the question isn’t whether a fetus is an adult but whether it is “human”. And the question of humanity boils down to whether a fetus has a soul. And a fetus doesn’t have a soul until “the quickening”, which is generally regarded as the point at which a woman can feel the fetus kicking in her belly (typically between week 16 and 25, on the back end of the second trimester).
So the real question a doctor has to ask before performing an abortion is whether he can detect a soul in the fetus he is aborting.
I think the biggest reason the debate continues amongst honest actors is that defining when life begins is always going to be arbitrary.
Is it meiosis - when a genetically unique human begins to form? Is it fetal heartbeat? Is it 2nd trimester? Is it birth? Is it after they’ve developed language and can begin to function in society?
The line is going to be arbitrary any place its drawn, and there will be people thinking it’s murder to abort and others who think it’s fine.
That’s one end of the argument. But the other is the same argument you’ll find with conjoined twins or child support payments. At what point do the needs of one individual supersede the well-being of another?
That’s another arbitrary line to draw. But the fundamental problem with “pro-life” as a movement is that said line seems to be drawn to explicitly exclude the pregnant woman. In fact, the possibility of pregnancy almost feels like an excuse to weaponize law enforcement against women, such that even the possibility of being pregnant instills a perpetual social/economic obligation on an entire gender.
there will be people thinking it’s murder to abort and others who think it’s fine.
There will be people thinking its murder not to abort in quite a few circumstances. And women bleeding out in ERs, because physicians are too afraid of the civil/criminal liabilities of aiding a pregnant woman are becoming entirely too common in these so-called pro-life states.
Which is why it’s so damn complicated. But I think the time line of when human life begins is the biggest sticking point because it’s the one that determines the basis of all other arguments.
You have to be willing to see the other side sometimes to have an honest debate.
The best pro-life argument I ever heard was to look at pregnancy like an accident. If you cause an accident that puts someone else’s life in danger, you’re legally required to stop and render aid to the victim until someone else can take over - up until doing so would endanger your own survival.
To the pro-lifer, choosing to have sex was causing the accident that placed the “child” in mortal danger, and carrying the child to term was rendering aid. They also held the position that the logic meant that a raped woman had no responsibility to continue the pregnancy because it wasn’t the victim’s fault they were raped, and that a pregnancy endangering the mother could be terminated.
That argument could be persuasive, but only if the fetus is considered a human.
I think the time line of when human life begins is the biggest sticking point
Its an age old philosophical debate, but that’s precisely why it isn’t a viable candidate for policy. You inevitably get into a contradictory standard of enforcement when the liabilities for fetal death eclipse the electoral benefits of prosecuting pregnant women.
Texas isn’t using these rules to adjudicate HOV lanes, for instance.
While the Texas penal code recognizes an unborn baby as a person, current transportation law in the state does not.
So the question isn’t what’s being raised. These are arbitrary distinctions set by the whims of the legislature.
You have to be willing to see the other side sometimes to have an honest debate.
The best pro-life argument I ever heard was to look at pregnancy like an accident. If you cause an accident that puts someone else’s life in danger, you’re legally required to stop and render aid to the victim until someone else can take over
The act of pregnancy itself puts the mother’s life in danger. However, the prospective father is not liable for providing health care to the woman he impregnated.
These theories are quaint thought experiments, but they fail to make their way into law.
That’s the thing though, you’re jumping straight to Ken Paxton as the standard example for the other side. You’re judging the other side of the debate by the extremists. There are millions of pro-life people who hold that position out of legitimate concern for what they consider to be unborn children, and not because they want to control women.
Acting like the goal of every pro-lifer is subjugation of women is no different than pro-lifers acting like pro-choice people are only interested in “murdering babies.”
It’s an antagonistic position that prevents honest discussion and only serves to empower the extremists on the right.
People on both sides have noble goals, and acknowledging that is the first step towards seeking consensus. Calling everyone on the other side mysoginists gets them defensive, and the political right has weaponized that defensive reaction for decades and used it to create the most powerful single-issue voting group in modern history.
That’s the thing though, you’re jumping straight to Ken Paxton as the standard example for the other side.
