Abortion's Possible Future

For John, BLUF:  At this point in time we had a compromise that seemed to work.  Unacceptable, but it provided access to abortion, if you are paying attention to your body, but discouraged abortion for all, at any point in the pregnancy.  Moves by both sides look to destroy that compromise.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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How Fetal Personhood Emerged as the Next Stage of the Abortion Wars

From The New Yorker, by Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, 5 June 2019.

Here is the concluding paragraph:

When Republican lawmakers consider the fact of rape or incest irrelevant to a decision to terminate a pregnancy, and when Thomas invokes the spectre of discrimination against a fetus, they are making the same point—that every “unborn child” is entitled to the same dignity as you or me.  And, if fetuses are thought to have basic rights as persons do, then a future ruling might reach beyond overturning Roe.  It might hold that it is unconstitutional for any state to allow abortions at all. This position—the constitutionalization of abortion abolition—would go far beyond what either liberals and conservatives have imagined possible, but it is where the ambitions of fetal personhood now entering the legal mainstream are headed.

There will be abortions, as long as men and women are having sex.  What is created, if there is creation, is a human (something some are blindly unwilling to admit).  At the same time, most of us have no stomach for putting in jail those who decide, early on, that their pregnancy is too much of a burden.

We are a diverse democracy.  Thus we must look for a compromise.

Regards  —  Cliff