Roe v Wade is on deck

[Elixir]

Lots of government guns around here, but they cause almost zero shootings. We get lots of out of State hunters with rifles, and often they also carry sidearms - they make me nervous. If you’re going into a grocery store, leave it in the fucking car!

I get where you're coming from... but there's significant risk of a firearm being stolen from a vehicle and used in the commission of a crime. Leaving guns of any sort unattended in a car is not a good idea. It's really only appropriate if you've got an actual travel safe for them.

Well, when yore a real man Texan out for killing large animals, you can leave the gun rack in your lifted pickup full of long guns pulling a trailer full of four side-by-sides parked outside Walmart with the engine running, and no two bit mountain town bumpkin is gonna fuck with your F350 or anything in it or attached to it.
And they ain’t gonna say nothin about your Glock when you wear it in the store, neither!

 

[Elixir]

these are not moobs grown via exogenous estrogen

I’m not particular about how moobs are grown!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

PLEASE! Let's keep this on-topic!

 

[Elixir]

That argument is based entirely on the notion that women can't be trusted to make good choices so choice must be preemptively taken from them.

Authoritarians use arguments like Emily’s to justify imposing their own preferences on others. Not by ensuring that the person or people most qualified and/or most invested in the decisions to be made, are empowered to make decisions about maternal or fetal healthcare, but by ensuring that individuals are NOT vested with the power to control their own bodies. They prefer to appoint third parties to wield decision making powers, ensuring that the decisions made are consistent with the “values” of that authority rather than those of the individual who is effected.
That’s what makes them authoritarians. Inferring and conferring “personhood” upon fetuses is not an empathic urge, it’s the indulgence of a dominance impulse.

Oh FFS, your disinformation is tiresome.

Your mischacterization of posts that accurately characterize your so-called “position”, are beyond tiresome, Emily.
Perhaps “disinformation” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Your bad habit is nothing more than repetitive, content free invective that doesn’t even rise to the level of a tactic of argumentation.
It frankly renders most of your excessively verbose rants so embarrassingly off the mark that they are not worthy of response. .

 

[Emily Lake]

You keep saying you support the framework set out in Roe v. Wade in which abortions rights were unfettered before the point of fetal viability but could be restricted after it. Okay. But then you present a thought experiment so extreme the situation it did not, and could not, exist when Roe v. Wade was in effect, one in which women in the last week before their due date can say, "I don't want to be a mother so kill my baby" and doctors immediately perform the most destructive form of abortion that exists and don't even try to deliver the fetus alive. That argument is based entirely on the notion that women can't be trusted to make good choices so choice must be preemptively taken from them.

Is that what you believe?

I believe that if given the opportunity, at least some humans will do absolutely abhorrent things. Lots of humans don't make good decisions, this isn't something unique to women, and trying to disingenuously spin this as be not trusting women specifically is bad faith.

Parents kill their infants. They beat their toddlers to death. They shake them until they get brain damage and sometimes die. They sexually abuse their children. Humans lie and cheat and steal and murder pretty regularly.

Why on earth do you think that this specific situation will be magically immune from bad people doing bad things?

I agree that sometimes people beat, abuse, and kill other people. I don't think any situation is "magically immune" from those occurrences.

Yes, there are murderers and sociopaths among us as well as people who make bad decisions based on fear, ignorance, and faulty thinking. We don't have laws and regulations because we think having a law will somehow keep a murderous sociopath from murdering, we have them to provide limits for people who respect limits and to establish consequences for those who do not.

I believe that having reasonable safeguards against rare or unlikely events is an appropriate approach, and is the cornerstone of most government regulations.

And that's how things were under Roe v. Wade until the Supreme Court threw it out and the Religious Right got their chance to rewrite State laws to make abortions illegal or so severely restrict them that a woman has to be literally and unmistakably dying from complications before doctors are legally allowed to intervene.

I reject the extremist stance on abortions that would rule out early delivery of a fetus in order to prevent a likely bad outcome for a pregnant woman. A woman who needs powerful medications in order to treat a dangerous disease, or one who is experiencing pain and suffering so great she's unable to either sleep or stay nourished, should not have to wait weeks to receive appropriate medical care. Yes, she and the doctors treating her should give the fetus as much in-utero time as they reasonably can before delivery, but not at the cost of the woman's life or health.

I reject the notion that politicians should make medical decisions about health care for pregnant women, especially politicians who have no knowledge of, or experience in, gynecology, obstetrics, neonatal care, or related fields. They don't know what they're talking about. And there is no way their kind of broad brush approach can address the various needs of individual patients. That is something the physician in charge can and should do, not a Senator or Representative in a legislature somewhere.

