US Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs Wade

Interesting you say "rights" to privacy. Plural. As I said, privacy can mean different things in different contexts. My point was that deriving a generalised right to privacy from the 4th and 9th amendments is nonsense. As for "what conservative voters want", my guess is if you were to weigh up overturning Roe against the non-existent right to privacy that comes from Roe, they'd overturn Roe. If you don't think so, then you do not understand conservative voters.

Yes. It's a state issue now. Perhaps one day the court could rule that abortion is unconstitutional, citing the Equal Protection Clause (on behalf of the unborn child). Some have argued that this would be correct. But this won't happen in the lifetime of this court.

Irrelevant. They can consider what they like in the decision.

-Yawn- I'm not trying to compel you. I'm saying that your entire argument begs the question as to whether unborn humans are human beings worthy of rights and you and other pro-choicers seem completely uninterested in engaging in a discussion about whether or not that's actually true or not.

That's an incoherent statement. A mother and unborn do not "cohabit" the same organic being. That's the wrong way to describe it. The mother is one organic being. The foetus is a separate organic being. The foetus happens to be inside the womb. Not sure how any of that is essential to the murderer/victim relationship. Worth noting the abortionist involved is regarded as the "murderer" in most anti-abortion legislation.

You're making the same mistake as the Roe V Wade decision. You're mistaking the right against "unreasonable search and seizure" in the 4th Amendment for a general right to privacy. You can't be forced to give your DNA to a government database for the same reason a cop can't search your house without either a warrant or probable cause.

It's an end run because you're writing abortion off as a "private medical decision" that the law has no business regulating without even engaging with the points of pro lifers that the unborn foetus is a human being worthy of the right to life.

Great. Let's do this old routine where we stand on the grave of Savita Halappanavar and completely ignore the coroner's report which stated she died due to sepsis and medical incompetence that led to her sepsis being misdiagnosed and had it not been initially misdiagnosed, either an abortion wouldn't have been necessary or one would have been carried out in time to save her life because the 8th Amendment allowed abortions to save the life of the woman.

No. The user was distinguishing between two things the anti choice brigade try to conflate and obfuscate. Which is at 34 weeks we do not terminate a fetus/baby. We terminate a pregnancy. Meaning, quite simply, we prematurely deliver a living baby and keep it healthy to the best of our ability.

So the user asked you, and you deflected and dodged, "Who said killing 34 week old babies is ok?". The reason you deflected and dodged is clear. No one said that. So you have no answer to give.

And I object to the use of language intended to humanise a fetus before it's due. And during our own referendum here every single anti choice poster I confronted on this issue essentially ran away.

It seems the reason people say "baby" is not the objection you claim, but in fact that the word is more evocative and emotive and so is an attempt to emotionally invest the electorate in the development of the fetus to a degree far beyond what is warranted. The result of the referendum suggests this tactic failed however.

Having listened to anti choice campaigners speak on the abortion issue for nearly 30 years now... I am well used to this. Their entire approach to the discussion appears to be to conflate biological life and human personhood as much as possible, almost exclusively through rhetorical moves and linguistic distortions of this kind. Clinging to words like "baby" and "life" and "human being" in lieu of any actual substantive arguments on the matter.

Actual moral and ethical arguments against aborting, say, a 12 week old fetus appear thin on the ground. Though I have sought them, and continue to seek them, as I said for nearly 30 years now. But the failure of their rhetoric and their failure in the referendum appears not to have sparked any motivation to go back to the drawing board here.

I think the difference between "fetus" and "baby" is actually entirely irrelevant except as a rhetorical emotive move. Mainly because I do not ascribe moral and ethical concern to anything based on the label it is given, so much as based on the ATTRIBUTES it has. I can think of no attribute a 12 week old fetus has which warrants any moral or ethical concern.

To answer your rhetorical question however, when we treat women for the emotional trauma of losing a pregnancy we in fact do distinguish with them the difference between having lost a baby and having lost a pregnancy. Precisely because it is "just" a fetus. I have written on this fact extensively in the past. I can do so again if required.

But humans are a narrative driven species. So much so that one writer even half jokingly suggested we should not be called "Homo Sapien" (Wise Ape) so much as "Pans Narrans" (Storytelling Chimpanzee). People can become emotionally invested in a fetus, and the baby and child they intend for it to become. So much so that this child becomes real to them early in the process. And so it's loss hits them equally emotionally. And this is the simple answer to your question about things like "Compassionate Leave". Though there is also a functional aspect to this as well as losing a pregnancy is not a trivial event medically either and as such temporary leave is justifiable for that reason too.

All that said however, the fact that some people become emotionally invested in the process is irrelevant to the discussion of abortion. Simply because one persons unwarranted emotional concerns is not something the rest of us should be held accountable to. Their emotional investment in the process, as beautiful as that may be in and of itself, does not hold us to any moral or ethical concerns that are relevant to the issue of elective abortion.

"Your definition mentions abortions usually take place within 28 weeks of pregnancy."

Which is a little misleading as definitions go as the statistics I found over the years show that the near totality of elective abortions happen in or before week 12 and certainly by week 16. The near totality of abortions AFTER this period are done not electively but due to some other necessity such as fetal abnormalities or the health of the mother. So posting pictures of a premature birth after 22 weeks is just an emotive move with no intellectual content at all.

As I explained to Pussy above, terms like "baby" and "fetus" and "Human being" are therefore nothing but red herrings and obfuscate what should really concern us. Which is that it matters not what a fetus LOOKS like. We even had one user who very comically went on about how it's tongue moves.

What matters is identifying A) What attributes precisely should we use to decide when to ascribe moral and ethical concern to something (such as human rights) and B) does the fetus have said attributes.

At 12-16 weeks, and in fact for some time afterwards, there is no reason I am currently aware of to suggest that the fetus has developed at all, let alone brought on line, the faculty of human consciousness/sentience. This is the only attribute I have found in nearly 30 years of conversations on this debate which warrants ascribing moral/ethical concern to an(y) entity. As such I fail to find any intellectual argument against elective abortion at this time.

Should any other attributes exist that I have missed I am all ears.

Not only is it premature, it's completely daft to see so many lose all sense of perspective, for, what is, a document that was never going to see the light of day in it's current form.

Any of the other justices in argeement would have made edits, comments, recommendations, to this initial draft and it may not have even been the majority position by the time it was released. Any of the judges can change their vote right up to the time the decision is due to be released, as has happened in the past.

Even more recently: