Re: framing the abortion debate

When the case is clear cut in medicine the physicians will act because the exception is on the books already.

Problem is all those times you have to assess a risk that is maybe significant but not necessarily lethal, and Texas only wants to allow you the abortion if life is at risk, and btw it's unclear what "risk" means legally (one of the problem is , 1%? 0.5%? 0.1%?)

Do you see the problem? if any number above 0 can be used to justify abortions you get a whole lot more abortions than if the risk has to be significant right? and how do you quantify when risk assessment in medicine is extremely volatile depending on individual patient circumstances? do you use literature risk rates? from which country, US -only? do you correct for age, weight, ethnicity, comorbidities? how exactly? you might not have enough numbers on rare diseases in combination with pregnancy especially with ulterior complications.

I understand your answer is "let the physicians decide", but that's not the will of the people and legislatures in many red states.

People who want to save women lives have to come down to the level of red states political will and help craft detailed exception legislation starting from which exceptions exactly lawmakers want to allow.

If instead you go there clamouring that the voters and the legislatures are wrong because you have a different opinion on abortion, exceptions will stay vague, physicians won't act because they don't want to risk anything personally, and a few women will suffer/die

Or we just pass federal abortion protections in 2024 under the Kamala Harris administration, and abortion will be legal in all states up to the point of birth, and sometimes after birth even.

That would require the senate to be democratic as well (still only a 25% proposition currently) , the legislative filibuster to be repealed (which would require 50 + democratic senators agreeing to do that) and SCOTUS not to consider it unconstitutional under the 10a (or other parts of the constitution).

I mean it's theoretically possible, but not very probable.

Meanwhile red states with strict abortion laws need help to write proper exceptions in ways that save as many women as possible without giving physicians too much power

Those are some pretty big leaps of logic there, Luciom. I point out that your claims of abortion bans and exceptions are a new area of law are bullshit and you make up six strawman arguments to knock down.

I mean if you want to keep using laws written when medical ultrasound wasn't a thing as proof that we don't have any need to legislate exceptions in a novel way in an era when we can assess risks for the mother health which we never were able to before roe v wade, keep doing that.

But it's a new area of the law, objectively.

"life risks for the mother" has to be translated into something much more specific to work as an exception.

Same as you allow self defense as an exception to murder but you need a ton of case law to determine the exact contours of it, and there will still always be gray areas and gray cases.

For self defense we have centuries of case laws, detailed legislation and what not.

For "mother is at risk of life" you have nada, pre roe isn't workable because the tools to assess risk back then were not the same.

Keep in mind Texas (and i think other states as well?) don't allow it just for generic HEALTH risks for the mother, it has to be a life or death risk.

I’m just imagining a doctor looking at an actuarial table to decide if the abortion is legal or not

They imagine having to do that in the trial to defend their choice, and so decide not to abort.

Which is why actuarial tables have to be looked at when writing the legislation, listing which specific conditions allow for abortion in which specific cases and so on

If you’re not vegan why do you even care about the life of a fetus? It has as much intelligence as a rat at that point.

Yeah but why should we care about the life of the fetus in the second or third trimester? What exactly is your reason for caring?

proximity to actual human life.

I am not religious so I don't start at arbitrary points like conception or actual birth.

Which were just simplifications for another era when we had no way to look inside basically.

a first trimester fetus is aborted naturally around 20% of the times (or at least that's the data I remember when I looked at it when my wife was pregnant).

it's very far from being actual human life and it's closer to the sperm and egg than to a baby, so it doesn't deserve particular outside protection by the system which would otherwise protect actual babies with great effort (the states society at large).

things can change for the mother and father ofc, significant damages should be paid if you kill the fetus against the will of the pregnant mother, so it's already something valuable, or potentially so, but not a human being worth of inherent protection.

going on with development it approximates what we value in human beings more including babies, and so it starts developing inherent protection rights even from parental decisions.

btw this is actual the consensus view among even atheists like myself, both right-wing and leftwing atheists, in Europe. we already solved this topic basically.

some details can differ but for example, I would keep abortion easy until amniocentesis is available, to check for down syndrome and decide.

after that mild restrictions and so on as per above.