I don't know if you ever heard about the death of Savita Halappanavar but it illustrates what I see as the biggest problem with the Religious Right's approach (which TBH they might think is a feature). She was admitted to a hospital in Ireland, a place where the Catholic Church has had its way with women's rights and choices for centuries. She was in her 17th week of pregnancy and therefore well before her fetus would have been viable outside her uterus. She was diagnosed as having a miscarriage, one the doctors could not stop. Her fetus was going to die, no question. But because the law was written in a way that prevented doctors from interfering with a pregnancy when there was a fetal heartbeat, the doctors did nothing to hurry along the process and preserve Dr. Halappanavar's health. Instead they just monitored the miscarriage for days. By the time her fetus was known to be dead she had developed sepsis. She died after seven days of suffering and trauma because, as the staff told her husband, Ireland was "a Catholic country".

^This is what happens when extremists write absolute laws about when an abortion can be performed and when it cannot, using something as arbitrary as 'fetal heartbeat' and not considering the full range of complications and risks pregnancy entails. Dr. Halappanavar's fetus could not have survived her death but she could have survived the death of her fetus. You might think that would make the decision to hurry along the ongoing miscarriage a no-brainer, but women aren't important to the Catholic Church, only their unborn fetuses are. So the doctors did nothing, she's dead for no good reason, and people who think all late term abortions are the result of evil women wanting to do evil things learned nothing from her case. In fact, right wingers in the US are trying to get their states to enforce similarly restrictive laws and seeing similarly horrible treatment of pregnant women experiencing complications showing up at hospital emergency rooms and being told to go wait outside because they're not dying yet.

Currently in Alaska our laws say that when a pregnant woman is having a medical emergency, the doctors should do everything they can to save both her life and that of her fetus, but if they can't save both they must do everything they can to save the one who has the best chance of surviving. Dr. Halappanavar would have survived that miscarriage if it had happened here. I don't want that to change.

Overall good post.

I'll once again point out for the peanut gallery that my actual position is... RvW approach. Which everyone seems to think was great, and for which I've been called all sorts of names and told I want women to die. So... Yeah. Fun times I guess.

 

[Emily Lake]

That argument is based entirely on the notion that women can't be trusted to make good choices so choice must be preemptively taken from them.

Authoritarians use arguments like Emily’s to justify imposing their own preferences on others. Not by ensuring that the person or people most qualified and/or most invested in the decisions to be made, are empowered to make decisions about maternal or fetal healthcare, but by ensuring that individuals are NOT vested with the power to control their own bodies. They prefer to appoint third parties to wield decision making powers, ensuring that the decisions made are consistent with the “values” of that authority rather than those of the individual who is effected.
That’s what makes them authoritarians. Inferring and conferring “personhood” upon fetuses is not an empathic urge, it’s the indulgence of a dominance impulse.

Oh FFS, your disinformation is tiresome.

Your mischacterization of posts that accurately characterize your so-called “position”, are beyond tiresome, Emily.

In what way do you think you are accurately characterizing my desire for RvW guidelines, Elixir?

Perhaps “disinformation” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I think it means that you knowingly say things that are false and intentionally misleading, in order to lead other people to form a false conclusion.

Your bad habit is nothing more than repetitive, content free invective that doesn’t even rise to the level of a tactic of argumentation.
It frankly renders most of your excessively verbose rants so embarrassingly off the mark that they are not worthy of response. .

All of my horrible verbose "rants" about how I want the same guidelines that were in place under RvW to be reinstituted, but this time as an actual genuine piece of legislation rather than an interpretation. Which is somehow embarrassing and not worthy of response.

Yet somehow you keep responding... while claiming that I oppose abortion rights, I want women to die, that I want medical emergencies during pregnancy to have to wait around for politicians to weigh in, and all of the other downright crazy and unsupportable things you insist are my views, but which absolutely are not.

 

[Elixir]

Yet somehow you keep responding...

My bad. I can definitely fix that.

while claiming that I oppose abortion rights,

You oppose SOME rights to bodily autonomy. You have argued variously for legal oversight, second opinions, medical authorizations prior to treatment and levels of culpability for doctors that I oppose.
You have yet to support those things. You have moderated and modified your “position” in response to light being shined on the consequences of previously expressed opinions, and respond to such observation by falsely characterizing others’ positions.
Sorry hun - I find you a less-than-honest broker in conversation. That is not impugning your motives, which I think you honestly try to keep pure as the driven snow.I think you don’t know any better and resist acknowledging any reason to change your position, even as you change your position. Not a federal crime, just a waste of time.
Abortion restrictions kill innocent women. You have not made any argument that rises to the level of even disputing that fact.
Buh bye now.

