Texas v abortion

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Hey guys, I heard senator Abbott is going to get rid of rape in Texas so that no one will ever get pregnant from rape again. This so that the abortion ban making no exceptions for rape victims won't be any cause for concern.

I guess we can scratch that problem off the list, huh.
 

CriticalGaming

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Hey guys, I heard senator Abbott is going to get rid of rape in Texas so that no one will ever get pregnant from rape again. This so that the abortion ban making no exceptions for rape victims won't be any cause for concern.

I guess we can scratch that problem off the list, huh.
Oh cool, problem solved then. Can Abbott then go around and take care of that in every other state too? Because universally getting rid of rape seems like a net positive.
 

crimson5pheonix

It took 6 months to read my title.
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Hey guys, I heard senator Abbott is going to get rid of rape in Texas so that no one will ever get pregnant from rape again. This so that the abortion ban making no exceptions for rape victims won't be any cause for concern.

I guess we can scratch that problem off the list, huh.
Minor correction. Governor Abbott has said he's going to ban rape now (as apparently it wasn't banned before?) despite being in office 6 years and not doing so until now.
 

MrCalavera

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Hey guys, I heard senator Abbott is going to get rid of rape in Texas so that no one will ever get pregnant from rape again. This so that the abortion ban making no exceptions for rape victims won't be any cause for concern.

I guess we can scratch that problem off the list, huh.
That's amazing. Is it possible to delegalize other forms of crime, as well?
 

Terminal Blue

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A fetus doesn't have control over another body either, a woman can still do what she wants when pregnant.
A person can still do what they want with one kidney..

I mean, firstly, don't be silly. Pregnancy is a relatively extreme medical condition. It affects a huge range of bodily functions. I don't know if you've ever spoken to someone who has been in the later stages of pregnancy, but it's incredibly debilitating. A person cannot do whatever they want when pregnant. Often they will struggle to do much at all, which is one reason why maternity leave exists. Historically, pregnancy and childbirth was also a major cause of death in women. Pretending its in any way unreasonable to not want to go through pregnancy isn't fair.

Secondly, the foetus doesn't control its mothers body, but it does impinge on its mother's medical control over her own body. It literally lives inside that body, it forces that body to change and adapt to its presence without consent, it may ultimately kill that body. The issue, fundamentally, is that the body is a person who possesses intrinsic value and rights. They are not an incubator, or a vehicle, or a tool. They are a living human being.

Did you not notice that the pro-choice side is in defense of the "there isn't a soul yet" position? Rephrase it to unconscious, or doesn't feel pain, or whatever humanizing thing you may think is relevant. The framework of "early abortions are fine but not after so many months" is the idea that at some point an abstract change transforms a fetus from a parasite into a person, and it was justified for centuries in religious terms. Changing the words to not say "soul" doesn't make the position more or less correct.
I think you've fundamentally misunderstood what the basis is for the restriction on late term abortions. It isn't meant to protect the consciousness of a developing foetus, that's not even a factor in the decision making process. The determining factor which is used to legally limit abortion, in the vast majority of secular countries, is the line of viability. That is to say, the point at which it becomes reasonably possible to potentially keep a foetus alive to term outside of its mother's body. It is entirely possible to abort a foetus after this point, and it does happen in some cases when it is deemed appropriate, but the medical ethics of doing so are more complicated and may involve complex medical decisions and balancing conflicting principles and priorities.

That is why we limit abortion. It's not because we believe in some magic point where a foetus becomes conscious or develops a "soul", it's to protect the people who perform abortions from difficult, stressful or ethically challenging decisions regarding whether or not to keep potentially viable foetuses alive. It is an unfortunate side effect of the fact that medical knowledge and technology is now extremely good at keeping premature babies alive far, far past the point of natural viability.
 
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tstorm823

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I've tried now three separate times to dig up a reliable breakdown of the ages of kids awaiting adoption, to no avail. If you have the stats to back up the idea that young kids needing homes "isn't a thing" in America, I'd love to see them. It'd make the country bizarrely unique.
I agree, hard statistics on specifically the children in foster care able to be adopted is either hard to find or non-existent. But I can at least offer a large sample size example. This website is a group that works to try and get children adopted out of the foster system, and you can search their database for children up for adoption. At this moment, searching for any kids between zero and eighteen yields 3724 listings, which is at least 5000 kids based on how many listing are from groups of siblings. If instead I search for a child from infant to 1 year old, I get 1 single result that's actually a 16-year-old that they forgot to type his age in.
That is why we limit abortion. It's not because we believe in some magic point where a foetus becomes conscious or develops a "soul", it's to protect the people who perform abortions from difficult, stressful or ethically challenging decisions regarding whether or not to keep potentially viable foetuses alive. It is an unfortunate side effect of the fact that medical knowledge and technology is now extremely good at keeping premature babies alive far, far past the point of natural viability.
We limit abortion the way we do because that's the way we've done it for centuries. It's just the conservative position of "let's keep doing what we've always done". You can rationalize that 1000 ways. Hell, the supreme court managed to decide that the 14th amendment somehow necessitated that we go back to exactly the framework in English common law. "It doesn't have a soul until it moves" is honestly more compelling than the argument made in Roe v Wade, but they're both equally irrelevant arguments in their specifics, because all of these arguments (yours included) are just different attempts to justify why society should remain the same as it has been for thousands of years.
 

