SCOTUS removes Roe V Wade

[Jastall]

Nah I'm one of those who mostly read and rarely post, I channel my own public service while on the shitter into dunking on rude idiots with a barebones (if at all) comprehension of critical thinking in FB comments instead so take it from me that there is definite value in you guys making it crystal clear just how disingenuous and faulty some of our resident posters.

Cheers then, and happy to help in my own way. Other people have already expressed some of what I wanted to add better than me so I won't do myself the displeasure of engaging him further.

[tehdang]

And as long as you continue to ignore the fact that the abortions you’re talking about aren’t taken lightly the way that you imply, you’ll continue to be rightfully branded a bad faith poster. Abortions at that stage are very rare, expensive, risky, and never just a matter of “oh, the mother just didn’t want it”.

You can put a thousand qualifiers on the deep, personal, and unsettling circumstances that an expecting mother would decide upon a late term abortion. But it's truly just up to her choice according to your view, whether we call it a "want" or a "wish." One person chooses for two, full stop.

If you want something more detailed, I'll just confirm that it is "rare, expensive, risky" and I only want to add "and only legal to undertake to save the mother's life or major injury or in view of the child's unlikely survival."

I've wasted a lot of breath in the past on the need for care and support for mothers who don't want the child or can't care for it. Or the million other reasons why someone would seek an abortion for a healthy baby and a healthy mother (I can already hear the background cries of "but pregnancy is a health issue!"). It's not the stuff that's quoted and responded to. Fair enough, the things we already agree on aren't what gets discussed for pages and pages. The only thing that really gets noticed is some departure from "the mother gets to decide, period, and anything less than that is a failure in understanding or compassion."

This is top-shelf entertainment, coming from you. I told you before when you reported me a few days ago. I have a particular disdain for cruel people that manipulate my goodwill. That's the catharsis coming out.

If you have a psychological need to say I reported you, fire away. But it's untrue.

I simply see a mother in pain trying to preserve her ability to have kids in the future. You see a woman that needs to explain that more. If you don't want to be perceived as evil, argue the position she should've chosen. Fire up the old word-salad generator, let's see what you think she should've done differently.

Considering I'm the only one in this thread to indulge in letting you express your beliefs, I'd say I'm the antithesis of seeing evil people, don't you think? I always want to understand why people have different perspectives than me. You spend 95% of your time belittling pro-choice positions, so spare me the appeals that you've got some innocent motive, here.

I see a doctor that needs to say that her medical experience leads her to believe an abortion is necessary to preserve her ability to have kids in the future. In the context of Texas law, that's "impairment of a major bodily function." In the statement, the doctor would not state that it was her reasonable medical judgment. The Texas Supreme Court cited it in their decision. If the facts aren't your major concern, or betray some lack of feeling to you, then state that up front. I'm capable of disregarding the factual dispute in favor of some other angle.

I'm not begging you to indulge me in any way. If you find my posts not worth your time engaging with, for whatever personal judgment makes you conclude that, then kindly disregard them.

If you don't think your own interactions constitute belittling the pro-life side, then kindly afford others the similar attitude that their posts also do nothing of the kind.

Once again you misunderstand. When I say willing to be enlightened, I mean willing to change your position not when your position is challenged, but when an alternative position makes more sense. I stand by my statement. I am willing to be enlightened by your positions. Sorry, I was willing. You destroyed that trust. Not because you have a different position than me, but you both flaunt that your position is superior, and be sure to point out that mine is inferior, but never tell me why your position is superior.

I've certainly changed my opinion on why a pro-choice arguer does not see any value in writing restrictions into law for late-term abortions. The forcefulness and sincerity of some posters have earned that. For the rest, I can only say that I don't find the logic sound, nor the arguments persuasive. I really do think that sincere disagreement will regularly involve both sides going away unconvinced and that's a fine thing and not indicative of some feeling of superiority or unwilling to be enlightened or whatever mumbo jumbo word salad you want to call it.