He’s the leading figure in the largest conservative state’s dominant pro-life political party. If he’s not the standard for “the other side” who is? He is quite literally dictating the policy by which “the other side” is being judged.
Acting like the goal of every pro-lifer is subjugation of women
This is the explicit stated goal of the most influential financial and religious leaders within the movement.
Its no secret that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. And it would be deeply insincere to claim abortion advocacy is - at least in part - driven by a desire among aspiring parents not to give birth to children with sever developmental issues. A down’s syndrome diagnosis is a leading cause of abortion.x
These are realities that people have to confront, not caricatures we should pretend are fabrications of the opposition. Some women simply do not want to be pregnant, full stop. And abortion opponents do not believe they have the right to terminate that pregnancy, full stop. The state intervention in that decision is - explicitly and definitively - an attempt by the pro-life movement to subjugate these women.
People on both sides have noble goals
That’s categorically untrue. The goals of these organization leaders range from the cynically mercenary to the outright misogynist. The goals of their members are entirely confrontational and removed from any kind of functional beneficial public policy.
This is a country that is ratcheting back everything from the public financing of emergency medical assistance to food aid for elementary school students. The goals are not noble. The perceived ends are not virtuous. The people are not simply coming at a complex problem from different points of view.
Eric Erickson, Steve Bannon, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Johnson are not your friends. They are not trying to do right by you. They do not want the best for your children.
And they aren’t regular people. That’s my entire point and you’re intentionally ignoring it.
Pro-lofe voters are a single-issue voting group. They legitimately believe that children are being murdered en masse, and that all other political issues combined are inconsequential. The Republicans have used that fact to get millions of people to vote for a party they find otherwise abhorrent. It’s why they can get religious people to vote for policies that are so hateful.
If Biden had been Pro-lofe and Trump pro-choice, millions of people would have voted for Biden instead. How many people would have swapped to vote for Trump? The Republican party is entirely dependant on the single-issue voter. The pro-life and pro-gun voting groups are why they are still so powerful.
It’s absolutely true that Republican leadership doesn’t care about “unborn children” or any other kind of child. Their policies make it clear. They’re monsters that are 100% willing to watch millions of poor people die if it puts another nickel in their pockets. In the 70s they were about to collapse entirely in the aftermath of Nixon when Roe gave them an opportunity to pick up voters, and the “religious right” movement took it from there.
Previously, when people thought of religious politicians they didn’t think of Republicans. Jimmy Carter was a textbook religious politician. He believed in social welfare and protecting the environment. His post-presidential career was focused entirely on charity.
Religious figures had featured prominently in the Civil Rights movement. They fought for immigrantion reform, welfare, social justice, and more. The Republicans needed a way to steal their influence and direct the religious to their side, and Roe was the key.
It’s actually something that quietly terrified Republicans when Roe was overturned. They’d spent 50 years depending on it to get people to vote Republican, and when it was actually overturned lots of voters felt freedom to vote based on other issues.
They are the leadership of the movement. The people that the “regular people” listen to when developing their views and understandings of the policies at hand.
You can’t decouple Ken Paxton from the political movement that champions him.
Previously, when people thought of religious politicians they didn’t think of Republicans. Jimmy Carter was a textbook religious politician.
Jimmy Carter hasn’t been on anyone’s ballot in over 40 years. We have two full generations of voters who are utterly uninformed of his politics.
None of these right-wing “moderate” abortion opponents are crusading to expand Medicaid or public housing or provide any kind of state funded pre-natal care.
Religious figures had featured prominently in the Civil Rights movement.
At which point the state agents - themselves prominent in their religious communities - arrested, abused, and ultimately killed many of them.
It’s actually something that quietly terrified Republicans when Roe was overturned.
That’s absolute horseshit. The GOP movement organizers used the downfall of Roe as a validation of their entire political strategy. Its the liberals who have been terrified, both at the brazenness of the courts to overturn such a historical standard and at the powerlessness of their own representatives to push back in any meaningful way.
I have friends and relatives who are afraid to visit anti-abortion states, entirely thanks to the slew of news stores about women dying in hospitals from paranoid staff. My own sister has scuttled her plans to move back home, because she wants to have another child and can’t risk getting pregnant in Houston.