McElroy

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We limit abortion the way we do because that's the way we've done it for centuries. It's just the conservative position of "let's keep doing what we've always done". You can rationalize that 1000 ways.
I doubt anyone will claim the more or less arbitrary cut off point doesn't need any rationalization to back it up. Nor will anyone say that there aren't multiple different rationalizations. "It's all the same if it ends the same" doesn't undermine any particular argument, it just tells us that there will never be a shortage of people who will rationalize their position.
 

Piscian

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Alright so here me out. If most anti-abortionists are republican and most people who are prochoice are leftest, arent republicans just forcing more leftist into the world by forcing people most likely it to have abortions to have babies?
 

Worgen

Follower of the Glorious Sun Butt.
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Whatever, just wash your hands.
Alright so here me out. If most anti-abortionists are republican and most people who are prochoice are leftest, arent republicans just forcing more leftist into the world by forcing people most likely it to have abortions to have babies?
Well they are already doing a pretty good job of killing off their constituents with the anti-mask/anti-vaccine/anti-social distancing bullshit.
 

SilentPony

Previously known as an alleged "Feather-Rustler"
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Okay so this has been bothering me. No exceptions for rape and incest.
Incest can never be voluntary. Family members can not consent to sex with each other, that's why its a sex crime. Whatever consensual relationship between family members they claim to have, the state doesn't recognize it as proper consent. In the same way a 16 year old can say they consent to sex with a 40 year old, but the state just says it doesn't count, you don't have the power to consent to this.
So why differentiate? If state laws view incest as a form of rape, why not just say "exception for rape" and just assume everyone already include the illegal rape crime that is incest?
Just feels weird we have to differentiate between the non family member on other person rape crime that is rape, and the family on family member rape crime that is incest.
 

Avnger

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Incest is not as illegal as you think, and is not, in fact, considered by law to be a form of rape.

One key thing to keep in mind is that "regular" sexual assault, rape, and consent laws still apply in those situations. Incest (at least in the US legal system) is essentially an addition charge on top of those.
 

Mister Mumbler

Pronounced "Throat-wobbler Mangrove"
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A bit late with this, sorry in advance, but I would like to touch back here...
Like, pregnancy is an amazing, unique thing. In order to construct an analogy to it, you necessarily have to imagine a nearly magical scenario to even approximate it.
Because...is it really? Like, 90% of every living thing on this planet goes through some form of "pregnancy" (including plants), and some with more amazing feats. Such as kangaroo joeys that need to crawl out of the womb and into the mothers pouch. The only ways that human pregnancies are different is that we have a rather long pregnancy cycle (9 months) and that our young are absolutely useless for years.
 

SilentPony

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Incest is not as illegal as you think, and is not, in fact, considered by law to be a form of rape.

Okay if Im reading this right, in Jersey and Rhode Island, incest is legal. So would the wording of any abortion laws in that state not include "and incest" part, because its a perfectly normal act and any child is just a normal child? Like we don't say "in cases of rape, and interracial babies", and if incest is legal, they have no reason to give it special exceptions.

One key thing to keep in mind is that "regular" sexual assault, rape, and consent laws still apply in those situations. Incest (at least in the US legal system) is essentially an addition charge on top of those.
Here is my thing though, by differentiating the two, incest and rape, they're implying cases of one or the other, and both; a case of rape that does include incest, a case of rape that does not include incest, and a case of incest that does not include rape. Except incest as a sex crime can not be consented to, so its non-consensual sex and we have a word for that.
To me it sounds like differentiating between shooting someone through the head, and murder(attempted or otherwise) being two separate charges. Someone is charged with murder and shooting someone through the head, another murder with no shooting, and another with simply shooting, no attempted murder to speak of.
 
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TheMysteriousGX

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Okay if Im reading this right, in Jersey and Rhode Island, incest is legal. So would the wording of any abortion laws in that state not include "and incest" part, because its a perfectly normal act and any child is just a normal child? Like we don't say "in cases of rape, and interracial babies", and if incest is legal, they have no reason to give it special exceptions.
Interracial marriages don't tend to give children horrifying congenital defects.

Like, aside from the built-in moral and ethical fucked-upedness, there's solid genetic reasons not to dive into a shallow gene pool
 

SilentPony

Previously known as an alleged "Feather-Rustler"
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Interracial marriages don't tend to give children horrifying congenital defects.

Like, aside from the built-in moral and ethical fucked-upedness, there's solid genetic reasons not to dive into a shallow gene pool
I mean A. a one-off incest child is very unlikely to be some horrible mutant child, and B. those with genetic disorders aren't forbidden from having children. The post-birth life of the child isn't considered when it comes to the abortion debate, legally speaking.
European royalty all being a little fucked up comes from almost 1,000 years of inbreeding.