Well, if you're not willing to engage in good-faith, what are we left with? If discussion here is meant to be in good faith, and you continuously undermine that, I'm left to pontificate on your actual intent. I still don't think I'm far off.

I believe what I say, and I do my best to explain the factual and logical basis for those beliefs. Maybe that's all just word salad to you. Maybe not. I'm trying to respect you as best as I can, without really viewing all these personal attacks as anything more than frustration manifested. We all get frustrated.

I don't think you're low in understanding, low in compassion, lacking willingness to be enlightened, or maliciously using knowledge when you disagree, strongly, and repeatedly, not budging an inch on the opinions you held before my posts. If, for whatever reason, you can't or won't extend the same to me, then no hard feelings but I think you should reconsider choosing to interact.

[Elegiac]

You can put a thousand qualifiers on the deep, personal, and unsettling circumstances that an expecting mother would decide upon a late term abortion. But it's truly just up to her choice according to your view, whether we call it a "want" or a "wish." One person chooses for two, full stop.

And what you're advocating for is exactly the same. One "person" choosing for two, except you want the "person" making the decision to be the fetus - and conveniently deciding that in the absent of the fetus being able to actually make a decision, the default just happens to be the one aligning with your political and ethical beliefs.

But hey you could always just decide to stop constantly dodging inconvenient questions and answer why you think this particular ethical conundrum involving bodily autonomy merits a different outcome than literally any other case.

[Endus]

You can put a thousand qualifiers on the deep, personal, and unsettling circumstances that an expecting mother would decide upon a late term abortion. But it's truly just up to her choice according to your view, whether we call it a "want" or a "wish." One person chooses for two, full stop.

1> The fetus is not a "person".
2> Even if we grant that, there's three people. The pregnant person, the fetus, and the medical practitioner. That's where ethical considerations come in.

If you want something more detailed, I'll just confirm that it is "rare, expensive, risky" and I only want to add "and only legal to undertake to save the mother's life or major injury or in view of the child's unlikely survival."

And there's no justifiable reason to add that. It's an infringement on women's humanity, to push a religious argument onto nonbelievers against their will.

- - - Updated - - -

And what you're advocating for is exactly the same. One "person" choosing for two, except you want the "person" making the decision to be the fetus - and conveniently deciding that in the absent of the fetus being able to actually make a decision, the default just happens to be the one aligning with your political and ethical beliefs.

As has been pointed out before; the unborn are a really convenient group to claim to speak for, because there is literally no chance they will ever speak out to contradict you.

[Rasulis]

The e-commerce marketplace for abortion medication has expanded, and the cost for pills has fallen dramatically

Qutside of telemedicine options, there are over two dozen e-commerce websites that sell and ship medication abortion to the US. This international supply chain has grown significantly since Dobbs and most of these sites do not require prescriptions and do not require people to upload their IDs or have medical consultations. Plan C has vetted 26 of these sites, including testing their pills to ensure they’re “real products of acceptable quality.”

Seven of the sites Plan C has vetted offer pills for prices ranging from $42 to $47, with delivery times between two and nine days. The sites are typically selling generic medications originating from India, with the help of US-based shippers.

One unexpected development this year was that many of these e-commerce websites ultimately dropped their prices by hundreds of dollars, in an effort to get higher placement on Plan C’s website.

Wells says ProgressiveRx is a great option for women living in restrictive states to stock up on pills in advance. (Mifepristone has a shelf life of about five years, and misoprostol about two years.)

The New York Times estimated in April that international suppliers were likely to provide abortion pills to about 100,000 Americans in the year after Dobbs was decided, or “enough pills to cover about 10 percent of the country’s annual abortions.” Anti-abortion groups have acknowledged the difficulty in stopping the flow of abortion drugs into the US.

Volunteer distribution networks have expanded

Community support groups, also known as “companion networks,” have grown since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and now actively provide free abortion pills to people living in states with bans on reproductive health care. These groups, some of which can be found on sites like Plan C and Red State Access, mail medication abortion and offer doula support.

“You communicate with these groups via [encrypted messaging apps like] Signal, and you don’t need a credit card or a bank account, which can be especially important for young people who might not have those resources,” Wells said. “We know the volunteer networks well and we have no hesitation in recommending them.”