 

[Jarhyn]

You oppose SOME rights to bodily autonomy. You have argued variously for legal oversight, second opinions, medical authorizations prior to treatment and levels of culpability for doctors that I oppose.

She opposes abortion rights in all but claimed name only.

Everything she proposes will cause deaths and red tape that takes decision making powers away from people at times absolutely critical to their health.

This is a plain fact.

With the nature of how certain inflections and weights of regulation act on human behavior, no doctor would risk performing an abortion in a world such as ours, where all it takes is the wrong hard-line judge to send you up on death row or to prison and the loss of your medical license. It is a stochastic threat of violence if someone has the temerity to do so. Occasionally "examples" would be made for doing it at all, and that means people would often let other people die before rendering life saving care.

This isn't an opinion. We know this is the effect of that. We have watched it happen in places, likely where this bad-faith position was field-tested.

That kind of regulation is a ban while attempting very hard not to use the word "ban". It is violence against women, while being such a fucking coward so as to try to hide behind multiple layers of abstraction and obscurity and distant accusations that murder people slowly and quietly. This is indirect and socially leveraged violence against women.

And the fact is, I liken anyone who seeks to revel in such violence against "sluts", whether it is violence rendered through fists or violence rendered down a sneering nose over a keyboard typing an email about how they gave someone an abortion to deliver to a Texas bureaucrat and delivered finally by Men with guns and handcuffs and eventually someone else, possibly in a mask putting a needle into someone's arm and pushing a button to both be exerting violence.

One is merely attempting to mask it from themselves and others, if they say they are not being violent and not calling what they do violence.

Writing an email can be violence.

Writing such a law is participation in institutional violence.

Enforcing such a law is participating in violence.

But make no mistake that the violence is being directed by the person writing the email, in that moment.

A rumor in someone's ear can be violence.

This proposed legislation is violence and voting for it is a violent act, and supporting it is a threat.

It's just really easy to hide that fact behind all those layers of indirection, possible even from oneself.

 

[Arctish]

I'll once again point out for the peanut gallery that my actual position is... RvW approach. Which everyone seems to think was great, and for which I've been called all sorts of names and told I want women to die. So... Yeah. Fun times I guess.

Roe v. Wade established a pregnant woman's right to an abortion prior to fetal viability. You and I agree on women having that Right.

Our disagreement isn't over decisions made by women and their doctors during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy but what can or should happen after that point. And our individual approaches to that problem are very different.

Your starting point has been to present a thought experiment in which we imagine a pregnant woman a few days before her due date walking into a hospital or clinic and demanding that doctors kill her healthy, perfectly viable and fully formed fetus and that a doctor might do it. With that as a starting point the initial stance becomes "no abortions in the last weeks/months of pregnancy" because we want to stop evil women and evil doctors doing evil things. From there we can back off a little bit to allow abortions when a pregnant woman is clearly and obviously in immediate danger of dying if an abortion isn't performed, but only if her condition and that of her fetus meets the pre-determined legal requirements set by lawmakers.

As Elixer said, your proposal is :

Very sensible, as long as you have, in hand,
a ready mechanism for instantly determining both the viability of a fetus that threatens a pregnant woman’s life and the level of threat to the woman’s life posed by that fetus, so an informed judgment of medical necessity can be handed down and the doc(s) can get a signoff or denial of permission to perform an abortion, maybe before it becomes a moot issue due to mom and/or fetus already being dead of complications.

Time is of the essence when a pregnant woman has a medical emergency or is developing serious complications. Anything that interferes with a doctor's ability to immediately provide appropriate care is not just a problem, it's a huge problem. All these stricter limits on abortions some State have adopted are driving up maternal death rates. All these so-called Pro-life initiatives are proving to be Pro-death of the pregnant woman.

Instead of focusing on the possibility of evil women colluding with evil doctors, I suggest we focus on the probability of a pregnant woman urgently needing medical care that might include early delivery of their fetus, either through induced labor or C-section, or even an abortion that would kill the fetus outright. Because sometimes, despite our best efforts and good intentions, not every life can be saved. We have to let doctors save the ones they can even when we don't like the only available method of saving them.

So let's suppose that a woman three days away from delivery of a health infant walks into a hospital and demands an abortion. What should happen?

I think the first thing that should happen is the hospital admits her as a patient in the Emergency Room and starts running tests because Jeezy Creeezy, something is very wrong here! Is she on drugs? Did she eat the wrong kind of mushrooms, is she suffering from hypoxia, is she severely sleep deprived and hallucinating, does she have an undiagnosed mental illness, or a brain tumor, or what? The wrong thing to do is presume she's simply an evil person looking for an evil doctor to be her accomplice in a premeditated murder. And the utterly unconscionable thing to do is to send her away with no one to help her through what is clearly a crisis.