I don't think availability should matter (see roe v Wade) because that is a feature that depends on technology and I don't think you guys as well are going to want to ban abortions if we ever become able to have mechanical wombs that can keep carrying the pregnancy on even at 6 weeks or whatever

I thought you were a hardcore libertarian that say government shouldn’t intervene in the life of the people .
Yet you wish government intervention to decide who and what can they do for their bodies .

Now you say it’s to protects life so it’s ok but you would be against regulation for guns to protect life , against regulation in general (restaurant, water, environment, private sector business as a whole , etc) that would protect the health and life of the people .

You are hard to follow .

That sentence caries zero semantic value to me. What does that mean?

Also have you heard of the violin thought experiment? What if you were forcibly hooked up to a legendary violin player as you slept and had to give them blood/nutrition for 9 months or else you would die? Technically this is much closer to actual human life than a fetus is, so you would have more of a moral responsibility to take the violin player to term, correct?

I have to think that no one ever thinks like this, that the genetic proximity to humans is what makes us value other people.

it means that if something is 4/10 or 6/10 of a human being that justifies partially applying protections (ie inherent legal value, inherent legal recognition of rights) to it.

yes fetuses are a special case because they are ACTUALLY partial human beings and depending how close they are to be a human being with full rights it makes sense to give them some.

not sure about the violin player (first time I heard of it) but keep in mind you had 3, full months to get rid of the violin player in my model.

you CANNOT end up linked to him like that against your will in my model so maybe that example makes sense to contrast people who are fully anti abortion but it doesn't work at all with me, as I am in favor of first trimester abortion.

if you choose every day for 3 months not to abort you are fully choosing the pregnancy and it's consequences.

btw it's not genetic proximity, it's proximity to what we value in human life.

the baby is close to come out and smile and so on

At what number of months does the fetus become closer to actual human life than a Marxist?

what exactly do we value in human life?

a Marxist is fully human

Quoted for posterity.

answers can vary a lot I suppose.

personally I am a specist supremacist, I find value in human life arbitrarily above all other life forms

every human being starts life with significant inherent value but there are actions that can decrease it, or even make it negative.

you are still fully human if you are a serial rapist though, and you are still fully human if you are a Marxist.

And you were doing so well.

this is a contradiction or a tautology. I thought you said you value human life because of some aspect of it, but no you're literally saying you just value the DNA. So why not value the life of the newly formed zygote? Seems like valuing that would maximize the thing you value, which is more humans.

no you keep saying DNA but I didn't.

inactive DNA wouldn't matter at all, very similar DNA that wanted to kill me wouldn't as well and so on.

if my offspring can't reproduce with a living form (or it's offspring) I care much less about it, is that clearer perhaps?

yes it's a tautology, an arbitrary value proposition, axiomatic.

At the end in a reductionist form I suppose you could say I value human life because being human I want to preserve my in group more than I care about any other form of life, as a survival mechanism perhaps.

for myself and my DNA but in the opposite sense that you meant.

in order for my offspring to thrive it's good that human life is thought to have inherent value.

moreover a badly raised human being is a bad thing for society. if parents want to kill their fetus they aren't going to be great parents if they are forbidden to do so in the first trimester. that aborted life isn't a life that would have been great to have around me , get what I mean? (see freakonomics on crime dropping fast if you allow abortion, Romania case)

oh btw, corollary: super pro parents giving up the child at birth ofc, they have to be able to do so

If that's the case then abortion being legal up to birth is completely compatible with your view of why humans have value, because all you're really saying is that you value humans because you value humans. Valuing humans is not mutually exclusive with aborting a fetus in the third trimester, especially since the tiny rate that it happens poses no threat to your survival. So I actually think this argument just fails since it doesn't lead logically to the view that a fetus has a right against abortion at any point in fetal development.

A baby however since it is a born life and has full societal rights as anyone else wouldn't be allowed to be terminated as allowing post-birth termination would be murder and violate the rights, and if their rights were violated other people you care about might have their rights violated and so on.

if you mean that someone else could come up with the arbitrary cutoff of birth yes, he could, and some people do.

I disagree but it's not something I would go to war for, I don't think the topic is as important as many people think it is (at least in the USA).

when we do culture war discussions in Italy the topic almost never enters the picture. some radical conservative sometimes can say something against normal abortion, but leftists who talk with me won't even bring it up to me as they know I don't care. not do normal pro capitalism people here.

I care about my kids and if my wife went crazy when she was in third trimester I would have liked for society not to let her abort btw