Some of the volunteer companion networks are aided by activists in Mexico. The most prominent Mexican activist group is Las Libres, which was founded in 2000 to serve Mexican women. Abortion access in Mexico has improved, though, and in 2021 Las Libres pivoted to helping Texas women who were newly subject to the state’s six-week ban. The group’s US focus expanded further after Dobbs, and after Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide in September 2023. In 2022 alone, Las Libres helped terminate roughly 20,000 pregnancies in the United States.

[Surfd]

Or the million other reasons why someone would seek an abortion for a healthy baby and a healthy mother (I can already hear the background cries of "but pregnancy is a health issue!").

Millions of reasons, eh? MILLIONS. So I guess you could enumerate, say, 10 pretty easily. Right? So by all means, please do outline 10 perfectly legitimate reasons why someone might want to seek an abortion for a 3rd trimester healthy fetus just out of the blue.

[Captain N]

Millions of reasons, eh? MILLIONS. So I guess you could enumerate, say, 10 pretty easily. Right? So by all means, please do outline 10 perfectly legitimate reasons why someone might want to seek an abortion for a 3rd trimester healthy fetus just out of the blue.

I'd add to that -- those 10 reasons must also not include anything of a religious of misogynistic nature since every single one of his arguments up to this point have involved one or both.

[Adamas102]

I've wasted a lot of breath in the past on the need for care and support for mothers who don't want the child or can't care for it. Or the million other reasons why someone would seek an abortion for a healthy baby and a healthy mother (I can already hear the background cries of "but pregnancy is a health issue!").

Your continued dismissive attitude towards the facts of pregnancy is ludicrous. There's really no other way to put it because it's not that complicated a concept. EVERY pregnancy can result in things like pre-eclampsia, uncontrolled post-partum bleeding, and infection, all of which can be fatal. Those are just a few things that can result in the death of a perfectly healthy mother, and not even touching on all the other temporary and permanent effects that carrying a pregnancy to term can entail. Every pregnancy is a health issue. That's a fact that shouldn't be so easily dismissed.

Your denial of FACTUAL statements is even more infuriating because it is personal for me. My wife had none of the risk factors associated with pre-eclampsia, but she still developed it the day she went into labor at 38 weeks and had to be pumped full of magnesium to prevent the condition from worsening even after delivery. We spent 3 days in the hospital to make sure she didn't develop seizures and die. Totally normal pregnancy with no concerns leading up to that. Pre-eclampsia can present as early as 20 weeks, though usually it occurs closer to 32 weeks. Carrying a pregnancy to term ALWAYS carries a risk of complications and death. ALWAYS. Can you wrap your mind around this fact?

Carrying a pregnancy to term is 10-15 times more likely to result in death than a safe abortion. So yeah, every woman should be able to have the choice of whether they wish to undergo said risks of pregnancy. If you'd actually read that article about the Colorado abortion doctor you'd also know that there is a point where carrying to term becomes a safer alternative, and that happens to closely coincide with the point at which a human fetus is developed enough to have a chance of surviving removal from the womb. The abortions you refer to (ones performed around 32 weeks onward) are ONLY undertaken for SEVERE medical emergencies. There are no healthy women aborting healthy babies in those final months. These "million other reasons" you cite simply don't exist when even the most abortion absolutist doctor requires rare and extreme circumstances in order to perform the procedure at that point.

I believe what I say, and I do my best to explain the factual and logical basis for those beliefs.

Anyone who tries to pass off "abortion up until birth" as an argument in favor of legislation is either extremely stupid or maliciously trying to push an agenda based on misinformation. No matter how much you try to pass off your beliefs are reasonable and logical, if you base them off of concepts that you apparently refuse to understand then they are anything BUT "reasonable and logical".

[Edge-]

I'm still unsure the objection to correctly referring to any pregnancy as a health risk?

Like, we've got some pretty credible sources that we're looking to for information on this for example: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/...e-202301252881

Simply being pregnant poses significant short-term and long-term risks to health, particularly in the US.

Or - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/healt...risk-pregnancy

All pregnancies carry risks.

And I'm sure most of us can/would dig up similar blogs or studies or comments from experts in the field with tons of practical experience on this topic that informs our opinion that any pregnancy carries inherent health risks. That doesn't mean that folks will experience adverse outcomes each time or that the risks will be the same or that their experiences are all the same etc. etc., plenty of folks go through it without any problems at all. But that's the reality of what the medical science and broader data tells us.

So @tehdang, at your convenience, I think we'd all love to be enlightened by where your strong opinions on this topic are coming from. Because they don't appear to be coming from the doctors in the relevant medical field. This isn't a question of morality, this is a practical question of agreeing on some basic facts of reality.

[s_bushido]

I'm still unsure the objection to correctly referring to any pregnancy as a health risk?

If abortion isn't healthcare, that's just another way they can try and justify unjustifiable policies.

[Muzjhath]

I've wasted a lot of breath in the past on the need for care and support for mothers who don't want the child or can't care for it. Or the million other reasons why someone would seek an abortion for a healthy baby and a healthy mother (I can already hear the background cries of "but pregnancy is a health issue!"). It's not the stuff that's quoted and responded to. Fair enough, the things we already agree on aren't what gets discussed for pages and pages. The only thing that really gets noticed is some departure from "the mother gets to decide, period, and anything less than that is a failure in understanding or compassion."

On this and this alone. As it's about giving more support to the mother etc and other alternatives.
Are you in favour of taxpayer funded maternity care and delivery?
Free Pree-K for everyone.
A combined for both parents 11 momths at 80% salary with guarantee to be allowed back parental leave.
And you paying higher taxes for all of this.
And a complete overhaul of the fostercare system.

If you're not. If you aren't. If charities etc should do it. Etcetc then you are disingenuous and don't care about anyone involved as anything but a theoretical problem.

[Poopymonster]

I'm still unsure the objection to correctly referring to any pregnancy as a health risk?

Like, we've got some pretty credible sources that we're looking to for information on this for example: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/...e-202301252881



Or - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/healt...risk-pregnancy



And I'm sure most of us can/would dig up similar blogs or studies or comments from experts in the field with tons of practical experience on this topic that informs our opinion that any pregnancy carries inherent health risks. That doesn't mean that folks will experience adverse outcomes each time or that the risks will be the same or that their experiences are all the same etc. etc., plenty of folks go through it without any problems at all. But that's the reality of what the medical science and broader data tells us.

So @tehdang, at your convenience, I think we'd all love to be enlightened by where your strong opinions on this topic are coming from. Because they don't appear to be coming from the doctors in the relevant medical field. This isn't a question of morality, this is a practical question of agreeing on some basic facts of reality.

It's impossible that any pregnancy could ever have a risk of something going "wrong".
Everything about this miracle is right.
It's all part of His plan.
/s

[Xyonai]

It's impossible that any pregnancy could ever have a risk of something going "wrong".
Everything about this miracle is right.
It's all part of His plan.
/s

And the only reason Maternal Mortality rates as so low -now- is because we've made great strides in the last hundred or so years to keep that from happening; it's why States with the worst medical care also, not-so-coincidentally, have some of the highest maternal mortality rates. This goes up exponentially for women of color because for "some reason" medical professionals are less likely to take their needs as seriously.

Like by -default- Pregnancy is a Health risk we've only just gotten around to mitigating because we have the technology too, but this only covers Maternal Deaths, not other complications (as already noted by other, more informed posters), and flippantly dismissing those things is either utterly ignorant or absolutely cruel.

[Poopymonster]

And the only reason Maternal Mortality rates as so low -now- is because we've made great strides in the last hundred or so years to keep that from happening; it's why States with the worst medical care also, not-so-coincidentally, have some of the highest maternal mortality rates. This goes up exponentially for women of color because for "some reason" medical professionals are less likely to take their needs as seriously.