That’s what we’re squaring up against in the modern moment. Not some polite disagreement between well-meaning neighbors.
If you want to get really theological
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_abortion
the question isn’t whether a fetus is an adult but whether it is “human”. And the question of humanity boils down to whether a fetus has a soul. And a fetus doesn’t have a soul until “the quickening”, which is generally regarded as the point at which a woman can feel the fetus kicking in her belly (typically between week 16 and 25, on the back end of the second trimester).
So the real question a doctor has to ask before performing an abortion is whether he can detect a soul in the fetus he is aborting.
I think the biggest reason the debate continues amongst honest actors is that defining when life begins is always going to be arbitrary.
Is it meiosis - when a genetically unique human begins to form? Is it fetal heartbeat? Is it 2nd trimester? Is it birth? Is it after they’ve developed language and can begin to function in society?
The line is going to be arbitrary any place its drawn, and there will be people thinking it’s murder to abort and others who think it’s fine.
That’s one end of the argument. But the other is the same argument you’ll find with conjoined twins or child support payments. At what point do the needs of one individual supersede the well-being of another?
That’s another arbitrary line to draw. But the fundamental problem with “pro-life” as a movement is that said line seems to be drawn to explicitly exclude the pregnant woman. In fact, the possibility of pregnancy almost feels like an excuse to weaponize law enforcement against women, such that even the possibility of being pregnant instills a perpetual social/economic obligation on an entire gender.
There will be people thinking its murder not to abort in quite a few circumstances. And women bleeding out in ERs, because physicians are too afraid of the civil/criminal liabilities of aiding a pregnant woman are becoming entirely too common in these so-called pro-life states.
Which is why it’s so damn complicated. But I think the time line of when human life begins is the biggest sticking point because it’s the one that determines the basis of all other arguments.
You have to be willing to see the other side sometimes to have an honest debate.
The best pro-life argument I ever heard was to look at pregnancy like an accident. If you cause an accident that puts someone else’s life in danger, you’re legally required to stop and render aid to the victim until someone else can take over - up until doing so would endanger your own survival.
To the pro-lifer, choosing to have sex was causing the accident that placed the “child” in mortal danger, and carrying the child to term was rendering aid. They also held the position that the logic meant that a raped woman had no responsibility to continue the pregnancy because it wasn’t the victim’s fault they were raped, and that a pregnancy endangering the mother could be terminated.
That argument could be persuasive, but only if the fetus is considered a human.
Its an age old philosophical debate, but that’s precisely why it isn’t a viable candidate for policy. You inevitably get into a contradictory standard of enforcement when the liabilities for fetal death eclipse the electoral benefits of prosecuting pregnant women.
Texas isn’t using these rules to adjudicate HOV lanes, for instance.
So the question isn’t what’s being raised. These are arbitrary distinctions set by the whims of the legislature.
But we’re well past the point of debate. We past that point when AG Ken Paxton petitioned to stop the abortion of a nonviable pregnancy.
The act of pregnancy itself puts the mother’s life in danger. However, the prospective father is not liable for providing health care to the woman he impregnated.
These theories are quaint thought experiments, but they fail to make their way into law.
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
That’s the thing though, you’re jumping straight to Ken Paxton as the standard example for the other side. You’re judging the other side of the debate by the extremists. There are millions of pro-life people who hold that position out of legitimate concern for what they consider to be unborn children, and not because they want to control women.
Acting like the goal of every pro-lifer is subjugation of women is no different than pro-lifers acting like pro-choice people are only interested in “murdering babies.”
It’s an antagonistic position that prevents honest discussion and only serves to empower the extremists on the right.
People on both sides have noble goals, and acknowledging that is the first step towards seeking consensus. Calling everyone on the other side mysoginists gets them defensive, and the political right has weaponized that defensive reaction for decades and used it to create the most powerful single-issue voting group in modern history.
He’s the leading figure in the largest conservative state’s dominant pro-life political party. If he’s not the standard for “the other side” who is? He is quite literally dictating the policy by which “the other side” is being judged.
