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U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#141

Post by Aunche »

gfodor wrote: post #123
Aunche wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abortion isn't analogous to pulling the plug on someone on life support. It's analogous to sending someone on life support on a guillotine. The fetus is violently killed during the process.

Analogies are dumb when it comes to abortion. The point is if you decide a mother has a right to cut the umbilical at any time, the fetus will die regardless during most phases of pregnancy (the ones where abortion is legal in the US.) So now you get to decide given death is a certainty, what is the proper act. I could be persuaded the current mechanisms are the wrong choice. Would you propose to just cut the cord an…

I'm pro-choice, but I imagine that a lot of pro lifers would be less horrified by abortion if that were the case. My point is that the body autonomy argument is in bad faith and simply meant to spread propaganda that conservatives are misogynists. Given the violent nature of abortion, one can only conclude that people think it's ethical because they don't consider the fetus a human life.

Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#142

Post by gfodor »

Aunche wrote: post #141
gfodor wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analogies are dumb when it comes to abortion. The point is if you decide a mother has a right to cut the umbilical at any time, the fetus will die regardless during most phases of pregnancy (the ones where abortion is legal in the US.) So now you get to decide given death is a certainty, what is the proper act. I could be persuaded the current mechanisms are the wrong choice. Would you propose to just cut the cord an…

I'm pro-choice, but I imagine that a lot of pro lifers would be less horrified by abortion if that were the case. My point is that the body autonomy argument is in bad faith and simply meant to spread propaganda that conservatives are misogynists. Given the violent nature of abortion, one can only conclude that people think it's ethical because they don't consider the fetus a human life.

I believe you are right than many pro-choice advocates have lost the plot and think it’s about the right to choose to kill vs choose to cut, or that right comes from a lack of personhood.

However, that aside, my point is that once you take death as inevitable, then the mechanism to do may fall to minimizing suffering. And so, it stands to reason that a procedure which a) doesn’t result in long, perhaps painful starvation and b) doesn’t put the mother at risk by having a dead fetus inside of her are worthy considerations. I do think that you are right to think that the violence of current procedures, while perhaps ethical due to minimization of suffering, may be contributing to moral confusion about the right to cut vs right to kill or the dehumanization of the fetus. I do fear that as this moral confusion winds it’s way upward, the rights to abortion may expand beyond viability, which to me would flip my position on where I stand with regards to maintaining the legal status quo vs reversing it. I support Roe v Wade but would not support a law which gave a mother discretion to terminate past viability.

Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#143

Post by juletide »

beaner wrote: post #128
juletide wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes. I agree some of the mainstream rhetoric doesn't emphasize this in the interest of pithiness and such, but this strikes me as an odd complaint. (2) You seem to imply that some scientific definition of when life begins would offer a clear cut solution... but whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right? An…

> Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes Yeah that's my point. I don't know why it's an odd complaint. "Men trying to control women's bodies" isn't true and turns an ethical debate into something about sexism, which means we don't get closer to an answer because we're not working on the right things. > whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right?…

It is not women vs men. However, anti-choice policies do have outcomes that disproportionately burden women, which is another way of saying such policies are misogynistic, which is... sexism. You can argue sexism only counts as such if there's intent behind it, or you can argue the sexism here is less important than other considerations, but I don't think it's derailing or distracting from an ethical issue to point out this sexism. It's something worth considering when deciding on the ethical issue.

Again: even in "pure" science, you are generally making value judgments when studying stuff like "what makes something a member of a species", "what counts as a life for the purposes of this study", etc. E.g. a scientist may use the biological, ecological, or evolutionary species concept to study a population of organisms, depending on what question they're trying to answer. There is no "objective" answer to what a species is; it depends on what question you're trying to study. Similarly there is no "objective" answer to when life begins; someone can pick "at conception" or "at first breath" or whatever, and then we have to have a value discussion about why that, why not something else? See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma..., which argues well (in a different context) how this sort of thing works.

The Texas law is far more restrictive. Six weeks is much shorter than first trimester.

Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#144

Post by klyrs »

colinmhayes wrote: post #102
anonymouse008 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how it matters whether the fetus is alive or not. If it can't survive outside the mother then the mother has the right to kill it. I shuddered a bit reading this. By this logic, at any point where I am dependent on someone else for my survival in passage (say an airplane) the principle in the relationship (the pilot or airline) has a right to kill me? If that’s the logic, then we can squarely see that w…

Having sex is not agreeing to carry around another person for 9 months. Consent is important. I don't think society has agreed that we punish people who kill others in car accidents, but I'd love examples of when we have and the person at fault wasn't drunk.

Consent isn't a question in the Texan law. Get raped by your dad? Have the baby or get sued.

Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#145

Post by beerandt »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #124
notadev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no particular stance on abortion myself, but speech and bearing arms are constitutionally protected. Is abortion?

Speech and bearing arms are only constitutionally protected in criminal law this is civil law, which the Constitution doesn't apply to[0]. And the supreme did rule that abortion is constitutionally protected, at least thats my understanding of roe v wade. So parent's arguments stand, if this law stands, free speech and gun rights could be aborted (hehe) by just making them civil cases and giving people the right to s…

How in the hell in the same paragraph do you claim speech and firearms aren't protected civilly (which is false), but figure privacy and/or non-explicit abortion rights aren't?

Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#146

Post by samizdis »

caconym_ wrote: post #86
samizdis wrote: post #3

"Looking at the abortion law, or the gun law, or the voting law, it's a form of vigilante justice, where you're empowering individuals to enforce the law," said Tyson Tuttle, the CEO of Austin-based Silicon Laboratories (SLAB.O). "It's been a rough week in Texas and a harbinger of what's to come across the country." I'm from across the pond, and have spent limited time in the US - none of it in Texas - but I always t…

> However, the recent stuff - abortion and voting rights being eroded - has just knocked me sideways. I'd have said they were un-American. Now, I don't know what to think. I really mean this. Was I always wrong? Anti-abortionism has always been a core pillar of the GOP's social policy because it's highly popular with the religious demographics that make up much of their base, even people who might otherwise not vote…

>... powerful state- and local-level politicians were willing to kowtow to Trump and repeat his baseless lies in the fallout from the 2020 election. These are political hacks with zero regard for the integrity of our electoral process, ...

>I would call it a relatively new trend, and it is fucking frightening. They are learning that the more they corrupt the process, the less anybody is able to hold them to account, and their mendacity and depravity seem to know no bounds.

Yes, this.

It is something that I would never have expected in the US, because, to me, "unAmerican".

When I was growing up, I was extremely conscious that although I was British by birth, my entire family was Irish (from the republic). I fielded a lot of crap from people on account of my parents' accents etc; there were lots of problems in the UK because of IRA attacks etc.

My go-to place, my haven in my head, was that the US (although I realised even when growing up that many Irish-Americans were pro-Republican and supported extremism in the cause of a united Ireland) was bigger, better and as a nation above partisanship, seeing a world picture and being the leader in championing rights and fairness. Yes, a bit cut-throat and market-driven, but always in pursuit of equal opportunity and fairness.

I'd imagined that the US would lead the world into a higher plane - by example, and by sheer economic force: "you need our money, you toe the line".

Anyhow, I still cling to my childhood dream of America and Americans coming through for the rest of the world. In simplistic terms, as I saw that dream, that everyone deserves the same degree of respect because of our common humanity.

To restate my original sentiment, perhaps I was just wrong.

Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#147

Post by beerandt »

lenkite wrote: post #54
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case it's very simple: Is a fetus/embryo a baby or not? And what is the logical conclusion of that?

More importantly, is a fetus 6 weeks after conception, after the development of the umbilical cord, a baby or not ? We can take the view that as long as the child is inside the mother, then the mother's choice trumps the right of the child to exist. After all, the mother's body is hosting the child. Or we can take the view that rights of life immediately after conception is sacred and must be upheld. Or we can take t…

The mother's choice is made by partaking in the act that leads to conception.

Courts have zero problems legally binding men to that act.

Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#149

Post by beerandt »

beaner wrote: post #83
emeraldd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is a fetus a baby or not? The question seems to be: "When is a fetus considered a separate life?" or perhaps "When does a fetus become a baby?" That's a lot harder to define than you might think. (At least that's the argument ...) Pro-life people tend to see a cut and dried answer to that, where Pro-Choice people tend see it as a bit more ambiguous.

The cynic in me believes that the ambiguity is intentional, because it allows us as adults to have a greater ability to escape the consequences of our actions. (Excepting rape, etc.) I'm pro-choice, it just seems like a truth people don't want to acknowledge.

The choice angle is simple- you choose the act that leads to conception.

The pro-abortion side just doesn't like the answer.

Re: U.S. companies lash out at Texas law changes, including abortion ban

#150

Post by azinman2 »

option wrote: post #104
azinman2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because many poor and specific minority groups people don’t have IDs. These laws are specifically designed knowing that these groups rarely vote Republican yet are big enough group to make a dent.

so isn’t the main problem which need immediate fix is the fact that they don’t have an Id. You do already have to have an Id for many basic thing. Getting an Id should be very cheap (even free for some) and very easy. Personally, when I came to US as an immigrant it was very cheap and easy for me. And in my home country in Europe everyone needs an Id to vote and no one complains.

You have the right to vote as a US citizen. Every little thing you do to add friction to that disenfranchises such populations. We're not talking about urban, educated people with means. To get an ID you will need other forms of identification, which depending on who you are and what your background is, can mean you have nothing to present.

Much has been written on this topic. I encourage you to do a little research before jumping to conclusions.

From the top link to a simple google query [1]:

• Rates of identification-ownership are highest among White individuals, while other ethnic groups disproportionately lack necessary photo ID. Thirteen percent of Blacks, 10 percent of Hispanics, but only 5 percent of Whites lack photographic identification. • Lower-income individuals are less likely to have photo ID. Twelve percent of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with over $150,000 annual income. • Young adults are less likely to have photo ID: 15 percent of 17-20 year- olds lack photo ID, and 11 percent of those ages 21-24 lack photo ID.

[1] http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...

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