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

Just stop digging this hole deeper, please. You are misusing the term "parasite" and I imagine you may, later in your own life, come back to these remarks with a distinct feeling of shame.

Whether or not questions around abortion "disproportionally affect" women is not the question. Abortion also disproportionately affects aborted babies, if you believe they're alive. 1-year olds also disproportionally affect women. Should we be able to kill children until the age of 5? Why not?

I think your take from the perspective of categorization is one that tries to blur things intentionally. It may be the case that an organism does or does not "objectively" belong to a race. But that does not mean that the specific attributes of that organism are themselves not objectively measurable. You're just talking about what definitions are being used.

I think that argument is an attempt to derive ethics from words - rather than discovering the scientific process, deciding ethically what is appropriate or desirable, and identifying the language which should be used to describe it. It's backwards.

At some point a fetus goes from necessarily relying on the mother, to being self-sustaining (if fed) even if removed from the mother. That's a knowable thing. If the baby is removed it will either live or die and that is our answer. Call that life, or independence, or whatever. The lens you choose may change where the line is for you, but not when it is crossed.

I would say that if you believe that children should not be killed post-birth, then you are already cognizant of some kind of threshold that exists which is eventually crossed and cannot be undone, after which adults are obliged to attempt care and continued life of the child.

Because we don't have a way to test exactly when a fetus becomes independent, we use heuristics. For the most part, the first trimester we consider dependent; the last trimester we consider independent; in the ambiguous middle trimester we err on the side of the preference of the already-living, and in some places allow abortions through this time even though there may be a chance that the baby is alive and independent.

But these are just heuristics. "The Texas law is far more restrictive." Yes, it is. But you also said "Go from there" and that is what they did. Texas narrowed to a specific criteria that its people perceive to better approximate the threshold for life. "Life" being in this case a catch-all amalgamation of lots of peoples' concepts that mostly approximates the ability to self-sustain under care. It would seem on the surface at least that an organism without a heartbeat is dead-on-arrival while one with a heartbeat at least has a chance.

The way past this for a place like Texas is to propose a new testable threshold and explain why it is not possible for a self-sustaining baby to be exist before then.

I think there is actually an obvious good compromise here - Require Id for voting if and only if 99.5% (should be set by specialists) of county’s population has an Id. If the county doesn’t meet this threshold (I’d imagine most poor and republican counties) - don’t require it until it meets the threshold. Obviously people not being able to get an Id is somewhat an urgent problem that needs fixing.

I did not say the policy's disproportionate affect should be the sole consideration; I did say it's worth considering, because in practice the vast majority of ethical questions are not simple binaries; we have to weigh competing needs/desires/etc and decide what the best course based on all the factors at play.

My intention is not to "blur things intentionally" but to encourage thinking about this in a less black-and-white way, and explore some unexamined (arguably irrational!) assumptions that seemed present in your original post. For instance, you said:

> When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother?

...with the implication that answering this will give us a "rational" and correct answer to the ethical question. But there is nothing about this framing itself that is objective or rational. Knowing that a life is at some point (via whatever scientific definition we've chosen) doesn't tell us what ought be done about it; in general you can't derive an ought from an is; you could easily instead reframe the ethical question as "is there some point when a fetus's life is more important than the woman's bodily autonomy," and come up with a very different set of heuristics for answering the question. You can pick an objectively measurable line but the choice of what that line is, and what to do about it, are not a thing that can be objectively chosen.

My intended point wrt Texas is that, based on the discrepancy between polling data and the law as written, it seems like the representatives in Texas have passed a law that is in fact more restrictive than what the majority of voters want; ergo, I don't think it actually reflects the majority's intuitions on when abortion should be OK. But this really isn't my main point; I'm mainly trying to point out this isn't a question that can be solved solely by finding some science answer, and an attempt to sway voters solely on that type of argument seems not-correct based on everything we understand about how people in modern democracies make such decisions.