will deter. Would this perspective amount to "dog owners can do no wrong"?
(On the object level, miscarriages are common! Among the people I know well enough to know such details, more have miscarried at least once than have successfully had children without a single miscarriage.)
I live in Texas, with probably the strictest abortion laws among high income countries(maybe Liechtenstein?). No prosecutions for miscarriage have happened here- and 40% of the childbearing aged women without elective abortion in the U.S. live here.
More to the point, there really, legitimately are lots of people who, when it comes to abortion specifically, do not think there’s a possible case of abortion that is morally wrong. Relatively recently, in Louisiana, there was a case of a young woman who wanted to keep her pregnancy and was deceived by her mother into taking an abortion pill ordered from out of state. The pro-choice crowd did not seem to respect this young lady’s choice to keep her baby- including the governor of New York, from which this abortion pill came.
This is like trying to hold a gun store owner responsible when someone buys a gun and uses it to commit a crime. Everyone knows the real agenda here is that you don't want anyone getting abortion pills period.
Avoid consensus-building phrases like "everyone knows," as well as presuming you know the other person's motives. You are probably correct that @hydroacetylene does not want anyone getting abortion pills, but you need to actually engage with him ("Are you saying...?" or "I think your actual agenda is...") rather than simply asserting it in this antagonistic fashion. This is a pattern you're unfortunately engaging in a lot. I hate to see it, because here you are a leftie on a mostly anti-left forum (you aren't wrong about that, though you are wrong about "far right"), and you are of course being heavily downvoted and reported for having unpopular opinions. The usual failure mode from here is you get more and more frustrated and antagonized by everyone telling you off, and eventually the warnings accumulate and you get banned. I realize this is a hard pattern to break out of, and maybe it's not entirely fair, but I will tell you that rightie posters that start taking the same attitude you do to all comers who argue with them also wind up getting banned because they just can't stay calm and gracious enough while arguing with people whose opinions they clearly do not respect.
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Consensus building
So you're a mind-reader? You're not going to engage with the argument being made, but only with what you think the "real" position is?
Plainly uncharitable.
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I understand that you probably don’t want a poor black teenager to keep her baby either. But it is utterly uncontroversial that gun store owners taking advantage of differing state laws to fetch a premium for some light law breaking are treated as professional criminals, which is the actual equivalency. A California resident can drive to Nevada, buy illegally-full-size magazines, and probably get away with it when he drives back with them. A Nevada gun store owner who sells such magazines by mail to Californians is committing a crime.
Glad we agree the underlying issue is that you don't want anyone in Louisiana to have access to abortion pills and I do. The governor of NY agrees with me, thus she is not extraditing the doctor, as is her right.
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That's a pretty misleading description of what's going on. Most of the outrage seems focused on the attempt to prosecute the doctor, which requires that New York extradite her to Louisiana. The rest of it centers around the hypocrisy that Louisiana had a pre-Dobbs parental consent law, which would suggest that parents have the authority to determine whether their children carry a child to term. If a parent can veto the decision to abort, they would presumable also be able to veto the decision to have the baby. I haven't seen any commentary suggesting that the mother was right to surrepetitiously abort the fetus.
That is certainly not true. That authority to forbid is not the authority to require.
Forbidding one thing necessarily means requiring something else. One can just say that parents should have the ability to forbid their children from having their own children.
Your logic is confused.
The majority of US states are (still) allowing underage marriage (age 16 or 17) if a parent or other legal guardian consents, but that doesn’t mean that parents can legally force a marriage against the will of their child.
Or if in a restraining order a judge forbids you to get near someone, that doesn’t give the judge the power of an “anti-restraining order” where you must stalk someone.
There are many (state) law exemptions making underage drinking legal when provided or in the presence of a family member. But that doesn’t mean your parents can legally force you to get black out drunk.
If my rent contract specifies that I am not allowed to paint walls black, that doesn’t mean my landlord can force me to paint the walls white. That would need to be another term in the contract.
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Paleoconservatives never say "I disagree with X, but my values require me to respect their right to do it." Their "freedom" and "federalism" and "common law" always ends up only applying to actions they approve of. Ditto with the liberals. Big Tech has the right to censor you because "muh private company" but they never say "I wish company X wouldn't do what they're doing but they're a private company so doing it is their right."
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Is your "should" borne out as a matter of fact? I don't think so.
You can argue that the asymmetry is unjust, but that's not the same as stating the asymmetry doesn't exist.
