Roe v Wade is on deck

[Jimmy Higgins]

Because the other conversation ran its course?

 

[Jarhyn]

Because the other conversation ran its course?

200 pages of "being a busy-body will kill women" and vapid responses in the vein of "BuT tHiNk Of tHe cHiLdReN", as if we didn't JUST explain how that kills people.

Every time, they would rather see their goal at the end of a trail of corpses.

They showed how they would treat others.

They volunteered for a treatment of themselves.

I'm not saying we should treat them as they have asked through their actions, but there's a line that needs to be drawn.

 

[Bomb#20]

Catching up on backlog, sorry for the delay, yada yada...

The word viable in this context means to me “is not yet, but has a good chance to become”.

that's not what "viable" means

Do tell - what does viable mean in this context?

As per Merriam-Webster...

1 a: capable of living
a viable skin graft
viable offspring
b of a fetus : having attained such form and development of organs as to be normally capable of surviving outside the uterus
a 26-week old viable fetus
c: capable of growing or developing
viable seeds
viable eggs

There's no "is not yet" or "become" in there. The meaning of "viable", in this context, is agnostic as to whether a viable fetus is already a person.

 

[Elixir]

having attained such form and development of organs as to be normally capable of surviving outside the uterus
a 26-week old viable fetus

...means the same thing as "could become a child" IMHO. YMMV, but I don't see how.

 

[Bomb#20]

If I may risk asking an ignorant question, what is the point of asking about personhood when that question has not been answered scientifically to any degree of certainty?

Elixir accused Emily of being irrational, and the case he'd made for that relied on the premise that late-term fetuses aren't persons. So asking about personhood was relevant to evaluating the fairness of his accusation.

Perhaps it comes down to a question of valuation, which is of course subjective. Some people value cats and dogs as persons, some don't. At some point in this thread a quote was cited that said, essentially, "A happy cat is worth more than an unhappy child" - A quote I found reprehensible quite honestly.

I don't think Peter Singer actually said that, but it's an easy implication to read into various things he's said. If you aren't familiar with him, Singer is a Princeton philosophy professor who's famous (or infamous) for believing in Utilitarianism, taking it seriously, and opposing speciesism on the grounds that animals are just as capable of happiness and suffering as humans are. He thinks there's no moral case for maximizing the total happiness of only humans at the expense of the total happiness of all sentient beings -- that such a moral theory is every bit as arbitrary and tribal as a moral theory that advocates maximizing the total happiness of Americans.

Do we know when a fetus becomes sentient, becomes conscious, when it starts to think, to dream, and, most importantly, when is it capable of suffering?

I don't. Some people in the thread have offered opinions but I'm not clear on how to measure consciousness.

 

[Bomb#20]

having attained such form and development of organs as to be normally capable of surviving outside the uterus
a 26-week old viable fetus

...means the same thing as "could become a child" IMHO. YMMV, but I don't see how.

Why on earth would you think those mean the same thing?

Consider a 26-week-old preemie in a NICU incubator. He's capable of living. He has attained such form and development of organs as to be normally capable of surviving outside the uterus. He's capable of growing or developing. So he satisfies every element of the definition of "viable". That makes him a viable baby. But that doesn't mean he could become a child. It's too late for him to "become" a child -- he already is a child. Therefore "viable" cannot possibly mean "could become a child". To get to "could become a child" you need the combination of "viable" and "is not already a child". "Viable" by itself won't do the job.

 

[Elixir]

Why on earth would you think those mean the same thing?

Because they DO, functionally, in this context.
I think I mis-attributed Singer with the happy cat quote; it may have been someone else's interpretation of his statements.
Sorry.

 

[Elixir]

Consider a 26-week-old preemie in a NICU incubator. He's capable of living.

He IS LIVING. Living as an organism not directly dependent on another organism's oxygen and nutrition to continue living.
That is a CHILD. Not a FETUS.
A fetus is also living, as were the cells I scraped off the back of my hand while opening a gate a while ago.
Calling a fetus a child is a specious distinction that really only serves as an excuse to regulate its host's options.

To get to "could become a child" you need the combination of "viable" and "is not already a child".

Which a fetus is, no matter how much you torture the word "child" to include viable fetuses.

