I'm baaaaaack!
And I had to cut my old responses due to message length, OK?
There was no exception for life of the mother, which is why many Democrats voted against it. Many also didn't want to vote for an unconstitutional bill. Democrat-bashers always fail to leave out these facts when they discuss the PBA ban.
Emsworth covered this already. And it makes such a good issue to compare various politicans' votes on in the
Almanac of American Politics, Dem and Rep alike - the consistency is striking, and you can identify the libertarian Reps and communitarian Dems pretty easily by this vote.
It was basically a statement of principle, given Constitutional issues with it. Seriously, if it was a legal bill,
and if there was a exception for the life of the mother whoops, there was one, how many Democrats would really have changed their votes in support of it?
Again, there is no such thing as "abortion on demand" so your insistence to continue to use that term shows your intellectual dishonesty.
How many votes for option 1 are there? And who cast them? That poll *at this moment, w/17.1% for option 1* is a pretty good reflection of the percentage of the American population that favors unrestricted abortion, i.e., abortion-on-demand, and note that those who have come out of the shadows to indicate their option 1 votes are all very socially leftist. I voted for Option 3, of course, BTW. And as I mentioned in my reply to Al, if you don't think it exists, look at the District of Columbia's abortion rate (IIRC David S once posted a map of those stats by state). I chose it for two reasons: 1) it is pretty clearly run by the left, and 2)
at the time of the map, there were more abortions than live births in D.C.! Oh yes, abortion-on-demand can exist...
The majority of women do not want the government controlling their reproductive decisions. Reasonable restrictions are fine, but many states would institute a complete ban if RVW was overturned, which would be tragic.
OK, we need Brandon H to provide the link to the abortion polling data again.
The data, taken as a whole, demonstrate the complexity of the issue and wipe out the '70% of Americans are pro-choice' fallacy I keep hearing from the social left. It's way, way, more complicated than that - there's
four blocks of opinion on this, and you can say Americans are majority pro-choice or pro-life depending on how you define the two middle groups - the 'allowed with some restrictions' and the 'prohibited with some exceptions' groups (who of course could be further subdivided...). And that complexity extends to women as well.
Your second sentence is a separate issue. Defining 'reasonable restrictions' is the contested part of the argument. The AOD (Abortion-On-Demand) Left says ANY restrictions are unreasonable (Option 1 voters again
), the Total Ban Right (that would be Option 2, I believe) says NO restrictions are unreasonable. The option 3 Center debates which restrictions to implement. As for what states would do after Roe/Casey/etc/ is removed...
Ernest has the most likely vision of what would happen. Most states
would probably restrict 2nd trimester abortions more than they are now and put parental permission requirements in place, but would not outright ban the procedure. A total ban might be tragic, but so is the current situation, from my perspective - there's a LOT of killed babies since Roe...
This is the way to go. Increase sex education and access to contraception (espeically emergency contraception) and you will see abortions go down. I am also fine with reasonable restrictions (parental notificaition and make abortion illegal in last 3 or 4 months of pregnancy).
Yes, opposition to this makes me hit my head on my desk at times...
Ah, so that's what you mean by 'reasonable restrictions'. As expected, the primary area of disagreement between us is over that 2nd trimester, where I'm more restrictive than you are.
There's not too much difference over the 1st and 3rd trimesters (although I will always consider it abhorrent even in the 1st trimester, that doesn't mean I'd rush to ban it then). I suspect that if the states had control, we'd move away from trimesters to issues of brain function, viability, and so on. I had a pretty good debate with Nym over this back in the day...
I never acccused you of that.
In every abortion argument on these forums, it comes up eventually. I was just seizing the opportunity to foreclose that line of debate.
And Texasgurl has something in her signature right now that suggests it
would come up, sooner rather than later. Of course this ties in with my views on health care in general...
Here's that extremely good discussion on health care I mention from time to time. Read it...you may be surprised...I definitely agree with that.
Excellent.
One
more thing that isn't mentioned enough...
This is another common sense approach that would be a great step to reducing abortions.
Remember what I said about hitting my head on my desk sometimes?
Because in this instance, you're directly controlling another person's body (specifically 51% of the population) and I'm not OK with that. I believe we should be giving people more rights, not taking them away.
But from my perspective, you're taking
all rights away from the unborn, and directly controlling their bodies in ways far more severe and intrusive that just about anything we've discussed. And I'm not OK with that. I do try to balance the competing sets of rights, but err more on the side of protecting life. And from my POV, I
am giving people - the unborn - more rights. And thus we argue with each other.
I obviously want to see abortions reduced as much as possible, but we disagree on the solutions. I think you come up with some great solutions up top, but we disagree on the main point of criminalizing abortion or not. I think criminalizing abortion would be a disaster. If I was a woman, I would not want the government to force me to give birth if I was pregnant.
That first sentence sums up position 3 on that poll.
The second sentence is a pretty good description of our debate.
As for the third sentence, criminalizing abortion by itself won't stop abortions from happening, thus my search for other aspects of a solution. I think it's far too easy to get an abortion as it is right now
de facto thus I do support restricting it more thanit is now. Maybe the foreigners can answer this next bit: hasn't it been said before that most of Europe has
more restrictive abortion laws than the U.S. does, contrary to established belief? As for the last sentence, well, competing sets of rights come into play, as well as the personal responsibility I mentioned below. It's much better to do, oh, wait, you mention that next. Hold on a second.
The better steps would be reasonable restrictions, increase education, increase access to contraception, and work to decrease poverty in the country. You have to look at the root cause of the problem, and not just the outcome.
With the exception of our disagreements over what construes 'reasonable restrictions' - a debate that should happen among the people and the states, not in a courtroom IMO - I agree with the rest of what you said.
That sounds great on paper but reality is much different. People make mistakes in life, and you shouldn't have the rest of your life ruined if you had unprotected sex once or twice when you were a teenager.
Competing sets of interests strike again!
This problem will take time to fix. People do make mistakes, but should an innocent be killed to avoid the consequences of those mistakes? And the rest of your life would not be ruined under my ideas.
There's something I forgot yesterday...
- I also support revamping and sufficiently funding the adoption system so that it is a real, viable alternative to abortion and so that these kids can get adopted by good families quickly. The problem is not a lack of loving adopting parents - said parents are
going overseas to adopt children, so clearly the demand is there - it is...you're not going to like this, Scoonie...anti-white racist attitudes among leftist social workers who think that black children shouldn't go to white parents, or for that matter that all children should be raised by their racial/ethnic group.
Can we agree that is absolutely ridiculous?
If you were expecting a Pat Robertson rant from me, sorry to disappoint you. I can yell at you and tell you you're going to hell if you like, but only if you ask nicely.