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I mean, I know - I'm one of them! The case you describe still does sound morally wrong to me, in the same way in which drugging your daughter and submitting her to a cosmetic surgery would be. This is still not "women can do no wrong" - it's interesting how culture warriors on both sides refuse to believe that the other side could actually disagree with them on the moral status of fetuses, and think it must actually all be about women (blue: "red just wants to punish women for recreational sex" - red: "blue thinks women can do no wrong").
(Not that I'm not guilty of this myself - it is still genuinely different for me to believe in my heart that right-wingers really think fetuses are people being murdered, and it's not just a case of the real principle being rationalised by a loftier one like when people always remember international law when their enemies break it. It's hard when many of the same people are arguing a few threads down that women having sex with no prospect of marriage or childbirth is the root of all of our problems.)
Im surprised by this. There are lots of pro-life people. How many of them would have to be just rationalising before the number of genuine believers reaches lizardman levels? It seems pretty clear that theres a line of thought there thats compelling to a significant number of people (though I sometimes feel it should be the left that its compelling to)
In my eyes, the international law thing I mentioned feels like blatant belief substitution (I don't think "rationalisation" is quite the right term for the postulated mechanism, where a low-status value is replaced by a higher-status subgoal that serves it) due to how self-serving and selective it is - but it seems to be believed by absolute majorities in countries like Germany without even having a well-defined proximate outgroup rejecting it. Why would it not be plausible that pro-lifers, who are less of a majority and are in a mutual chokehold against an outgroup rejecting this premise, could do the same thing? (Though to begin with, it's not really well-defined where the boundary between rationalising and normal belief formation even lies.)
I would guess they also genuinely believe that its different when we do it. Most people are unable to take anything as literally as they would need to to see the symmerty there. (This is in part why I was surprised. I have strongly internalised that people are crazy, much crazier than being against abortion, and I would have thought you have too) I suppose you could say that they are therefore unable to really believe anything, but that doesnt seem productive.
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The view I’m putting in (some of)my opponents’ mouths is not ‘women can do no wrong’. It’s ’there is no such thing as an abortion which is morally wrong’. Aka the occasional pro-life canard that ‘freedom of choice only applies to one choice’.
I don’t think the pro-abortion side not taking the time to say ‘it’s a tragedy what happened to this young woman’ is because the person who deceived her into an abortion was a woman. I think it’s because some of them genuinely don’t think an unwanted abortion is a tragedy and the rest are afraid of offending those handful.
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That's because it is- more specifically, it's about power.
Abortion rights are, at the end of the day, a sex worker protection law. Babies are a service sex workers provide on contract, they're taking a lot of risk to provide one (especially true pre-medicine, but it's an obligation that normally consumes your entire adult life) and as such it makes sense that if that contract goes badly they should have an out. This includes things like "birth control doesn't work", "contract falls through" [husband leaves- progressives agree with traditionalists that a penis entering a vagina carries the same contractual obligations], "this service was stolen by physical force", and "this service offered violated other sex worker labor laws" [age of consent violations, casting couch, etc.].
This is why [the group of women who resent being sex workers, realize that they are sex workers, but have nothing to offer anyone beyond sex work] are most fiercely in favor of these, and related, laws. The average pro-abortionist is a #metoo and #fightfor25 proponent for this reason.
Traditionalists don't really have a problem with women being sex workers- rape could not be a property crime against fathers if it wasn't- but they strongly believe that a binding contract needs to be signed before sex work of this nature can occur as the primary form of worker protection. So, the fact that being 'forced' (in the presence of trivial alternatives) to carry to term when they have sex outside of that contract is good, proper, natural.
The thing they're missing is that the social infrastructure that once existed to punish this kind of contract violation has been destroyed (age of consent laws are the only compromise still standing, and is part of why traditionalists are very worried that progressives will erase them too). But they're also generally unwilling to build any new social infrastructure and just use what power they have to complain about this, just like progressives are- in fact, progressives would rather destroy traditionalist organizations that exist to support pregnant women in marginal cases than fix the problem; traditionalists do the same thing to conception-prevention organizations when they get the chance (and this should be a sufficient explanation as to why).
The personhood of a fetus, existing or not, really doesn't matter here for either group (traditionalists tend to more strongly believe that their property rights extend to their children; progressives are a lot more redistributionist about that, but they still believe it). Yes, it is convenient that it's alive for the pro-life side; but that's all it is- I have no evidence to believe this would be different were the matter of facts swapped (and is why progressives fight to prove the fetus isn't alive).