Like by -default- Pregnancy is a Health risk we've only just gotten around to mitigating because we have the technology too, but this only covers Maternal Deaths, not other complications (as already noted by other, more informed posters), and flippantly dismissing those things is either utterly ignorant or absolutely cruel.

It was also ended with /s for sarcasm.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

Honestly don't even give that restriction. Let him open up his canvas and paint the picture. I'll get some popcorn.

It will just be repetition of everything he's already said... and, honestly, we don't need to waste more pages countering what has already been countered 100 times before.

[Xyonai]

It was also ended with /s for sarcasm.

Oh I know I was kind of just shouting into the void.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

And the only reason Maternal Mortality rates as so low -now- is because we've made great strides in the last hundred or so years to keep that from happening; it's why States with the worst medical care also, not-so-coincidentally, have some of the highest maternal mortality rates. This goes up exponentially for women of color because for "some reason" medical professionals are less likely to take their needs as seriously.

Also, over the last few years....maternal mortality has increased in the states.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat...2019%20(Table).

This report updates a previous one that showed maternal mortality rates for 2018–2020 (2). In 2021, 1,205 women died of maternal causes in the United States compared with 861 in 2020 and 754 in 2019 (2). The maternal mortality rate for 2021 was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with a rate of 23.8 in 2020 and 20.1 in 2019 (Table).

In 2021, the maternal mortality rate for non-Hispanic Black (subsequently, Black) women was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, 2.6 times the rate for non-Hispanic White (subsequently, White) women (26.6) (Figure 1 and Table). Rates for Black women were significantly higher than rates for White and Hispanic women. The increases from 2020 to 2021 for all race and Hispanic-origin groups were significant.

[Xyonai]

Also, over the last few years....maternal mortality has increased in the states.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat...2019%20(Table).

Which honestly just reinforces the need for better Medically Necessary Abortions

[Mekh]

@tehdang truly has turned into the Forced Birth @Shalcker.

[tehdang]

Yet you're incapable of putting yourself in the woman's shoes ...
Your conversations aren't rooted in good faith, because as you said, our positions aren't logical or persuasive. When you talk down to your listener, so to speak, the faith is lost...
I mean, sure, some posters insult your position. But it's not based in ignorance. They see your posts. They are unpersuaded and actually insulted ...

I'll get some popcorn.

You can hold the popcorn. I think the tensions and emotions are a little too high in this thread at the moment to carry on as if your former posts were weeks or months ago, instead of only a couple days ago. I mean no insult to your daughter and three nieces. I have no desire to get your emotions caught up in the argument. But I simultaneously read that it's "pretty fucking personal" to you and "makes [you] pretty fucking emotional." I read and acknowledge your sincere feelings, and understand your responses to come from a deeply personal and emotional place for you. I would ordinarily compose something as flippant as your popcorn, or altogether engage with you as you have seen fit to engage with me. But I cannot both do that and respect you for what you've divulged over your last posts. I'll argue sentencing reform, but not with a woman that was almost made a widow from a violent attack on her husband. I'll argue politics, but not to the point where people think I mean them and their loved ones harm from a broad, societal viewpoint.

If I can detect that tensions and tempers are lower in the future, and not just as regards you and your posts, I do think there are some points to address in these past posts that are worthy to take up as subjects. They include, in no particular order, elective abortions post-viability (20/24weeks until full term), what (if anything) changes at 32 weeks & "abortion legal up until birth," the differences between why a journalist would ask about an abortion for the women's "health is at risk" vs how a doctor might say every abortion can be said to be a "health risk" semantically, why disregarding the life of the child at every juncture is the twin argument to allegedly dismissing the serious reasons why an abortion is contemplated (and why this forum desperately needs a diversity of views on the subject, but does not possess it), revisiting the "Abortion Absolutist" article from the Atlantic, whether any of this does reduce to arguing that no law is necessary "it never happens," and whether anything hinges on bad people writing the bad laws. But I'm no fool to keep in discourse that I think has been substantive from my point of view, and you declare is dismissive, disrespectful, "word salad," unconvincing, and in bad faith.