 

[Toni]

The simple fact is that, rare though the cases, sometimes things go so badly during labor that only the mother or the child can be saved. Or only the mother.

Doctors should not face the potential tail of being charged with performing an abortion during a medical emergency.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The simple fact is that, rare though the cases, sometimes things go so badly during labor that only the mother or the child can be saved. Or only the mother.

Doctors should not face the potential tail of being charged with performing an abortion during a medical emergency.

Exactly. And as demonstrated in Texas, where the Attorney General personally intervened in an exception attempt to the abortion ban, the red tape can mean the doctors are no longer treating the patient but having to act like lawyers.

 

[Emily Lake]

This isn't an opinion. We know this is the effect of that. We have watched it happen in places, likely where this bad-faith position was field-tested.

The "bad faith" opinion that RvW guidelines were reasonable and appropriate.

Honestly, why do you spend so much of your time inventing fantasies about me and then posting them as if they mean anything at all?

 

[Emily Lake]

Writing an email can be violence.

Writing such a law is participation in institutional violence.

Enforcing such a law is participating in violence.

But make no mistake that the violence is being directed by the person writing the email, in that moment.

A rumor in someone's ear can be violence.

This proposed legislation is violence and voting for it is a violent act, and supporting it is a threat.

None of those are violence. You're humpty-dumptying words and contorting them in order to support your own implied desire to commit ACTUAL violence against people who don't hold the same beliefs as you.

 

[Emily Lake]

I think the first thing that should happen is the hospital admits her as a patient in the Emergency Room and starts running tests because Jeezy Creeezy, something is very wrong here! Is she on drugs? Did she eat the wrong kind of mushrooms, is she suffering from hypoxia, is she severely sleep deprived and hallucinating, does she have an undiagnosed mental illness, or a brain tumor, or what? The wrong thing to do is presume she's simply an evil person looking for an evil doctor to be her accomplice in a premeditated murder. And the utterly unconscionable thing to do is to send her away with no one to help her through what is clearly a crisis.

On what possible basis do you assume that I disagree with this?

 

[Emily Lake]

The simple fact is that, rare though the cases, sometimes things go so badly during labor that only the mother or the child can be saved. Or only the mother.

Doctors should not face the potential tail of being charged with performing an abortion during a medical emergency.

I agree, they shouldn't.

 

[Arctish]

I think the first thing that should happen is the hospital admits her as a patient in the Emergency Room and starts running tests because Jeezy Creeezy, something is very wrong here! Is she on drugs? Did she eat the wrong kind of mushrooms, is she suffering from hypoxia, is she severely sleep deprived and hallucinating, does she have an undiagnosed mental illness, or a brain tumor, or what? The wrong thing to do is presume she's simply an evil person looking for an evil doctor to be her accomplice in a premeditated murder. And the utterly unconscionable thing to do is to send her away with no one to help her through what is clearly a crisis.

On what possible basis do you assume that I disagree with this?

On the basis that every time I've seen you post about pregnant women showing up in hospitals wanting abortions you always present it as healthy, sane women planning to murder babies and demanding doctors be their accomplices, not as frightened, desperately ill persons seeking help.

I haven't seen you propose any of the steps I suggested, or anything like them.

I'm going to quote Elixir from back in May:

I am not, and have never been, opposed to abortion being legal.

I know that Emily. You’re not opposed to abortion being legal as long as it is subjected to a second opinion. In advance. That is neither bodily autonomy nor personal freedom IMHO.

And that “position” was moderated from something that reeked even more strongly of authoritarianism, as it originally involved politicians.
At least that is what I have gotten from what you have said.

“I’m so misunderstood!” Is the wailing lament of one cannot succinctly explain themself.

If you clearly state the difference between what you really mean and what I (and a “couple of my extremist friends”) have gleaned from your posts, we can discuss it. Telling me I’m wrong, and endlessly re-phrasing that assertion doesn’t tell me what’s right. If you cannot do that, it’s pretty pointless to try to discuss with you.

If we're not understanding your point, explain it to us again. You might have to get really, really wordy. Just be as specific as you can.