Note the absence of the word "fetus", even as "similar":

 

[Bomb#20]

The constitution does say that if it doesn't deny a right, that right falls to the citizens.

Quote it. It says pretty much the opposite of that. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." "Or" means "or". That seems to me to make it pretty clear that among the rights the Constitution doesn't deny, some of
them fall to the citizens, while the remainder are up to the States, to confer or withhold as each State's government sees fit.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people

Which is the same thing. Rights not delegated to the US are delegated to the people until/unless reserved by the States.

Why on earth would you think that's the same thing? The way James Madison wrote it, rights not delegated to the US are delegated to the people until/unless* reserved by the States. The way you wrote it, "The constitution does say that if it doesn't deny a right, that right falls to the citizens.", the states are kicked out of the equation.

Rights specifically delegated to the people may not be reserved by States. That’s why RvW was important.

Agreed.

(* With the proviso that the 9th Amendment makes an unspecified subset of them ineligible to be reserved by the states.)

 

[Bomb#20]

What is it about the geometrical positioning of a womb that forestalls a different organism's personhood?

If anything “forestalls” it, that would be the parasitic relationship that is operational with a fetus and is not with a preemie in an incubator.

In the first place, how the heck would parasitism imply somebody isn't a person? Do you think Judith Thomson's famous violinist magically becomes a nonperson when the Society of Music Lovers saves his life by kidnapping you and plugging his circulatory system into yours so your kidneys can filter toxins from his blood? If you do, do you think he'd agree with you?

And in the second place, how the heck do you figure a preemie in an incubator isn't a parasite? He's deriving nourishment from the rest of us without providing any benefit in return. We look after preemies because we're nice, not because they're symbionts. (For that matter, the entire animal kingdom is parasitic on plants.)

 

[Bomb#20]

A doctor who does that should be subject to civil penalties IMHO.

A doctor who does what? Aborts a healthy late-term fetus when its healthy mother pays her to?

If she can find one still practicing, I guess so.
If the doc bears personal civil liability for needless late term abortions, it might weed out the few who would do it “just for the money”.
I think this hypothetical woman is crazy, drugged, depressed or otherwise impaired. No doctor with any decency would cater to her in the first place.

What personal civil liability do you have in mind? Normally civil liability refers to losing a tort lawsuit and having to pay damages. (Or more realistically, having one's malpractice insurer have to pay damages, and then having one's insurance premiums go up.) Who would collect such damages? The victim of the tort is the fetus, who isn't in a position to collect; the fetus's next-of-kin is the mother, who's implicated in the tort and who wouldn't have sued anyway. Who else would have standing to sue? I can't imagine you'd advocate a Texas-style law empowering anyone who disapproves to get a $10,000 windfall in exchange for helping the state perpetrate a fiction that it's a nongovernmental matter.

So I'm guessing by "civil penalties" you don't mean money, but rather disciplinary action from a licensing board. In the first place, that's still giving the authority to legislators -- they're the ones who decide which board of physicians to require you to satisfy in order to keep your license. And in the second place...

... if I understand your entire thrust in this thread correctly, your whole substantive objection to Emily's proposal to legislate RvW is your expectation that some doctor would delay medically indicated 3rd-trimester abortions until the mothers' situations worsen enough that he can be confident his ass is covered in the event that some D.A. second-guesses his judgment that abortion really was medically indicated. (A plausible concern -- after all, that's happening right now with 1st and 2nd trimester abortions in states that bar those except for when necessary for the mother's health.) So the question for you is, why the heck wouldn't you expect the same cover-my-ass reaction from a doctor threatened with losing his license that you expect from a doctor threatened with jail? How do you figure subjecting doctors to civil penalties for performing inappropriate abortions won't cause women to bleed out and die waiting for their doctors to judge them sick enough to be personally safe to provide abortions to? Telling a guy who devoted his education and career to medicine that he can't be a doctor any more is just as life-ruining as a jail term.

 

[Elixir]

that's still giving the authority to legislators -- they're the ones who decide which board of physicians to require you to satisfy in order to keep your license.

Ok, And? They won’t intercede in or delay a needed late term abortion, so I’m not particularly concerned.