Yes, it's unpleasant to acknowledge that the occasional 10 year old will get pregnant, or that some women will die because of this, or that unborn children are killed- but they die because [we believe, and perhaps correctly] our contract law is more important, in the same way school shootings are [the right to defend oneself is a part of the social contract certain societies make with the expendable gender, in return for that expendability- when classical liberals say guns are the left's abortion, this is what they actually mean].
Yeah, but they're just the spear counterpart to the group of women I described earlier (existential anxiety of men about what they are). If they do that task well, they'll be rewarded; that is one of the earliest contracts.
Many "traditional" societies were fine with abortion. In the Greco-Roman world infanticide was allowed. Now, it's true that authority was (theoretically) in the hands of the paterfamilias rather than the woman. But it was not prohibited by the state, Romans would have responded to a pro-life march with "mind your own d*** business."
You're also wrong about age of consent laws. Before 1900 most states set the age of consent at 10-12. Higher age of consent laws are a modern invention.
You strike me as a secular right-winger who's grasping for straws to justify why the church lady anti-abortion crusade is actually rational and BASED. With that motivation and an inaccurate view of history, you've created this theory. Anything other than accept that maybe the hated liburals are right about a single subject.
This is a perfect explanation for the semi-rhetorical question later posed by @hydroacetylene here- as a response to you, in fact- the reason "liburals" (I prefer "progressives" for this group- progressives are not classical liberals so I don't call them that) don't take traditionalists seriously about decreasing baby murder is that decreasing baby murder is obviously not a terminal value for them and it's just a fight over aesthetics (because if it was, traditionalist organizations would be handing out as many free IUDs and Nexplanon as humanly possible; since they oppose this, they're obviously not serious about solving the problem as long as it's not their way).
No, you're proving my point. Gynosupremacy/feminism pushed for high age of consent laws coincident with their emergence as a viable political force, which itself follows socioeconomic effects (gender equality following the decoupling of physical strength from production of goods) in industrial societies; I'm explaining why they did that. I can't link to the original post(s) here more fully explaining this because the person who made them has their account set to private (and they're banned, or at least their alt is).
Yes, obviously. Children are property of those who make them, and it is their right to dispose of them as they wish coincident with the child's ability to resist it as dictated by market conditions (usually a society's age of majority, though less than that due to the fact an age of majority results in market distortions so it's usually higher than it actually is).
What, you weren't told "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it" as a child? That was a Cosby show thing, I believe.
You really haven't read enough of me.
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That is a very noncentral use of the term "sex worker".
Sure, but it's also perfectly accurate; the problem comes from outdated notions of attaching a moral valence to it. It's just what each partner in a relationship has a high statistical probability of bringing to the table (or the opposite partner have a high statistical probability of attaching outsized value to) when negotiating how to live together- nothing more, nothing less. It and [love for one's partner] remain compatible with this view; indeed, love is the notion of long-term investment/convergence backstopping these negotiations.
Without that framing, the dynamics around the argument aren't comprehensible. You even get comment chains like this that show the people making these arguments are so incredibly close to completely understanding it, but are lacking that one final piece/self-honesty... or they're just burying it.
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Why is this hard? If anything, their consistency should reinforce your belief in their integrity.
In what way is this integrity? If this is actually what is going on, it's more like motte ("abortion is murder, I want to stop murder") and bailey ("nothing to force hoes to become housewives like saddling them with a baby").
Their belief is that the wicked actions of women are corrupting them, and they're consistent on this. Of course a lifestyle that embraces infanticide is also self-destructive and corrosive to society more broadly.
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Come now, there are countries that don't even make rape exceptions.
Texas does not make rape exceptions. The standards for Texas abortion exceptions have been posted here before; no exceptions for rape, no exceptions for fetal non viability, maternal health exceptions are narrow and strictly defined.
Hot damn, that is indeed too spicy even for my tastes.
Greg Abbott literally let the Texas Catholic bishops write the exactitudes of clarifying the state's maternal health exceptions- just like in Andorra, where the local bishop as co-president prevents any liberalization of abortion, the threat of excommunicating Greg Abbott prevents any abortion loophole-abuse in Texas.
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I'm told that some extremely-conservative states don't even have exceptions for killing two-year olds conceived by rape. In 2025! Even during Pride Month!
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