This is the explicit stated goal of the most influential financial and religious leaders within the movement.
Its no secret that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. And it would be deeply insincere to claim abortion advocacy is - at least in part - driven by a desire among aspiring parents not to give birth to children with sever developmental issues. A down’s syndrome diagnosis is a leading cause of abortion.x
These are realities that people have to confront, not caricatures we should pretend are fabrications of the opposition. Some women simply do not want to be pregnant, full stop. And abortion opponents do not believe they have the right to terminate that pregnancy, full stop. The state intervention in that decision is - explicitly and definitively - an attempt by the pro-life movement to subjugate these women.
That’s categorically untrue. The goals of these organization leaders range from the cynically mercenary to the outright misogynist. The goals of their members are entirely confrontational and removed from any kind of functional beneficial public policy.
This is a country that is ratcheting back everything from the public financing of emergency medical assistance to food aid for elementary school students. The goals are not noble. The perceived ends are not virtuous. The people are not simply coming at a complex problem from different points of view.
Eric Erickson, Steve Bannon, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Johnson are not your friends. They are not trying to do right by you. They do not want the best for your children.
And they aren’t regular people. That’s my entire point and you’re intentionally ignoring it.
Pro-lofe voters are a single-issue voting group. They legitimately believe that children are being murdered en masse, and that all other political issues combined are inconsequential. The Republicans have used that fact to get millions of people to vote for a party they find otherwise abhorrent. It’s why they can get religious people to vote for policies that are so hateful.
If Biden had been Pro-lofe and Trump pro-choice, millions of people would have voted for Biden instead. How many people would have swapped to vote for Trump? The Republican party is entirely dependant on the single-issue voter. The pro-life and pro-gun voting groups are why they are still so powerful.
It’s absolutely true that Republican leadership doesn’t care about “unborn children” or any other kind of child. Their policies make it clear. They’re monsters that are 100% willing to watch millions of poor people die if it puts another nickel in their pockets. In the 70s they were about to collapse entirely in the aftermath of Nixon when Roe gave them an opportunity to pick up voters, and the “religious right” movement took it from there.
Previously, when people thought of religious politicians they didn’t think of Republicans. Jimmy Carter was a textbook religious politician. He believed in social welfare and protecting the environment. His post-presidential career was focused entirely on charity.
Religious figures had featured prominently in the Civil Rights movement. They fought for immigrantion reform, welfare, social justice, and more. The Republicans needed a way to steal their influence and direct the religious to their side, and Roe was the key.
It’s actually something that quietly terrified Republicans when Roe was overturned. They’d spent 50 years depending on it to get people to vote Republican, and when it was actually overturned lots of voters felt freedom to vote based on other issues.
They are the leadership of the movement. The people that the “regular people” listen to when developing their views and understandings of the policies at hand.
You can’t decouple Ken Paxton from the political movement that champions him.
Jimmy Carter hasn’t been on anyone’s ballot in over 40 years. We have two full generations of voters who are utterly uninformed of his politics.
None of these right-wing “moderate” abortion opponents are crusading to expand Medicaid or public housing or provide any kind of state funded pre-natal care.
At which point the state agents - themselves prominent in their religious communities - arrested, abused, and ultimately killed many of them.
The modern civil rights movement has been hollowed out by decades of intrusive surveillance (famously, the Bush Administration had the NSA and FBI spying on The Quaker Communities of Pensylvania), illegal detentions (anti-terror laws used to round up “Cop City” protest church groups in Georgia), and financial coersion (state funded lawsuits seeking to bankrupt Planned Parenthood).
That’s absolute horseshit. The GOP movement organizers used the downfall of Roe as a validation of their entire political strategy. Its the liberals who have been terrified, both at the brazenness of the courts to overturn such a historical standard and at the powerlessness of their own representatives to push back in any meaningful way.
I have friends and relatives who are afraid to visit anti-abortion states, entirely thanks to the slew of news stores about women dying in hospitals from paranoid staff. My own sister has scuttled her plans to move back home, because she wants to have another child and can’t risk getting pregnant in Houston.
That’s what we’re squaring up against in the modern moment. Not some polite disagreement between well-meaning neighbors.