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Why stop there? More Canadians are killed by cancer, heart disease, COVID, and accidents than doctors. More Americans are killed by themselves than by other people with guns. Reasoning with raw quantities is more likely to get assisted suicide expanded rather than abolished. You won’t dismantle the master’s house with his tools.
Who, exactly, do you have in mind? Doctors? Liberals?
It is a little ridiculous. Most states still have restrictions after 5 to 6 months, including California, Virginia and New York. Most states will also allow extremely late abortions…if only to save the mother’s life. Some, like Texas, have been intentionally vague about what they would and wouldn’t tolerate. Massachusetts claims that it’s rescinding its second-trimester exception specifically to help mothers in that situation. There is no insinuation that anyone involved would be happy about a D&E.
In conclusion, I think you’re overfitting the trend. Abortion laws are relatively stable now that the post-Dobbs reactions have smoothed out. They also don’t really connect to suicide or organ donor laws on the left. For the religious right, they’re all spiritual concerns, but the material facts don’t line up.
Vermont, Colorado, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington DC, & New Mexico will let you abort any time you want. & infact, there are clinics around the US that will let you do so, such as the DuPont Clinic.
You missed Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, and Maryland.
But every state has an exception to save the mother’s life. Even some of the most conservative, like Alabama, allow aborting nonviable pregnancies.
Sure, but the problem im pointing out here is that those abortions in several states are allowed no matter what! The moms life doesnt need to be in danger, she can do it for any reason at all.
Right.
All states “legalize abortion up to the moment of crowning” under some conditions. 10 states, most of them left-leaning, stripped the conditions. On the other hand, states like CA and NY, which are usually furthest left, didn’t feel the need.
This suggests that “legalize abortion up to the moment of crowning” was not really what “the Left wanted.” It’s more like a side effect of 1) avoiding Texas-style ambiguity and 2) countersignaling that they aren’t like those icky red states.
If one believes that unnecessary abortions are really quite rare, or that they are permissible if unsavory, then that looks like a good trade. If not, then it looks like leaving a loophole for sickos.
You don't need to remove gestational limits to avoid Texas style ambiguity, nor does having them mean you are like a red state. Many of these states who have no gestational limits were like that pre dobbs.
I guess you more or less disputing, from what i can see now, about whether or not the left wanted that. But if they did not want that, they wouldnt have done it.
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Would you extend this much charity to a crowd you weren't already sympathetic to?
The insinuation is that they just don't care. They cheered at the signing of the bill. I do not feel the need to see them cheer at the actual D&E.
Is there a word for this "you are not allowed to draw revealed conclusions to the left" thing?
Reminds me a little of the "I'm not for open borders; I just vehemently oppose all enforcement and refuse to describe any enforcement I'd find tolerable" attitude.
EDIT:
"Life is meaningless at the beginning, it's meaningless at the end, and we won't help you figure out what it's supposed to mean in between" is a helluva philosophy.
Yes. Something like “the right wants to punish women for having sex” would be a ridiculous claim, even if some laws occasionally have that effect. Even when some of the fringe will cheerfully say as much! I believe conservatives when they say they really want to stop the baby murders.
Massachusetts says that this law is supposed to reduce uncertainty in an already-tragic situation. In doing so, it creates the possibility for an abortion right up before crowning. I hope that never happens, and I would be disturbed and disgusted if it did—but it is not the goal of the law. Polling suggests most Americans think like I do, and support bans with exceptions rather than unrestricted abortion. I expect most residents of Massachusetts would feel the same way.
Bans with exceptions are the popular, median position. I suspect it's probably something like an intensive activist core pushing as far as possible, and politicians (who may or may not share the fervor) granting the win because no one bothers to read the text of bills. It's easy to spin positively and almost trivial with a compliant media. We had plenty of disingenuous articles about purported tragedies resulting from post-Dobbs bans. I would predict that even if it happened, we would never see an article about a woman getting a 7-9 month abortion because it interfered with Coachella from any outlet further left than Fox News.
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No it very manifestly is not.
We are watching mainstream Democrats pivot from "Don't be ridiculous that would never happen." to "Yes it's happening and that's a good thing." in the space of an election cycle.
I don’t find this framing to be especially persuasive since Massachusetts is apparently the 10th state to do it, and laws of the other similar states all pre-date the 2024 election. If the mainstream democratic position was “don’t be ridiculous, [passing such a law] would never happen” then they were factually wrong then, and nothing really changed in the space of an election cycle.
The steelman is that the mainstream democratic positions are actually “don’t be ridiculous, [the late-term elective abortions with zero medical reason] would never happen” and “Yes, it’s good we passed this law because it reduces the red-tape for late-term abortions for medical reasons”. These two positions are not internally contradictory.
For what it’s worth, I do not agree with this new law because I think it would actually lead to elective late-term abortions and I would prefer they kept the previous version, similar to California’s abortion laws.
Generally, from what I've seen the steelman is, "If a woman wanted to abort for purely elective reasons she would have done so earlier in the pregnancy. These laws just make doctors fear that if they perform an abortion for medical reasons (the baby or mother is extremely unlikely to survive) they'll be put on trial."
Which is one of those things that sounds plausible but not sure how true it is.
It bullshit, they have caught people going over gestational limits before. But going beyond that, most countries have gestational limits, and the idea that having them will put women in danger or make it hard for doctors makes no sense, given that fact.
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Ignoring that they could be put on trial for that more generally, of course. Everyone else has a reasonable fear that in a self-defense case this will occur anyway, and isn't that generally the justification the pro-abortion side trots out?
So the hospitals that pre-emptively prohibit the procedure are generally either just grandstanding (re: "Blues think they're the only bastion of civilization in a hostile country"), or are sunk into the tarpit of (Blue-style) extreme risk-aversion by banning the practice. Which they're incentivized to do, since this can give their side a few graves to stand on to enable the grandstanding, even though those deaths are ultimately caused by them and their power structure being insane people.
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Lying. They were lying. Ralph Northam, everyone that defended him, et cetera and so forth, all lying.
Hypocrisy is not the only offense in the world, and it's unenforceable against people who do not share one's own moral precepts.
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