.. if I understand your entire thrust in this thread correctly, your whole substantive objection to Emily's proposal to legislate RvW is your expectation that some doctor would delay medically indicated 3rd-trimester abortions until the mothers' situations worsen enough that he can be confident his ass is covered in the event that some D.A. second-guesses his judgment that abortion really was medically indicated. (A plausible concern -- after all, that's happening right now with 1st and 2nd trimester abortions in states that bar those except for when necessary for the mother's health.)

Also in 3rd trimester emergencies that require immediate intervention to save the mother's life.

why the heck wouldn't you expect the same cover-my-ass reaction from a doctor threatened with losing his license that you expect from a doctor threatened with jail?

A fair question. Why would one need a criminal statute to bolster what you imply would be sufficient deterrent to the administration of lifesaving care?
In the case of a Doctor who sincerely believes they are acting in compliance with the Hippocratic oath, including “first, do no harm”, I don’t believe they would think twice in an emergency. Do you? Do you know a lot of doctors whom you think would watch a patient die before facing the Board? Unless their life liberty and pursuit of happiness was immediately imperiled by a criminal statute, I don’t think so. Prove me wrong. And not with just one case, but with an example of things that happen with a regularity that equals or exceeds that of women dying from care delayed or denied.

Question: Couldn't a medical liability insurance policy hold the Company harmless in cases where the board has found a doctor civilly liable?

There are no perfect remedies because perfect pregnancies are not the norm, so we are forced to weigh values. That’s why Ems is so upset; her values seem to cherish a hypothetically viable 28+ week fetus equally with the life of an adult who has memories, friends, family, relatives, a birthday and all those things none of us remember not having, even though at one time we didn’t. I reject that equivocation.
(So Sue me? )

Why am I the only party in the discussion who is expected to actually answer questions directly? I decline to address your wall -o- questions

Who would collect such damages? Who else would have standing to sue? Why wouldn't a doctor ... ? etc.

When I am charged with writing the law, I'll take answering all those questions as my mandate, my job.
For the purposes of this discussion, this one is germane IMHO:

In the first place, how the heck would parasitism imply somebody isn't a person?

It does beg the question -
Why am I the only party in the discussion who is expected to actually answer questions directly and REPEATEDLY?
I do NOT think parasitism obviates the illusory thing you call "personhood". I think that the END of parasitism is the END of any rational excuse to deny "personhood". Got it?
AFAIC a two hour old, two cell blastocyst could be a "person" but I do not see it as beneficial to anyone to consider it so, other than some RW legislators determined to keep their mitts on women's bodies, which I think is sheer perversion.
YMMV

 

[Bomb#20]

There's no certainty for a neonate in the NICU either. Or even for an apparently healthy full-term infant at home asleep in a crib.

Not to mention million dollar hospital bills for months of neonatal ICU care. That's the kind of thing that totally destroys families.

Zipr in on the "kill the premies" side of the argument, I guess?

For someone who never stops complaining that their "position" is being misrepresented, you sure have a solid habit of misrepresenting others' positions. One might almost suspect that all that protest is just projection.

This, from the guy who wrote:

(It’s called reductio ad absurdum.)

 

[Bomb#20]

It's like this:

View attachment 49683

You can't draw an objective single line separating the red from the blue, but there's no doubt that the beginning is not the same as the end.

To me, this is as good an argument as any for letting each mother draw the line where she chooses, without interference from the law.

You appear to have jumped from an is to an ought. Feel free to show your work.

What you wrote looks an awful lot like arguing that a newborn is as much a child as your starting line is red, and a thirty-year-old is as much an adult as your ending line is blue, and you can't draw an objective single line separating those too immature to drink safely from those who are mature enough, but there's no doubt that the beginning is not the same as the end, and this is a good argument for letting each child start downing brewskies when she chooses without interference from the law. I presume you'd agree with that conclusion.

(I also presume that's because you're Australian, not because it's a sound argument. )

 

[Bomb#20]

The boundaries are fuzzy.

RIGHT.
We all agree.
We all agree that somewhere in that red zone is an abortion that shouldn't happen, and should be have either criminal or civil repercussions.

No we don't. That conflicts with stuff bilby said.

We all agree that somewhere in that blue zone, there should be no legal restriction to abortion.

Looks that way.

We all agree that "personhood" is attained at some point, at latest, by the time it is biologically autonomous.