What are you proposing should be the approach doctors and other health care providers take when a 25 weeks pregnant woman is developing complications? What laws or regulations or guidelines do you think would be most helpful in ensuring the best possible outcomes for the woman and her fetus? Do you agree that stringent laws would act as impediments to best medical practices, or do you think laws can be both strict and formulated in ways that ensure patients get proper medical care without delay?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

LD has stated that he supports a women deciding to abort three days prior to delivery for any reason. I respect that he has that opinion, but I very strongly disagree with it. At that point, I can't see an rational way in which it's not murder. There's a very broad range of gestation where it's gray, and I'm very happy to discuss where the optimal place to draw that line might be. I can be somewhat flexible on what specific stage of gestation should be chosen as the limit, and I'd prefer to err on the somewhat later end. But I'm not willing to pretend it's okay to kill a baby two weeks before delivery without a very solid medical reason to do so.

"Don't kill babies" seems like something that shouldn't have to be said.

What you don't understand is that this isn't actually the issue. I would be very surprised if he actually thought an abortion three days before birth was acceptable. Rather, we are looking at the failure modes. Leaving it up to the doctors--we have that "research" you cited, but it doesn't feel like proper scientific research. We have no credible reports of third trimester abortions other than due to defects. On the flip side we have already seen multiple women die because they could read between the lines and understood that was the intended outcome--they would be punished for doing the medically correct thing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You keep saying you support the framework set out in Roe v. Wade in which abortions rights were unfettered before the point of fetal viability but could be restricted after it. Okay. But then you present a thought experiment so extreme the situation it did not, and could not, exist when Roe v. Wade was in effect, one in which women in the last week before their due date can say, "I don't want to be a mother so kill my baby" and doctors immediately perform the most destructive form of abortion that exists and don't even try to deliver the fetus alive. That argument is based entirely on the notion that women can't be trusted to make good choices so choice must be preemptively taken from them.

Is that what you believe?

I believe that if given the opportunity, at least some humans will do absolutely abhorrent things. Lots of humans don't make good decisions, this isn't something unique to women, and trying to disingenuously spin this as be not trusting women specifically is bad faith.

You're acting like she would be making the decision alone. No--just because she wants an abortion doesn't mean a doctor will do one. Multiple medical people would have to agree and that hasn't been happening.

Parents kill their infants. They beat their toddlers to death. They shake them until they get brain damage and sometimes die. They sexually abuse their children. Humans lie and cheat and steal and murder pretty regularly.

Why on earth do you think that this specific situation will be magically immune from bad people doing bad things?

I believe that having reasonable safeguards against rare or unlikely events is an appropriate approach, and is the cornerstone of most government regulations.

There is such a thing as too much safety.

In this case you are after spending a lot of effort on avoiding a failure we have no credible evidence of it happening, pushing towards a failure we have multiple examples of it actually happening.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That argument is based entirely on the notion that women can't be trusted to make good choices so choice must be preemptively taken from them.

Authoritarians use arguments like Emily’s to justify imposing their own preferences on others. Not by ensuring that the person or people most qualified and/or most invested in the decisions to be made, are empowered to make decisions about maternal or fetal healthcare, but by ensuring that individuals are NOT vested with the power to control their own bodies. They prefer to appoint third parties to wield decision making powers, ensuring that the decisions made are consistent with the “values” of that authority rather than those of the individual who is effected.
That’s what makes them authoritarians. Inferring and conferring “personhood” upon fetuses is not an empathic urge, it’s the indulgence of a dominance impulse.

Oh FFS, your disinformation is tiresome. I LITERALLY want it to be a medical decision, based on maternal and fetal health care. The "third party" I want involved is LITERALLY the doctor.

So somehow, the thing I actually want is transformed into the thing I'm trying to get rid of? How wrapped up in your own fantasy do you have to be to type this out and think you're making sense?

No, you want it to be a "medical" decision with politicians allowed to second guess them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Objection: "elective". Doesn't mean what you think it means.

Medically, anything you schedule is elective. Doesn't matter if you have no chance of survival without it. This means that fetal defect abortions get listed as "elective". And those who would cram religion down our throats exploit this to pretend things are happening that aren't.

That's not true, Loren. There's a pretty commonplace distinction between medical necessity and elective, and it's a cornerstone for medical billing, prior authorization, and stuff like whether Medicare will cover it at all.

If the procedure alleviates an injury, reduces the impact of the injury, or mitigates a risk that would create a future injury, it's usually deemed medically necessary. That doesn't mean it's urgent, however. Thus an ACL surgery can be deemed medically necessary, but not urgent. It has full support for the procedure to be performed, but it doesn't need to be done right away - there's usually a relatively wide range of timing involved that produces a degree of discretion for timing.

Terminations for fetal defect don't generally get listed as "elective" outside of those few states that have gone for complete bans. Those states are stupid.

You're listening to the pro-punishment crowd.

If you can select when it is considered elective.