No we don't. That conflicts with stuff Jarhyn said.

So IMHO, using personhood as a factor in a statutory decision is irrational, period.

That appears to be, at the least, a hasty generalization. I suspect we all agree it should be statutorily legal to own a horse and illegal to own a human; if we don't all agree, at least you and I do. If there's a more rational reason for the law to make that distinction than because a human is a person and a horse isn't, I'm not seeing it.

 

[Bomb#20]

RIGHT.
We all agree.
We all agree that somewhere in that red zone is an abortion that shouldn't happen, and should be have either criminal or civil repercussions.
We all agree that somewhere in that blue zone, there should be no legal restriction to abortion.
We all agree that "personhood" is attained at some point, at latest, by the time it is biologically autonomous.
(yes, even in a respirator with IVs, pulse/ox cardiorespiration monitor etc. )
We all agree that we don't want to know when "personhood" is attained.

FIFY

I think what we have agreed upon is the threshold to personhood is "arbitrary" and people should stop acting like it is an objective attribute to existence.

I think people should stop acting like objectivity is an unchanging attribute to the existence of changing objects. The arbitrariness and subjectivity of a threshold tell us jack squat about the objectivity of the properties of entities far removed from the threshold.

 

[Bomb#20]

Arguments regarding personhood date back millenia, have no concensus, and have no objective basis from statistics to rely on onee thing to justify one choice over the other. The only consistent thing is that legal provisions generally only apply to an individual post birth.

Do tell.

Murder in California law - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Code defines murder as "the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought"​

 

[Elixir]

The arbitrariness and subjectivity of a threshold tell us jack squat about the objectivity of the properties of entities far removed from the threshold.

So go with the only reliably identifiable moment of transition from fetus to baby. Duh.

The Code defines murder as "the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought"

CA.
They have hired a board of psychics to divine the malice and aforethought of doctors who perform abortion?
Or is it the “unlawful “ part that needs litigating?

We all agree that we don't want to know when "personhood" is attained.FIFY

Speaking for yourself of course. Only by not knowing can RW legislators rationalize their presence in an ER or birthing suite.
Personally I would find a magical personhood detector to be a blessing, as it would obviate at least THAT part of the abortion legality mess.
Unfortunately your modification to my statement is utterly inaccurate. I advocate for the safe bet that an autonomous human organism is a person. At least it can be positively determined - except perhaps in the case of some conservatives’ offspring.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Arguments regarding personhood date back millenia, have no concensus, and have no objective basis from statistics to rely on onee thing to justify one choice over the other. The only consistent thing is that legal provisions generally only apply to an individual post birth.

Do tell.

Murder in California law - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Code defines murder as "the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought"​

I conditioned my statement with a "generally". Finding an exclusion isn't breaking the veracity of my statement. As far as most governments are concerned, life begins at birth: life insurance, health care, social security, dependents, disability coverage, birth certificates, etc...

 

[bilby]

What you wrote looks an awful lot like arguing that a newborn is as much a child as your starting line is red, and a thirty-year-old is as much an adult as your ending line is blue, and you can't draw an objective single line separating those too immature to drink safely from those who are mature enough, but there's no doubt that the beginning is not the same as the end, and this is a good argument for letting each child start downing brewskies when she chooses without interference from the law. I presume you'd agree with that conclusion.

I presume that you imagine I won't, or that the conclusion is at least sufficiently absurd as to give me pause, but both history and current practice (in more liberal places than the USA) suggests that the less legal constraint there is on alcohol consumption, the better the outcomes are for society at large.

French people who grow up drinking the occasional glass of wine at meals, with the encouragement and support of their families, tend to have far fewer problems with alcohol than British people who are legally debarred from alcohol until the age of 18, on which birthday they are suddenly permitted to drink as much as they can stomach.

America's history of legal constraints on alcohol consumption suggests that such constraints do a lot more harm than good.

That an American should be so certain that a law must be present and enforced is unsurprising, as is the subtext that they expect this "fact" to be self-evident. Indeed, it highlights exactly the problem Americans have with their bizarre insistence that having strict law (and strict enforcement of that law) is compatible with freedom.

Americans talk a lot about freedom. I wonder whether they will ever find out what the word means - if they do, I think they're going to be quite embarrased.